Raising Genius Children & Hacking Memory with Dr. Lev & Prof. Anna Goldentouch

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“Every opportunity is a learning opportunity. So, first you play, and then you think about how to use it.”
— Dr. Lev Goldentouch

Greetings, Superfriends, and welcome to the show!

As I'm sure most of you know, my journey towards becoming the humble host of this show started when I built an online course translating the materials of two of my mentors and tutors, on the topics of memory, speed reading, and accelerated learning. That course grew into the 50,000 student army it is today, as well as a bestselling book, and… long story short, it was the platform upon which I decided to go full time into content creation.

In our first ever episode, we went into this a bit with my co-authors, Dr. Lev and Professor Anna Goldentouch, and explored what exactly accelerated learning means. After that episode – which is one of our most popular of all time – there were lots of questions left over, and so I recently took the opportunity to have Dr. Lev and Professor Anna back on the show, to answer your questions, particularly on new topics not ever discussed before.

If you're not an existing student of the course and haven't heard the previous episode, some of the concepts might not be familiar to you – though, we do try to explain when we use jargon and so on. Either way, no prior knowledge is really assumed. If you are a student or have heard the first episode, this episode will answer a lot of the questions that you've been burning to ask.

We talk about language learning, applying superlearning techniques to teaching children, hacking motivation, real-life examples of how to learn, and much, much more. Whether or not you have kids, this episode will be an interesting one. We all have children in our lives, whether they're our own, our nieces and nephews, cousins, or siblings, and we all want to make sure that the next generation succeeds. Let us know what you think of this episode either in the comments or on Twitter!

In this episode, we discuss:

  • How can superlearning principles be taught to and adapted for children?
  • What can we, as adults, learn from children?
  • What are Dr. Lev and Prof. Anna working on right now?
  • How can we learn languages more effectively, particular grammar?
  • How can you hack motivation and keep yourself motivated to when learning gets difficult?
  • How have Dr. Lev and Professor Anna raised their children to become exceptional life-long learners
  • What are the different needs of children vs. adult learners?
  • The story of how Anna turned a C- student to an A student in just a few days
  • What is the role of creativity in learning?
  • How can you get your children “unstuck” when they have difficulty in learning
  • “The 5 Year Rule,” or how my parents raised me
  • The idea of being a “kid” with your kids, and the delicate balance
  • How to apply superlearning techniques to advanced techniques like math and science
  • How learning examples and cases can give a natural or intuitive understanding of the rules
  • What are the most impactful things Dr. Lev and Prof. Anna have ever learned?
  • Live demonstrations of how to create “markers” (or visual memories)
  • The difference between markers and details of markers
  • How do we remember historical dates when we learn something?
  • Dual encoding and enriching your memories
  • Creative markers vs. logical markers
  • When are children ready to use markers and other memory techniques
  • How Dr. Lev and Professor Anna are using cartoons to educate their children
  • Is there a risk of confusing languages if they're exposed to more than 1?

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

Favorite Quotes from Dr. Lev and Prof. Anna Goldentouch:

“Motivation is very easy to hack.”
“Every kid comes with his own challenges. We tried to use our superlearner skills, and this just didn't work.”
“When I started to talk to my kids about finance and economics, and they started to explain it back to me… that was a good one!”
“The teacher cannot really teach every child in the way that is proper for that particular child.”
“It's easy to think that we can just take our knowledge and give it to a child – just put it into his head. It's harder to take the learning speed of the child.”
“Very often, we create the markers, and we don't understand that we've created them. This happens to all of us.”
“If you store the information in the form of question and answer around that marker, it will arrange all the other details.”
“If you start a sentence and a conversation in one language, you have to finish it in the same language.”

Transcript:

Introduction: Welcome to the Becoming SuperHuman Podcast. Where we interview extraordinary people to bring you the skills and strategies to overcome the impossible. And now here's your host, Jonathan Levi.

This episode is brought to you by the best selling online course Become a SuperLearner. If you're like most people, you probably have a long list of books you want to read, languages you wish you knew and skills you wish you had the time to learn. This course teaches you how to learn anything and everything faster and more effectively. By teaching you not only speed reading, but also an entirely new framework for understanding, creating and storing memories. To get an 80% off coupon and join over 25,000 satisfied students, visit jle.vi/learn. That's http://jle.vi/learn.

Greetings, Superfriends and welcome to the show. I'm really excited to have you guys today, as I'm sure most of, you know, my journey towards becoming your humble host actually started when I built an online course, translating the materials of two of my mentors and tutors. On the topics of memory and speed reading, accelerated learning and all that good stuff.

Now that course over the course of the last couple of years, grew into the 50,000 student army that it is today, as well as the bestselling book and long story short, it's become the platform that's allowed me, to do this podcast for you guys now in our very, very first episode, you may remember that we went into a bit with my co-instructors, Dr. Lev and Professor Anna Goldentouch. And we explored a lot about what accelerated learning and memory techniques really look like.

