Michelle: Mark, I read a wild statistic. The average person forgets 70% of new information within 24 hours. Honestly, for me, it feels more like 90%. My brain is basically a sieve with a marketing budget for useless trivia. Mark: I know that feeling all too well. It’s like you pour all this knowledge in, and by the next morning, all you’re left with is a faint memory of the book cover and a single, random fact about the history of spoons. Michelle: Exactly! I can remember the lyrics to a commercial from 1998, but not the key takeaway from the meeting I just had. It’s infuriating. Mark: Well, that exact frustration is the starting point for the book we're diving into today: SuperLearner: Learn Speed Reading, Boost Memory & Get Smarter by Jonathan A. Levi. And what makes this book so compelling is the author's own story. Michelle: Oh? He wasn't just born with a super-brain? Mark: Not at all. In fact, it was the complete opposite. Levi describes himself as a "slow learner" who struggled with learning disabilities and depression for years. His whole journey started when he met a friend, Lev Goldentouch, who could read at this almost unbelievable speed with near-perfect comprehension. This book is basically the result of Levi dedicating his life to reverse-engineering those skills for the rest of us. Michelle: Okay, I love that. It’s not a genius telling us to be more like him; it’s someone who started from behind the curve and figured out a system. That makes me feel like there's hope for my brain-sieve. Mark: There absolutely is. And the first step, according to Levi, is realizing that the feeling of your brain fighting against you isn't your fault. We've just been given the wrong user manual.

Michelle: The wrong user manual? What does that even mean? My brain didn't come with instructions, unfortunately. Mark: That's the point! We assume our brains should be good at reading dense text and remembering abstract facts, but evolutionarily, that’s a brand-new task. Levi paints this incredible picture of our ancestors, the Paleolithic cave dwellers. Michelle: Ah, the original open-plan living. Mark: Exactly. Imagine a cavewoman a hundred thousand years ago. She doesn't need to read. She needs to walk through the savannah and instantly recognize thousands of different plants—which ones are food, which are poison, which are medicine. She needs to remember their smell, their texture, their exact location relative to a weirdly shaped rock. Michelle: Right, her life literally depends on it. Mark: And the caveman needs to track animal migrations, remember the subtle signs of a predator nearby, and navigate vast, complex landscapes without a map. Their brains weren't built for text; they were built for vivid, multi-sensory, and spatial information. Their memory was a survival tool, hardwired for images and locations. Michelle: Wow. So our brains are basically running on ancient, powerful survival software, but we're trying to use them to read legal documents and academic papers. No wonder it feels like a struggle. Mark: It’s a total mismatch. Levi points out that this fear of new information technology isn't even new. He quotes Socrates, who worried that the invention of writing would "weaken the memory and soften the mind" because people would stop training their internal recall. Michelle: And here we are, thousands of years later, worried that the internet is doing the same thing. It’s the same anxiety, just a different technology. Mark: Precisely. And science backs this up with something called the "picture superiority effect." Our brains are ridiculously good at remembering images compared to words. We can recall thousands of pictures with high accuracy days later. Try doing that with a list of a thousand words. Michelle: You’d be lucky to remember ten. Okay, this is making a lot of sense. But here's the problem: I can't just go forage for my data. I have to read articles, reports, and books. How do we bridge that gap between our caveman brain and our modern information-filled world? Mark: That is the million-dollar question, and it leads directly to the core of the SuperLearner method. You don't fight the caveman brain; you give it a modern job. You learn to speak its language.

