[tt] Wired: Get Smarter: 12 Hacks That Will Amp Up Your Brainpower

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Get Smarter: 12 Hacks That Will Amp Up Your Brainpower
http://www.wired.com/print/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/gs_intro
8.4.21
[Linked by Arts and Letters Daily]

Face it: Your IQ is basically hardwired. Still, there are lots of
ways to get smarter -- to max out your so-called functional
intelligence. Think of it as a software upgrade. Our guide to better
brainpower shows you how to boost your memory, sharpen your
concentration skills, and even pop the right combination of drugs
and supplements. Start download now.

Beautiful Mind: Steve Carell on How to Act Brilliant
http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/gs_carell

The Memory Master: Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? 
Surrender to This Algorithm.
http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_wozniak

Powering Up: A Dozen Ways to Super-Charge Your Brain
http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/gs_01distract

Plus! 6 Intelligence Myths Exposed
http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/gs_myths


HACK YOUR BRAIN

1: Max Your Mind's Performance by Distracting Yourself
http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/gs_01distract

2: Caffeinate With Care: Small Shots Do a Brain Better Than Big Blasts
http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/gs_02caffeinate

3: Feed Your Mind With Impressive Information
http://www.wired.com/special_multimedia/2008/gs_03feedyourmind

4: Think Positive, and You Will Get Smarter
http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/gs_04thinkpositive

5: Give Your Intellect a Boost -- Just Say Yes to Doing the Right Drugs!
http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/gs_05drugs

6: How to Juice Your IQ Score
http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/gs_06iqtest

7: Thalamus, Cortex, Amygdala ... Pick Apart the Brain
http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/gs_07yourbrain

8: Don't Panic. It Makes You Stupid.
http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/gs_08dontpanic

9: Embracing Chaos Could Bring Order to Your Memory
http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/gs_09embracechaos

10: Take on Any Map by Getting Visual
http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/gs_10getvisual

11: Up Your Intelligence by Choosing Your Exercise Wisely
http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/gs_11excercise

12: Comprehension Climbs When You Slooooow Doooown
http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/gs_12slowdown

ONLINE EXTRAS

Find Your Inner Spock: Jonny Magic's Logic Tips
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/04/find-your-inner.html

Sleep Hacking Produces Results -- For a Time
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/04/sleep-hacking-p.html

Q&A: Facebook's Biggest Brain Tells All
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/04/being-smart-is.html

Gallery: Behind the Camera With Steve Carell [not shown]
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/multimedia/2008/04/gs_carell_ss

Video: U.S. Memory Champ Santos Shares His Tricks [not shown]
http://video.wired.com/?fr_chl=80a8e3e449c0a4bcfc70ab580e283f9210c80ab6&rf=bm

* Disclaimer
All increased intelligence becomes the property of WIRED magazine
(hereafter referred to as "The Magazine") and will not be
acknowledged or returned. Neural damage is the responsibility of the
reader. Attempts to enhance mental capacity as measured by
standardized metrics neither legally nor ethically compel The
Magazine to make commensurate enhancements in quality or content.
Readers with demonstrated cranial enlargement or cortical thickening
may be required to sign a liability/publicity/copyright release and
to appear on the cover of The Magazine, provided they are also the
star of an upcoming motion picture. Anne Hathaway especially. The
Magazine reserves the right to cancel, terminate, or modify people
who use brain-embiggening technology because look, dude, this is
Condé Nast. Do you think we're just playing around here?

++++++++++++++++

Steve Carell on How to Act Brilliant
By Nancy Miller Email 04.21.08 | 6:00 PM

Steve Carell is no dummy. In fact, the man who plays hapless
half-wit Michael Scott on NBC's The Office and equally hapless
gumshoe Maxwell Smart in this summer's big-screen redo of Get Smart
is nothing short of a genius -- a genius wrapped in a doofus, hidden
by an idiot. Here's his advice on how to attain Carell-level smarts.

Engage in Reading-Type Behavior

If we were meant to read for enjoyment, would God have created
television? Read as it was intended -- for exercise. The more you
read, the more you expand your -- what's the word I'm looking for?
-- your stockpile of words. You must have a stockpile of words that
you can pass along to your children for their stockpile.

Appear to Listen

I've learned to appear scintillatingly intellectual by asking people
questions ("Do you like pizza?"). Then I just look at them, nodding
and saying "Hmmm" and "Um hmmm" every few seconds. Try and keep one
or two things in your head to regurgitate later. After all, what is
knowledge, really, but high-resolution regurgitation?

Just Say Yes

I've been injecting human growth hormone into my brain for several
years now, with no ill effects. I feel smarter, and I often feel
compelled to show people -- really show them -- just how smart I am.
HGH has also colored the way I perceive the world, which is now a
sort of bloodred.

Get the Abs of Einstein

A healthy body means a healthy mind. You get your heart rate up, and
you get the blood flowing through your body to your brain. Look at
Albert Einstein. He rode a bicycle. He was also an early student of
Jazzercise. You never saw Einstein lift his shirt, but he had a
six-pack under there.

Don't Chew Your Food

I recommend tuna melts. Fish is very healthy, as is cheese, and
toast. I also recommend eating peeled baby carrots. Carrots are very
good for the eyes, but they absolutely must be baby carrots so you
don't chew too much. I don't think I have to explain crunchwaves to
people who read wired. They already know that when you chew
something too hard, the vibrations fire up those crunchwaves, which
shake the neurons in your brain. Do that too much and those brain
cells shake loose and die. I usually gulp my food, and you should,
too.

Practice Thinking by Yourself

Your brain, like your tongue, is a muscle. Practicing thinking by
yourself really helps develop your brain, which you need throughout
your day. I like to practice my thinking in a darkened room, alone.
I focus on one thing, such as Tree. I think about Tree. Then, after
that, I think about Cloud. Then later, as I walk outside, I see Tree
and since I have practiced thinking, I avoid hitting it. I try and
have six or seven thoughts a day.

Match Your Shoes to Your Belt

If you don't look good, you don't think good.

Know Things

It's important to be well-rounded -- not purely scientific and
analytical. Explore the arts: poetry, music, decoupage (a visual art
form I've been developing since the first grade). And remember, it's
always better to have a cursory knowledge of a lot of things than to
actually know a lot about any one thing. This is called a liberal
arts education.