After that episode, which by the way, is one of our most popular of all time, there were a lot of questions left over. And so I recently took the opportunity to have Dr. Lev and Professor Anna back on the show to answer your questions, particularly on some exciting new topics that we've never discussed before. If you're not an existing student of the course, and you haven't heard the previous episode, some of the concepts might not be that familiar to you, though we do try to explain, when we use jargon and so on. 

Either way, no prior knowledge is assumed in this podcast. Though, if you are a student and have heard that first episode, I discussed. This episode, will answer a lot of the questions that might've been burning or might've been left over. In it we talk a lot about language learning, but we really focus on applying super learning techniques next to teaching children, and then we go into hacking motivation, real life examples of how to learn and really a lot more.

So whether or not you have kids, this episode will be an interesting one for you. Though, I will say that we all have children in our lives, whether they're our own, our nieces and nephews, our cousins, or even our siblings.

And I know we all want to make sure that we're grooming the next generation to succeed and continue their thirst for learning. Let us know what you think of this episode, either in the comments or on Twitter, it is a little bit different than our typical interview style episode, but I think you guys are going to love it, nonetheless.

And so with that, let me present to you, my co-authors Dr. Lev and Professor Anna Goldentouch. 

So Dr. Lev, Professor Anna, welcome back. It's really good to see you guys. I rarely get to see you guys anymore because you're so busy, with kids and work and writing books. How you guys been. 

Dr. Lev: Well, we have been where we were working on several new projects and we will be enabling them soon. I hope you will like them.

Jonathan Levi: That's exciting. So can I talk a little bit about our new projects? Yes, of course. Awesome. So we've been working all day, which is the occasion why I got to see you guys when we were working on a really interesting topic, which is how can you raise your children to be SuperLearners, as we've said in the course, some of this stuff, most of the stuff that we're teaching in our course really only works once you have foundational knowledge. 

You already read very well, you already have a lot of life experience, but it's been interesting, to explore. How would this look, if we were trying to set children up for learning and success, do you guys want to comment on that a little bit? 

Dr. Lev: Well, I think that everybody's a little bit of a child and it will not hurt anyone to go to this course.

Jonathan Levi: Absolutely.  I think it's really interesting. Some of the points that we covered, I think transition also into SuperLearner and how we can improve our flagship course, for example, asking the right questions, learning how to ask questions, I think is really important skill. Yeah. That we can learn from the children.

Exactly. I'm looking at the world in the way that they do as everything is new. And we talked a lot about assumptions as well, which I think is interesting questioning assumptions and stuff like that. So give us one other project you guys are working on. Tell us about that.

Dr. Lev: Well we are working on some are stops. It will help to learn languages, foreign languages.

Jonathan Levi: Yeah. Interesting. You guys know that that's a passion of mine. So tell me about that. Tell me about, uh, what are some of the make or break techniques that allow people to learn languages more effectively?

Dr. Lev: Well, it was the problem with learning languages is usually motivation. Very sewing into learning languages, we just lose motivation. So as long as you can keep your motivation up, you will probably learn the language. 

Jonathan Levi: Oh, I've definitely experienced that. And I think part of it is the first month you study a language, every hour you sit is a quantum leap. It's like, oh my gosh. Now I can order in a restaurant and then you sit another hour, oh my gosh, now I know how to ask really important things. 

But then when you get to a hundred hours, suddenly every time you sit, you're making very, very minor changes that are improving your grammar. So how do you hack that motivation? 

Dr. Lev: Motivation is very easy to work. You kind of imagine how you will use your new skills every time in a defense situation. How you will fail without knowing and how annoying it will help you.

Jonathan Levi: Hmm. So creating a little bit of pressure and urgency. It's 

Dr. Lev: always about visualization and the visualization should be very accurate for specific stuff that you're learning. Like you go to a restaurant, you order your food. That was the how do you react when something's wrong. How do you act is efficient? 

Jonathan Levi: Oh, wow. That's interesting. Because up until this point, you've been able to order and then all of a sudden, I never thought of that.

Very interesting. What about learning grammar? Have you guys given any thought to that? Because that's where I struggle. 

Dr. Lev: The interesting thing about polyglots is just people just to use, they just see words and parts of words with scholar. So we developed a little model that helps us to build the skill and the, when I see words, I usually see them in colornow. This is something that you learn. 

Jonathan Levi: But you  also you're also, you have a lot of kind of synesthetic abilities. 

Dr. Lev: I was not born Muslim. 

Jonathan Levi: Interesting. One of the things that I found so interesting about people who studied grammar and, you know, I've had Benny Lewis on my podcast, is they don't study grammar.

They practice it and they experience it. And eventually they allow the mind to intuitively figure it out by itself, which has made it so hard when you talk to some of the world's language learning experts, and they say, don't study grammar, just start speaking. It makes it very hard to try and build a super learning hack around it.

Dr. Lev: It's actually, we talk about in our course for the kids is going from my role to examples. And from example, to say some things that most people do not know how to use. And if you have enough examples and deal skills good enough, you will generate automatically. You don't have to learn the role, but if you learn the whole, it will not always help you to generate as examples.

Jonathan Levi: Oh, that's a really, really good point. So it's a matter of looking at macro. It's a matter of structuring the knowledge in the right order. 

