Introduction to Super-Learning
A guide to cultivating your brain to learn faster, deeper, and more broadly than ever before.
What you don’t know and don’t make the effort to understand will become the very thing you are forced into knowledge of.
.Rachel Cusk, Outline: A NovelARTICLE TECHNICAL LEVEL: EASY FOR EVERYONE
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Super-learning is one of my favorite topics and even though I wasn’t planning to write about it until I finished other articles, it’s on my mind more than ever these days so I wanted to put out a quick introductory piece that provides an overview of what super-learning’s all about—and how to apply it in your own life, pilgrim.
Super-learning is a multi-faceted approach to learning that enables one to learn new material faster, more deeply, and more joyfully. It’s a lifespan learning approach, meaning you will get the greatest benefits after you’ve been applying its principles for several years or longer. It involves both mental and physiological changes, and it’s the physiological changes that make autistic brains particularly well-suited for super-learning.
The whole reason super-learning is on my mind these days is its astonishing impact over the course of my life. I’m in my fifties now and my ability to learn new knowledge and skills keeps accelerating. I’m learning more and faster now than I did in my early twenties.
I spent a lifetime learning to learn and early on I came to understand that my brain—my darkly gifted brain—went about learning different than other folks’ brains. I spent a lot of youthful effort attempting to understand how my strange brain learns.
Because I tackled this on my own, rather than following any conventional notions of education or mental development, I eventually arrived upon a unique approach to learning that was quite powerful and consistently propelled me ahead of others—including folks whose brains weren’t as impaired by neural deficits as mine.
Before I discuss the nature of super-learning and what it’s enabled me to achieve—and, more importantly, what it may help you achieve—let me first state quite emphatically that I wasn’t “born smart.” One of the tenets of super-learning is to put aside and ignore any notion of “intelligence,” whether bandied about by Harvard psychologists or Artificial Intelligence researchers, and consider it benighted social propaganda rather than capturing some kind of essential physical truth about a person’s mental abilities.
Super-learning isn’t about boosting your IQ. It’s about acquiring new knowledge and skills rapidly and putting them into a broader context where this knowledge can be harnessed for practical purposes across diverse domains of your life. Super-learning is designed to work with your mental limitations, including any neural deficits, and indeed is designed to convert some of your deficits into mental assets.
Let me briefly share my own learning journey. I hope it will make clear that you’d need a tortured definition of intelligence to suggest that somehow my brain was born to learn fast. Autistic folks aren’t born smart. We’re born to absorb the world around us in unique ways.
When I was starting out in school, my brain experienced:
trouble reading.
trouble understanding metaphors and figures of speech.
trouble doing math (though there’s some big caveats with this one).
trouble drawing.
trouble with spatial orientation and spatial reasoning (I was never any good at chess).
trouble paying attention to any sort of lecture, especially in class.
trouble remembering events, names, faces, and facts (I had difficulties keeping people’s identities straight).
trouble processing information in a group where multiple people were interacting.
trouble learning foreign languages.
trouble following step-by-step instructions, especially if they were delivered verbally.
trouble sticking with any particular goal.
trouble writing in a manner that others found comprehensible and appealing.
I got in endless trouble in school and was kicked out or dropped out of five colleges, not a conventional mark of an effective learner.
But I did nurse a special interest that emerged when I was about ten years old: a ferocious interest in understanding the fundamental nature of reality. I needed to know the reason for my existence and how the physical universe worked, top to bottom. It was, and is, a spiritual quest.
And then when I was eighteen years old, I underwent an intense experience that made me realize it was possible to attain such aims. That within a human lifetime, a sentient mind could grasp the ultimate nature of our shared reality: why the cosmos exists, how it works, what an individual soul should be pursuing in a universe where death was inevitable.
It was a very motivating experience. After that, I set myself the task of training my neurally defective brain to learn as much and as fast as I could. I set out to develop what I would eventually conceive of as super-learning.
But first, I cannot emphasize strongly enough the greatest benefit of a lifetime of super-learning: I love existing in the universe. I find something interesting and new and joyful in every moment, in every situation. Our reality is full of meaning and creativity and endless wonder. I feel myself a vital part of the universe—allied with the universe and its enchanted unfolding.
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Here’s an overview of the main principles of super-learning, which we’ll delve into in future articles. Though I must confess this is the first time I’ve put this down on paper (or pixels, rather) so there’s fair chance I’ll revise how I talk about it as we go along.
The main principles of super-learning
Know your brain. Tagging your deficits is the best start.
Know your mental strengths and weaknesses. You’ll be doing this at a more detailed and intricate level than you’ve likely encountered before.
Know your tastes, preferences, and interests. (In my book Dark Horse: Achieving Success Through the Pursuit of Fulfillment we call this knowing your “jagged profile.”)
Understand the basics of supermind dynamics and, specifically, how and why the human species was wired by evolution to believe that tribe is truth. This is essential so you can (1) distinguish between social truth and cosmic truth—exceedingly hard to do without guidance and practice, and (2) develop the confidence to continue learning when every person around you tells you that you don’t know what you’re doing and are deluded and wrong.1
Understand why collective human knowledge (including human science) and even language itself is strictly limited by the lowest common denominator. Individual minds are limited in what they can learn by what the community is capable of understanding. Super-learning is designed to break through this limitation.
Make failure a way of life. Super-learning involves constantly exposing yourself to failure, even epic failure. You almost always learn more when you fail than when you succeed.
Embrace immersive learning. You must be prepared at all times to jump without a parachute into new environments and experiences that seem downright terrifying.
Get out of your head and into the flow—then learn to go back and forth between flow and intellectualizing at will.
These principles can be deployed by anyone, though autistic brains will enjoy an easier time with principles 4 (tribe is truth) and 5 (lowest common denominator of the tribe), as the dark gift naturally impedes tribal thinking.
But there are other principles that may be limited exclusively to autistic brains.
The autistic principles of super-learning
Develop and harness the power of super-focus. Because of our particular autistic attention deficit, it is easier for our brains to focus on learning intensely and for longer periods of time.
Embrace the self-reorganization of your brain. Because of our particular autistic attention deficit, the neural circuitry of our brain gets naturally rewired over time for exceptional learning, even more so when guided by your conscious will. (Your learning circuitry will invade and colonize the “underused” parts of your brain that were supposed to be dedicated to social cognition.) This comes with a great and genuine sacrifice: the better at learning you want to become, the worse your social skills will become. (This is part of the Dark Gift Dilemma.)
Though there is a crucial beautiful caveat:
Once you start to get the hang of super-learning, you can apply super-learning to the cultivation of “synthetic” social skills that may markedly improve your social experiences.2
Super-learning is a way of life, rather than a specific methodology. It’s a way of engaging with the world around you to maximize your brain’s natural ability to find patterns in the chaos. It is fun and fulfilling, or at least, it always has been for me!
In the articles to come, we’ll break down each of these principles and explain what they’re all about and provide you with practical guidance on using them in your life.
One example is when Sai Gaddam and I were preparing to study the sexual brain by analyzing massive quantities of online behavioral data. Every single academic colleague in neuroscience that we consulted, without exception—and there was at least ten of them—insisted it was a crazy idea and that we would not find anything useful and it would destroy our career. I suppose they were right about the career part, but Sai and I ended up understanding more about the human sexual brain and human sexuality than anyone alive.
These days I can generally pass in crowded public as an ordinary non-autistic man, something that was downright impossible for me to achieve through my thirties.