Google didn’t make me stupid I was always stupid!

Deep reading

In his article 'Is Google making us stupid', Nicholas Carr asks the question.

Our the skills, associated with deep reading being eroded, are we losing the ability to connect, to concentrate, to comprehend and if we lose these skills are we losing the ability to engage in productive, creative, critical and conceptual thinking.

You see the ability to concentrate to hold information in working memory facilities connections which leads to comprehension, which leads to critical thinking and feedback loops, creative and conceptual breakthroughs then follow.

Memory it turns out is the key building block of intelligence.
Memory the type you need for deep reading, verbal memory is not a skill I have ever possessed, I believed I did but I was wrong, just goes to show how stupid I really was and yet remarkably I am the company of some of the great minds who have defined the modern world, Marconi, Faraday and Edison. Who as a boy was sent home by his teachers with a note.

The note read "too stupid to learn anything" of course Edison didn’t listen and went on to be fired from his first two jobs for being unproductive. Edison story illustrates that what you know what you are certain of is almost certainly wrong.

‘Our story however does not begin with Edison but with a 25 year old patent clerk who against all the odds wins a Nobel prize, it is baffling how this is possible, how can something as prosaic as memory hold the key to how a c’ student, a school dropout turns around so completely that he wins a Nobel prize.

A self confessed visual thinker with strong visualisation capabilities and memory, a young Einstein had poor auditory focus and memory.

A form of rote learning, photographic learning of text can mask a problem but without comprehension problems are multiplied in later in life, without connections without context there is no creative or conceptual breakthroughs‘

Rather like Marconi, our ideas are not new — numerous investigators had explored various techniques for over 50 years, but none had proven successful; for anything except memorizing lists.

Marconi did not discover any new and revolutionary principles , but rather he assembled and improved on a number of components unified and then adapted them to his system

Marconi first did better what others were doing and then by unifying into his system created something that no one else was doing.

In a nutshell this is our offer, this is what we do. We improve memory. We train it.