Limitless - Jim Kwik Page 0,87

the corner and avoid being noticed.

I was in one such classroom one day along with a few hundred other students. Up front, the professor was lecturing to us and using an overhead projector to show images. At one point, he put some text up on the projector, and I instantly burst into laughter. This was an entirely natural reaction for me; the quote was funny. But it was otherwise completely quiet in the hall, which caused a huge number of people to swivel their heads in my direction. I’m guessing most of these people would never have been able to identify me as one of their classmates before this moment.

I was hugely embarrassed. I’d made so much effort to be invisible, and now it was as though I’d stormed the stage to draw attention to myself. I was blushing so hard that I thought my face was going to combust, and I shrank back as far as I could.

Then several seconds later, others in the hall started laughing. At first, I thought they were laughing at me, but as more joined them, I looked out and noticed that they weren’t staring at me at all; they were reading the text. And that’s when I realized the source of my embarrassment: I’d read the words so much faster than my classmates that I’d reacted to it way sooner than everyone else. I’d known I improved the speed at which I read and the level at which I comprehended it, but until that moment I had no idea how rare but learnable an ability it was.

While still feeling a bit awkward about my unintended outburst, I left that class buoyed by the understanding that my learning had risen to an entirely new level. Due to the techniques I’d taught myself, reading had become one of my superpowers, paving the way to enormous breakthroughs in my learning. While I vowed not to laugh so loudly in the future, I walked out of that lecture hall with an incredible sense of excitement about learning and about discovering the other superpowers that were just emerging.

HOW READING MAKES YOUR BRAIN LIMITLESS

Any plan to make your learning limitless needs to include reading. Just as memory is foundational to nearly all brain function, reading is foundational to nearly all learning. If anyone tells you that they don’t read, they’re essentially saying, “I’ve stopped trying to learn.” Yes, you can learn something from watching videos, listening to podcasts, or going to the movies. Even the silliest network sitcom is likely to teach you something. But it is nearly impossible to make learning a dynamic and renewable part of your life without a dedicated approach to reading. Here’s why this is true:

Reading kicks your brain into gear. When you read, you’re using your brain for many functions at once—which is a vigorous and rewarding workout. As Dr. Ken Pugh, president and director of research at Haskins Laboratories, points out, “Parts of the brain that have evolved for other functions—such as vision, language, and associative learning—connect in a specific neural circuit for reading, which is very challenging. A sentence is shorthand for a lot of information that must be inferred by the brain.”1 In other words, reading gives you an incomparable level of mental exercise, and the brain is always a “muscle” that gets stronger the more you challenge it.

Reading improves your memory. Because you’re giving your brain such a great workout when you read, your brain functions at a higher level. One significant benefit of this is with regard to memory. In a study conducted by Dr. Robert S. Wilson at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, reading was shown to have a meaningful effect on memory decline. “We shouldn’t underestimate the effects of everyday activities, such as reading and writing, on our children, ourselves, and our parents or grandparents,” he noted. “Our study suggests that exercising your brain by taking part in activities such as these across a person’s lifetime, from childhood through old age, is important for brain health in old age.”2

Reading improves your focus. One of the things we do when we sit down with a book or even spend some dedicated time with a newspaper is train our focus on this one thing. Unlike when we browse the Internet or click through YouTube, when we’re reading, we usually give the vast majority of our attention to what we’re reading. This practice makes it easier to apply the same level of focus to other tasks.

Reading improves your