WHY IT WILL WORK
HOW IT WILL WORK
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

When you take our course on How to Raise a Super Performer

Working while very young with mature achievers is so incredibly productive. The list is endless: 16 year old Alexander ruling Macedonia as regent in his father's absence and leading the army in a victorious campaign to crush a rebellion; 14 year old Alexander Hamilton learning the ways of world commerce clerking in a West Indies trading house, and running the whole show in the owner's absence; 13 year old Andrew Carnegie, the steel magnate and one time richest man in the world, learning the foundations industry and self reliance working as a steam engine handler and clerk; young Margaret Thatcher, learning how a nation thinks by working in the family store. And then there is Michael Milkan, the star-crossed genius of the "junk bond" revolution that helped finance the technological explosion of the eighties and nineties. He was sent to prison for insider trading, but there is no doubt that the cellular phone you hold in your hand today has something to do with the fact that a few decades ago a 10 year old boy was able to work productively in his father's accounting business.

You don't have to take your son across the angry Atlantic in a wooden ship, or buy a grocery store for your daughter.You don't have to send your children into the wilderness with a set of surveying instruments, or farm them out to a printer. You don't have to buy your son an army or conquer a country to make him a regent. You have work for your young son or daughter - real work that will put them years ahead in the great game of life. You will know how to identify it.

You will know how effectively these things will work when we provide you with our powerful concept of learning. We think you will find this concept one of the most original and compelling concepts of learning you have ever heard of. Our classroom demonstrations and our computer based models of human thought (which you can take home with you and run on your own computer) will allow you to validate these ideas for yourself. You will see that they are based on some incredibly important and facts about your own intelligence.

What is the most destructive idea about learning commonly promoted today? When you see these models in action the answer will pop right out at you and you will know how to protect your son or daughter from its deadly effects.

WHERE WE ARE COMING FROM The insights that underlie this course are ultimately derived from lifelong studies of human thought and achievement, fifty years of "thinking about thinking". This effort has been grounded on degrees in philosophy and history and reinforced by fifteen years of teaching and 25 years of computer science. This includes three years as the director of an artificial intelligence laboratory, where teaching machines to "think" provided great insights into the awesome dimensions of human intelligence. Interviewing thousands of candidates for computer positions, hiring hundreds and monitoring their training and progress provided numerous additional insights into human learning and development. For ten years I also lectured to schools and civic groups on "The computer and the Brain." I learned that when people are shown new insights into their own brain, almost everyone is endlessly fascinated with the machinery of their own intelligence. It is almost a certainty that you will be too.

Along the way I saved up every clue that came my way regarding the nature of human intelligence and every insight into the learning process. Then about 15 years ago all the pieces seemed to fall into place as the result of a singular experience. One evening my son Eric was home at Christmas, while he was studying for his doctorate in Computer Science at Berkeley. We sat down at the kitchen table and he walked me through the Hopfield method for implementing a simple computer based memory model with a simulation of interconnected brain cells (neurons) called a neural net. John Hopfield, shown here, is pioneer of biological physics. This is based upon that exceptional leap of insight called the Hebb learning rule.

Donald Hebb, the pioneer Canadian psychobiologist, speculated that when two brain cells, or neurons, "fired" during the same small time frame the connection between them would be strengthened. This would facilitate the passage of signals from neuron to neuron in ways that would produce memory, sight, hearing and thinking in all sorts of wonderful ways. The surprising thing is that when I extended this model to make it more realistic it seemed to confirm almost everything I had discovered about memory and learning in gathering my clues over the past half century.

As simple as this model is when you see it in operation on the computer's digital projector it will clearly show how this basic summation process can produce all kinds of complex capabilities. It involves an incredibly neat little process and it is lots of fun to see it in action. This model will clearly show how the insights that underlie our methods can arise from the Hebb rule applied to neural connections.

THE PROOF OF THE PRINCIPLES

While our model will clearly demonstrate how our basic learning principles can function, we will show you how to prove them to yourself through the application of basic logic to what you already know. Consider, for example, our very important principle that your ten or twelve year old has an adult capacity for logical thinking, given the relevant knowledge. We have a very neat way of demonstrating that your ten or twelve year old has the capacity to handle logical implications equivalent to what you would learn in a college level logic course, but for most of us this capacity is buried in our our everyday language, so we tend not to be aware of it. Of course, we all need more discipline in our thinking, but lack of discipline is not lack of capacity.