Dr. Lev: Exactly. All the knowledge is we use all the time is structured. When we read the book, we do not just read a very, very, very long story. Very, very checked out, very paragraphs.

Reading sentences and each of each paragraphs brings a new idea and information structure, this is the best way for us to use it. 

Jonathan Levi: Mm. Bringing it back to the languages though. Now that I think of it, every time I meet, for example, a Russian, a native Russian speaker. And I always tell them, I struggle with the cases and they go, remind me what the cases are again, they have no idea.

They've just heard a million examples of how these cases are used. And they know the rules and they know how to apply the rules better than I do as a different vote in Russian it's called pyadesh. 

Dr. Lev: Unless, you know, the support case. 

Jonathan Levi: I think even when I tell them, I say like a per the edge, or now put the edge or all right.

Dr. Lev: Where you talk, the pronunciation is not. Right. Right. So it sounds like when you go out with me, well, the thing though is.

Jonathan Levi: Yeah, and I want to touch on pronunciation as well because of the language learning course. But yeah. Even if I tell them to put the G they're like, yeah, I don't really know what that is.

I just speak. And I know how to conjugate the word or how to it's actually declined saying the word. If I'm not mistaken correctly. And they just know which case somehow they know which case to use, that's the way the children learns language as opposed to the language and they build it intuitively.

Dr. Lev: Exactly. And then only in school. They learn the patient part of learning any languages, immersion. At some point you just need to be open to huge amount of text or whatever it is, music dancing, whatever it is in that specific language. So unless you had like 1000 pages of some text and some language, your language skills will not visit the hood.

Jonathan Levi: Right. And that connects back. Just drawing the point to a conclusion, almost connects back to letting the brain figure out the rule from the examples. 

Dr. Lev: Yeah. Yes. It's a good idea. But you can sometimes help by learning the rules before. Yeah. 

Jonathan Levi: Yeah. I think that, I mean, that's how most people have learned languages historically.

So Anna mentioned on the course for kids, and she mentioned how kids learn. Tell me a little bit about the process you guys have really innovated. I mean, you guys have a background in learning, but then you had to learn how to be parents, not so long ago. And at some point, as I could tell from our discussions today, you've spent a lot of time adapting these materials because you can't just throw them on a kid's lap.

So tell me about that process of trial and error and figuring out. 

Dr. Lev: Well, we had some problems resolve our kids because every kid comes with his own set of challenges. And we tried to use our Superliner scale since this just didn't work. So we went to professionals and they used two totally different skillsets.

Jonathan Levi: Interesting. What was one of the big successes? And when you realized like, Oh my gosh, we figured out how to adapt something so sophisticated that, you know, even a child can use it.

Dr. Lev: I started to talk with my kids about finance and economics and they started to explain it to me back. So that was a good one.

Jonathan Levi: Oh yeah. That was a moment of victory, huh? Yes. Wow. That's so cool. So yeah, I know we spent the entire day. Really going over this, and I'm finally starting to understand how the method works and how you guys have adopted it. But walk through a little bit in general, like, what are some of the basic principles when you want to teach your kids how to be more effective learners?

Dr. Lev: Well, I need to have fun. This is basics risks, kids. Like, we need to understand what we are doing. Kids need to have fun. So as long as they can play while they're learning, they will learn. 

Jonathan Levi: Yeah. But it's interesting because we do talk in the main super learner course. We talk about Malcolm Knowles and he figured out the six things that adults need that children don't, but we never go back.

And do the math the opposite way, which is to say, you know, adults need pressing need. They need applicability of the knowledge and they need to know, but kids need to know that this knowledge is fun and engaging. And at least in my experience, it's not until the age of 12 or so. When you start looking up at the teacher and going, when am I going to use this?

Children just go, is this fun or is this not fun? Am I enjoying watching this cartoon or am I not? And so it's much more important than any of the pressing need. And of course it goes without saying the other. Knock on those big one is connected to prior knowledge and kids don't have much prior knowledge prior knowledge supplier of all time.

Jonathan Levi: So they are different games, but not say to multiplication tables. I mean, how are they going to connect fingers?

Dr. Lev: There are rules of how to multiply by fingers. So if you play enough time skids, they will multiply. Was my second son. It was much easier. He just wanted to embarrass everybody. So we started them to multiplies and multiplies and we went to Google Plex and we started to a deals or numbers back.

Jonathan Levi: Oh, interesting. So a lot of it. And a lot of what we discussed today is about knowing how to structure a conversations and structure play in an educational way. Or is it the other way around? Is it structuring, play as educational, which I think many parents do, or is it structuring education as play? I think those two things are a little bit different.

Dr. Lev: Every opportunity is a learning. It is so first you play and then you think how to use it. 

Jonathan Levi: Interesting. Anything to add to that? Yeah, a really naggy parent and now all the time. And why do you think that and why? So it engaged my children to talk to me all the time. And then I just fell in love with Knight.

You know, I wasn't able to understand or able to learn how to do it or how to say, and I really. 

Dr. Lev: Enjoy that I know it's very modest. Actually. One of her first sweeping skillsets for staking, a child who was getting C minus C and bringing the child to a, an, it worked every time and it took less than five days.

