Tag Archives: Brain Power

You Can Always Find Your Way Back Home

Where Am I?

So what do you do when you suddenly find yourself lost? That’s what happened to me once. I heard from a friend of a friend about this magnificent party, and he’d heard from another friend some convoluted directions to get there. Both of us, and the friend, had only been living in the area for a few weeks, so it was pretty obvious what was going to happen. They were going to go straight after work, which was about 6 PM, while I had to work until a couple hours later.

I remembered the directions as best as I could, and decided I’d figure out how to get there on my own. It didn’t take long before I had no idea where I was, no idea where I came from, and no idea how to get back home.

I had a really interesting experience a couple of weeks ago. I had just moved to a new city, and a new apartment. I mean new for me, as well as a new building. Everything was new and modern and really cool. I had spent a few hours driving to this new town from my old town, which involved driving over this huge bridge (several miles long) since my previous apartment was on this big island. A really big island.

So there I was, about to drift off to sleep, when an idea hit me. I had spend all day packing moving, unpacking and setting things up in my new place, I looked around at my new familiar surroundings, and I predicted I would wake up in the morning and experience a few moments of absolute disorientation. When you look around and for brief moment, you don’t know where you are, how you got there, or the last few things that happened before you found yourself in your particular situation.

That has only happened to me a couple times, all after waking up in a strange place. Probably the most pronounced event was a night of heavy, um, entertainment after a Who concert. I woke up in my friends house, and for about five or ten seconds (which is a long time to have no clue where you are or how you got there) of complete discombobulation.

But as I lay in my apartment a couple of weeks ago, I looked around at my new furnishings, and actually predicted I would wake up in the morning and draw a complete blank for the first few moments.

And when I woke up, just as I thought, I drew a complete blank. But here’s the cool part: Before I remembered where I was and how I got there (moving and driving over the bridge) I remembered predicting that I wouldn’t remember, only then did I remember everything else.

It was like back in the old days of when they had to bootstrap the first computers. They had these giant machines that ran off of punch cards, and they had no memory at all. They didn’t have enough memory to turn on all their systems.

So the guy who was using the computer had to feed it a punch card that was only to tell the computer how to turn itself on and get started, and how to read the other punch cards. Once that “memory” was loaded into the computer, then you could stick other, more complicated, punch cards into the machine so it could finally be able to do what you wanted it to.

We take all that for granted, as all of our computers today are pre programmed with complex operating systems and software that makes virtually every machine plug and play. There’s a reason Bill Gates is one of the richest dudes on the planet.

That was a truly odd sensation, waking up in a strange looking around in complete and utter cluelessness, and then remembering that I wasn’t going to remember anything, and then starting to remember everything else.

And when I finally figured out enough to back track to someplace familiar, I was able to use that familiarity to backtrack to a road that I actually knew. And from there finding my way was home was easy. I had given up on going to the party (which I later heard wasn’t all that exciting, anyway) long ago.

No matter how far off track you get, your brain will always find ways to get back to what is familiar. That seems to be an underlying prime directive of our brains. Familiarity.

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Is Your Brain Stuck?

How To Make All Things New

The other day I was talking to a friend of mine about language. He is a fellow teacher, and we were discussing the best way that children learn. There are those that believe there is a small window of opportunity, about three or four years, where a kid’s brain is especially compliant and flexible, and that they can learn pretty much anything. After that, teaching them something new is much more difficult and complex. Some say that during this time period, much of a child’s outlook on life will be determined, their beliefs, ideas, beliefs about their own capabilities and other core mental components will be pretty much set.

Then there are those that believe that it only appears that way, because during this time period of a kid’s life, they aren’t really expected to do anything except soak up information. They are supposed to hold down a job, or pass any university entrance exams, or even do any household chores. It is because kids are given a free pass that they can devote their whole lives to learning different things and ideas. This particular school of thought holds that if you took any adult, at any age, and put them in the same environment, and they would produce the same amount of learning.

This of course would require they have all their needs taken care of, and don’t need to produce anything whatsoever, and any failure is met by complete acceptance and encouragement by those around them. Like just being a kid.

It’s easy to imagine this being the case. Imagine going off to some foreign language camp. You are subjected to the new language twenty-four hours a day. You don’t have to worry about doing anything, not even learning the language in a “school” type environment. You are in a place where there are others around you, going about their business, learning the language, and every time you use it correctly you are given smiles and praise. And if you mess up, there are no negative repercussions. And all you have to do is eat, sleep and play, and follow other people around and try and pick up the language they are speaking.

If you’ve seen the movie “The Last Samurai,” that’s kind of what happened to the character played by Tom Cruise. For the first few months, he wasn’t expected to do anything except wander around and try to fit in as best he could, so naturally he picked up the language fairly quickly.

