ジム・キースの影響力
Welcome to the Deep Dive. Today we're taking a really interesting English quote and sort of using it to look at learning and life, really.
It's great for anyone working on their English.
Absolutely. And our focus is Jim Keese. He's, you know, a big name globally in learning faster, memory, how the brain works. He's very active right now.
Right. Not someone from history. He works with huge companies like Google, Nike, helping people reach their potential.
Exactly. And the quote, the idea that kind of sums up his work is this.
There is no such thing as a good or bad memory, only a trained or untrained memory.
Seems simple, doesn't it? But to really get it, we need to look at his own story.
Yeah. Because his journey gives it so much weight. It actually starts with a real difficulty.
When Jim was five, he had a brain injury.
Oh, wow. At five.
Yes. And it made school incredibly hard for him, just trying to keep up reading things over and over again.
That sounds really tough. And didn't a teacher actually label him?
That's right. Yeah. A teacher pointed him out, called him the boy with a broken brain. Awful.
学び方の発見
Oh, that's terrible. And he believed it.
Completely. He really thought his brain was, well, broken, fixed. He took that belief with him all the way to college, always feeling like he was behind.
But something changed, right? Around 1991.
Yes. A big turning point. He was really struggling in college, just trying to survive academically.
And he met his friend's father.
Okay.
And this man gave him a book. And he said something like, through books, you can become anything.
Wow. Just a simple moment like that.
Yeah. But it sparked something.
Yeah.
Jim started thinking. Maybe the problem wasn't his brain itself. Maybe he just hadn't learned how to learn.
Ah, so it wasn't that he couldn't learn.
Exactly. It was that nobody had taught him the methods. So he dove in, studied memory, speed reading, how the brain learns best, all on his own.
And what happened? Did it work?
Oh, dramatically. He went from barely reading one book a week to reading, like, a book a day and remembering it.
A book a day? That's amazing.
It really shows the power of training, right? Which leads back to the quote.
神経可塑性の理解
The key thing here, really, is that he didn't change his actual brain, but how he used it, the methods.
That's the core of it. It connects to that idea of neuroplasticity, doesn't it?
Mm-hmm. The idea that our brains aren't fixed, like stone. They can change, grow, make new connections.
At any age, with the right training.
Right. Our brains can adapt.
But, you know, we have to remember the context back then, when Jim was a kid, this idea of neuroplasticity.
Well, it wasn't really common knowledge. People didn't talk about it much.
Ah, good point.
So, yeah, he must have had a really tough time without people understanding why he struggled. He probably felt very alone with it.
That makes his transformation even more powerful. And it explains why companies like Google hire him now.
Totally. They don't see him as fixing broken people. They see him as unlocking potential through training. They get the difference.
So, let's bring this back to, you know, our listeners learning English.
If you're sitting there thinking, oh, I'm just bad at English, or my memory for words is terrible.
記憶と訓練の重要性
Jim Quick's message is basically challenging that. He'd say that feeling of being bad at it.
It might just be an illusion, a label you've accepted.
Like his broken brain label. So, if you find it hard to remember vocabulary.
It doesn't just mean you have a bad memory. It likely means you haven't found or practiced the right training methods yet.
Things like mnemonics or spaced repetition, specific techniques.
It's about the training, not some fixed talent you either have or don't have.
Precisely. His whole life is proof. When we say I can't, especially with language, often it just means I haven't trained effectively yet.
It's about taking off those limits we put on ourselves.
So, let's hear that quote one more time. It really sums it up.
No such thing as a good or bad memory. Only a trained or untrained memory.
Think about that. If your bad memory or your poor English skills are maybe just untrained skills.
Then the question becomes, what's one new method, one small training step you could try starting today, right now?
It's never too late to start training.