It was really amazing how she took person from sit way in five days. How seven times. Well, I actually even have a blog post about it. The basic idea is just to build career city, to make the student in driven his learning. And once the student enjoys what he's learning is the next step is build one small success upon another, no matter how small success celebrate it.

Jonathan Levi: Interesting. It sounds so basic. I mean, this is stuff that doesn't just apply to children applies to human beings, and yet it sounds like a lot of schools and a lot of parents are not using this knowledge.

Dr. Lev: Why do you guys think that is it's very hard to work with many kids. When you're a parent, you have like 100 things that you need to do.

You need to clean, you need to get some money. You need to have fun yourself. You need to have sleep. You need to make food. You need to make a lot of things and sometimes as a child, and if you have some time to be with this child, you will probably have some fun and argue about the shores, but you will not get to studying properly when you get to studying, you ask, okay, what did they give you school now at schools?

I have a very similar problem. So I've had like 20, 30 or 40 tickets for one tissue and the kids are different. So there's teacher cannot really teach every child in a way as it is proper for this particular individual individually. 

Jonathan Levi: It's easy to think that we can take our knowledge and give it to a child.

Just put it into his head. It's harder to take the learning in the speed of the child. So if the child needs to take it slower than when need to go with him, and this is the ability to step out and think about the process and not just tell what I know about the subject. 

Dr. Lev: It's very easy to try and recreate what were understandable things. Very hard to make Zaza person understand it. 

Jonathan Levi: Hmm. Interesting. I mean, we're kind of boring. I think one of the interesting things is that it takes a lot of creativity, right? On the educators perspective on the parent's perspective, but also on the child's perspective, right. It takes a lot of creativity to learn anything.

Dr. Lev: Really children are creative, don't break some outness. 

Jonathan Levi: Certainly, certainly they're very creative, but I think it's about harnessing the creativity and new ways. Maybe. 

Dr. Lev: Kids role and allow the stall. We just get stuck in some things, we imagine some thinking a certain way and we cannot continue farming. So one of the main points tactics is just getting your kid unstuck.

Jonathan Levi: What does that look like? 

Dr. Lev: Well, we're talking about something and Zen I'm saying something, which doesn't sound funny to me. Like I said, Warren Buffett and they started to talk about waffles and how they want to involve us. So it was very hard to unstuck them. 

Jonathan Levi: From that point. Yes. I have to ask why aren't you talking to your kids about Warren buffet?

Finances, really? But that's an interesting thing because since I've been an adult, I've spoken with my parents a lot about what I think they did. Well, a little bit of what I think they didn't do as well. But one of the most powerful things I think they ever did is they had something called the five-year rule.

My dad calls it the five-year rule. My mom calls it just never talking down to a child, but my dad had a rule that he would always treat me as if I was five years older than I was. So at age five years old, he wanted me to start practicing sports. Team sports, stuff like that. At 10 years old, he wanted me to start thinking about colleges.

Okay. And then at 20 years old, I was ready to buy a house. So he told me I should start thinking about buying a house. Now he's pushing pretty hard for grandchildren, but so my mother did the same thing. She never spoke down to me. I think that's what you were talking about a little bit with your kids being good in finances.

You don't treat them like children, you treat them like adults who maybe have a little bit less knowledge. 

Dr. Lev: What are your thoughts on that? Well, Sarah kids have a lot of fun and, uh, actually I treat myself as, yeah.

Jonathan Levi: Yeah. I think you and my father would get along. He likes to brag to his friends. That he's more of a kid than I am, which I think honestly at this point is true.

Dr. Lev: Which is a point where you should say that your father is an engineer in a huge company and the team.

Jonathan Levi: He was an engineer at Intel.

He's retired now, but then he was also an entrepreneur had his own company, but he's still a kid. I mean, if he listens to this, which hopefully he will, he'll be very proud to admit that he says, quote, I'm more kid than you are. Which is a play on words because it's grammatically incorrect. You know, it's like a clever joke, but I think there's a lot of power in that because it allows children to look at their parents as someone else who's learning and someone else who's fun.

And then they engage with you as an equal and not as someone that they're shy or afraid of or anything like that. 

Dr. Lev: Well, your donate to teach you boundaries and Patricia respect mean there is a limit to everything. Yeah. 

Jonathan Levi: Yeah, absolutely. So how do you strike that balance? It's not easy. 

Dr. Lev: I know it does.

Jonathan Levi: And it does the hard part, right? Yeah. You're talking on the podcast and Anna does the hard part of striking the balance. So tell me a little bit about, I want to dive in a little bit just to our course, because just so you guys know we've had, uh, almost 12,000. Downloads it's the most popular episode we've ever had of the becoming superhuman podcast, but there were some questions that were left unresolved.

One of those, which I hope I'm not going to fall asleep because I'm not a technical or mathematically inclined person. At least that's how I was convinced by a lot of educators. Unfortunately, I remember being pulled aside and told you're just not good at math, but a lot of students ask, how can you accelerate the learning process?

Of technical materials, such as mathematics, such as scientific formulas, things like that.

