in 2002, in london, a guy named dominic o’brien memorized 54 shuffled decks of cards. 2,808 cards, each seen only once, recited back in order. guinness record.
he went on to become an 8x world memory champion.
now you might think: another genetic freak. a brain wired differently at birth.
nothing more wrong.
as he himself said: *“I was diagnosed with dyslexia... I dropped out of school when I was 16. academic information just didn’t get through to me.”*/ *“I failed most of my exams, and I couldn’t concentrate.”*
no degree. no training. no talent anyone had ever noticed.
at 30, he sat on a couch and watched a man on TV memorize a whole deck of cards in under three minutes.
he dug deeper into how the man did it and simply taught himself the method.
now... if a dyslexic school dropout with no degree and no academic record could memorize 2,808 cards in a single sitting, then why do the most brilliant students spend weeks on one chapter and still, when the exam comes, hit their heads against the wall?
the answer is simple: people skip one of the most fundamental skills you can ever acquire: learning how to learn.
in order to master it, you need to understand the mechanics behind it.
how to wire your attention so the brain actually records what’s in front of it.
how to store a fact in a place instead of a list.
how to use sleep to consolidate new information.
most people don’t even know how to read a non-fiction book properly. (you don’t read it like a fcking novel, page by page.)
and to be honest, it’s hard to blame them.
they don’t teach you this in the school system. they don’t teach you this in a work environment.
they give you the material and then simply test you on it: write a test, an essay, complete a report.
so you do what everyone does. highlighting, rereading hundreds of times, and when the time for action actually comes, the mind goes blank.
this is not an effort issue.
your brain is built to take information in a very specific way and you can’t simply brute-force around it.
thousands of years of evolution decided how your brain stores things. not your study schedule.
that’s why a random dropout with no talent can memorize 2,808 cards, and a straight-A student can’t remember one chapter.
similarly, the most brilliant minds the world has ever seen, leonardo da vinci, charles darwin, nikola tesla, were very rarely a product of genes and some supernatural intelligence.
they were a product of a system. more precisely: of a very specific way of understanding, categorizing, and remembering complex information.
it’s another early morning as I’m writing this and my lab is once again buried in material...
*the science of self-learning.* the *corpus hermeticum.* iamblichus on pythagoras. bruno’s *de umbris idearum.* a printout of a 2003 brain scan study.
people often ask me how do I study so much and write all these articles on complex topics so often.
you will find all the answers in this article.
we’re not going to go into mainstream stuff like cornell notes or pomodoro timers or the 27 highlighter colors.
we’re going to go deep into methods stemming from the greatest esoteric sources of the western tradition. the ones that created the greatest minds the world has ever seen.
the plan is as follows:
first we’ll dissect the entire MACHINERY. understanding how your brain is wired to take in new information. crucial for implementing anything that follows.
later, you’ll receive my complete PROTOCOL. the actual, step-by-step techniques those who study like “super humans” actually use.
ladies and gentlemen. get your pens, papers, coffee and whatever else you need, ready in place. this is not the type of content you skim through or read between notifications.
it requires your full attention. and in return...
I’m going to teach you how to learn once and for all.
let’s get into it.
THE MACHINERY: HOW THE BRAIN ACTUALLY LEARNS
*"all enquiry and all learning is but recollection."*
— plato, meno 81d
YOUR BRAIN IGNORES 99.9995% OF WHAT YOU READ
first off, we need to establish something most people got utterly and fundamentally wrong: the mere act of sitting in front of a book isn’t “studying.”
scanning a page with your eyes isn’t reading it.
repeating a definition out loud isn’t remembering it.
underlining a sentence in fancy pinky colour doesn’t make it more important.
your brain has a very specific way of filtering incoming input.
you see, every second, around 11 million bits of information are pouring into your brain. (including: the sound of the fridge, the smell of the coffee, the weight of your shirt on your shoulders, every color in the corner of your eye.)
your brain doesn’t process every bit. it would require way too much effort and would waste far more energy than it has.
therefore, throughout millions of years of evolution, it learned to intake only what it flags as absolutely necessary, and filter out everything else.
of those 11 million bits, about 50 make it into conscious awareness. 99.9995% of what you see, smell, hear goes unnoticed. and I mean it: as if it was never ever there.
that’s why you can be “reading” a book and catch yourself not remembering a single word out of the 5 previous pages you’ve just read.
that’s why you can drive for 30 minutes and come back home with absolutely no memory of the drive.
and that’s why you can be “studying” for 5 hours non-stop and score 2 out of 72 points on an exam.
whatever your brain, more specifically your RAS, does not flag as important, goes simply unnoticed. like background noise.
with that being said, to remember more of what you learn, you shouldn’t be studying more.
you should actually study LESS.
how tf does that make sense?
another property of the RAS is that it relatively quickly turns off. sustained attention on one task starts to drop after about 20 to 30 minutes, and the deepest kind of focus, the kind that actually flags things, runs in blocks of 60 to 90 minutes at most before the flag stops firing. after that, you’re scanning pages with your eyes again.
that’s why 8-hour non-stop focus study blocks are simply wasted if they’re not organized in the right way.