Those that argue against this idea will say that the brain changes somehow, and that after a certain age, usually around seven or so, the brain is pretty much frozen. You try to teach an adult a foreign language, and they’ll be studying for years and years and still not get it right.

I’m sure you could make equal arguments for each case. The problem with things like this is that you can’t really do proper scientific studies, as that would be out of the question. You could scarcely get any funding for an experiment that would take several adults and put them into a situation where they would be like Tom Cruise’s character for a year or so. And you couldn’t take a kid out of his or her natural upbringing and subject them to different ideas at the whim of an experimenter.

Human studies like this can only be done in retrospect, with naturally occurring events that weren’t planned by any scientist. Which of course makes it easy to “prove” any theory simply by looking for the right data to support it.

My friend tends to believe in the biological view, that the brain physically changes at a certain age, making it much harder to learn new things, as we get older. I tend to think that it is more of an environmental issue, at least more so that his idea gives credit to.

I’ve known people that have come to the United States as teenagers, not speaking a word of English, and successfully learned accent free English in a couple of years, simply by immersing themselves in language learning above all else. I’ve also known people that have been in the United States for ten years or more and can barely speak English.

The Jesuits used to say that if you gave them a child, they would make him a solider of Christ for life by the time he was seven. This was clearly a belief in the biological model of learning, that after a certain age, the brain is closed off to new ideas and ways to look at the world.

But the past is filled with individuals who, through late in life conversions, changed the course of history through simply taking on new ideas. Saul, Mohammad, and Malcolm X are just three individuals who come to mind who experienced late in life conversions, or inspirations that changed the course of history. Of course, one could argue that each of these received “divine” help, and that the brains of normal individuals, which are not exposed to these divine interventions, don’t qualify for late in life learning.

Various social experiments show time and time again that as humans age, choices and habits become less and less flexible, but what is causing what? Does aging cause inflexibility, or does inflexibility cause aging?

Personally, I’m off the believe that it’s never too late to learn something new, and that you really can teach an old dog new tricks. So long as you put yourself in an environment that is conducive to learning, the sky’s the limit to the things you can put into your brain.

Of course this gets harder and harder as we get older, and pick up more and more responsibilities and restraints on our time. But that only means you need to get more creative with how you look at the same things every day.

One trick is to spend a few minutes every day looking at normal, every day objects, and specifically giving them names that don’t fit. For example, look at a book and call it a frog, and then look at your shoe, and call it a taxi. If you do this a few minutes every day, with ten or twenty objects, you’ll be building lots of new neural pathways in your that can give the same old boring stuff you see every day a new perspective. Many people report that after doing this mind experiment for a couple weeks, the world begins to look a lot more brighter and more interesting, just like when you were a kid and you got a new toy.

And if you can look at the same stuff every day the same way a kid looks at a new toy, you’re doing pretty good.

Instantly Develop a Powerful Memory

Have you ever wished you could develop a potent memory that would cause you to never ever again need to write anything down? Have you ever been amazed by those guys on TV who could instantly memorize a room full of people that they’d just met? Can you imagine how cool you’d look to a room full of your friends when you stand up to give a speech with absolutely no note-cards whatsoever? Well, after you read this article and put these techniques into practice you’ll be able to easily develop such incredibly powerful mental skills you’ll not only have useful strategies but a set of wildly entertaining party skills. Ready?

The basic method is to learn a technique called pegging. This is a wild form of association.  Association is when you immediately link two ideas or words together. Like for example, when you think of the word baseball, you might immediately think of glove, or bat, or stadium. That is an association. Technically it’s because inside your brain there’s a strong neural connection between those two words. The idea behind pegging is to create a strong association between something that you already know well, to that which you want to remember.

Normally, these associations take time and effort. Like spelling. Many words don’t follow any normal spelling rules, like psychology, for example. The only way to remember to spell it without thinking is to write it over and over. Similarly, unless you can count really fast in your head, the only way to remember that 12 x 12 = 144 is to repeat the equation enough times so that you can create a strong neural connection.

However, pegging is an easier, quicker, and much more fun way to do this. Here are the simple steps:

Step 1: Create a list of items that you already know inside and out. For example, five things that are almost alwasy in your bedroom. (Like your bed for example.)

Step 2: Create an itemized list of the things you want to remember. Points in a speech, items at the grocery store, steps of the Kreb cycle, anything will work.

Step 3: Create a fantastically crazy cartoonish action and sensory filled picture containing any item from Steps 1 and 2 from above. It helps to involved yourself in this action cartoon picture. And if you are comfortable with it, add in the two secret ingredients (more on these later.)