Dr. Lev: Well, it has a lot to do with going from examples to goals, rules of a general, and it's very hard to memorize the holes. You kind of need to understand the goal, to feel the goal. And it's like learning the cases in a foreign language, right.

But examples are not so general and they don't change very much. So you need to memorize a lot of examples and then everyone understands everything. 

Jonathan Levi: So if I'm looking at a medical textbook, I want to look at different cases and different ways that that would play out. 

Dr. Lev: So this is a question that is oldest asked by medical students.

They need to make differential diagnosis and it's very hard. But they have a lot of use cases and they have very clear protocols. So they just follow the clear protocols for each use case until it becomes kind of national frozen. So if you take a doctor at 4:00 AM, you will get the full protocol.

Jonathan Levi: Interesting. Give me some examples. Say you have mathematical formulas where the examples might be very complicated, right? So I remember one of the biggest things I struggled with in high school was in algebra two and I needed to memorize X equals negative B plus or minus square root B squared, minus two, AC all over to A.

Right. I even forget what the name for that equation is. I think it's the quadratic equation, but how could I better learn that rather than I created a song for it? And to this day, I still have to sing the song. 

Dr. Lev: Actually, there were like five or six different forms of writing it. So we just, at school, I had a very good master share and that's why I became a mathematician.

So one of the ways that he was teaching girls was just taking the situation, putting in various numbers, various places and understanding. Decomposing how each number at each place changes the result. So you kind of start feeling what will happen if this number was up or down after you feel it, you can learn.

Jonathan Levi: And then the formula becomes natural. Just like speaking in cases is natural. Natural. That's very interesting and I love the, it just ties together so nicely with that. This is all kinds of learning really. I mean to touch back. That's why we speed read because you can get more examples at once. If you're speed reading an entire book with dozens of stories, about the same idea.

Dr. Lev: It's very hard to find a good t-shirt and it is probably even harder to know how to teach yourself.

Usually people start teaching themselves after completing PhD degree, which not everybody can afford. 

Jonathan Levi: Yeah, I think I got lucky because I had add from an early age and at some stage I learned that I think it was actually about 12 or 13 years old. I realized that people were never going to stop asking me to learn things.

So I better figure out how the hell to learn. And pretty much from age 13 to 18, I would come home every single day. I'd close my door, lock my door, and I would just teach myself whatever it was that the other students were able to pay attention and learn in the class because I was not learning in the class at all.

Dr. Lev: I had very bit, a childhood experience of century of deprivation. My parents always said to me, well, you should learn. You should learn. They should learn. And I was not exposed to anything actually. So I was so eager to experience new stuff. So once I was old enough, I just couldn't stop experiencing new stuff.

Jonathan Levi: Hmm. What was one of the first major pivotal things? That you taught yourself. I mean, I know you didn't actually study electrical engineering or computer science. 

Dr. Lev: I studied electrical engineering and computer science was something like a, on the job training. I just started to work. I came with some algorithms that are all in one language and they said, okay, is it diverse?

Nice. Now I should do it in another language. So I just needed to adapt and by kind of frailty. In another language, then they looked at it but said, well, this works, but we cannot use it. This has the holes that you should fall. So I followed the rules. 

Jonathan Levi: So it was all autodidactic learning. It was following the rules.

Interesting. The rules that you never actually studied, the rules that you learned by assembling examples and experience. Yes. Interesting. Let me ask another question, which is just my own personal interests that actually, this wasn't a requested question. What do you think for both of you? Each one? What do you think is the most impactful thing you've ever learned?

Dr. Lev: When to talk and when to shut up. 

Jonathan Levi: Okay. That's a pretty good one. Anna, what do you think, how do you enjoy the experiences or was, or eager to learn to be the best? This is what my parents taught me as a rule in life. And then just to see the small things and from that point of view, and sometimes even push back the rules because they want to enjoy.

I think that's great. So presence being in the moment and appreciating, yeah. I asked that question with a motivational, which is really to thank you guys, because I think the greatest thing I've ever learned is relearning how to learn. I don't think I can do anything that I do now. If I hadn't learned from you guys.

How to learn and how to accelerate my learning. So thank you guys. Thank you. What else, tell me about you guys are working on a book, as I understand, tell me about that. 

Dr. Lev: Well, the book is almost finished and we will see very soon on Amazon. 

Jonathan Levi: Awesome. So as I understand it, the book is really it's for the diehard fans.

It's for the people who religiously read the blog, they want more than, I mean, because our courses. Slimmed down, let's say for, to appeal to the mass audience, the book offers more content. 

Dr. Lev: So Google doesn't sell. It just helps many people have different needs. And they came to me, they came to Ana with different questions, which cannot be addressed by a slim course.

Right. So if you want to treat a specific problems, that is not. So common, but still occurs with like 5% of our students. You will find the recipe for it. 

Jonathan Levi: Interesting. So it's the difference between the 20% and the 80%? Yeah. 

Dr. Lev: It's just like Pareto, but remember, as I have many subjects in our course, right. So someone will fail at something at some point, this fellow should not stop.

