Jose Silva was born on August 11, 1914, in Laredo, Texas. At the age of four, he moved in with their 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 6, 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 has never gone 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. What he picked up was a lesson from a correspondence course on how to repair radios. Jose asked to borrow it, but the barber would only rent it, and that on one condition that Jose completes the examinations in the back in the barber's name. Each week Jose paid a dollar, read the lesson, and completed the examination.

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Soon a diploma hung in the barbershop, while across town Jose, at the age of fifteen, he began to repair radios. As the years passed, his repair business became one of the largest in the area, providing money for the education of his brother and sister, the wherewithal for him to marry, plus eventually some half-million dollars to finance the twenty years of research that led to The Silva Method.

Silva has studied advanced electronics to join the Signal Corps as an Instructor in WORLD WAR II.

When he was discharged, with savings gone and $200 in his pocket, he began slowly to rebuild his business. At the same time, he took a half-time teaching job at Laredo Junior College, where he supervised three other teachers and was charged with creating the school’s electronics laboratories.

Five years later, with television on the scene, his repair business began to flourish and Jose called a halt to his teaching career. His business once again became the largest in town.

Jose Silva began his journey as a humble radio repairman in Laredo, Texas, and later as an electronics instructor with the United States Army Signal Corps.

Despite his career in electronics, Silva had a keen interest in hypnosis and the workings of the human mind. He spent his days working at his job and his nights studying the work of thought leaders like Freud, Jung, and Adler.

Another man with diplomas, these more conscientiously earned than the barber’s, inadvertently sparked this research. The man was a psychiatrist whose job was to ask questions of men being inducted into the Signal Corps during World War II.

“Do you wet your bed?” Jose’ was dumbfounded.“Do you like women?” Jose, the father of three, and destined one day to be the father of ten, was appalled.

Surely, he thought, the man knew more about the human mind than the barber knew about radios. Why such stupid questions?

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. Through their writings, Freud, Jung, and Adler became his early teachers.

The stupid questions took on deeper meanings, and soon Jose was ready to ask a question of his own: Is it possible, using hypnosis, to improve a person’s learning ability—in fact, raise his I.Q.? In those days I.Q. was believed to be something we were born with, but Jose was not so sure.

What he learned about hypnosis, plus what he knew about electronics, plus some F’s on his children’s report cards brought him back to the question he had raised earlier—can learning ability, the I.Q., be improved through some kind of mental training?

Jose soon abandoned hypnosis and began experimenting with mental training exercises to quiet the brain yet keep it more independently alert than in hypnosis. This, he reasoned, would lead to improved memory combined with understanding and hence to higher I.Q. scores.

The exercises from which The Silva Method evolved called for relaxed concentration and vivid mental visualization as ways of reaching lower levels. Once reached, these levels proved more effective than Beta in learning. The proof was in his children’s sharply improved grades over a three-year period while he continued to improve his techniques.

Jose had now scored a very significant one, which other research, principally biofeedback, has since confirmed. He was the first person to prove that we can learn to function with awareness at the Alpha and Theta frequencies of the brain. Another first, an equally astonishing one, was soon to come.