Michelle: Give it a modern job? Okay, I'm picturing a caveman in a suit, working in IT. How does this work? Mark: It starts with translating boring, abstract information into the language the caveman brain understands: vivid, bizarre, and unforgettable images. Levi calls these "markers." Michelle: Markers. Like a bookmark for your brain? Mark: A much more interesting one. Let's take a simple example from the book. You meet someone new, and their name is Mike. Your brain is likely to discard that information in minutes. It's just a sound, it's abstract. Michelle: Happens to me all the time. I'm terrible with names. Mark: So, instead of just repeating "Mike, Mike, Mike," you create a visual marker. Levi suggests you imagine shaking his hand, and as you do, you picture the famous boxer Mike Tyson, on a karaoke stage right behind him, horribly singing an off-key song into a microphone. Michelle: (Laughs) Oh my god, that is so specific and ridiculous. Mark: But you'll never forget it, will you? The next time you see that person, your brain will flash that absurd image, and the name "Mike" will pop right out. You've just translated a boring piece of data into a memorable mini-movie. Michelle: That's brilliant. But does it have to be so… bizarre? What if I'm trying to remember something for a professional setting? I can't be conjuring up violent or weird images all the time. Mark: Levi argues that you almost have to! He talks about the "bizarreness effect." Our brains are novelty-seeking machines. They're designed to ignore the mundane and pay sharp attention to anything that's strange, threatening, funny, or sexual, because in our evolutionary past, those were the things that mattered for survival or reproduction. The more absurd the image, the stronger the memory. Michelle: So my inner weirdo is actually a learning superpower. I like that. But where do you put all these crazy images? My mind still feels like a messy desktop with a million icons scattered everywhere. Mark: This is where the second, and arguably most powerful, technique comes in: The Memory Palace. It's an ancient Greek technique, also called the method of loci. You take a real location you know intimately—like your childhood home—and you use it as a mental filing system. Michelle: A mental filing cabinet, but instead of boring folders, it's full of bizarre movie scenes? Mark: Exactly! Let's build a tiny one right now, using the example from the book. Picture your childhood bedroom. Stand in the doorway. We're going to place five pieces of information in here, representing the five principles of why memory palaces work. Michelle: Okay, I'm there. It smells like old posters and teen angst. Mark: Perfect. In the first corner to your left, I want you to vividly imagine two giant seahorses in the middle of a mating ritual, but a vacuum cleaner suddenly appears and starts sucking them up. It's noisy and chaotic. Michelle: What?! That's… deeply strange. Okay, got it. Seahorses and a vacuum. Mark: That marker represents novelty and the hippocampus, the part of your brain that loves it. Now, the second corner. Picture the walls smeared with chunky peanut butter. You can smell it, see the texture. It's disgusting. Michelle: Ugh. Gross. Chunky peanut butter. Check. Mark: That represents using all your senses. The third corner: a huge, tangled ball of electrical wires, sparking and buzzing. Michelle: Okay, tangled wires. Mark: That's for chunking information. Fourth corner: a beautiful, framed historical picture that you love. It’s perfectly lit and emotionally resonant. Michelle: A historical photo. Got it. Mark: That's the picture superiority effect. And finally, blocking the doorway so you can't leave, is a giant, red Google Maps location pin. It's massive, made of steel. Michelle: A giant map pin. Okay, that was a weird trip. Mark: But now, walk through it again in your mind. What's in the first corner? Michelle: The… seahorses getting vacuumed. Oh wow. And then the peanut butter. Then the sparking wires, the photo, and the map pin. I remember all of them. In order. Mark: See? You just hijacked your brain's natural GPS system—its incredible spatial memory—and used it to store abstract ideas. That's a memory palace. You can build them out of your house, your walk to work, your favorite video game map. The possibilities are endless. Michelle: That is genuinely incredible. It feels like a cheat code for the brain. But I have to bring this up—it also sounds like a lot of work. The book has received some mixed reviews, and a common point of criticism is that these techniques require a ton of upfront effort and consistent practice. It's not a quick fix. Mark: You are absolutely right to point that out. It's not a magic pill, and Levi is clear about that. Creating the memory is just step one. The real challenge, and the one that separates casual dabblers from true SuperLearners, is making sure that memory sticks around for good. And for that, you need a system.