the question therefore isn’t:
*how do I force myself to focus longer?*
but:
*how do I reset my attention span, divide my work blocks and make my brain flag incoming information as actually important?*
YOUR BRAIN CAN’T STORE A LIST. IT CAN STORE A ROUTE
another property of your brain when it comes to remembering things is that it tends to memorize patterns in a very specific manner.
it works best when the object can be attached to already familiar places and images.
again, it’s a product of millions of years of evolution.
back then, your ancestors didn’t need to memorize the dates of some battles or the definition of marginal utility.
they needed to memorize the layout of the shelter, the escape routes, where the water is and which valley has the saber-tooth tigers.
this formed a kind of map in memory, where every piece of information is connected to some familiar location. the hippocampus, the part of the brain that handles memory, is literally built around cells that fire for places: place cells, grid cells, an internal GPS. there is no equivalent for dates.
there are no tigers around the corner anymore, but that property of the brain remained. neuroscience calls it spatial memory.
in 2003, the neuroscientist eleanor maguire conducted an experiment to see what makes people with supernatural memory capability different. 10 memory champions were scanned with fMRI and guess what? they haven’t got a different brain. all parts intact, same structure as the control group, same IQ. except one thing: while memorizing, their navigation regions lit up. the hippocampus, the parts of the brain you use to find your way home. 9 out of 10 of them were doing the same thing: putting the numbers, the faces, the cards into places.
that’s the reason why you can easily walk your home blindfolded, but cannot remember a few dates from a chapter you read yesterday.
your brain remembers best what it can see, walk through, and picture. what it can imagine.
THE KNOWLEDGE IS INSTALLED IN SLEEP
you might think that after all that studying, the job is done. you close the book and the knowledge is in.
but what you did is in reality only HALF of the process.
the other half needs to be done when you close your eyes that night.
the mechanics are simple:
during your waking hours, all the incoming information is landing in the hippocampus. the very part of your brain that acts as a temporary buffer, a fast, small storage for things that just happened. but within a short period of time, it gets overwritten and forgets.
that’s why you can feel like you learned everything in the morning and when you try to remember it at night, it feels like it’s simply not there.
consolidation of memory requires a transfer, and that transfer happens only when you sleep.
during deep sleep (roughly 20 to 30 minutes after you drift off, and mostly in the first 3 hours of the night) your brainwaves slow down to less than 1 cycle per second, and the hippocampus begins to replay back to the cortex, the permanent archive, everything it flagged that day.
not once. hundreds of times, like a mantra, in bursts of electrical activity called sharp-wave ripples, nested inside the slow waves. each replay burns the pattern a little deeper into the cortex.
this was best exploited in the darkest project the CIA ever conducted: MK ultra.
they were playing looped affirmations into subjects’ heads while they were drugged and in a coma. the usual filtering systems are off and everything goes straight into the subconscious mind, stored as a fact.
but one catch:
the night doesn’t replay everything. it prioritizes information that was
1) flagged by the RAS as important,
and 2) recent.
what you touched last before closing your eyes goes to the front of the queue. sometimes a simple 10-minute pass over the material before sleep can double the waking memory the next day compared to the same material studied in the morning and followed by a day awake.
and one more thing: the same replay runs while you’re awake. in the few minutes right after you close the book, and in the first few minutes after you wake up.
the same filtering systems are down and the hippocampus keeps replaying the last thing it received. unless something new lands on top.
READING IS NOT LEARNING. CORRECTING IS
you don’t learn by reading and mindlessly storing information.
you learn best by first guessing, then checking it out against the source, and then updating the model, overwriting on what you already knew.
the reason is that your brain runs a constant prediction engine.
before you read the answer, before you learn the thing, your mind already has some model of it stored. a guess. an expectation of how it works.
when you simply read new stuff, your brain has no chance to connect it to the already existing model and therefore, the model doesn’t get updated. the new information sits on top, unattached, and slides off by morning.
the best learning happens in the moment your brain registers a prediction error.
your brain had come up with its model of reality, got confronted with what’s actually true, and was forced to recalibrate it. that recalibration is the learning. the gap between what you expected and what you got is the signal that tells the brain: rewrite this.
that’s why nothing teaches as well as a bad answer on an exam. you were so certain about your answer, got confronted with the correct one... and next time you’ll remember. the more confident you were, the harder the correction lands. psychologists even have a name for it: the hypercorrection effect. errors made with high confidence are the ones most likely to be fixed for good.
so the idea of opening the book on page one and reading it line by line is simply dumb.
before you even read a chapter, you should first test yourself on it. guess what it says. answer the headings. write down what you already think you know.
then attack it based on your needs, find where the gaps are, where the guesses were wrong, and gradually overwrite the old model with the correct one.
that’s the whole difference between reading and learning. one puts information in front of you. the other forces your brain to rewrite itself.
that would be enough of theory. now you know the core mechanics of how your brain takes in, stores and retrieves information. now it’s time to put them to work.
THE SUPER-STUDENT PROTOCOL
- *how to understand, memorize and consolidate information at extraordinary pace without any extraordinary effort.*
the continuation of this article with specific techniques and the exact practice and is available only on Substack.
continue reading here → https://cipheron.substack.com/p/the-mastery-of-learning-how-to-absorb
