Limitless - Jim Kwik Page 0,78

of bed, how to get dressed, how to brush your teeth, how to eat your breakfast, and how to drive a car. That would be quite inconvenient. Luckily you were born with a great memory; you just need to be shown how to use it.

KWIK START

How would you rate your memory right now? What aspects would you like to improve? Take our memory assessment at www.LimitlessBook.com/resources to understand more.

If you’re going to perform a major upgrade on your brain, you’re going to want to unlimit your memory, as memory is such a fundamental part of most brain function. Since that’s the case, let me reassure you with a very important fact: There’s no such thing as a good memory or a bad memory; there is only a trained memory and an untrained memory. If you have trouble remembering people’s names, making presentations without notes, or even finding your car keys in the morning, it’s extremely unlikely that this is because you’re incapable of doing these things. Instead, you just haven’t gotten the training.

Joshua Foer is proof positive that memory can be trained. In 2005, Joshua was a journalist who had taken on the assignment of writing about the little-known world of mental athletes. Fascinated by what he saw in elite memorization contests, he wanted to discover more about the participants. To his surprise, he learned that almost every participant he interviewed described themselves as having a poor or average memory before they learned and practiced the principles of memorization. Now they were competing at the highest levels of these contests.

It dawned on Foer that there were no restrictions to memory and that memory can be trained just like athletic skill. He began to practice what he learned. One year later, he returned to the U.S.A. Memory Championship but this time as a competitor. The day of the event, we had lunch together between competitions and marveled at the fact that often what appears to be genius can actually be learned. Later that day, Foer placed number one and took home the trophy. He went on to write the groundbreaking book Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything.

Why is memory so important if you’re going to unlimit yourself? Because your memory serves as the foundation for every action you take now and every one you will take in the future. Imagine what it would be like if your computer had very little storage or had inconsistent access to what it had stored. Most functions would be nearly impossible to perform—you’d start to write an e-mail message, and your computer might or might not have the addressee among your contacts and might or might not remember how to send the message after you’d written it—and the ones that it did perform would take excruciatingly long while your computer figured out how to do it.

While I’ve likened our brains to supercomputers, we all know that they’re so much more than that. Perhaps the most significant difference is our ability to reason, to consider the facts or the situation in front of us, and to act, innovate, or navigate through circumstances based on those facts and situations. The process of reasoning requires us to shift through our rich store of memories, using tools that have proven useful in the past to make informed and productive decisions.

“It is impossible to think creatively into the future without a sense of what is known,” writes Dr. Eve Marder, professor of neuroscience at Brandeis University. “We commonly say that we are looking for interdisciplinary and synthetic thinkers who can make connections between disparate fields and see new paths for discovery. I cannot imagine finding those creative leaders for the future among the legions of students who forget everything they have learned because they can ‘just look it up.’ How does one know what to look up if one has forgotten so much?”1

Dr. William R. Klemm, who we met in Chapter 12, gives us five reasons why improving memory is essential:

Memorization is discipline for the mind. Much needed in an age when so many minds are lazy, distracted, have little to think about, or think sloppily. Memorization helps train the mind to focus and be industrious.

No, you can’t always “Google it.” Sometimes you don’t have access to the Internet. And not everything of importance is on the web (and a great deal of irrelevant trash will accompany any search). Nor is looking up material helpful under such situations as when you learn to use a foreign