Teach Your Brain New Tricks

Exercising these three talents is a good reminder that, even on a bad day, your built-in computer is very powerful

THE AVERAGE PERSON’S BRAIN contains 86 billion neurons and trillions of synapses. All those brain cells mean your mind can do so much more than you think – such as these seemingly impossible feats.

1 MEMORISE ANYTHING

Say I asked you to memorise this list of ten words: ladybird, comb, oatmeal, lawyer, coal, stamp, knife, worm, bell, lettuce. You’d normally have to repeat them in your head many times before you achieved 100 per cent recall. Even after accomplishing this feat, a few hours later, you’d probably remember only two to three words from the beginning and end of the list. That’s because of what cognitive psychologists call the primacy and recency effects: information at the beginning and end of a series interferes with recall of information in the middle of a series.

This difficulty stems from the limitations of our verbal memory; the linguistic portion of our brains, where we store arbitrary lists of words, has limited storage.

However, our visual brains have vastly more storage than our linguistic brains. Thus, when you store information visually, as opposed to linguistically, you can recall it much better. And that’s the secret to remembering the ten words above.

Instead of repeating the words in your head, convert them to images – and not just any images, but vivid pictures. Then visualise your house and mentally place the image of each object on the list in a different room or distinct location, within the house.

For instance, place a very large ladybird– say a metre in diameter to make it really vivid – where the welcome mat would lie by the front door. Then deposit a large orange comb on the floor just inside the front door. Continue to place each successive object on the list throughout your house.

When you’re done, take another stroll through your home and ‘see’ the objects you’ve left in different places. You should have no trouble visualising each and every object.

You can use this same trick to memorise strings of numbers, letters, symbols, or anything else. Just convert what you’re memorising into something meaningful; for example, the number 2 might be represented by an image of you and your spouse.

2 NAVIGATE IN THE DARK

Bats navigate in the dark by listening for the returning sound they create from ultrasonic clicks, chirps and tones. We all have an inner bat that can also echolocate. Find a long stick or pole with a hard tip (metal is ideal) and a friend to spot you, then go to an uncarpeted area of your house. Close your eyes and tap the stick in front of you, as visually impaired people do. Observe that you can get a rough sense of the presence and distance of large nearby objects, just by listening to the clicks.

If you’re like most sighted people who do this for the first time, you will just ‘ know’ when you are getting close to a wall or a large object without knowing exactly how you know. This ‘knowing without knowing how’ is another example of implicit memory.

But if you listen carefully to the clicks of your stick, you’ll start to notice that a click made from tapping the floor a metre or so from a wall has a hollow quality because of slight echoes that immediately follow the original click of contact. If you tap the stick closer to the wall, the click will have a somewhat higher pitch.

3 SEE BEHIND YOU

Sound shadowing is a close cousin of echolocation. It lets you sense when someone – or a large something, such as a predator – is right behind you, even when that someone (or something) makes no sound.

Stand with your eyes closed on a sound- deadening surface such as carpet, grass or beach sand, and have a friend sneak up behind you so that you don’t hear his or her footsteps, breathing or clothes rustling. The experiment works best when you have a conspicuous sound source, such as a radio, located about three metres behind you to create background noise.

As your friend approaches from behind, even though you can’t see or hear him or her directly, you should be able to ‘feel’ the person’s proximity by the sound shadow that he or she casts – the way the person blocks the sound. If you pay close attention to the sound shadow, you’ll perceive it has two parts: a slight lowering of volume and a deadening of echoes of the radio noise off surfaces behind you. These two effects become increasingly obvious as the person gets closer to you. Our unconscious ability to sense that someone is behind us may have given rise to that overworked phrase in thrillers and mysteries: “She felt someone watching her.”

Although the perception of sound shadows, like echolocation, is yet another example of implicit memory, it may also have a hardwired survival component that helps us fill in a large blind spot behind us that predatory animals (and nasty humans) could otherwise exploit.

WE HAVE AN UNCONSCIOUS ABILITY TO SENSE SOMEONE IS BEHIND US