Super Brain (7 page)

Finally, look upon this whole project as natural. Your brain was designed to follow your lead, and the more relaxed you are, the better that will be for your mind-brain partnership. The best memory is one you rely upon with simple confidence.

HEROES
OF SUPER BRAIN

N
ow that we have dispelled some false myths, the path to super brain looks clearer. But a new obstacle up ahead is blocking the way: complexity. The neural network of your brain is the computer of your body, but it is also the computer of your life. It absorbs and registers every experience, however tiny, and compares it with past experiences, then stores it away. You can say, “Spaghetti again? We had it twice last week,” because your brain stores information by constantly comparing today with yesterday. At the same time, you develop likes and dislikes, grow bored, long for variety, and reach the end of one phase of your life, ready for the next. The brain enables it all to take place. It constantly connects new information with what you learned in the past. You remodel and refine your neural network on a second-by-second basis, but so does the world you experience. The largest super computer in existence cannot match this feat, which all of us take for granted.

The brain isn’t daunted by its endless tasks. The more you ask it to do, the more it can do. Your brain is capable of making a quadrillion (one million billion) synapses. Each is like a microscopic telephone, reaching any other telephone on the line as often as it wants. Biologist and Nobel laureate Gerald Edelman points out that
the number of possible neural circuits in the brain are 10 followed by a million zeros. Consider that the number of particles in the known universe is estimated to be only 10 followed by seventy-nine zeros!

You may think you are reading this sentence right now, or looking out the window to check the weather, but actually you are not. What you are actually doing is outstripping the universe. That’s a fact, not science fiction. Occasionally this fact intrudes into an everyday life with astonishing results. When it does, complexity is either a friend or enemy, and sometimes a little of both. One of the most exclusive clubs in the world consists of a handful of people who share a mysterious condition that was discovered only recently, in 2006: hyperthymesia. They remember everything. They have total recall. When they get together, they can play mental games like: What’s the best April 4 you ever had? Each person rapidly flips through a mental Rolodex, but instead of note cards, they see the actual events of every April 4 in their lives. Within a minute someone will say, “Oh, 1983, definitely. I had a new yellow sundress, and my mother and I drank Orange Crush on the beach while my dad read the paper. That was in the afternoon; we went to a seafood restaurant for lobster at six.”

They can recollect any day of their lives with complete, unerring accuracy. (
Thymesia
, one of the root words in
hyperthymesia
, is Greek for “remembering.” The other word,
hyper
, means “excessive.”) Researchers have located only seven or eight Americans to date who exhibit this condition, but it isn’t a malady. None of these people have brain damage, and in some cases their ability to remember every detail of their lives began suddenly, on a specific day, when ordinary memory took a quantum leap.

To qualify for the diagnosis of hyperthymesia, a person has to pass memory tests that seem impossible. One woman was played the theme song from a sitcom that ran on television for only two episodes in the 1980s, but having seen one of them, she instantly knew the show’s name. Another candidate was a baseball fan. She
was asked to recall the score in a certain game between Pittsburgh and Cincinnati years before. “That’s a trick question,” she replied. “The team plane broke down, and Pittsburgh never arrived. The game was a forfeit.”

We discussed memory in the previous chapter of this book, and hyperthymesia is the ultimate example of an ability that everyone shares being carried to superhuman lengths—only, it’s very human still. When asked whether she liked having perfect recall, one subject sighed. “I can remember every time my mother told me I was too fat.” Those with hyperthymesia agree that revisiting the past can be acutely painful. They avoid thinking about the worst experiences in their lives, which are unpleasant for anyone to recall but extraordinarily vivid for them, as vivid as actually living them. Much of the time their total recall is uncontrollable. The mere mention of a date causes a visual track to unspool in their mind’s eye, running parallel to normal visual images. (“It’s like a split screen; I’ll be talking to someone and seeing something else,” reports one subject.)

You and I don’t have hyperthymesia, so how does it relate to the goal of super brain? The problem of complexity enters the picture. Science has studied total recall and the brain’s memory centers; several are enlarged in people with hyperthymesia. The cause is unknown. Researchers suspect links to obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), since people with hyperthymesia often display compulsive behaviors; or to various forms of attention deficit, since total recallers cannot shut down the memories once they start flooding in. Perhaps these are people who never developed the ability to forget. One thing can always be counted on with the human brain: you can’t look anywhere without looking everywhere.

Looking for Heroes

The way to get around the problem of complexity is to turn it on its head. If your brain is ahead of the universe, then its hidden potential
must be far greater than anyone supposes. We can leave those quadrillion connections to the neuroscientists. Let’s pick three areas where, in a normal healthy brain, peak performance is reachable. In each area there will be someone who has led the way. These are heroes of super brain, even though you may not have seen them that way before.

HERO #1
ALBERT EINSTEIN
FOR ADAPTABILITY

Our first hero is the great physicist Albert Einstein, but we are not choosing him for his intellect. Einstein—like geniuses in general—is a paragon of success. Such people are intelligent and creative far beyond the norm. If we knew their secret, each of us would have greater success, no matter what we pursued. Highly successful people don’t merely have seven habits. They use their brain in a way that is keyed to success. If you shut yourself out from Einstein’s way of using his brain, you limit your possibilities for success. It isn’t a matter of just “good genes.” Einstein used his brain in a way that any person can learn.

The key is
adaptability
.

Super brain takes advantage of your innate ability to adapt. This ability is necessary for survival. Of all living things, humans have adapted to all environments on the planet. Confront us with the harshest climate, the strangest diets, the worst diseases, or the most fearsome crises presented by natural forces, and we adapt.
Homo sapiens
does this so incredibly well that we take it for granted until someone appears before us who carries adaptability to a new level, someone like Einstein.