Act "Human"

When I go to parties, people often look stunned at how smart I am.
But nobody wants to talk about astrophysics at a dinner party. Hey,
when I want to talk like that, I head to the lab! Instead, I talk
about "human" things they enjoy and understand: midrange wines,
movie trivia, and mundane subjects like family and emotional
fulfillment. I like to end my conversations with a quote, usually
something in French, like "c'est la vie," which means "down the
hatch!" But don't overdo it: Nobody likes a show-off.

Retain Your Childlike Sense of Wonder

Children are very smart, in their own stupid way. A child's brain is
like a sponge, and you know how smart sponges are. My children are
like little processors. They pick up all kinds of things, then
process that into information. And what is knowledge, really, but
processed information? We must always strive to be overly processed,
like our children.

+++++++++++++++

Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm

The winter sun sets in mid-afternoon in Kolobrzeg, Poland, but the
early twilight does not deter people from taking their regular
outdoor promenade. Bundled up in parkas with fur-trimmed hoods,
strolling hand in mittened hand along the edge of the Baltic Sea,
off-season tourists from Germany stop openmouthed when they see a
tall, well-built, nearly naked man running up and down the sand.

"Kalt? Kalt?" one of them calls out. The man gives a polite but
vague answer, then turns and dives into the waves. After swimming
back and forth in the 40-degree water for a few minutes, he emerges
from the surf and jogs briefly along the shore. The wind is strong,
but the man makes no move to get dressed. Passersby continue to
comment and stare. "This is one of the reasons I prefer anonymity,"
he tells me in English. "You do something even slightly out of the
ordinary and it causes a sensation."

Piotr Wozniak's quest for anonymity has been successful. Nobody
along this string of little beach resorts recognizes him as the
inventor of a technique to turn people into geniuses. A portion of
this technique, embodied in a software program called SuperMemo, has
enthusiastic users around the world. They apply it mainly to
learning languages, and it's popular among people for whom fluency
is a necessity -- students from Poland or other poor countries
aiming to score well enough on English-language exams to study
abroad. A substantial number of them do not pay for it, and pirated
copies are ubiquitous on software bulletin boards in China, where it
competes with knockoffs like SugarMemo.

SuperMemo is based on the insight that there is an ideal moment to
practice what you've learned. Practice too soon and you waste your
time. Practice too late and you've forgotten the material and have
to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment
you're about to forget. Unfortunately, this moment is different for
every person and each bit of information. Imagine a pile of
thousands of flash cards. Somewhere in this pile are the ones you
should be practicing right now. Which are they?

Fortunately, human forgetting follows a pattern. We forget
exponentially. A graph of our likelihood of getting the correct
answer on a quiz sweeps quickly downward over time and then levels
off. This pattern has long been known to cognitive psychology, but
it has been difficult to put to practical use. It's too complex for
us to employ with our naked brains.

Twenty years ago, Wozniak realized that computers could easily
calculate the moment of forgetting if he could discover the right
algorithm. SuperMemo is the result of his research. It predicts the
future state of a person's memory and schedules information reviews
at the optimal time. The effect is striking. Users can seal huge
quantities of vocabulary into their brains. But for Wozniak, 46,
helping people learn a foreign language fast is just the tiniest
part of his goal. As we plan the days, weeks, even years of our
lives, he would have us rely not merely on our traditional sources
of self-knowledge -- introspection, intuition, and conscious thought
-- but also on something new: predictions about ourselves encoded in
machines.

Given the chance to observe our behaviors, computers can run
simulations, modeling different versions of our path through the
world. By tuning these models for top performance, computers will
give us rules to live by. They will be able to tell us when to wake,
sleep, learn, and exercise; they will cue us to remember what we've
read, help us track whom we've met, and remind us of our goals.
Computers, in Wozniak's scheme, will increase our intellectual
capacity and enhance our rational self-control.

The reason the inventor of SuperMemo pursues extreme anonymity,
asking me to conceal his exact location and shunning even casual
recognition by users of his software, is not because he's paranoid
or a misanthrope but because he wants to avoid random interruptions
to a long-running experiment he's conducting on himself. Wozniak is
a kind of algorithmic man. He's exploring what it's like to live in
strict obedience to reason. On first encounter, he appears to be one
of the happiest people I've ever met.

In the late 1800s, a German scientist named Hermann Ebbinghaus made
up lists of nonsense syllables and measured how long it took to
forget and then relearn them. (Here is an example of the type of
list he used: bes dek fel gup huf jeik mek meun pon daus dor gim
ke4k be4p bCn hes.) In experiments of breathtaking rigor and tedium,
Ebbinghaus practiced and recited from memory 2.5 nonsense syllables
a second, then rested for a bit and started again. Maintaining a
pace of rote mental athleticism that all students of foreign verb
conjugation will regard with awe, Ebbinghaus trained this way for
more than a year. Then, to show that the results he was getting
weren't an accident, he repeated the entire set of experiments three
years later. Finally, in 1885, he published a monograph called
Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology. The book became
the founding classic of a new discipline.

Ebbinghaus discovered many lawlike regularities of mental life. He
was the first to draw a learning curve. Among his original
observations was an account of a strange phenomenon that would drive
his successors half batty for the next century: the spacing effect.

Ebbinghaus showed that it's possible to dramatically improve
learning by correctly spacing practice sessions. On one level, this
finding is trivial; all students have been warned not to cram. But
the efficiencies created by precise spacing are so large, and the
improvement in performance so predictable, that from nearly the
moment Ebbinghaus described the spacing effect, psychologists have
been urging educators to use it to accelerate human progress. After
all, there is a tremendous amount of material we might want to know.
Time is short.

How Supermemo Works

SuperMemo is a program that keeps track of discrete bits of
information you've learned and want to retain. For example, say
you're studying Spanish. Your chance of recalling a given word when
you need it declines over time according to a predictable pattern.
SuperMemo tracks this so-called forgetting curve and reminds you to
rehearse your knowledge when your chance of recalling it has dropped
to, say, 90 percent. When you first learn a new vocabulary word,
your chance of recalling it will drop quickly. But after SuperMemo
reminds you of the word, the rate of forgetting levels out. The
program tracks this new decline and waits longer to quiz you the
next time.

