How To Teach Your Brain New Tricks

Exercising these four talents is a good reminder that, even on a bad day, your built-in computer is awfully powerful.

- Eric Haseltine

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 Memorize Anything

Say I asked you to memorize this list of ten words: ladybug, 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 percent recall. Even after accomplishing the tiring 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 extremely vivid pictures. Then visualize your house and mentally place the image of each object on the list in a different room or distinct location, such as a closet, within the house.

For instance, place a very large ladybug—say three feet 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, preferably in the order you would take someone on a guided tour.