For example, let’s say you are going to the store, and you need to buy eggs. You choose an item from your bedroom, let’s say your bed. So then you need to create a fantastical mind movie starring the eggs and your beds.  How about this: You are really tired, and you walk into your bedroom and collapse on your bed. Only somebody has put about a thousand eggs under your sheets, and all the runny egg stuff oozes out all over you, in your hair, under your clothes, inside your socks, between your toes. Or how about this: You come home, tired liked before, only this time you go to collapse on our bed, but you realize too late that your bed has magically changed into a giant egg, complete with sheets and covers and bed spread. As you collapse on your bed/egg it naturally breaks, but only partially and you find yourself inside a giant egg with all the bedsheets soaked in egg goo, and wrapped around you. Make sure to really feel the egg goo in your mind as you create this picture. It sounds complicated, but it really only takes a couple seconds.

So after you easily create this image, when you go to the store, and think of your bed, the egg image will instantly pop into your head.  You peg things to items in your bedroom, your bathroom, your car, any landmarks between your place and the closest 7-11, anything will work.

After you practice for a while, you’ll naturally become extremely proficient. I once gave a demonstration in front of a speech class I was taking.  People were amazed. When you do this, especially at parties or happy hours, people will think that you are a genius. Which, actually, you are as you start to use these mind development techniques that many others, like you, have learned.

And the secret ingredients? Sex and pain. Yep. If you involved sex and pain in your picture, it will be impossible NOT to remember it. Just make sure to keep the sex and the pain involving yourself (and the eggs and the bed in the above examples.) Be as graphic and creative as possible, but make sure not to let anybody peek inside your head while you are doing this, because they might think you are a little weird. And be sure that after you do this at parties and impress your friends with your new super powerful memory techniques, not to tell them about the sex and the pain part. You might be walking home.

Make sure to check back often to read these articles.  Because I will be posting as often as possible, please link or share this site as well.

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Easily Develop Incredibly Powerful Brain Power

Imagine being the go-to-person when your company has a problem that they need solved. Now. Imagine you are talking with a client or on a date, and you have an almost magic ability to steer the conversation wherever you want it to go, and the other person thinks that it was their idea. Imagine being surrounded by stressed out executives who are almost ready to call it quits when you tilt your head to the side, think for a moment, and say “Why don’t we try…” and they look at you in utter astonishment. “Why didn’t we think of that?” They ask. “You’re a genius! We’re saved!” Would you like that? Would you like to develop the mental dexterity of thought that Bruce Lee demonstrated with his nunchucks?

Well, here I give you two strong tips that when practiced, will allow you to develop so much flexibility and creativity of thought that you won’t know how you managed after you naturally become incredibly smarter.

Since they both work on the same principle of how the brain is physically set up, you’ll probably find yourself able to make up new exercises after you make these a habit.

The first one is simple, but it’s pretty weird, so make sure you don’t do it if anybody is in earshot. Especially at work.  What you do, is look at ordinary objects, but give them a different name. For example, if you look off to the left of your computer, now, and see a pen, look at it and say “apple!” Then look at something else, say a piece of paper, and say “pickup truck!” The key here is to make sure your ‘new’ names for the objects don’t fall in the same category.  Like in the above example, if you called your pen an ‘apple’ and then called the piece of paper an ‘orange,’ it wouldn’t be as effective, because orange and apple fall in the same category of food, or even fruit. So try to pick your new names completely different categories, sizes, colors, uses, as different as possible. Beware, this sounds deceptively simple, but when you start to practice this regularly, you’ll realize it is anything but. The reason it isn’t as simple as it sound is because you are literally building new circuits in your brain.  Be prepared to have some wild dreams when you start this.

The next trick requires a pen and paper, or better, notepad or some other word processor.  Think of anything, any regular object, for example, potato. Then pick something in a different category, but starting with the same letter, in this case, the letter ‘p.’  So let’s say you choose potato, and Porsche. Next, you just start rambling off anything that comes to mind regarding those two objects, AND, whatever comes up after that, just let your brain flow, and everything you think of, write it down.  Don’t worry about spelling, or grammar, or anything like that. Just write your thoughts out as fast as you can. This also literally causes you to build new connections in your brain, so you will be able to connect ideas in ways that will astound your friends.

One word of caution. It’s difficult to see results with these exercises because it takes time to build new neural pathways, and as you build them, it feels normal, and you can’t really notice the results right away. It’s not like you’ll have to change hat sizes or anything. What will most likely happen, is if you put just 5 or 10 minutes a day into either of these exercises, you will have a powerful ‘Aha!‘ moment.  After about a week or so you will suddenly realize that you have an ENOURMOUS amount of data stored up in your brain. And I’m talking about the whole size of the internet enourmous. And trust me, this is a really cool feeling. It will make you feel incredibly confident in a way that you never have before.

Because you will soon be developing your new super brain power, I won’t have to remind you to check back often to see what other articles I’ll be posting on a daily basis. But if you want to share or link this site, please feel free to do so.

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