[graphic omitted]

However, this technique never caught on. The spacing effect is "one
of the most remarkable phenomena to emerge from laboratory research
on learning," the psychologist Frank Dempster wrote in 1988, at the
beginning of a typically sad encomium published in American
Psychologist under the title "The Spacing Effect: A Case Study in
the Failure to Apply the Results of Psychological Research." The
sorrrowful tone is not hard to understand. How would computer
scientists feel if people continued to use slide rules for
engineering calculations? What if, centuries after the invention of
spectacles, people still dealt with nearsightedness by holding
things closer to their eyes? Psychologists who studied the spacing
effect thought they possessed a solution to a problem that had
frustrated humankind since before written language: how to remember
what's been learned. But instead, the spacing effect became a
reminder of the impotence of laboratory psychology.

As a student at the Poznan University of Technology in western
Poland in the 1980s, Wozniak was overwhelmed by the sheer number of
things he was expected to learn. But that wasn't his most troubling
problem. He wasn't just trying to pass his exams; he was trying to
learn. He couldn't help noticing that within a few months of
completing a class, only a fraction of the knowledge he had so
painfully acquired remained in his mind. Wozniak knew nothing of the
spacing effect, but he knew that the methods at hand didn't work.

The most important challenge was English. Wozniak refused to be
satisfied with the broken, half-learned English that so many
otherwise smart students were stuck with. So he created an analog
database, with each entry consisting of a question and answer on a
piece of paper. Every time he reviewed a word, phrase, or fact, he
meticulously noted the date and marked whether he had forgotten it.
At the end of the session, he tallied the number of remembered and
forgotten items. By 1984, a century after Ebbinghaus finished his
second series of experiments on nonsense syllables, Wozniak's
database contained 3,000 English words and phrases and 1,400 facts
culled from biology, each with a complete repetition history. He was
now prepared to ask himself an important question: How long would it
take him to master the things he wanted to know?

The answer: too long. In fact, the answer was worse than too long.
According to Wozniak's first calculations, success was impossible.
The problem wasn't learning the material; it was retaining it. He
found that 40 percent of his English vocabulary vanished over time.
Sixty percent of his biology answers evaporated. Using some simple
calculations, he figured out that with his normal method of study,
it would require two hours of practice every day to learn and retain
a modest English vocabulary of 15,000 words. For 30,000 words,
Wozniak would need twice that time. This was impractical.

Wozniak's discouraging numbers were roughly consistent with the
results that Ebbinghaus had recorded in his own experiments and that
have been confirmed by other psychologists in the decades since. If
students nonetheless manage to become expert in a few of the things
they study, it's not because they retain the material from their
lessons but because they specialize in a relatively narrow subfield
where intense practice keeps their memory fresh. When it comes to
language, the received wisdom is that immersion -- usually amounting
to actual immigration -- is necessary to achieve fluency. On one
hand, this is helpful advice. On the other hand, it's an awful
commentary on the value of countless classroom hours. Learning
things is easy. But remembering them -- this is where a certain
hopelessness sets in.

As Wozniak later wrote in describing the failure of his early
learning system: "The process of increasing the size of my databases
gradually progressed at the cost of knowledge retention." In other
words, as his list grew, so did his forgetting. He was climbing a
mountain of loose gravel and making less and less progress at each
step.

Photo: Patrick Voigt

The problem of forgetting might not torment us so much if we could
only convince ourselves that remembering isn't important. Perhaps
the things we learn -- words, dates, formulas, historical and
biographical details -- don't really matter. Facts can be looked up.
That's what the Internet is for. When it comes to learning, what
really matters is how things fit together. We master the stories,
the schemas, the frameworks, the paradigms; we rehearse the lingo;
we swim in the episteme.

The disadvantage of this comforting notion is that it's false. "The
people who criticize memorization -- how happy would they be to
spell out every letter of every word they read?" asks Robert Bjork,
chair of UCLA's psychology department and one of the most eminent
memory researchers. After all, Bjork notes, children learn to read
whole words through intense practice, and every time we enter a new
field we become children again. "You can't escape memorization," he
says. "There is an initial process of learning the names of things.
That's a stage we all go through. It's all the more important to go
through it rapidly." The human brain is a marvel of associative
processing, but in order to make associations, data must be loaded
into memory.

Once we drop the excuse that memorization is pointless, we're left
with an interesting mystery. Much of the information does remain in
our memory, though we cannot recall it. "To this day," Bjork says,
"most people think about forgetting as decay, that memories are like
footprints in the sand that gradually fade away. But that has been
disproved by a lot of research. The memory appears to be gone
because you can't recall it, but we can prove that it's still there.
For instance, you can still recognize a 'forgotten' item in a group.
Yes, without continued use, things become inaccessible. But they are
not gone."

After an ichthyologist named David Starr Jordan became the first
president of Stanford University in the 1890s, he bequeathed to
memory researchers one of their favorite truisms: Every time he
learned the name of a student, Jordan is said to have complained, he
forgot the name of a fish. But the fish to which Jordan had devoted
his research life were still there, somewhere beneath the surface of
consciousness. The difficulty was in catching them.

During the years that Wozniak struggled to master English, Bjork and
his collaborator, Elizabeth Bjork (she is also a professor of
psychology; the two have been married since 1969), were at work on a
new theory of forgetting. Both were steeped in the history of
laboratory research on memory, and one of their goals was to get to
the bottom of the spacing effect. They were also curious about the
paradoxical tendency of older memories to become stronger with the
passage of time, while more recent memories faded. Their explanation
involved an elegant model with deeply counterintuitive implications.

Long-term memory, the Bjorks said, can be characterized by two
components, which they named retrieval strength and storage
strength. Retrieval strength measures how likely you are to recall
something right now, how close it is to the surface of your mind.
Storage strength measures how deeply the memory is rooted. Some
memories may have high storage strength but low retrieval strength.
Take an old address or phone number. Try to think of it; you may
feel that it's gone. But a single reminder could be enough to
restore it for months or years. Conversely, some memories have high
retrieval strength but low storage strength. Perhaps you've recently
been told the names of the children of a new acquaintance. At this
moment they may be easily accessible, but they are likely to be
utterly forgotten in a few days, and a single repetition a month
from now won't do much to strengthen them at all.

The Bjorks were not the first psychologists to make this
distinction, but they and a series of collaborators used a broad
range of experimental data to show how these laws of memory wreak
havoc on students and teachers. One of the problems is that the
amount of storage strength you gain from practice is inversely
correlated with the current retrieval strength. In other words, the
harder you have to work to get the right answer, the more the answer
is sealed in memory. Precisely those things that seem to signal
we're learning well -- easy performance on drills, fluency during a
lesson, even the subjective feeling that we know something -- are
misleading when it comes to predicting whether we will remember it
in the future. "The most motivated and innovative teachers, to the
extent they take current performance as their guide, are going to do
the wrong things," Robert Bjork says. "It's almost sinister."

