Superlearning Systems
One of the great failures of modern society is public education. In the United States, the public education system has been denied adequate funding for so long that teachers frequently resort to buying textbooks for their students with their own money. Many schools lack even fundamental instructional tools like desktop computers, and much about public education remains mired in bureaucracy and political power grabs.
The advancement of modern civilization will require a quantum leap in the approach of public
education. It’s not simply about giving more money to the schools, raising teachers’ salaries,
or buying textbooks for students; it’s about changing our entire approach to teaching our next
generation of human beings the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in tomorrow’s world.
Superlearning systems offer the ability to rapidly accelerate the learning process for children and adults alike. But what is a superlearning system? Today, it’s a largely fictional technology that’s perhaps best described in the sci-fi movie Brainstorm, released in 1983 and starring Christopher Walken. In Brainstorm, a brain monitoring device could record the thoughts and sensory experiences of one person, then replay them into the brain of another person. The promise of the device was perhaps best described by one character in the film who said, “How would you like to learn the entire fifth grade in ten minutes?”
It may have been science fiction in 1983, but today the exploration of superlearning is underway.
In the last two decades, there has been a tremendous amount of research conducted on multi-
sensory learning theory. Researchers have found that the human brain learns best through multi-
sensory association, not rote memorization. A child will learn best, for example, when she is
engaged in a learning activity that uses sight, sound, emotions, tactile feedback, spatial orientation,
and even smell and taste. Learning has also proven to be far more effective when subjects are in
a relaxed mental state.
Compare this to modern day schools and universities, where to this day, tenured professors mumble over a collection of notes to an auditorium full of students who learn little more than how to take notes and pass rote memorization tests. Sadly, many of today’s institutions of learning aren’t very good at their only mission.
Advances in superlearning will require the radical reformation of our learning institutions and yet will simultaneously usher in a new era of prosperity and quality of life. To believe this idea, you have to believe that it is the lack of education that’s largely responsible for the problems of society. And that’s the point I’ll explain next.
of education causes hardship If you take all the people with the most pronounced hardships in life -- the working poor, the criminals, the drug addicts, and so on -- you find they all have one thing in common: a lackluster education. Nearly all the people who fall between the cracks in society share a childhood education crisis: they didn’t get the same education that others received. Or they couldn’t learn in the same way that others learn.
Multiply that situation by twenty or thirty years and you get someone who falls between the cracks of modern society: a petty criminal, a homeless person, a drug addict, or, if you’re lucky, people working from one minimum wage paycheck to the next, just barely surviving, usually with the help of public assistance.
Simultaneously, lack of education also affects everyone I haven’t mentioned yet: the working
middle class and wealthy. If they never learned about the real history of the world, they’re likely
to repeat the same mistakes today. If they never learned about other countries, populations, and
cultures, they will undoubtedly emerge from public schools with an ethnocentric viewpoint and
demonstrate a disturbing intolerance for people of different ethnic backgrounds. If they didn’t
study the great authors, the great artists, or the great poets, they will act in soulless ways, or
without an open heart and mind. If they didn’t learn about the history of the universe, our planet,
the evolution of the species, and ancient man, they will never come to appreciate the sanctity of
their own lives, nor of others’ lives.
See, education does more than just keep people out of the gutter: it transforms an ordinary, closed-minded human being into a world citizen. Studying the great masters -- the philosophers, the healers, the poets, the political figures, the artists, the scientists, the revolutionaries -- is the pathway to being a great citizen of our world.
Education is everything to society. Without it, we are all just berry-hunting primates. Education is
what allows us to carry memories, lessons and advances from one generation to the next. And
it’s a short window: the blink of a human life. In the span of a single lifetime, we as a society must
transfer the entirety of our knowledge and wisdom to the next generation. Inevitably, each of us
will pass on.
Education is the keystone of civilization. And superlearning brings us the promise of accelerating our education processes so that we can, in a sense, multiply the “bandwidth” of information and wisdom being passed to our children.
What is learning? So what kind of superlearning systems might work for us? Answering that requires a closer look at what “learning” is in the first place. At a biological level, learning is simply the building of new associative pathways in the human nervous system. As we learn new things, we don’t increase our brain matter, we simply make new neural pathways in the brain cells that are already there. A “smart” person has more interconnected neural pathways than a “dull” person, although they may possess the same physical brain matter.
