Limitless - Jim Kwik Page 0,35
the potential for genius, or at the very least, greatness. But the reason we prefer to believe that we’re either a genius or we’re not, or that we’re either talented or not, is because it relieves us from the responsibility of taking control of our own life. “A belief in inborn gifts and limits is much gentler on the psyche: The reason you aren’t a great opera singer is because you can’t be one. That’s simply the way you were wired. Thinking of talent as innate makes our world more manageable, more comfortable. It relieves a person of the burden of expectation.”8
Your intelligence is not only malleable but dependent on your ability to cultivate a growth mindset. Start looking at your attitude. Listen to the way you talk; a fixed mindset usually shows up in your language. Maybe you say to yourself, “I’m not good at reading.” This kind of statement implies that you believe this is a fixed situation and that your skills can’t be improved. Instead, try saying something like “This is something I’m not good at yet.” This shift in language can be applied to anything you want to improve.
Test scores do not determine your future. They don’t determine what you’re capable of learning and accomplishing. Take your education into your own hands.
Here’s the truth: It’s not how smart you are; it’s how you are smart. There are multiple types of intelligence (more on this later). Like so many things, intelligence is a combination of attitudes and actions, and is dependent on context.
New belief: Intelligence is fluid.
LIE NO. 2: WE ONLY USE 10 PERCENT OF OUR BRAINS
We’ve all heard this myth. Some of us heard it for the first time in a classroom, some of us heard it from a friend. Some of us heard it through the media—maybe a documentary, a TV show, or a movie. This myth is usually used in the context of highlighting longed-for possibilities: If only we could access the rest of our brains, what could we accomplish?
The story has been traced to a number of different sources, but as so often happens in the shaping of public opinion, it’s likely built on by successive events. Some attribute it to author and philosopher William James, who wrote in The Energies of Men that “We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.”9 It could have originated with the work of Pierre Flourens, a French physicist famous for his discoveries in the late 1800s about how the brain and the nervous system work and work together.
The myth could also be related to the work of Dr. Karl Lashley in the 1920s; when Lashley removed parts of rats’ cerebral cortex, an area responsible for higher order cognitive processing, he found the rats could still relearn some tasks. This led him to hypothesize —incorrectly—that whole parts of the brain were not necessarily being used.10 Some blame the earliest neuroimages from PET and fMRI scans, which showed bright blotches on a screen with simplified explanations like “This is what your brain does when you pick something up.” These images typically showed just one portion of the brain lighting up, leading the layperson to conclude that we only use a small portion of our brains at one time.11
This assumption has also been perpetuated in countless ads and movies over the last hundred years. The adaption of the book The Dark Fields, which was produced as Limitless in 2011, says we use 20 percent of our brain function; the 2014 movie Lucy claimed we use 10 percent at any given time. In 2017, an episode of Black Mirror, a show known for its research and well-thought-through use of facts and statistics, touted the myth, saying, “even on a good day, we only use 40 percent of our brain capacity.” All of these storylines were focused on the idea of unlocking our greatest, albeit hidden, potential.
Needless to say, this myth is pervasive, and yet it’s not true.
In a succinct NPR segment, the host plays a clip of Morgan Freeman posing, in his dramatic bass voice, the what-if scenario upon which Lucy is based: “What if there was a way of accessing 100 percent of our brain? What might we be capable of?”
Neuroscientist David Eagleman gives a pointed response: “We would be capable of exactly what we’re doing now, which is to say, we do use a hundred percent of our brain.”12
Countless evidence backs this up—too much of it to include it all