The most popular learning systems sold today -- for instance,
foreign language software like Rosetta Stone -- cheerfully defy
every one of the psychologists' warnings. With its constant feedback
and easily accessible clues, Rosetta Stone brilliantly creates a
sensation of progress. "Go to Amazon and look at the reviews," says
Greg Keim, Rosetta Stone's CTO, when I ask him what evidence he has
that people are really remembering what they learn. "That is as
objective as you can get in terms of a user's sense of achievement."
The sole problem here, from the psychologists' perspective, is that
the user's sense of achievement is exactly what we should most
distrust.

The battle between lab-tested techniques and conventional pedagogy
went on for decades, and it's fair to say that the psychologists
lost. All those studies of human memory in the lab -- using nonsense
syllables, random numbers, pictures, maps, foreign vocabulary,
scattered dots -- had so little influence on actual practice that
eventually their irrelevance provoked a revolt. In the late '70s,
Ulric Neisser, the pioneering researcher who coined the term
cognitive psychology, launched a broad attack on the approach of
Ebbinghaus and his scientific kin.

"We have established firm empirical generalizations, but most of
them are so obvious that every 10-year-old knows them anyway,"
Neisser complained. "We have an intellectually impressive group of
theories, but history offers little confidence that they will
provide any meaningful insight into natural behavior." Neisser
encouraged psychologists to leave their labs and study memory in its
natural environment, in the style of ecologists. He didn't doubt
that the laboratory theories were correct in their limited way, but
he wanted results that had power to change the world.

Many psychologists followed Neisser. But others stuck to their
laboratory methods. The spacing effect was one of the proudest
lab-derived discoveries, and it was interesting precisely because it
was not obvious, even to professional teachers. The same year that
Neisser revolted, Robert Bjork, working with Thomas Landauer of Bell
Labs, published the results of two experiments involving nearly 700
undergraduate students. Landauer and Bjork were looking for the
optimal moment to rehearse something so that it would later be
remembered. Their results were impressive: The best time to study
something is at the moment you are about to forget it. And yet -- as
Neisser might have predicted -- that insight was useless in the real
world. Determining the precise moment of forgetting is essentially
impossible in day-to-day life.

Obviously, computers were the answer, and the idea of using them was
occasionally suggested, starting in the 1960s. But except for
experimental software, nothing was built. The psychologists were
interested mainly in theories and models. The teachers were
interested in immediate signs of success. The students were cramming
to pass their exams. The payoff for genuine progress was somehow too
abstract, too delayed, to feed back into the system in a useful way.
What was needed was not an academic psychologist but a tinkerer,
somebody with a lot of time on his hands, a talent for mathematics,
and a strangely literal temperament that made him think he should
actually recall the things he learned.

The day I first meet Wozniak, we go for a 7-mile walk down a windy
beach. I'm in my business clothes and half comatose from jet lag;
he's wearing a track suit and comes toward me with a gait so buoyant
he seems about to take to the air. He asks me to walk on the side
away from the water. "People say that when I get excited I tend to
drift in their direction, so it is better that I stand closer to the
sea so I don't push you in," he says.

Wozniak takes an almost physical pleasure in reason. He loves to
discuss things with people, to get insight into their personalities,
and to give them advice -- especially in English. One of his most
heartfelt wishes is that the world have one language and one
currency so this could all be handled more efficiently. He's
appalled that Poland is still not in the Eurozone. He's baffled that
Americans do not use the metric system. For two years he kept a
diary in Esperanto.

Although Esperanto was the ideal expression of his universalist
dreams, English is the leading real-world implementation. Though he
has never set foot in an English-speaking country, he speaks the
language fluently. "Two words that used to give me trouble are
perspicuous and perspicacious," he confessed as we drank beer with
raspberry syrup at a tiny beachside restaurant where we were the
only customers. "Then I found a mnemonic to enter in SuperMemo:
clear/clever. Now I never misuse them."

Wozniak's command of English is the result of a series of heroic
experiments, in the tradition of Ebbinghaus. They involved
relentless sessions of careful self-analysis, tracked over years. He
began with the basic conundrum of too much to study in too little
time. His first solution was based on folk wisdom. "It is a common
intuition," Wozniak later wrote, "that with successive repetitions,
knowledge should gradually become more durable and require less
frequent review."

This insight had already been proven by Landauer and Bjork, but
Wozniak was unaware of their theory of forgetting or of any of the
landmark studies in laboratory research on memory. This ignorance
was probably a blessing, because it forced him to rely on pragmatic
engineering. In 1985, he divided his database into three equal sets
and created schedules for studying each of them. One of the sets he
studied every five days, another every 18 days, and the third at
expanding intervals, increasing the period between study sessions
each time he got the answers right.

This experiment proved that Wozniak's first hunch was too simple. On
none of the tests did his recall show significant improvement over
the naive methods of study he normally used. But he was not
discouraged and continued making ever more elaborate investigations
of study intervals, changing the second interval to two days, then
four days, then six days, and so on. Then he changed the third
interval, then the fourth, and continued to test and measure,
measure and test, for nearly a decade. His conviction that
forgetting could be tamed by following rules gave him the
intellectual fortitude to continue searching for those rules. He
doggedly traced a matrix of paths, like a man pacing off steps in a
forest where he is lost.

All of his early work was done on paper. In the computer science
department at the Poznan University of Technology, "we had a single
mainframe of Polish-Russian design, with punch cards," Wozniak
recalls. "If you could stand in line long enough to get your cards
punched, you could wait a couple of days more for the machine to run
your cards, and then at last you got a printout, which was your
output."

The personal computer revolution was already pretty far along in the
US by the time Wozniak managed to get his hands on an Amstrad PC
1512, imported through quasi-legal means from Hamburg, Germany. With
this he was able to make another major advance in SuperMemo --
computing the difficulty of any fact or study item and adjusting the
unique shape of the predicted forgetting curve for every item and
user. A friend of Wozniak's adapted his software to run on Atari
machines, and as access to personal computers finally spread among
students, so did SuperMemo.