The human brain will create these new neural pathways in response to external stimuli -- the more diverse, the better. So a child who is given the definition of the word “weightless” in a verbal format gets that information in one channel: the audio channel. That creates a one-dimensional association in their brain.
But take the same child and show them a movie of a person floating in space while you’re saying the word “weightless,” and you now have a two-dimensional learning experience: the child both sees and hears the word.
Better yet, take the child to a trampoline and start bouncing up and down. Make it fun, because that invokes the emotional channel. Between bounces, when you’re in the air, happily shout, “Weightless!” Now the child gets the word in two more channels, and the understanding of that word is firmly implanted in their brain. They’ll probably never forget the word.
That’s a simplified example of how learning can be made more effective: use immersion and engage multiple channels of experience to introduce people to new concepts.
So getting back to the superlearning machine, how can we use this process of learning to create a superlearning experience? One answer is something I’ve already presented in this report: augmented reality!
Superlearning with augmented reality
Augmented reality can provide a multi-channel, high-immersion learning experience that teaches
new concepts to children or adults at many times the speed and efficiency of today’s standard
teaching approaches. Augmented reality systems can provide the imagery, sounds, user
feedback mechanisms (like using your hands to control virtual objects that appear to be floating
in front of you) and even the tactile sensations that accelerate learning. Properly programmed,
these wearable augmented reality systems could guide students through an unlimited series of
educational exercises that are experiential, multi-channel, self-paced, fun, and highly effective.
As one example, consider the walkthrough history lesson presented earlier in this report: with augmented reality systems, students could physically explore historical events, hold conversations with historical figures, and see, hear and feel history with their own senses. This represents a quantum leap over today’s public school lessons: “Read chapters two and three for tomorrow, there will be a quiz...”
Good teachers are always needed
Of course, having good teachers involved in this superlearning process is absolutely essential. A good teacher, by this definition, is one who can properly assess the learning potential of each student, assign the appropriate augmented reality learning programs, keep the students challenged and motivated, and when necessary, enter each student’s own augmented reality to provide assistance with the learning process.
In my own early drafts of such a system, the teacher is networked into each student’s augmented
reality feed and can flip from one student’s reality to another like clicking on software screens in
the Windows operating system. Being fully networked with all the students, the teacher can serve
as an active mentor to either observe or assist the student, depending on the lesson context. The
teacher need not even be physically present: a virtual representation of the teacher will suffice, as
long as both the teacher and the student share the same rendering of the augmented reality.
Also important to superlearning is social collaboration among students. This, in fact, represents the
best first step into the world of superlearning until augmented reality
technology comes along. By
engaging in group problem solving, group tests, and group discussions, students can learn from
other students’ associations. As learning theory research has shown, individuals in a group tend
to automatically integrate (“learn”) things originally known by only a few members of that group.
Put simply, if one student knows the solution to a problem, and that answer is shared with other
students in a team setting, the other students tend to quickly grasp the solution very quickly.
Superlearning, then, has two promising fronts so far: technology (augmented reality) and social
learning (group learning environments). Yet there’s another important factor to consider when it
comes to enhancing our society’s ability to do a better job of passing information and knowledge
from one generation to the next... and this is something we can tackle right now: nutrition.
Better learning through better nutrition Nutrition, it turns out, is a strong determining factor in the ability of any human being to make new neural pathways. Unfortunately, the nutritional habits followed by most people today -- and especially children -- present significant obstacles to learning. In fact, it’s accurate to say that the diet of most American children today is a diet that automatically results in a very low level of intelligence. Let’s look at this more closely.
The human brain is a delicate organ. It requires a precise mixture of water, blood sugar, temperature, electrolyte minerals, essential fatty acids and a whole host of other nutrients to function correctly. Alter even one of these just slightly, and brain function suffers dramatically. For example, a 30% drop in blood sugar -- the inevitable result of consuming a breakfast of refined white flour and sugar as found in practically every brand-name breakfast cereal -- causes brain “fuzziness”, moodiness, a drop in the ability to concentrate and even tendencies towards violent behavior, especially in young men.
The lack of sufficient hydration -- a condition affecting the vast majority of Americans -- also affects the brain. Since electrical impulses are impeded by even a slight dehydration of the brain, not getting enough water literally interferes with proper brain function.
