Think Smart: A Neuroscientist's Prescription for Improving Your Brain's Performance (9 page)

James Flynn’s research underscores several important points. While it’s true that genes play a role in determining intellect, social-cultural factors combined with effort play an even greater role. In other words, our cognitive functioning is largely modifiable. Each of the six traits associated by Flynn with enhanced mental abilities—mental acuity (fluid intelligence), knowledge and information (crystallized intelligence), memory, speed of information processing, curiosity, and the ability to think in abstract terms unrelated to specific applications—can be improved by one’s own efforts.

Of these six cognitive processes, memory is the one that most rewards our efforts at enhancement. A good memory is the bedrock of a superior functioning brain. A good memory also is a prerequisite for success in any aspect of life; learned new information can’t be applied unless that information can be assimilated and related to earlier information and remain available for later recall. Anything that increases our memory powers increases our access to everything we learn. For these reasons, let’s explore the ways memory can be improved.

Failures of memory—forgetting—result from two principle causes. The first is distraction. We can’t recall someone’s name moments after being introduced to him because during the introduction we were mentally preoccupied with something else and weren’t really listening. Since we weren’t really listening, our brain never successfully encoded the information and therefore cannot later recall it. The cure for this is straightforward: focus our attention on the name and the face during the introduction.

The second most common cause of forgetting relates to failures to register what is going on during the original experience. A fundamental way to enhance your memory, therefore, is to pay more attention to your sensory experiences. The more vivid your impressions about what you see, hear, smell, taste, or touch, the easier it is to establish a vivid and easily recollected memory.
So the first step toward an enhanced memory involves exercises in sharpening our senses.

The director Lee Strasberg, founder of the Actors Studio, taught his students to sharpen their acting skills by what he called sense-memory exercises. Harry Governick, one of Strasberg’s early students, describes the first exercise, which involves an empty coffee cup:

After filling a cup with coffee, the student is encouraged to carry out every day for at least fifteen minutes a detailed exploration of every sensory aspect of the cup. Governick suggests starting with the sense of sight. “As your eyes view the cup, your mind should answer every detail about the visual aspects of the cup.” Among other suggestions by Governick, the student should note the height of the cup, its diameter, its color, its material composition, and the dimensions of the cup’s handle. He should look for ridges on the cup’s lips, and note the shape and color of any artwork or ceramic design on the cup. He should also check for the shape and color of any reflections from the lights in the room that may be visible on the cup. “After you have exhausted every possible question your mind has asked your sense of sight to answer, move on to another one of the five senses, such as touch, and explore in the same deliberate exhaustive manner.”

If the exercise is carried out faithfully, Governick claims, “you will actually ‘see,’ ‘touch,’ ‘smell,’ and ‘hear’ the cup and the coffee, as though it were right there in front of you. Your senses will faithfully re-create the cup and drink for you.”

Although the sense-memory exercises were designed for actors to train their senses to respond on stage as they do in real life, I’ve found that nonactors can use the same exercises to sharpen sensory impressions and enhance concentration.

Visual sense memory exercises
involve concentrating on small familiar objects such as the cup suggested by Governick. Pick anything that appeals to you and study it intently. If your attention begins to lag, switch to drawing the object while saying out loud the features you are trying to incorporate into the drawing. Then describe aspects of the object you’ve noticed but cannot capture on paper because of limitations in your drawing skills. Similar exercises can be used to enhance acuity in the other senses.

As a
sound sense-memory exercise,
focus your attention on the ambient sounds around you. Do this in a relatively quiet area where different sounds can be distinguished easily. How many separate sounds can you hear? Identify them. Then concentrate on one sound at a time and write down all of the things that occur to you about it that distinguishes it from all other sounds. Or purchase a CD of bird calls and correlate the calls with the names and pictures of the birds. Other animal sounds will do just as well. For instance, when I discovered a large number of frogs living in and around the pond near my summer home in Prince Edward Island, Canada, I purchased a CD and guidebook to the calls of all of the frogs living in North America. At odd moments I play the CD and test how many distinct frog calls I can recognize. Admittedly, this isn’t the most exciting of exercises; many people would find it downright dull. But the point is that it provides an intellectual sound challenge for me. So choose a sound sense-memory exercise that appeals to you.