Michelle: A system. Right. Because my Mike Tyson karaoke memory might be strong today, but what about next month? Or next year? Mark: Exactly. And this is where we get into the science of forgetting. A German psychologist in the 1880s named Hermann Ebbinghaus became obsessed with this. He spent years memorizing thousands of nonsense syllables—like 'bap' and 'zof'—just to see how quickly he'd forget them. Michelle: That sounds like a terrible way to spend your time. Mark: It was grueling, but his discovery was revolutionary. He created what's known as the "forgetting curve." It shows that we forget things exponentially. You lose the most information in the first 24 hours, and then the rate of forgetting slows down. Forgetting isn't a bug in our system; it's a feature designed to save energy. Michelle: So how do you fight the curve? Mark: You don't fight it; you hack it. Ebbinghaus found that if you review the information at just the right moment—right before you're about to forget it—the memory becomes much stronger, and the curve flattens out. This is the principle behind Spaced Repetition Systems, or SRS. Michelle: I think I've heard of these. Like smart flashcard apps? Mark: Precisely. Anki is the most famous one. You create a digital flashcard—maybe with your Mike Tyson image on it—and the app's algorithm schedules it for you. If you remember it easily, you won't see it again for a few days, then a few weeks, then months. If you struggle, it shows it to you more often. It automates the process of reviewing at the perfect interval. Michelle: Okay, so that’s the maintenance plan for the memory palace. That makes sense. It's a system for retention. Mark: It's a huge piece of it. But Levi adds one final, crucial layer to go from just remembering something to truly understanding it. And he borrows it from the legendary physicist Richard Feynman. Michelle: "The Great Explainer." I've heard of him. Mark: Feynman had a simple rule: if you can't explain a concept to a child in simple terms, you don't actually understand it yourself. The ultimate test of knowledge isn't being able to recall it; it's being able to teach it. Michelle: Ah, the old "to teach is to learn twice" idea. Mark: It's more than just an idea; it's a powerful diagnostic tool. The book tells the famous story of the physicist Max Planck and his chauffeur. Planck gave the same lecture on quantum mechanics all over Germany, and his chauffeur memorized it word-for-word. One day, the chauffeur gave the lecture in Planck's place and did it flawlessly. Michelle: No way. Mark: Yes. But then, a professor in the audience asked a highly technical follow-up question. The chauffeur, completely stumped, just said, "I'm surprised to hear such a simple question in an advanced city like this. I'll have my chauffeur answer it," and pointed to Planck in the front row. Michelle: (Laughs) That's an amazing save! But it perfectly illustrates the point. The chauffeur had the information, but Planck had the understanding. Mark: Exactly. So the complete SuperLearner system is a three-part engine. First, you use vivid, bizarre markers to encode information in a language your brain understands. Second, you organize those markers in a memory palace to make them structured and recallable. And third, you use spaced repetition and the act of teaching to drive that knowledge into deep, long-term mastery. Michelle: It’s not just one trick. It’s a whole new operating system for your brain. You’re installing new hardware with the memory palace and new software with the repetition and teaching systems.

Mark: That's the perfect analogy. And I think the book's most profound insight is that for most of our lives, we've been trying to learn by brute force. We've been running at a locked door, hoping to break it down, when the key was in our pocket the whole time. Michelle: The key being these ancient, built-in systems for visual and spatial memory. We've just forgotten how to use them. Mark: We've been taught to ignore them in favor of rote memorization and passive reading, which are our brain's weakest skills. The SuperLearner method is about reclaiming our natural strengths. It’s about working with our brain's evolutionary design, not constantly fighting against it. Michelle: It really makes you wonder what else we're capable of if we just used the right 'user manual' for our minds. It's not about being smarter; it's about learning smarter. Mark: Absolutely. And it's a skill that applies to everything—learning a language, mastering a new job skill, or even just remembering your grocery list without having to write it down. Michelle: I'm definitely going to try to create a marker for my grocery list. It's probably going to involve a penguin juggling avocados. Mark: (Laughs) Perfect. We'd actually love to hear from our listeners. What's the most bizarre, unforgettable visual marker you can come up with for a simple fact? Share it with the Aibrary community online. We could all use the inspiration. Michelle: This is Aibrary, signing off.