I want you to imagine, for a moment, that you’re a Paleolithic caveman or -woman, roaming through the savannah, about a hundred thousand years ago. It’s a sunny, pleasant morning, and though you’re a little bit hungry, you’re not famished.
As an average Paleolithic human, you are, of course, highly intelligent. In fact, you don’t know it, but you are literally the most intelligent species ever to have walked this earth. You can remember and find your way back to the tribe, the watering hole, or the secret locations of your winter food supply just by observing your surroundings, the sun, and the stars.
If you’re a female, your expertise is most likely foraging. You can identify thousands of plants, their nutritional or medicinal uses, when they grow, and where to find them in a pinch. If you’re a male, you are likely a skilled hunter. You regularly track and predict the migrations of all types of beasts, collaborate and coordinate kills, and prepare carcasses to prevent rotting. You can skillfully craft an arrowhead in seconds, create a fire in minutes, and construct a shelter in hours.
Beyond these very useful survival skills, you also have a vast understanding of social systems and ties. You are versed in the language, religion, and culture of your tribe. In fact, you know the history and genealogy of everyone in it. This knowledge extends outside your tribe as well. You can easily identify neighboring tribes by their markings and dress. You know which tribes roam which areas, which ones are hostile, and which ones are valued trading partners. All of these skills, in time, will help your descendants conquer the entire planet—for better or for worse.
What you don’t know is how to read or write.
In fact, you’ve never even seen a written character, aside from the occasional cave painting.
Does this bother you?
Not in the least.
You see, the types of information that gave our Paleolithic ancestors a survival advantage didn’t come from textbooks or Bible verses. It was olfactory, gustatory, and visual information—in other words, smell, taste, and sight.
Allow me to explain: smell and taste, which are connected senses in the brain, were among the first to develop. In fact, they predate even the mammalian brain and are hardwired into the much older, deeper, reptilian brain. This is why, when someone passes out, smelling salts will wake them up even when sound or touch fail to do so. It’s also why smell and taste are by far the most memorable of senses. Don’t believe me? Head on over to the department store, and see if you can find the cologne or perfume that your first love used to wear. As you smell it, you’ll be instantly taken back decades to the thought of them—whether you like it or not! And yes, the same goes for Mom’s home cooking.
If you think about it, this makes perfect sense. If you’re a dinosaur roaming Pangaea two hundred million years ago, you’d best remember what rancid meat or poisonous plants smell and taste like. If you don’t, it’s only a matter of time until repeatedly gorging on them kills you. Plus, chances are, that’s going to happen before you have the opportunity to mate. You know what that means: your anosmic (unable to smell) genes aren’t getting passed forward. Evolution: 1, You: 0.
Behind smell and taste, the next most survival-inducing sense is, of course, sight. Sure, hearing is great, but as you might have noticed on National Geographic, predators rarely give a friendly shout-out before attacking. That’s why, whether you’re a saber-toothed tiger or an early hominid, you aren’t going to get very far unless you can remember what danger looks like. You need to see (and remember) when the river is too high to cross, when the shape of the snake means “venomous,” and the subtle difference between the leaf that heals you and the leaf the kills you. Ultimately, this is the type of information that has helped us, and millions of other sighted species, survive over the last five hundred million years.
Closely related to our sense of sight is the ability to locate ourselves. After all, our sense of location is wholly based on being able to recognize and remember our visual surroundings. Make no mistake: for just about every land-faring species, this skill is life or death. Forget your way to the watering hole? Lose track of that winter food supply? Bad news, my friend. Evolution wins again.
The point is, after hundreds of millions of years of cruel evolution, you, me, and most of our mammalian friends are left with brains that are really good at remembering smells, tastes, and sights. As Homo sapiens, we’re especially adapted to learning in ways that are vivid, visual, and experiential. Scientists refer to this as “the picture superiority effect.” And though many of you have been led to believe that you’re an “auditory” or “tactile” learner, the truth is, we are each naturally gifted at remembering pictures. What we’re not so naturally gifted at is learning from boring lectures or dense textbooks. Heck, we only invented writing systems some five thousand years ago, and the average person couldn’t read until a few hundred years ago. Evolution is an all-powerful mistress, but she’s not a fast-moving one.
Knowing this, I’d like you to think back to your days as a student. Even if you were lucky enough to study something very visual, like medicine or engineering, what percentage of your learning would you call vivid, visual, or experiential? What percentage came via boring textbooks and rambling lectures? Think, for that matter, about the most recent thing you attempted to learn—even if it was outside of school. How did you approach it?
The most innovative schools, from the established Montessori to the new-age MUSE, know this and have modeled themselves accordingly. Students in these schools don’t learn geometry from a textbook; they learn it by building real structures and observing real phenomena. They don’t study biology by listening to a teacher drone on; they learn it by cultivating gardens that feed the entire school.
Fortunately, it is not too late for you to claim your birthright as a SuperLearner. You just need to return to the basics. To learn like a caveman. But first, let’s examine what it actually takes for your brain to learn something.