After the collapse of Polish communism, Wozniak and some fellow
students formed a company, SuperMemo World. By 1995, their program
was one of the most successful applications developed by the
country's fledgling software industry, and they were searching for
funding that would allow them to relocate to Silicon Valley. That
year, at Comdex in Las Vegas, 200,000 people got a look at Sony's
new DVD technology, prototypes of flatscreens, and Wozniak's
SuperMemo, which became the first Polish product shown at the great
geek carnival, then at the height of its influence. In Europe, the
old communist experiment in human optimization had run its course.
Wozniak believed that in a world of open competition, where
individuals are rewarded on merit, a scientific tool that
accelerated learning would find customers everywhere.

Wozniak's chief partner in the campaign to reprogram the world's
approach to learning through SuperMemo was Krzysztof Biedalak, who
had been his classmate at the University of Technology. The two men
used to run 6 miles to a nearby lake for an icy swim. Biedalak
agrees with Wozniak that winter swimming is good for mental health.
Biedalak also agrees with Wozniak that SuperMemo produces extreme
learning. But Biedalak does not agree with Wozniak about everything.
"I don't apply his whole technique," he says. "In my context, his
technique is inapplicable."

What Biedalak means by Wozniak's technique is the extension of
algorithmic optimization to all dimensions of life. Biedalak is CEO
of SuperMemo World, which sells and licenses Wozniak's invention.
Today, SuperMemo World employs just 25 people. The venture capital
never came through, and the company never moved to California. About
50,000 copies of SuperMemo were sold in 2006, most for less than
$30. Many more are thought to have been pirated.

Biedalak and I meet and talk in a restaurant in downtown Warsaw
where the shelves are covered in gingham and the walls are lined
with jars of pickled vegetables. He has an intelligent, somewhat
hangdog expression, like a young Walter Matthau, and his tone is as
measured as Wozniak's is impulsive. Until I let the information
slip, he doesn't even know the exact location of his partner and
friend.

"Piotr would never go out to promote the product, wouldn't talk to
journalists, very rarely agreed to meet with somebody," Biedalak
says. "He was the driving force, but at some point I had to accept
that you cannot communicate with him in the way you can with other
people."

The problem wasn't shyness but the same intolerance for inefficient
expenditure of mental resources that led to the invention of
SuperMemo in the first place. By the mid-'90s, with SuperMemo
growing more and more popular, Wozniak felt that his ability to
rationally control his life was slipping away. "There were 80 phone
calls per day to handle. There was no time for learning, no time for
programming, no time for sleep," he recalls. In 1994, he disappeared
for two weeks, leaving no information about where he was. The next
year he was gone for 100 days. Each year, he has increased his time
away. He doesn't own a phone. He ignores his email for months at a
time. And though he holds a PhD and has published in academic
journals, he never attends conferences or scientific meetings.

Instead, Wozniak has ridden SuperMemo into uncharted regions of
self-experimentation. In 1999, he started making a detailed record
of his hours of sleep, and now he's working to correlate that data
with his daily performance on study repetitions. Psychologists have
long believed there's a correlation between sleep and memory, but no
mathematical law has been discovered. Wozniak has also invented a
way to apply his learning system to his intake of unstructured
information from books and articles, winnowing written material down
to the type of discrete chunks that can be memorized, and then
scheduling them for efficient learning. He selects a short section
of what he's reading and copies it into the SuperMemo application,
which predicts when he'll want to read it again so it sticks in his
mind. He cuts and pastes completely unread material into the system,
assigning it a priority. SuperMemo shuffles all his potential
knowledge into a queue and presents it to him on a study screen when
the time is right. Wozniak can look at a graph of what he's got
lined up to learn and adjust the priority rankings if his goals
change.

These techniques are designed to overcome steep learning curves
through automated steps, like stairs on a hill. He calls it
incremental reading, and it has come to dominate his intellectual
life. Wozniak no longer wastes time worrying that he hasn't gotten
to some article he wants to read; once it's loaded into the system,
he trusts his algorithm to apportion it to his consciousness at the
appropriate time.

The appropriate time, that is, for him. Having turned over his
mental life to a computerized system, he refuses to be pushed around
by random inputs and requests. Naturally, this can be annoying to
people whose messages tend to sift to the bottom. "After four
months," Biedalak says sadly, "you sometimes get a reply to some
sentence in an email that has been scrambled in his incremental
reading process."

For Wozniak, these misfires were less a product of scrambling than
of an inevitable clash of goals. A person who understands the exact
relationship between learning and time is forced to measure out his
hours with a certain care. SuperMemo was like a genie that granted
Wozniak a wish: unprecedented power to remember. But the value of
what he remembered depended crucially on what he studied, and what
he studied depended on his goals, and the selection of his goals
rested upon the efficient acquisition of knowledge, in a regressive
function that propelled him relentlessly along the path he had
chosen. The guarantee that he would not forget what he learned was
both a gift and a demand, requiring him to sacrifice every
extraneous thing.

From the business side of SuperMemo, Wozniak's priorities can
sometimes look selfish. Janusz Murakowski, one of Wozniak's friends
who worked as a manager at the company during its infancy, thinks
that Wozniak's focus on his own learning has stunted the development
of his invention. "Piotr writes this software for himself," says
Murakowski, now a professor of electrical engineering at the
University of Delaware. "The interface is just impossible." This is
perhaps a bit unfair. SuperMemo comes in eight flavors, some of
which were coded by licensees: SuperMemo for Windows, for Palm
devices, for several cell phones, even an Internet version. It's
true that Wozniak is no Steve Jobs, and his software has none of the
viral friendliness of a casual game like Brain Age for Nintendo DS.
Still, it can hardly be described as the world's most difficult
program. After all, photographers can learn to produce the most
arcane effects in Photoshop. Why shouldn't more people be able to
master SuperMemo?

"It was never a feel-good product," Murakowski says, and here he may
be getting closer to the true conflict that lies at the heart of the
struggle to optimize intelligence, a conflict that transcends design
and touches on some curious facts about human nature. We are used to
the idea that normal humans can perform challenging feats of
athleticism. We all know someone who has run a marathon or ridden a
bike cross-country. But getting significantly smarter -- that seems
to be different. We associate intelligence with pure talent, and
academic learning with educational experiences dating far back in
life. To master a difficult language, to become expert in a
technical field, to make a scientific contribution in a new area --
these seem like rare things. And so they are, but perhaps not for
the reason we assume.

The failure of SuperMemo to transform learning uncannily repeats the
earlier failures of cognitive psychology to influence teachers and
students. Our capacity to learn is amazingly large. But optimal
learning demands a kind of rational control over ourselves that does
not come easily. Even the basic demand for regularity can be
daunting. If you skip a few days, the spacing effect, with its
steady march of sealing knowledge in memory, begins to lose its
force. Progress limps. When it comes to increasing intelligence, our
brain is up to the task and our technology is up to the task. The
problem lies in our temperament.

