Jim Kwik had suffered three brain injuries by the time he turned 12. The most significant happened when he was just five. “I had an accident where I fell off a chair and headfirst into a heater,” the entrepreneur and founder of Kwik Learning tells me. “I developed learning difficulties and processing issues. I had migraines every day, and balance issues too. It took me three years longer [than it should have] to learn to read. I was slowing down the rest of my class and being teased and bullied for it.” In an unadvisable turn of phrase, one of his teachers at the time leapt to his defence and told the class to quit taunting “the boy with the broken brain”.On the latest episode of Brave New World, Kwik reveals how he turned this phrase on its head, becoming a world expert on brain health and optimisation. His tips and tricks on how to improve cognition, outlined in his bestselling book, Limitless (2020), are uniquely accessible. “In school they teach you what to learn, but less so how to learn,” Kwik says. His learning disabilities pushed him to think long and hard about the latter. “How does my brain work?” he recalls wondering. “And how can I work my brain?”
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00:00I didn't start out with this ability.
00:03I had actually learning disabilities growing up.
00:07I had an accident when I was five years old.
00:09I was in school, and I fell off a chair headfirst into a heater.
00:16And because of it, I was rushed to the emergency room,
00:19and I had learning difficulties, poor focus, poor memory.
00:24They called it processing issues,
00:26where teachers would repeat themselves over and over again,
00:29and I didn't understand.
00:31I had migraines every day.
00:33I thought it was normal.
00:34Balance issues when I was five, six, seven.
00:37It took me three years longer to learn how to read.
00:40That was very difficult.
00:41It really hurt my self-esteem.
00:45I had a lot of self-doubt, a lot of fears around not having the answers.
00:51Maybe some people could relate to it.
00:53When I was nine years old, I was slowing down in class,
00:55and I was being teased and bullied for it.
00:58And a teacher came to my defense.
01:00She pointed to me in front of the whole class and said,
01:02leave that kid alone.
01:03That's the boy with the broken brain.
01:05So I was known as the boy with the broken brain through school.
01:10And when I was 18, I learned some strategies.
01:12I started studying the brain.
01:14I was obsessed with answering this one question,
01:16how does my brain work so I could work my brain?
01:18It's one of the reasons why our courses and our work is,
01:22the book and everything is so, so popular,
01:24because people are just drowning in information.
01:27It's like taking a sip of water out of a fire hose.
01:29The amount of information is doubling at dizzying speeds,
01:31but how we learn it and read it and retain it is the same.
01:33So that growing gap creates something called digital deluge,
01:36information anxiety.
01:38They call it information fatigue syndrome,
01:40which has health consequences, higher blood pressure,
01:43compression of leisure time, more sleeplessness, right?
01:46Because we can't keep up with it all.
01:49So teaching people how to learn faster, read faster, focus better,
01:53retain information to be able to keep up with this data overwhelm.
01:57Research shows that actually it'll help you live longer,
02:01studying each day.
02:03And there was a study done with nuns.
02:05They were living 80, 90 and above, kind of like your grandparents.
02:09Half of it, they found out their longevity was their faith,
02:14emotional gratitude, all that.
02:16The other half, though, was they were lifelong learners.
02:19They were studying every day.
02:20They were having deep conversations.
02:22And because of it, added years to their life and then life to their years.
02:26The study was on Time Magazine, the cover.
02:29The study's called Aging with Grace.
02:31So you want to keep your brains active.
02:34Because the two dips we see in cognitive performance is when people graduate
02:40school, because some students associate education and learning as the same,
02:45that when their education's done, their learning is done, right?
02:48And when people retire.
02:50Often when people retire, they don't quite use their minds as actively,
02:55and that can be a challenge also as well.
02:57So new learnings.
02:59And then finally, the last number 10 key for better brain is stress management.
03:04And we talked about this already.
03:06The chronic stress shrinks your hippocampus,
03:09and you create cortisol, adrenaline.
03:11It puts you in fight or flight.
03:13So on a scale of zero to 10, 10 being the best,
03:16how are you coping with stress?
03:18Some people, they go get a massage.
03:21Some people, they meditate.
03:22Some people, they go out in nature or spend time with their pets.
03:25But we need mechanisms and activities to be able to reduce that stress buildup,
03:32because that stress could lead to other challenges down the road.