How to Approach Learning in the Age of AI (Without Harming Your Memory)

Everywhere you turn, someone’s either hyping up AI or panicking about it. But if you’re a lifelong learner, you can’t afford to miss one simple fact: The real danger isn’t the technology itself. No, the major problem we all face is how other people’s thoughts about AI quietly and constantly reshape our thinking. Pretty much on a daily basis, we undergo a whiplash of influence as one person plays prophet of doom and another froths with unhinged praise. If you don’t study memory and its relationship to thinking as much as I do, you might not notice this shift happening. But I do, and am concerned that many people can’t see why the disconnected dialog about artificial intelligence is so corrosive. Perhaps most alarmingly of all is how many people adopt new tools unthinkingly and try to move faster, consume more and mistake speed for substance. Little by little, they come to rely on the dopamine hits created by endless summaries instead of doing the critical thinking work that leads to synthesis and understanding. The solution for you so that you don’t burn out and wind up forgetting everything you try to learn? Slow down. Continue using notebooks, sketches, mind maps and time with physical books. As I’ll show you in a moment, the best AI innovators are doing just that. And it’s smart because these simple activities will help build your memory, preserve your thinking and ensure you get the most out the new tools. While continuing to enjoy the benefits of ancient memory techniques. To help you find the balance, in the video below and various resources I’ve shared on this page, I’ll help you explore AI technologies while creating a brain that no technology can imitate. Let’s get started. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XOiutq-Af4 How to Use AI as a Lifelong Learner (Without Harming Your Memory) The first strategy is to keep using physical notebooks. You might think that sounds old fashioned, but it’s not. For example, David Perell recently had Sam Altman on his podcast to discuss his method for clear thinking. It’s very similar to the journaling method I’ve been teaching myself for years. It involves pen, paper and the mind. Nothing more. If the CEO of OpenAI operates this way, why wouldn’t you? I think this example, amongst the journaling habits of other top performers is great. It helps us completely sidestep yet another paranoid conspiracy that suggests the moment you stop writing by hand, you start letting machines dictate how you think. It’s the other way around: The humans shaping the way artificial intelligence platforms operate regularly journal. Why Analog Tools and Slow Reading Matter More Than Ever Their example is also useful because it highlights the relationship between the medium you use to assist your thinking, what you think about, and how you think. And I believe it’s beyond obvious that many people mistake how fast they consume information as an accomplishment, when far too often it’s really just busy work. Little more than activity. This confusion of activity as accomplishment isn’t a new problem. Speed reading gurus have duped people for years with the fantasy that speed is a kind of substance. And the few good ideas you might find in speed reading books and courses? They tend to be borrowed from somewhere else. Skimming and scanning books, for example? Many, much better tactics existed decades before mass market speed reading books started teaching such tactics. Many ultimately wound up watering the strategy down. These days, the entire speed reading industry is obsolete. And the reading approaches I’ve advocated since my university teaching days has never been more important. I’m talking about my realistic approaches to reading faster, finding the main points and memorizing what matters in textbooks. It’s more important than ever before because now, the real skill is knowing when to use shortcuts and when to apply reflective thinking so that books have time to settle in. Sometimes it makes sense to take a second pass through courses and books. This is one reason I developed a personal re-reading strategy. Even though I use zettelkasten and the Memory Palace technique, reviewing both your notes and the source material often gives you additional insight that you cannot get any other way. Yet, we live in an “efficiency” focused culture where the speed of AI summaries create an illusion of depth, when in fact they are actually prompts to get back to traditional reading tactics and techniques. The Real Meaning of Artificial Intelligence As you can tell by now, I’m not at all saying to avoid using AI. Rather, I believe that the best way to protect your lifelong learning goals must involve learning to use it through experimentation. But not without acknowledging the strange paradox we all face. Various AIs can now summarize any book you feed them. In all kinds of flavors depending on their training. In other words, if you want to know how...