José Silva

Jose Silva was born on August 11, 1914, in Laredo, Texas. At the age of four, he moved in with his grandmother along with his older sister and younger brother, as they lost their father and his mother remarried soon.

Two years later, at the age of six, he became the family breadwinner, selling newspapers, shining shoes, and doing odd jobs. In the evenings, he watched his sister and brother do their homework, and they helped him learn to read and write. He never went to school except to teach.

Jose, raised in poverty, began one day when he was waiting his turn in a barbershop. He reached for something to read and picked up a lesson from a correspondence course on how to repair radios.

José Silva was the visionary behind the Silva Method, a self-improvement program that has helped millions of people around the world lead happier and healthier lives.

Soon a diploma hung in the barbershop, while across town Jose, at the age of fifteen, began to repair radios. As the years passed, his repair business became one of the largest in the area.

Silva studied advanced electronics to join the Signal Corps as an instructor in World War II.

After the war, with savings gone, he slowly rebuilt his business and also taught electronics at Laredo Junior College, where he developed the school laboratories.

Despite his career in electronics, Silva had a keen interest in hypnosis and the workings of the human mind.

Another man with diplomas inadvertently sparked Silva’s research. The man was a psychiatrist whose job was to ask questions of men being inducted into the Signal Corps during World War II.

It was this perplexing moment that started Jose on an odyssey of scientific research that led to his becoming, without diplomas or certificates, one of the most creative scholars of his age.

The questions took on deeper meanings, and soon Jose was ready to ask his own: Is it possible, using hypnosis, to improve a person’s learning ability—in fact, raise his I.Q.?

What he learned about hypnosis, plus what he knew about electronics, brought him back to the question he had raised earlier: Can learning ability be improved through mental training?

Jose soon abandoned hypnosis and began experimenting with mental training exercises to quiet the brain yet keep it more independently alert.

The exercises that evolved into The Silva Method called for relaxed concentration and vivid mental visualization as ways of reaching lower levels of awareness.

Over three years, he watched his children’s grades improve dramatically as he refined his techniques.

He became the first person to prove that we can learn to function with awareness at the Alpha and Theta frequencies of the brain.