Einstein adapted by facing the unknown and conquering it. His field was physics, but the unknown confronts everyone on a daily basis. Life is full of unexpected challenges. To adapt to the
unknown, Einstein developed three strengths and avoided three obstacles:

Three strengths:
Letting go, being flexible, hanging loose

Three obstacles:
Habits, conditioning, stuckness

You can measure a person’s adaptability by how much they are able to let go, remain flexible, and hang loose in the face of difficulties. You can measure how poorly a person adapts by the dominance of old habits and conditioning that keep them stuck. Harmful memories of shocks and setbacks in their past tell them over and over how limited they are. Einstein was able to ignore old habits of thought that surrounded him. He hung loose and let new solutions come to him through dreaming and intuition. He learned everything he could about a problem, then surrendered to unknown possibilities.

This isn’t how the public views Einstein, who is imagined as a brainiac with wild frowzy hair filling the blackboard with mathematical equations. But let’s look at his career from a personal perspective. As he tells it, Einstein’s great motivation was awe and wonder before the mysteries of Nature. This was a spiritual state, and he would say that penetrating the secrets of the universe was like reading the mind of God. By seeing the cosmos first as a mystery, Einstein was rejecting the habit of seeing it as a giant machine whose moving parts could be figured out and measured. That was how Isaac Newton had viewed physics. Remarkably, Einstein took the most basic notions in the Newtonian system, such as gravity and space, and totally reinvented them.

He did so, as the whole world soon learned, through the theory of relativity and his famous equation, E=mc
²
. Higher mathematics was involved, but that’s a red herring. Einstein once told some young students, “Do not worry about your problems with mathematics. I assure you mine are far greater.” This wasn’t false modesty. His creative method was more like dreaming than cogitating; once he “saw”
how time and space worked, devising the mathematical proof came later, with much difficulty.

When you face a new problem, you can solve it in old ways or in a new way. The first is by far the easier path to follow. Think about an old married couple who argue all the time. They feel frustrated and blocked. Neither wants to give an inch. The result is a ritual, in which they repeat the same stubborn opinions, make the same nagging complaints, exhibit the same inability to accept the other’s point of view. What would be a new way to get an old married couple out of their misery?

Instead of remaining stuck in the old behaviors, which are wired into their brains, they could use their brains in the following ways:

HOW TO BE ADAPTABLE

Stop repeating what never worked in the first place.

Stand back and ask for a new solution.

Stop struggling at the level of the problem—the answer never lies there.

Work on your own stuckness. Don’t worry about the other person.

When the old stresses are triggered, walk away.

See righteous anger for what it really is—destructive anger dressed up to sound positive.

Rebuild the bonds that have become frayed.

Take on more of the burden than you think you deserve.

Stop attaching so much weight to being right. In the grand scheme of things, being right is insignificant compared with being happy.

Taking these steps isn’t simply sound psychology: it creates a space so that your brain can change. Repetition glues old habits into the brain. Nursing a negative emotion is the surest way to block positive emotions. So every time an old married couple revisits the same resentments, they are wiring them harder into their brains. Ironically, Einstein, a master at applying such amazing adaptability to physics, saw himself as a failure as a husband and father. He divorced his first wife, Mileva, in 1919 after living apart for five years. A daughter born out of wedlock in 1902 has disappeared from the pages of history. One of his two sons was schizophrenic and died in a mental asylum; the other, who suffered as a child when his parents separated, was alienated from his father for two decades. These situations caused Einstein much pain. But even for a genius, emotions are more primitive and urgent than rational thoughts. Thoughts move like lightning; emotions move much more slowly and sometimes almost imperceptibly.

Here is a good place to point out that separating emotions and reason is totally artificial. The two are merged. Brain scans affirm that the limbic system, a part of the lower brain that plays a major role in emotions, lights up when people think they are making rational decisions. This is inescapable because the circuitry of the brain is entirely interconnected. Studies have shown that when people feel good, they are willing to pay unreasonable prices for things. (Pay three hundred dollars for jogging shoes? Why not, I feel great today!) But they are also willing to pay more when they feel depressed. (Six dollars for a chocolate chip cookie? Why not, it will cheer me up.) The point is that we make decisions against an emotional background, even if we rationalize that we don’t.

Part of adaptability is to be aware of the emotional component instead of denying it. Otherwise, you run the risk that your brain will start using you. The economist Martin Shubik devised an unusual
auction, in which the object put up for sale was a dollar bill. You might assume that the winning bid was $1, but it wasn’t, because in this auction, the winner got the dollar bill, but whoever made the second-highest bid had to pay that amount to the auctioneer. Thus if I win by bidding $2 and you lose by bidding $1.50, you must hand over that amount, with nothing to show for it.

When this experiment was run, the bidding went well above a dollar. Typically, two male students were the last bidders standing. They felt competitive; each wanted to punish the other; neither wanted to be the loser who got punished. Whatever their motives, irrational factors sent the bidding higher and higher. (One wonders why it didn’t skyrocket, ending only when one bidder ran out of money.)

Just as interesting is the fact that when experimenters try to eliminate the emotional side of decision making, they fail. No one has yet run a study where the subjects made purely rational decisions. We pay a high premium for stubbornly sticking to our opinions, backed by stuck emotions, habits, memories, and beliefs.

Bottom line: If you want to achieve success in any field, become like Einstein. Maximize your brain’s ability to adapt.