THE PROOF OF THE PUDDING

In the process of going from a philosophy and history major to a department head responsible for a hundred mathematicians, systems analysts, engineers and programmers I had to do a great deal of self teaching. The subjects included computer architecture, a great many computer languages, various mathematical and engineering computer applications, etc. Also, as part of a "thought experiment" dealing with the impact of language on thought I taught myself enough Chinese to earn a good supplementary income translating scientific Chinese into English. I often wondered why people who seemed every bit as smart as I was shied away from teaching themselves if a course was not available. I came to realize I was doing a few things differently. From my studies of the mind I had picked up a few principles that are now a part of this course. Actually, my theories of learning have made things easier for my all my adult life, including the way I taught myself roller blading at the age of 65 - a fabulous way for a senior citizen to keep in shape, without wrecking one's knees. When you learn what we have learned about learning growing up will be a lot easier for your kids and growing old will be a lot easier for you!

But the greatest confirmation of these principles comes from a different source. After I had been pursuing my Chinese language thought experiment for about a year I saw this young Chinese woman walking out of my philosophy seminar and walked up to her to see if I could practice my Chinese. One thing led to another and we wound up making a life and raising four children together. It turned out that she was quite an educator. Her father died when she was seventeen years old leaving the family destitute. She took it upon herself to support the family, her mother, two brothers, her sister and herself and two former servants. She did this by tutoring faltering children of well-to-do families. She was so confident of her methods that she offered to take no pay if she her students did not succeed. So highly valued was this instruction that her clients paid her in gold. In a country where inflation could wipe a days wages between morning and evening this was literally a life saver. She not only educated these children but also herself, getting a college degree, and passing a nationwide exam which enabled her to come to America to study history at the University of Minnesota.

It was not until almost fifty years later that I got around to asking her about her secret, her teaching methodology. I was surprised and delighted to learn that her core principle was essentially the same as my own. Like the second law of thermodynamics, there are several different but equivalent ways of expressing this principle: We see with our memory. Also: Knowledge precedes understanding. At first glance, they might seem puzzling but our model will make this principle crystal clear, a little diamond that you can put in your pocket and take to the bank. Thus a young woman, struggling to feed her family in the chaos of war torn China arrived at the same core principle of learning as a one time Minnesota Norwegian farm boy pursuing a study of the human mind over a period of half a century.

These desperate achievements were made possible in part on a father who did much of what we are proposing. He put his daughter to work on useful adult tasks at a very early age. Having learned to read at the age of two she was early on consulted on many of the human problems (which Chinese history and literature deal with in great abundance) of her father's complex business dealings . At the age of twelve she was sent to collect the rent on her father's various small farms. Certainly these farmers in this male dominated society were not glad to be importuned by this young girl. Yet there can be no doubt that by teaching his young daughter to stand up to the world through such tasks this father eventually saved his whole family.

Our own children all learned how to read and learned their math facts before they started school. Instead of just being read to they early on read to their mother. They grew up in a house full of books with many learning rich tasks.

I will not embarrass them by boasting of their many accolades in this public way, But I will talk about our son Eric, who, after a brief career teaching philosophy, was killed in a car crash at the age of 31 in France in 1989 along with his beloved wife, Mary and her mother, shortly before he would have received a doctorate in computer science. Eric is the coauthor of an important book on artificial intelligence that was written by Eric's brilliant and generous thesis adviser, Stuart Russell, in 1991, using a great deal of Eric's work and original discoveries. Receiving many accolades for the originality and usefulness of these discoveries, this book is still in print and is widely cited in recent research. Thus it could be said that Eric has achieved a small but significant niche in the exciting story of artificial intelligence. What might he have achieved had he lived?

There can be no doubt that his highly valued work, cut down like a rocket exploding in ascent, was greatly facilitated by the experience of the eleven year old boy, writing sophisticated computer programs for his father, and reading landmark books on science and history, like James Watson's Double Helix to his mother. So this course is dedicated to Eric, with the hope the the great promise unrealized in him can be realized in your son or daughter.

One thought kept reassuring me about the great worth of Eric's painfully shortened years. Life is longer than it seems. Not as long as when we are young and looming years are mountains to be scaled but certainly longer than when we are old and decades past are yesterdays which have inexplicably slipped away. Even in his short life Eric was on this earth for over a quarter of a million hours. Certainly we have all known hours so filled with friendship, experience, learning and growth that such an hour can be likened to a lifetime in microcosm, where the earliest minutes are way back there many thoughts and experiences ago. Your ten year old, your fourteen year old, your eighteen year old, can expect to yet experience half a million to two thirds of a million hours on this earth. You can enrich those hours in ways you never dreamed of. Right now we are offering you one such hour. Let us come in and tell our story. We will explain our course in one of the most interesting hours you ever experienced, for it is all about your mind and many of the truly exciting things about your own intelligence that you very likely never thought of.  1