More important than the sounds of birds, frogs, or other animals is the sound of human speech. Since human speech plays such an important role in our lives, it’s useful to learn to detect subtleties in the sound of the human voice. An excellent test for auditory memory is to record a conversation and later attempt to mentally re-create everything that was said in the correct sequence. Novelists and psychotherapists are especially good at this. The novelist listens and remembers conversations because she needs to make certain the dialogue she writes captures how people actually speak—often not in complete sentences.

After I’ve finished recalling what was said and in what sequence, I check my recall against the recording. What did I forget? Does my recollection of the conversation occur in the precise sequence in which it occurred?

Next, I replay the recording, but this time I ignore meaning and content while listening to the voices as
simply voices.
I pay special attention to emotional features as signaled by changes in tone, cadence, loudness, the frequency of interruptions, and other changes in pacing. This exercise calls into play the right hemisphere of the brain, which is specialized to discern the nonverbal auditory signals whereby one person communicates with another.

For instance, several years ago I found myself uncomfortable and irritated when talking with a certain business acquaintance. Try as I might, I couldn’t identify what it was about our conversations that bothered me. So I recorded one of our conversations and applied the two approaches mentioned above. In the first part—simply listening to the playback of one of our conversations and then writing it out from memory—I couldn’t identify anything that explained my discomfort. Nothing in the dialogue seemed out of the ordinary. But when I performed the second part of the exercise and concentrated just on the sound of the voices, I discovered an interesting and maddening conversational quirk.

Although my acquaintance never interrupted me, he nonetheless maintained control of the conversational space by means of a low peremptory hum that began whenever I started speaking. It was barely detectable—a kind of very subtle vocal “nudge” that continued throughout my part of the conversation. The overall effect was: “Please hurry up and finish what you’re saying, because I want to speak once again.”

Now I knew the source of my discomfort and annoyance: he never completely relinquished control of the conversation, even when I was speaking and he was supposed to be silent. But he was never silent, and if I hadn’t recorded our conversation and listened to it as simply sound, I would never have discovered the source of my unease. Be prepared: at first you’ll find it difficult to listen to your native language and hear it as just sound. That’s because after learning language our brains are wired primarily for detecting the meaning rather than the sound. It’s far easier to listen to a foreign language as pure sound because you can’t process the meaning of the words you hear. But with practice you can pick up on tones of voice conveying emotion in your native language without consciously registering the meaning of what’s actually been said.

Touch
is the next sensation to be expanded. Start with fabrics like silk, leather, wool, suede, cotton, and cashmere. Arrange articles of clothing made from these materials on a sofa or a bed and, with your eyes closed, identify them by touch alone. Put them in your closet and over the next few days select a particular item by touch alone. As another touch sensory exercise, randomly set out twenty or thirty similar-size objects (a tennis ball, an orange, a potato, a parsnip, an onion) and sort them with your eyes closed, identifying each object by touch alone. Simply touch the object using the first three fingers of either hand. (Be careful not to pick them up or manipulate them in any way, since this provides information via receptors located in joints, tendons, and muscles.) Even better, ask someone else to select and arrange the objects; that way you won’t know anything about the objects beforehand.

The next touch exercise is one I learned from a patient who worked as a blackjack dealer in Las Vegas. As she demonstrated for me on several occasions, she was able to cut a deck of cards and then correctly identify by touch alone the number of cards in each half of the cut deck. This skill required several years of regular practice to acquire, so don’t expect to be able to accomplish it using a full deck of cards. Instead, try it with only a part of the deck (twenty cards is about right). Cut the cards and by touch alone estimate the number of cards in each half of the deck.