Making matters worse, most Americans simply don’t eat enough of the critical nutrients needed to build and maintain the brain from infancy. One of the most common deficiencies is GLA (gamma linolenic acid), an essential fatty acid found in abundance in human breast milk, but entirely missing from cow’s milk. Baby cows don’t have quite the need for brain matter that human babies have. Fortunately, nature has made sure that human breast milk provides the nutrients needed to build large, healthy brains. Not surprisingly, clinical studies have shown that babies raised on cow’s milk score lower on intelligence tests than those raised on human breast milk. (But don’t expect the dairy industry to remind you of this little fact...)
Beyond the lack of essential nutrients found in the American diet, the brain function of children is especially susceptible to the influence of destructive dietary ingredients such as refined white flour, white sugar and high-fructose corn syrup (the primary sweetener in soft drinks). The regular consumption of these ingredients, researchers have now demonstrated, leads to alarming changes in the behavior of adolescents. Such behavior is typically described as “hyperactive” or having a “short attention span.” These children, as you may have now guessed, are typically diagnosed as having ADHD and are frequently dosed with narcotic drugs such as Ritalin. This treatment protocol is entirely unnecessary, since dietary changes alone bring nearly all children back into the realm of “normal” behavior. Studies in the UK with so-called hyperactive children have demonstrated this quite convincingly: change the child’s diet, and their behavior shifts in a matter of days. Read more about this at http://www.SugarFactor.org
So there’s more to superlearning than merely inventing some cool new
technology: we have to start getting serious about preparing the bodies and brains of our children to be ready for learning
in the first place. As a society, we cannot have both a quality education system and an adolescent
population that acquires nearly 30% of its dietary calories from junk foods and soft drinks. A child
who regularly consumes soft drinks and junk foods is a child who is not biologically prepared to
learn.
We can address this problem in several ways, but some of the more obvious starting points are
to ban all junk food vending machines in public schools, outlaw all advertising of junk foods to
children (including television, magazines, and retail merchandising), and start educating parents
on the fundamentals of nutrition so that they can make informed choices about what to feed their
children.
Ultimately, in an advanced civilization, the production, distribution and marketing of ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup, refined white flour, refined white sugar, hydrogenated oils, aspartame, sodium nitrite and other metabolic disruptors would be outlawed altogether. These substances have no place in a society of intelligent, healthy human beings. (Read more at http://www. DangerousFoods.org)
In conclusion, advances in superlearning hold tremendous promise for uplifting our civilization, but only if we are biologically prepared for learning (good nutrition). Until the technology arrives, group learning, total immersion learning, and fundamental improvements in health education can deliver great improvements over the current system of teaching and learning.
Where is Nanotechnology?
You probably noticed that nanotechnology isn’t on the top 10 list. This is no oversight. Nanotech
isn’t on the list because nanotechnology isn’t a specific technology in the first place. The term
“nano
technology” has been so distorted by the popular press and researchers who add “nano” to
their projects in order to get funding that, today, it essentially means “anything that’s really tiny.”
Makers of artificial joints drill tiny holes into the surface of the joint structures and call it
nanotechnology. Why? The holes are nano. Makers of pants that resist stains claim to use
nanotechnology, too: pant fibers are coated with “nano whiskers” which are, essentially, tiny cloth
fibers. Sunscreen makers claim to be using nanotechnology, too. By producing sunscreen lotion
particles smaller than ever, the easier it can be dispersed on the skin and block UV rays.
These are just three of the many examples where manufacturers are jumping on the nanotech
bandwagon with items that fundamentally have nothing to do with the original definition of
nanotechnology. Based on the examples above, a household blender is a nanotech device, because it can blend foods into very tiny particles. This isn’t to say that these innovations aren’t useful. They are. But they’re not nanotech. Yet the hype surrounding nanotechnology has reached insane proportions.
When I was a kid, a friend and I created an imaginary pet dog named Super Mutt. Super Mutt was an all-purpose companion who could perform miracles. He could not only mow the lawn, he could actually take shape as an apparent clone of one of us and go to school for us. When our cars ran out of gasoline, we could just stuff Super Mutt into the gas tank and use him as fuel. Super Mutt could do anything we wanted.
