Limitless was the first of many books that I read this year for tactical advice on achieving my goals. While it was a little fluffier than I'd have liked, and some of the techniques I've had exposure to prior, overall I thought it was a very coherent piece about how to improve your learning process. I found Jim's story inspiring - from his childhood brain injury and subsequent learning and identity issues, to how he overcame and now continues exceed his limitations, even enough to perform a last minute keynote on a subject he had zero knowledge of. Here are a couple of quotes and passages from the book I thought really distilled a lot of information:
Digital Overload
It’s important to note that overload, distraction, forgetfulness, and default thinking have been around for ages. While technology doesn’t cause these conditions, it has great potential to amplify them. The benefits of the digital age are plentiful, but let’s take a look at how the advances in technology that help you, can possibly also hinder you.
Compared to the 15th century, we now consume as much data in a single day as an average person from the 1400s would have absorbed in an entire lifetime. Not so long ago, information moved glacially through word of mouth, or a newspaper, or a posted bulletin in a town square. Now we have so much access to information that it’s taking a toll on our time and our quality of life.
Memory
Psychologists refer to this as the “forgetting curve.” It is the mathematical formula that describes the rate at which information is forgotten after it is initially learned. Research suggests humans forget approximately 50 percent of what they learn within an hour, and an average of 70 percent within 24 hours.
There are a lot of factors affecting memory, but Jim clarifies a few that we could stand to take more control of; Primacy and Recency for two. Primacy is the fact that we tend to remember things from the beginning, i.e. the beginning of a talk. Recency is somewhat the opposite; we'll closely remember things that just happened, so maybe the end of a talk.
We’ve all procrastinated before a test and then, the night before the exam, sat down to “cram” as much as possible without any breaks. Primacy and recency are just two of the (many) reasons cram sessions don’t work. But by taking breaks, you create more beginnings and endings, and you retain far more of what you’re learning.
Other techniques he recommends are using mneumonic devices like acronyms (like CuRRe for Cue, Routine and Reward, which are the stages of habit formation) or the method of Loci, which suggests that you engage your visual and spatial thinking to make your subject more memorable. It did make me think a bit; I've heard of memory palaces, a mental "structure" that memory masters use to systematically store and retrieve information. Most notably, it is the technique memory champion Joshua Foer (and not-so-real memory champion Sherlock Holmes) uses. If one were to engage the method of Loci regularly enough to come up with common visualizations and areas, would that not naturally build a spatial structure you can refer to - i.e. the memory palace? Guess I'll find out!
Knowledge Acquisition vs Exploitation
Although the phrase “knowledge is power” is commonly attributed to Sir Francis Bacon, the first known use of the exact wording was not penned until Thomas Hobbes, who acted as secretary to Bacon in his younger years, used the phrase scientia potentia est, Latin for “knowledge is power,” in Leviathan in 1651. He then expanded on the idea in De Corpore in 1655. Unfortunately, Hobbes’s original sentiments have been cut short over the years. In the original, Hobbes says: “The end of knowledge is power; and the use of theorems is for the construction of problems; and, lastly, the scope of all speculation is the performing of some action, or thing to be done.”
New belief: Knowledge × Action = Power
These two quotes really crystallize a thought that I've struggled with my entire life - to what use do we acquire information for? I could read all the books in the world, and they would be useless if I never put them to practice. For me, it drives home how important it is to strike a balance between acquiring new information and experiences vs exploiting and exercising what you already know.