exercise the brain in a systematic way. The reports of reversing mild-to-moderate memory loss by exercising the brain are as yet anecdotal, but they are encouraging nevertheless.
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 thatthe 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. Shewas asked to recall the score in a certain game between Pittsburgh and Cincinnati years
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 thatthe 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. Shewas asked to recall the score in a certain game between Pittsburgh and Cincinnati years
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