The Baltic Sea is dark as an unlit mirror. Wozniak and I walk along
the shore, passing the wooden snack stands that won't be open until
spring, and he tells me how he manages his life. He's married, and
his wife shares his lifestyle. They swim together in winter, and
though Polish is their native language, they communicate in English,
which she learned with SuperMemo. Wozniak's days are blocked into
distinct periods: a creative period, a reading and studying period,
an exercise period, an eating period, a resting period, and then a
second creative period. He doesn't get up at a regular hour and is
passionate against alarm clocks. If excitement over his research
leads him to work into the night, he simply shifts to sleeping in
the day. When he sits down for a session of incremental reading, he
attends to whatever automatically appears on his computer screen,
stopping the instant his mind begins to drift or his comprehension
falls too low and then moving on to the next item in the queue.
SuperMemo graphs a distribution of priorities that he can adjust as
he goes. When he encounters a passage that he thinks he'll need to
remember, he marks it; then it goes into a pattern of spaced
repetition, and the information it contains will stay in his brain
indefinitely.

"Once you get the snippets you need," Wozniak says, "your books
disappear. They gradually evaporate. They have been translated into
knowledge."

As a science fiction fan, I had always assumed that when computers
supplemented our intelligence, it would be because we outsourced
some of our memory to them. We would ask questions, and our machines
would give oracular -- or supremely practical -- replies. Wozniak
has discovered a different route. When he entrusts his mental life
to a machine, it is not to throw off the burden of thought but to
make his mind more swift. Extreme knowledge is not something for
which he programs a computer but for which his computer is
programming him.

I've already told Wozniak that I am not optimistic about my ability
to tame old reading habits in the name of optimized knowledge.
Books, for me, are not merely sources of information I might want to
load into memory but also subjective companions, almost substitute
people, and I don't see why I would want to hold on to them in
fragments. Still, I tell him I would like to give it a shot.

"So you believe in trying things for yourself?" he asks.

"Yes."

This provides his opening. "In that case, let's go swimming."

At the edge of the sea, I become afraid. I'm a strong swimmer, but
there's something about standing on the beach in the type of
minuscule bathing suit you get at the gift shop of a discount resort
in Eastern Europe, and watching people stride past in their down
parkas, that smacks of danger.

"I'm already happy with anticipation," Wozniak says.

"Will I have a heart attack?"

"There is less risk than on your drive here," he answers.

I realize he must be correct. Poland has few freeways, and in the
rural north, lines of cars jockey behind communist-era farm
machinery until they defy the odds and try to pass. There are
spectacular wrecks. Wozniak gives close attention to the qualitative
estimate of fatal risks. By graphing the acquisition of knowledge in
SuperMemo, he has realized that in a single lifetime one can acquire
only a few million new items. This is the absolute limit on
intellectual achievement defined by death. So he guards his health.
He rarely gets in a car. The Germans on the beach are staring at me.
I dive in.

Philosopher William James once wrote that mental life is controlled
by noticing. Climbing out of the sea and onto the windy beach, my
skin purple and my mind in a reverie provoked by shock, I find
myself thinking of a checklist Wozniak wrote a few years ago
describing how to become a genius. His advice was straightforward
yet strangely terrible: You must clarify your goals, gain knowledge
through spaced repetition, preserve health, work steadily, minimize
stress, refuse interruption, and never resist sleep when tired. This
should lead to radically improved intelligence and creativity. The
only cost: turning your back on every convention of social life. It
is a severe prescription. And yet now, as I grin broadly and wave to
the gawkers, it occurs to me that the cold rationality of his
approach may be only a surface feature and that, when linked to
genuine rewards, even the chilliest of systems can have a certain
visceral appeal. By projecting the achievement of extreme memory
back along the forgetting curve, by provably linking the distant
future -- when we will know so much -- to the few minutes we devote
to studying today, Wozniak has found a way to condition his
temperament along with his memory. He is making the future
noticeable. He is trying not just to learn many things but to warm
the process of learning itself with a draft of utopian ecstasy.

Contributing editor Gary Wolf (gary at aether.com) wrote about futurist
Ray Kurzweil in issue 16.04.

+++++++++++++++++

Max Your Mind's Performance by Distracting Yourself

Desperate to memorize a crucial fact? Look over there! (Kidding.)
The trick is to distract yourself by studying stuff that's slightly
different from whatever you're trying to learn. Your brain will then
work harder to permanently store the original information. It's a
tricky concept, but here's an example: In 2007, researchers asked
UCLA students to try to memorize a set of 48 word pairs (country:
Russia, fruit: lemon, flower: lily, etc.). After studying the list,
some students then had to sit through a slide show and view closely
related material (flower: rose). Guess what? The distracted students
performed better on subsequent recall tests. "Distraction forces you
to engage in processing," says Benjamin Storm, a UCLA researcher who
oversaw the study. Hey, up in the sky -- is that a blimp?

++++++++++++++++

6 Intelligence Myths Exposed

Playing Brain Age

Anyone who has ever begged their parents for a videogame system
knows the standard lines of appeal ("You don't want me to have
inferior hand-eye coordination, do you?"). Now kids can argue that
some games may make them smarter. That's the promise of Nintendo's
Brain Age, which claims to "help train your memory and keep your
mind sharp" through reading exercises, math puzzles, and other
mental gymnastics. After diligent effort, players routinely see
their "brain age" plummet from, say, a sluggish 60 to a taut 30.

But the improved performance may not be a sign of wit-sharpening.
Many users start with little gaming experience, so it's not
surprising that their scores improve -- a phenomenon known as the
practice effect. Sadly, there's no evidence that in-game gains
translate to the real world. -- Greta Lorge

Doing Crosswords

Completing that Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle isn't just a
diverting -- if usually futile -- pastime. It's also a great way to
keep your wits about you as you age. At least that's the common
belief, which holds that a regular schedule of cognitive exercise
can bulk up your brain with new neurons, the same way vigorous
weight lifting can build muscle mass. You can continue to sprout new
neurons well into adulthood, but they will be only as powerful as
the neural networks they're connected to. And it's not clear that
puzzles help forge those connections.