Some people’s acquired skill at cutting cards by touch alone provides one of the reasons you should never play cards for money with strangers: a “shaved deck” may be in play. If a very thin layer of the upper outer edge of one side of a deck is finely shaved
with the exception of one card
(usually an ace), it’s then possible to locate that card at any time simply by running a finger along that corner of the deck. The edge of the unshaved card juts ever so slightly from the shaved cards and can be detected by touch alone. To win, the person handling the deck has only to wait for a strategic moment and then draw that card from the deck or cut the deck so as to place that card on top.

Card sharks and pickpockets are masters of information management via touch alone. The pickpocket distracts his victim by touching one part of his body while deftly inserting a hand into the victim’s pocket and extracting his wallet. And—shifting our attention to perfectly legal activities—magicians manipulate cards, coins, and other props by means of enhanced touch sensitivity in their fingers developed over hours of practice.

Touch can provide a wealth of interpersonal information as well. When you are introduced to someone, pay special attention to the steadiness and firmness of his handshake, the level of moisture on his palm, the smoothness or roughness of his hand. I do this every day as part of my evaluation of patients. If you have the opportunity to touch an article of clothing, identify it by its texture. Is that jacket made of real or faux leather? Is that dress silk or a synthetic blend? When you combine that kind of information with active sensory attention to the person’s appearance and tone of voice, you already know a great deal about that person.

Tasting and smelling sensory exercises
are as readily available as the nearest garden, spice rack, and wine-tasting group. Here is my favorite exercise: Take a number of spices (in their containers) at random and set them out on a table. Without looking at the labels or contents, by smell alone identify each spice. A recent selection included oregano, thyme, mint, minced onion, sage, sweet basil, cumin, chervil, orange peel, and black pepper. You may find several of them difficult and need to taste as well as smell the spice.

The linkage of olfaction with the brain is straightforward: thanks to the arrangement of the olfactory nerves and their connection with the forepart of the brain, scents such as perfumes or wines are experienced as complex and highly evocative perceptions. The process has been compared to the contributions of individual musical instruments to a symphony. Perfume-makers and winemakers routinely use terms drawn from music when describing their creations: top, middle, and bass “notes,” each contributing to the harmonious “chord” of the scent. Just as a symphony cannot be any better than the performance of the individual artists and the quality of their instruments, smell (as well as taste) depends on each person’s ability to detect certain basic odors. And this ability can be improved by practice. The best way to test your current olfactory ability is to have someone assemble seven small jars containing the substances mentioned in the next paragraph, then challenge yourself to identify them.

Eighty-five percent of the U.S. population can identify the following seven odors: baby powder, chocolate, cinnamon, coffee, mothballs, peanut butter, and soap. If you had trouble with one or two of them, don’t worry. Surprisingly a few “normals” in the original test had difficulty identifying one or two of the odors.

Difficulty in smell identification is sometimes seen as an initial symptom of Alzheimer’s disease. This finding suggests the intriguing though unproven possibility that Alzheimer’s might be slowed in its progression by enhancing one’s olfactory powers via scent identification exercises like I’m suggesting. (I’m not making that claim but at the very least such exercises challenge two of the brain functions affected by Alzheimer’s: vocabulary, naming the scent, and memory, recalling past experiences with the scent.)

Next, I suggest
sensory (and motor) exercises
involving the hands. Since no part of the body is more functionally linked with the brain than the hands—with larger areas of the brain devoted to the fingers than to the legs, back, chest, or abdomen—developing nimble finger skills is a surefire way of improving brain function. Whenever you perform an activity requiring finger dexterity, you enhance your brain. Unfortunately, most adults—with the exception of musicians and surgeons—aren’t highly skilled in fine finger control. To counteract this, take up a hobby that requires fine detail work such as knitting, model-ship or model-train building, bike repair, simple carpentry, painting, or drawing. A Pulitzer Prize-winning writer I know started taking drawing classes three years ago and now carries a sketch pad with him at all times. He’s found that producing quick sketches of the things and people around him has sharpened his writing skills. Sketching helps him to notice additional details that he can then incorporate into his books and articles.