Nanotechnology is the world’s Super Mutt. Anything you can dream up, somebody will tell you that nanotechnology can do it, regardless of its merit. Need to clean up all that nuclear power plant radiation? No problem: nanotech robots will reconfigure the materials so they don’t radiate. Is your body’s immune system failing? No problem: little tiny robots will be your immune system for you. Concerned about global warming? Don’t fret. Airborne nano-robots will process the atmosphere and make sure the greenhouse effect never kicks in.
The popular press stories about nanotechnology are filled with such promises. Nanotechnology
has become, essentially, the scientific community’s Moses. Need a miracle? Call Nanotech
Moses.
The upshot of all this is that expectations about nanotechnology are off the charts. People expect
it to work miracles. The same hype was once observed about ceramics or even superconductors,
but neither panned out. The dot-com Internet hype didn’t pan out, either. Nanotechnology will be
no different.
Beyond the issues already mentioned here, there are other problems with the concept of nanotech that I’d like to point out:
Everything is nano: The physical world around us is made up of molecular building blocks.
Nature is already nano. As human beings, the vast majority of our biological processes operate at
the nano level. Everything is already nano, and has been for a long time. Saying that things are
suddenly nano and using the term “nanotechnology” is akin to saying that things are made up of
matter and claiming to be working on pioneering “matter technology.” Well of course!
Big on hype and government funding: If you’re a researcher seeking a government grant, just
add the word “nano” to your project and your odds of receiving funding quadruple. Dropping the
word “nanotechnology” into your research, no matter how irrelevant the concept may really be, is
a great way to make your work sound important and advanced. I’ve seen many examples of this nanotech hype in the scientific community. All of a sudden, there’s nano research everywhere! That isn’t because researchers changed their research focus, it’s largely because they attached the word “nanotechnology” to their pet projects. Today, there’s a lot of money being thrown at nano-sounding projects that aren’t nanotechnology at all.
Nanotech may fuel the next big stock market bubble: The discussions about nanotechnology in
the mainstream today seem eerily similar to those about the Internet in the mid 1990’s. Everybody’s
excited, everybody wants to get on board as investors, and yet nobody has demonstrated a
working application of hard-core nanotechnology (nano machines) that would actually generate
revenues and improve peoples’ lives. Nano is shaping up to be the catalyst for the next big stock
market boom and subsequent crash (like the dot-com crash). It is seriously overhyped.
Nanotechnology in medicine is a sham: One of the most frequently mentioned areas of
nanotechnology is in medicine, where researchers promise that an army of millions of nanotech
robots will travel through the bodies of medical patients and repair cells, destroy tumors, rebuild
damaged tissue, and perform other medical miracles. These researchers forget that the body
already has its own nanotechnology that does all this and more! It’s called the immune system
and the best way to improve the quality of life for most people, in terms of health, would be to
support their own natural healing abilities. Injecting a swarm of tiny robots into their bloodstream
-- which is precisely what is being proposed by medical nanotech pioneers -- is a fundamentally
flawed medical strategy that assumes scientists know how to heal people better than the body
itself. The true answers to improved health and quality of life are to be found in nutrition, physical
exercise, avoidance of disease-causing foods, and a wholesale shift away from pharmaceuticals
and Western medicine. Nanotechnology is not a promising solution for health and healing, but it
is a great way to rack up funding grants and, someday, charge patients hundreds of thousands
of dollars for complex-sounding treatments. But remember, the body already has its own
nanotechnology, and it’s far superior to anything the human mind can come up with.
Nanotechnology poses a potential danger to humans: One of the few areas in nanotechnology
actually completing research and producing results is the study of the toxicity of nanotech particles.
Experiments headed by Gunter Oberdurster, Ph.D., professor of Toxicology in Environmental
Medicine and director of the University of Rochester’s EPA Particulate Matter Center recently
revealed that inhaled nano-sized particles end up in the lungs and brains of rats. In other studies,
nano-particles have been shown to cause extensive brain damage in fish and to disrupt normal
liver function. If humans were exposed to such nano-particles, we would very likely start seeing
increases in brain disorders or perhaps even cellular malfunctions throughout the body. Nano-
particles are so small that they can work their way into the mitochondria (the “power plants” of
our cells). The long-term health impact of exposure to these particles is clearly being shown to be
very negative.
Amazing technology