Jonathan Levi: Yeah. I mean, when I was previewing the book, I realized it's not set up like a course it's set up like a resource guide. It has much of the same information and probably more information. But not in a way that a beginner would want to read it, then the sense that it's there for people who already, like you said, define the formulas that they need.

Would you say that's correct. 

Dr. Lev: You need to know what you're looking for. If you are buying this book. 

Jonathan Levi: Interesting. And then what's next. I mean, we've talked about learning, super learning for kids. We've talked about the new book we've talked about. Well, actually, you know, we, haven't talked a little bit about improvements to the super learner course, which is, I mean, now we're almost two years on, in October.

It'll be two years since we recorded the first course and we've done improvements throughout the way, but I think, uh, it would not be keeping in line with. What we preach if we didn't constantly improve the course, what are some things that stand out for you guys that we can do better? 

Dr. Lev: Well, we can provide much more examples. This is something that we definitely can do. 

Jonathan Levi: Absolutely. I think the markers are such a huge thing that we teach in the course that, especially there, it seems people just want more examples. They want to see love. When I tell you a new piece of information, how do you create the marker or Ana? How do you create the marker?

So maybe we could do a couple of interesting examples. Completely on the fly. Cause I know we didn't have a chance to rehearse this, but uh, completely on the fly. We can talk a little bit about how you might create markers for different things you learn. Okay, cool. So, Oh, what have I learned recently? Well, today I learned actually.

Why it is that you can't teach a child speed-reading before the age of 13. Now, just to give a brief explanation as I understood it it's because until you've done a lot of reading, you don't recognize words, just as words, you actually are still breaking them down into their sounds. But after many, many, many hours of reading, you look at the word.

Incomprehensible. And even if it's misspelled in the middle of the word, your brain just boom gets it. Now that's a pretty easy thing for me to remember because I'm very interested in speed reading and super learning, but how could someone set a marker? For remembering that concept, if maybe it was to do lists, look, you said, marker yourself.

Dr. Lev: You said several was the viral mail in regional letters were mixed and people still in the study. So it was your example. So you're actually creating the market very often to create the progress. And if we don't understand is we created them. 

Jonathan Levi: Is the thing that sticks out. If I just think about it, what the first thing come to my head, that would be a good marker.

And then spend a second. I think also people don't recognize that they then created a marker, but they don't take a moment. To pause and give detail. And because I've been trained by you guys, I actually exactly like love said, I saw the word in comprehensible and it just so happened that that viral male had a black background and slightly grayish letters.

And then it also said, you know how amazing your brain is, but brain was spelled Brian. And so I had very, very vivid detail for me. It comes automatically, but for a lot of students, that vivid detail is something they need to practice and they don't do it. 

Dr. Lev: I think details is a bit tricky because you details from new information.

So in this particular case, I would add details, not from this particular meals that you read like five, seven years ago, but from some other styles that you learn about it, this is where you compare the amount of markers you have. For example, when you read the paragraph, you have like one marker or two markers, and do you need to put in like 11 pieces of information, how you do it, you are detailed.

Jonathan Levi: So. Each detail becomes an element of a piece of information. So connected for me, let's say that the reason I was memorizing that piece of information, why can't you teach speed reading to ten-year-old children? Let's say if I were as memorizing that because it's a to-do list. Right. It's something I need to write a blog post about that and three other subjects.

Dr. Lev: Well, first of all, you put in the number of certain, which is like an age. So you should go really put in some kind of marker, which is associated with certain like a black kit, which is an unlucky number, or like a bar mitzvah corral. 

Jonathan Levi: And if you had a barometer or what about the word 13 with the numbers rearranged that way?

Dr. Lev: It will evolve well, because you cannot mix too much was in a marker. It should be very fast when you speed up your markers, you Margaret has become very, very simple. 

Jonathan Levi: I see. And don't forget or other details that you want to remember, according that fact that you learned. Okay. So that's need to remember the raking sounds and why is that and how is that and what should you do?

So if you store the information in a form of question and answer around that, marker, it will arrange all other details. 

Dr. Lev: Okay. For example, example breaking cause of work, just staying as a sink heritable and break it into pieces, color each piece in a different color, for example. 

Jonathan Levi: Okay. I lost you there.

Dr. Lev: When you say break, you should apply it to your marker. 

Jonathan Levi: Ah, so break is part of the, is a detail of the marker break.

Dr. Lev:  As in breaking the sound, everything's about incredible your Briggs award, incredible itself. You do not add words of Tibet notice original. Marker. Incredible. And the original marker where you use it by changing.

Jonathan Levi: Okay. Let's try another piece of knowledge. Uh, what's something one of you guys has learned recently. Yeah, it's always tough. It's like, what are you going to think about next? Uh, it's like meditation instantly. Your brain is clear, right? Yeah. 

Dr. Lev: The problem is that I learned a lot of stuff, but I cannot put it inside this lecture.

I, I learned a lot of stuff in spatial Portuguese, but actually I'm not very good at this languages yet. I spent like three hours learning most of them. So it's not a lot of time. So I'm kind of embarrassed to talk about it.

Jonathan Levi: Sure. Well, and also I think actually creating markers for new foreign languages is the easiest thing.