Some studies have reported that mental exercise can slow or reverse
cognitive decline. But aging expert Timothy Salthouse of the
University of Virginia says the evidence is all correlational, not
causal: The respondents who were most drawn to mental exercise or
pursued brain-intensive professions probably had greater cognitive
reserves to begin with. So no, crossword puzzles probably won't fend
off senility. What's a four-letter word for "commonly held but
unproven belief"? Oh, right: myth. -- G.L.

Eating Fish

Herman Melville. Ernest Hemingway. Schröedinger's cat. Some of our
brightest minds had a thing for seafood. That may be no coincidence.
Oily fish are rich in docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), an omega-3 fatty
acid that accounts for 40 percent of the makeup of brain cell
membranes and which could improve neurotransmission. DHA is
necessary for fetal brain development, and a handful of studies have
linked fish-heavy diets with reduced risk of mental decline in old
age.

But before you take the bait, consider: Those studies trusted
subjects to remember and report their dietary habits -- a fishy
procedure. A test of mice found that an omega-3-rich diet had no
impact on cognitive function. And cold-water fish that are high in
omega-3s are also likely to have elevated levels of methylmercury
and PCBs, both known neurotoxins. It would be great if fish really
were brain food. Unfortunately, we've got to throw this one back. --G.L.

Chewing Gum

School principals may scoff, but the notion that gum enhances
alertness dates to World War I, when sticks were slipped into
soldiers' rations. The rationale: Chewing increases blood flow to
the motor cortex and can trick the brain into expecting a meal. This
triggers an increase in insulin production that could boost cerebral
glucose levels -- and thus smarts. Too bad a 2004 study found gum
chewers to be less attentive than a control group. Looks like Mrs.
Snodgrass was right after all. -- G.L.

Listening to Music

Music can certainly expand your mind; if you don't believe us, play
Dark Side of the Moon while watching The Wizard of Oz. But can it
amp up your brain power? That's the claim of companies like iMusic
and the Monroe Institute, which market CDs and MP3s that promise to
increase focus and improve memory. This ain't Baby Bach: The
recordings pump a different frequency into each ear, and these
"binaural" tones mix in the brain to produce a pulse that supposedly
shifts the firing pattern of neurons, altering brain waves and, the
thinking goes, reverse-engineering the mental state that accompanies
them.

A compelling idea, but it's less likely to produce serious thought
than a Fergie concert. In a recent study at Oregon Health and
Science University, subjects exposed to a binaural pulse in the 3-
to 8-Hz theta band (which is linked to working memory) showed no
change in brain wave activity as measured by EEG. What's more, they
actually became depressed and forgetful. If you wanted that, you'd
just listen to Celine Dion. -- G.L.

Taking Supplements

The supplements industry claims its products can boost your
intelligence. Intelligent enough to check out the scientific basis
for those claims? Pill purveyors better hope not. Here's how a few
remedies rate on our snake oil scale. -- Mathew Honan

B Vitamins
Summary Useful for staving off Alzheimer's, but don't expect it to
help you solve that sudoku.
Snake Oil Rating [circles5.gif]

Ginkgo Biloba
Summary It may come in handy during your sunset years, but until the
dementia sets in, this won't help.
Snake Oil Rating [circles10.gif]

Ginseng
Summary Might regulate glucose, which may improve cognition, but
that's a whole lot of maybe.
Snake Oil Rating [circles7.gif]

Gotu Kola
Summary It reduces anxiety in rats, but for humans the only provably
"smart" thing is the marketing.
Snake Oil Rating [circles8.gif]

Huperzine A
Summary One study showed memory improvement in healthy adults, but
more solid evidence would be nice.
Snake Oil Rating [circles3.gif]

++++++++++++++

HACK YOUR MIND

1. Max Your Mind's Performance by Distracting Yourself

Desperate to memorize a crucial fact? Look over there! (Kidding.)
The trick is to distract yourself by studying stuff that's slightly
different from whatever you're trying to learn. Your brain will then
work harder to permanently store the original information. It's a
tricky concept, but here's an example: In 2007, researchers asked
UCLA students to try to memorize a set of 48 word pairs (country:
Russia, fruit: lemon, flower: lily, etc.). After studying the list,
some students then had to sit through a slide show and view closely
related material (flower: rose). Guess what? The distracted students
performed better on subsequent recall tests. "Distraction forces you
to engage in processing," says Benjamin Storm, a UCLA researcher who
oversaw the study. Hey, up in the sky -- is that a blimp?

2. Caffeinate With Care: Small Shots Do a Brain Better Than Big Blasts

Coffee, yerba maté, Red Bull -- there's a caffeinated beverage for
every demographic. And no wonder: Caffeine jump-starts the body and
sharpens the mind. But studies suggest that we Yanks are doing it
wrong. For optimal brain gain, regular tea breaks, as favored in the
UK, are more effective than a 20-ounce French roast sucked down at
Starbucks in lieu of breakfast.

Throughout the day, your noodle fills up with adenosine, a chemical
thought to cause mental fatigue. Caffeine blocks the brain's
adenosine receptors, countering the chemical's dulling effects. To
maximize alertness and minimize jitters, keep those receptors
covered with frequent small doses -- like a mug of low-caf tea or
half a cup of joe -- rather than a onetime blast. Test subjects
reported that periodic small shots made them feel clearheaded and
calm, both of which enhance mental performance. Even better, add a
lump of sugar or have a carbohydrate-rich snack at the same time for
an extra cognitive kick. It seems that glucose and caffeine together
do more to enhance cognition than either does alone. Biscotti,
anyone?

3. Feed Your Mind With Impressive Information
http://www.wired.com/special_multimedia/2008/gs_03feedyourmind
[Click the URL.]

Using the right techniques, you too can learn and memorize vast
amounts of knowledge. But some things are more impressive (and
easier) to learn than others. So where should you start? Try the top
right quadrant.
IFRAME: /wired/archive/16.05/knowledge_matrix.html
Flash Design: officevsoffice

4. Think Positive, and You Will Get Smarter

Learning new things actually strengthens your brain -- especially
when you believe you can learn new things. It's a virtuous circle:
When you think you're getting smarter, you study harder, making more
nerve-cell connections, which in turn makes you ... smarter. This
effect shows up consistently among experimental subjects, from
seventh graders to college students to businesspeople. According to
studies carried out by Stanford University psychology professor
Carol Dweck and others, volunteers with a so-called growth mindset
about learning ("persist in the face of setbacks") have more brain
plasticity. In other words, their noggins are more adaptable. They
exhibit increases in cognitive performance compared with those who
have a so-called fixed mindset ("get defensive or give up easily").
"Many people believe they have a fixed level of intelligence, and
that's that," Dweck says. "The cure is to change the mindset."
Certain that we're wrong? Enjoy stupidity!

