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In Limitless: Upgrade Your Brain, Learn Anything Faster, and Unlock Your Exceptional Life, Kwik argues that the digital world has made us too reliant on the judgment of others rather than on our own. We don’t let other people make decision for us in the real world, but don’t mind doing so through our devices.
Digital Challenges
There are 4 villains challenging our ability to think.
- Digital Deluge: Information overload.
- Digital distraction: No ability to focus.
- Digital Dementia: Losing memory muscle.
- Digital Deduction: Over-dependence on internet for critical thinking.
Poor memory results from us never allowing our brains to be bored.
The half-life of information is how long it takes before this information is replaced. You can study all you want, but the “facts” you know will soon become outdated.
Information overload makes people more stressed and less happy and satisfied. Many people have failed to develop routines for processing this information. The more you force yourself to recall information rather than look it up, the more you strengthen your permanent memory.
The ubiquity of information about everything means that there’s a ubiquity of opinion about everything. If you want to know how to feel about a controversial topic, you can just go online and collate the different opinions.
This could be a good thing. Having multiple perspectives can help us form our own opinions but people don’t do that. They select a few sources to do most of the thinking for them.
Natural ability to concentrate usually wanes after 10 to 40 minutes. That is why apps like Pomodoro can be helpful in managing how long you focus for and how long your breaks are. The sweet spot, as suggested by the app, is 25 minutes of work followed by a 5-minute break.
Stretching the Mind
Oliver Wendall Holmes said, “Every now and then a man’s mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.” When you read a book, you get the chance to permanently stretch the range of your mind.
To learn properly, you must be willing to suspend your current beliefs. The mind is like a parachute, it only works when it’s open.
3 questions when learning something new.
- How can I use this?
- Why must I use this?
- When will I use this?
Each second, your senses gather up to 11 million bits of information from the world. The conscious mind only processes 50 bits per second.
“Knowledge is power” is often accredited to Sir Francis Bacon. But it was his secretary, Hobbes, in his younger years who penned the phrase. Originally, it was, “The end of knowledge is power, and the use of theorems is for the construction of problems and the scope of all speculation is the performing of some action, or thing to be done.
Flow
Steven Kotler, founder of the Flow Research Collective and author of The Rise of Superman outlines 4 stages of Flow:
- Stage 1: Struggle – feels like the opposite of Flow.
- Stage 2: Relaxation – Break before Flow.
- Stage 3: Flow: The Superman Experience.
- Stage 4: Consolidation: Feeling somewhat let down, pulling everything you have accomplished together.
The 4 Levels of Competence
- Unconscious Incompetence: Unaware of speed reading.
- Conscious Incompetence: Know about speed reading but don’t do anything about it.
- Conscious Competence: Know about Speed Reading and do it when you want.
- Unconscious competence: Life-long learning goal – speed reading becomes automatic.
Downtime
With down time, rats could record memories of their new experiences. Without downtime, they were unable to do so. This could be known by measuring neural activity.
If you’re an entrepreneur and you want a quick guide to know what to think about before launching you business, check out The Myth of Entrepreneurship.