It's creating markers for concepts that I really struggle with. If you give me a new word in any language, I can come with a marker. It's. A fraction of a second. 

Dr. Lev: Well, everybody has a problem. Something different from my book. You can read about the homology method. Technology metal is the methods that I teach about how to learn different concepts.

It appears on my blog, but it doesn't appear in our main course. Tell me about that. You kind of search the word inside the dictionary. Once you found the word on Google, you can understand how the word was formed. Okay. And what did the early means?

Jonathan Levi: And this is for foreign language words. 

Dr. Lev: No, also for English. I mean, when you have a concept, which you do understand, you kind of deconstruct the concept into its building blocks. And when you study the technology of the vote, how's the word was constructed. It actually allows you to deconstruct it.

Jonathan Levi: Okay. So let's give an example. Since that's been our feedback transcendentalism, it's a nice word because it uses some components that are used other words in the language, other places in the language.

Dr. Lev: Yeah. Trance is over. Ascent is like, go up. So it starts with going up over. Okay. Now there is this dramatic ending E N T a L, which means unknown of how I go up over. 

Jonathan Levi: So I was going to look up the dictionary explanation so that we could connect it, but I actually. I don't even know how to spell transcendental is, um, Nope. I'm going to have to Google it. Google always works. Yeah. Google always knows to correct it.

Dr. Lev: Yeah. It's also very good for markers. If you cannot create a Margaret, just go to Google image, search and Google it. 

Jonathan Levi: Yeah, I would ask you where this word is a part of something. So maybe, you know, the concept, maybe you understand it, but let's say if you saw it in a movie or you read it in a book or you heard it in a lecture, that would be the visual marker. So always connecting to prior knowledge. If it's. 

Dr. Lev: Yeah, you could edit like a meaning, like who goes over up. It's a man's that is meditating. So you have a meditating man and you have a fast way to the heaven and the man is transcending this pathway. So you have both the meaning is the word itself, how it sounds. And you also have a use case how to use it. And the one shot.

Jonathan Levi: All in one go. So for those who are dying to know what the definition of transcendental ism is, it's a system developed by Emmanuel Kant based on the idea that in order to understand the nature of reality, one was first examine and analyze the reasoning process that governs the nature of experience.

So going over in a macro level, kind of looking from a further away. And then transcend transcendental ism. 

Dr. Lev: Given the nature of experience, you cannot learn from a very, very long explanation. So you always need to go to the simpler explanation. 

Jonathan Levi: Sure. And break it down a little bit. Let's give one more example.

And then I know we have to wrap up because you guys have kids to raise, to be super learners. Well, if we were going to try and remember some statistics or dates, now we talk in the course a little bit about creating symbols for each number. We also talk about the major method for memorizing numbers, but in actuality, if I read the date 1906 in a book, I'm not going to stop and encode that into actual major method.

And I'm not going to think a pen. And a fish and a bagel and a broken pair of glasses, which are my markers for one nine, zero six. So how would I do it? 

Dr. Lev: Well, personally, when I see star come formation, I connected to all, some other historical information is I was a failure of a notion of Russia in 1905.

So I just take the markets that they have for certain, for lotion at one, and one had one nice 1906 for me is, uh, there was a world's fair or a failed world's fair.

And so I connected that way. Anytime I hear anything about like 1970s. I think about specific musicians who might've been popular at the time or who might've died at the time.

Jonathan Levi: Yeah. Yeah. It's easier to learn if you have a lot of prior knowledge, um, for children in order to create prior knowledge is experience and as much as they experienced on themselves, different habits, different places, different stories, stories on. Hours when I'm telling them a lot about my childhood and what I learned and who I am and who they grandparents are, they learn and they come and like that experience.

Dr. Lev: For a lot of, uh, country specifical, uh, talks like, uh, I'm explaining, uh, about, uh, summarize forwards, uh, Chinese foods, sorry, summarize words. Katala and the little ones. Oh. So when they talk about Japan, they kind of imagine somewhere with a sport. Now, when I talk about China's the emerging Chinese food.

Interests organizing as a cultural experience and a culinary experience and some other experiences in one run based on our method.

Jonathan Levi: Let me ask this general question. I usually tell people when I'm interviewed on podcasts, that one of the most important things in the method is that everything you learn needs to become a highly detailed visual marker.

You guys would agree with that right now? No. Y, well, okay, hold on. It needs to become a highly detailed marker. If that marker is sensory, smell, touch, something like that. 

Dr. Lev: Well, first of all, if you really want to storage for long term, it's usually talk coding. Sure. So it's not only one sentence, but several hours.

And now you have creative markers and you have logical markers. If you have some sort of Volta, remember you will not generate a creative market for it. Creative markets are very good for specific examples. When you have logical goals, you kind of remember the logic and those are markers where there's interaction between different things like X creates Y yes.

Jonathan Levi: Okay. So I'm going to continue with my original line of inquiry, which is the base of our method is that you need to create a powerful symbol, even if that's feeling. Or emotion or this, you know, the, your marker for chocolate is the smell of chocolate. Your marker for childhood is brightly colored playgrounds.

