Limitless - Jim Kwik Page 0,74

is enough to heighten your recall.

Habit 5: Music for the Mind

Think about how you did some of your earliest learning. Did you, like so many people, memorize the alphabet through a song? Or perhaps you know how a bill gets through Congress because Schoolhouse Rock sang it to you. Parents have probably been teaching toddlers basic concepts through music for as long as music has been around. They do it because it works, and it works because there is strong science behind it.

Numerous studies link music to learning. The arousal-and-mood hypothesis, introduced by Dr. E. Glenn Schellenberg, identifies a connection between music and mood and the subsequent connection between mood and learning, suggesting that music can put us in conditions that improve our ability to learn.7

Baroque music seems to have some particularly valuable qualities. “Music stabilizes mental, physical and emotional rhythms to attain a state of deep concentration and focus in which large amounts of content information can be processed and learned,” states music and learning expert Chris Boyd Brewer. “Baroque music, such as that composed by Bach, Handel or Telemann that is 50 to 80 beats per minute creates an atmosphere of focus that leads students into deep concentration in the alpha brain wave state. Learning vocabulary, memorizing facts, or reading to this music is highly effective.”8

There’s no similar evidence that the results would be the same with, say, rap or K-pop, but because one’s reaction to music is such a personal thing, it’s possible that this music would work for you as well. But since streaming music is so ubiquitous, I’d recommend adding a baroque playlist as background to your study sessions. Amazon Music, Apple Music, and Spotify all have baroque playlists and, if you wanted to explore further, each have classical music playlists (comprised largely of baroque music) that have been specifically compiled for the purpose of studying.

Habit 6: Listen with Your Whole Brain

If you are going to unlimit your learning, you’re going to want to make sure your listening skills are fully tuned up. There’s a very strong connection between listening and learning, and more than a quarter of us are auditory learners, meaning that the primary way in which we learn is through hearing something.9

Listening is critical to learning, and we spend a large percentage of our waking time listening. But most of us are not particularly good at it. “Plenty of studies examine this phenomenon,” write Bob Sullivan and Hugh Thompson in their book The Plateau Effect. “While listening is the core of most of our communications—the average adult listens nearly twice as much as they talk—most people stink at it. Here’s one typical result. Test takers were asked to sit through a 10-minute oral presentation and, later, to describe its content. Half of adults can’t do it even moments after the talk, and 48 hours later, fully 75 percent of listeners can’t recall the subject matter.”10

One of the reasons we don’t listen well is that we tend not to apply all our brainpower to the exercise. Sullivan and Thompson, who conducted a study with Carnegie Mellon University on the nature of digital distractions, point out that “the human brain has the capacity to digest as much as 400 words per minute of information. But even a speaker from New York City talks at around 125 words per minute. That means three-quarters of your brain could very well be doing something else while someone is speaking to you.”11

To help alleviate this problem, I’ve devised a tool that will help you listen with your whole brain. Just remember the acronym HEAR:

H is for Halt: In all likelihood, as you’re listening to someone else speak, there will be other things going on in the same space. Maybe there are people milling about. Maybe your phone is chirping, telling you that you’ve just received a text. Maybe there’s music playing in the room or a television in the background. Meanwhile, you’re thinking about your to-do list, your next meeting, or what you’re going to have for dinner that night. Do everything you can to tune all of this out and to be completely present with whomever you’re listening to. Remember that listening involves more than just the words a person is saying; vocal inflection, body language, facial expressions, and more create additional context and provide additional information. You can absorb all of this only if you halt everything else.

E is for Empathy: If you can imagine yourself in the speaker’s shoes, you’re likely to learn more from