Everything you've learned needs to have a marker. Let me ask this. Do you think children at a young age are capable of that? Or when are they capable of that? 

Dr. Lev: Children do create powerful experiences. Those experiences are of different sorts and it takes some time kills us. Original vocabulary becomes strong enough to build upon it.

Okay. So I think that around the edge of certain visual vocabulary is large enough and strong enough to build upon it. I'm not sure what happens before it, because every child is different.

Jonathan Levi: Right? So when you say visual vocabulary, you mean that they've seen enough things? It kind of sounds funny. They've seen some things, man.

They've seen enough things and they have enough creativity built up to just randomly call up an image to associate with a memory. 

Dr. Lev: It becomes easier when you've watched TV and the books. 

Jonathan Levi: Interesting. It's funny. I think love is the only learning expert I've ever spoken to. Who encourages watching TV? We discuss, eh, cartoons to the day.

Dr. Lev: Yeah, yeah. With the kids. Yeah. Your kids are how old? Remind me seven and eight and two. And they're watching cartoons exclusively in Hebrew. No really? 

Jonathan Levi: Some languages  that we do. Okay. So they're also watching in Russia and also watching in English. Yeah, of course. And then we always ask them, what do you think is happening?

Why did the creator did that? And to like analyze it to the death, every opportunity is a learning opportunity. As you said earlier, lab, let me ask you this every year. Let me ask you this for me. I only spoke my second language Hebrew with my father, so I never got confused. Is there a risk of children? I mean, your children are growing up, literally speaking three languages, not just two and it's not that mom speaks one and dad speaks to the other.

Is there any risk of children, confusing languages. If you expose them to a foreign language earlier, our children predominantly use Hebrew.

Dr. Lev: We do not use it much of other languages. We kind of put this languages before them, but we don't require them to acquire this languages. Okay. So they do speak with our parents, passion.

They speak with us. . And the English, you saw things that we try to tune out TV too. 

Jonathan Levi: Do you think parents need to worry about their children becoming confused? Or is that another one of those? Take a lot of examples in the brain. We'll figure out the rules that if a word sounds like this, it's probably an English word.

I think there is a speech roles. The, for example, if you start a sentence, always finish it the same language. So there are rules that would help your child to become more accurate in each language. Yeah. 

Dr. Lev: And it's important. Yeah. It's important to keep contexts. If you started some conversations, some context you should not change languages in between.

Jonathan Levi: Yeah, I love that. I mean, it's such a super learner statement to be like, well, if you start a sentence or a conversation in one language, you have to finish it in a second. It's like, there are so many people all over the world who are afraid to learn new languages on your kids are learning three more. 

Dr. Lev: Uh, well, the, you love to practice martial arts and each martial art comes with a language, right?

So when my smallest child was here, so he was counting in Korean. 

Jonathan Levi: You're kidding me because his instructor. Yeah. That exactly. So that was a, yeah. So there are songs and sentences. 

Dr. Lev: I used to work at Sasha two times, so it was really fun. Yeah. 

Jonathan Levi: You'd come into Oregon and be like, I have, I don't know how to say three, but I have three tasks today we need to discuss.

That's really cool. Awesome. Thank you guys so much. It's been such a pleasure chatting with you guys, and I'm really looking forward. I don't know about you guys, but the learning course for me is something that's very. Personally meaningful, just given how much I struggled to learn. And honestly, how many teachers I had who kind of didn't believe in me because I had different needs as a learner.

So I'm very excited about that course. And I'm excited to improve our super learning course. Yeah. Any last thoughts you guys want to share? 

Dr. Lev: Do not forget to learn new things, learn new things. 

Jonathan Levi: Absolutely. Yeah. Awesome Dr. Liv and professor Anna. Thank you guys so much. It's been a pleasure chatting with you.

Dr. Lev: Bye. Thanks.

Jonathan Levi: All right, Superfriends. That's it for this week's episode. I hope you've enjoyed it. By the way, before you get back to rocking your day and applying some of the new knowledge you've picked up in the last half hour or so, please do us a big favor and head over to iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you discovered this episode and leave us a review reviews are a really important aspect of making the show a success.

And besides helping us create more great content for you. They really, really brightened our day. That's all for now. We'll see you guys next week.

Closing: Thanks for tuning in to the Becoming SuperHuman Podcast for more great skills and strategies, or for links to any of the resources mentioned in this episode, visit www.becomingasuperhuman.com/podcast. We'll see you next time.

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19 Comments

  1. Luiz
    at — Reply

    Thanks, I learned a lot of interesting things in past episodes.

  2. Shivaditya Purohit
    at — Reply

    loved th heart and the depth of the conversation. The way that Dr. Metivier shared from his enormous experience and insights was just amazing. Thank you Jonathan for doing this podcast!! 🙂

  3. Rob
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    Great interview with Dr. Greg Wells! He mentioned a doctor from Colorado around the 42:30 point of the podcast, discussing turmeric and black pepper. I couldn’t make out the doctor’s name. Can you provide me with his full name and maybe his website or contact info. Interested in his products.

    Thanks,

    Rob

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The Basics of Total Personal Transformation W/ Stephan Spencer