5. Give Your Intellect a Boost -- Just Say Yes to Doing the Right Drugs!
http://www.wired.com/print/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/gs_05drugs
Best to click the URL to get information about
How to get it
Order online
Buy from manufacturer
Tap black market
Fake illness
Hit drugstore.]

Brains + drugs = fried eggs, right? Not always. Some pills can boost
your cognitive output. But we at Wired aren't doctors. Anyone who
takes a bushel of drugs based on our say-so must be high.

KEY
What it does
Possible side effects

Adderall
Thought to optimize levels of dopamine and norepinephrine,
enhancing concentration and turning mundane tasks into wondrous
ones. Often prescribed to ADHD patients (wink, wink).

Addiction, headaches, insomnia, Tourette's-like symptoms, heart
attack

Aniracetam
Seems to boost release of glutamate, speeding
neurotransmission and improving memory. Not a ton of evidence,
though.

Anxiety, agitation, insomnia, dizziness, epigastric heaviness
(feeling full)

Aricept
An Alzheimer's drug that may also enhance memory in healthy
adults. Thought to reduce the breakdown of acetylcholine, a
neurotransmitter that helps relay messages around the brain.

Nausea, diarrhea, fainting

Methamphetamine
Triggers the release of dopamine. Can increase
concentration and creative output. Prolonged use can also make you
stupid and crazy.

Parkinson's-like symptoms, addiction, stroke, psychosis, prison,
death

Modafinil
A narcolepsy medication that improves focus, pattern
recognition, and short-term memory. The exact mechanism of action is
unclear. Good for card counters.

Chest pain, nausea, headache, life-threatening rash

Nicotine
Chemically similar to the neurotransmitter acetylcholine.
Spurs faster interaction between nerve cells in the brain, aiding
memory formation and attention.

Addiction, cancer, social isolation (depending on delivery mechanism)

Rolipram
Originally used as an antidepressant. May elevate levels of
cyclic adenosine monophosphate to boost memory. Improves cognition
(in rats).
Headache, nausea, intense vomiting

Vasopressin
Produced naturally in the hypothalamus^1 gland and used
in the formation of new memories. Shown to help users learn more
effectively (especially men). Prescribed as a drug for diabetes
insipidus.

Angina, nausea, wheezing, belching, coma

6. How to Juice Your IQ Score
By Steve Knopper Email 04.21.08
http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/gs_06iqtest
[Best to click the URL.]

Want to join Mensa? Or work for the military, FedEx, or the NFL?
Plan on taking an intelligence test. They're supposed to be
objective and consistent, but don't believe it. By prepping for the
verbal, numerical, and spatial problems on a typical psychometric
test, you can boost your score. Philip carter, author of IQ and
Psychometric Test Workbook, walked us through some sample questions.

Question 1
What is the word with the nearest meaning? SCURRILOUS
A wrong B defamatory C urgent D severe D unkind
TIP
Most IQ tests include synonyms, antonyms, and analogies. Focus on
eliminating wrong choices. (Urgent? Probably not.) "You have a
better chance of guessing the right answer out of just two or
three," Carter says.

Question 2
Which is the missing section?
"Don't panic," Carter says. Search for patterns. Reading left to
right, the grid skips one letter, then two, then one. Reading top to
bottom, it skips two, then one, then two.

Question 3
The value of each internal angle of a square is 90°
What is the value of each internal angle in a pentagon?
A 96° B 108° C 112° D 120°
TIP
Break it down. Draw a circle in the center and then five lines from
the center to the corners to create five isosceles triangles. A
circle has 360 degrees, so the angles in the center are all 72
degrees (360 divided by 5). The angles in any triangle add up to
180, so the other two angles are 54 degrees each. Add 54 and 54 to
get 108.

Question 4
What is 966 less 492?
TIP
Ah, basic math. Brush up on your multiplication tables. If possible,
simplify numbers into round, easy-to-work-with figures. For this
question, convert the problem into 966 minus 500, then add 8. Much
faster that way.

Question 5
Which tile is missing?
TIP
On spatial-aptitude tests with tiny pictures of odd shapes, it often
helps to rotate the images in your mind. Here, the top-right
horizontal diamond looks like the bottom-left one spun 180 degrees.
Turn the top-left vertical diamond 180 degrees to get the answer.

Rollover the ??? to reveal the answers.
Question 1 ???, Question 2 ???, Question 3 ???, Question 4 ???,
Question 5 ???

7. Thalamus, Cortex, Amygdala ... Pick Apart the Brain
http://www.wired.com/print/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/gs_07yourbrain

Socrates likened it to a wax tablet. Descartes thought it was all
about hydraulics. Today, it's seen as a supercomputer. Nice try. The
brain is one of the most complex structures on the planet, making it
nearly impossible to comprehend, much less describe with a metaphor.

Rollover the brain scan below to know your brain better...
[gs_07yourbrain1_f.jpg]
Cortex
Thalamus
Hippocampus
Amygdala
Hypothalamus
Cortex
This six-layer shell compiles impulses from throughout the brain and
synthesizes them into higher-level cognition. Different areas--motor
cortex, visual cortex, prefrontal cortex--are engaged during
specific activities.
Thalamus
The sensory data from your entire body is processed here before it's
sent to the cortex.
Hippocampus
The hippocampus seems to serve as a bundler of memories,
reassembling fragments from different brain areas and sending them
to the cortex. What triggers those fragments to come back together
in the first place is anyone's guess.
Amygdala
A deep-rooted structure known as the seat of fear and aggression,
this impulse center controls your decisions when your thinking brain
shuts down. It also links to the hippocampus to give an emotional
spin to your memories.
Hypothalamus
The switching station between electrical impulses and blood-borne
hormones, the hypothalamus relays signals through the pituitary
gland to the adrenal gland, telling it to release adrenaline and
cortisol in response to stress.

8. 8. Don't Panic. It Makes You Stupid.

If you're fleeing a cave bear, it's good to be stressed -- you'll
run faster. If you're stepping onto the set with Alex Trebek, that
same anxiety will put your brain in jeopardy. While a little
nervousness can boost cognitive performance, periods of intense
stress essentially turn us into Neanderthals: The amygdala, known as
the fear center, one of the most primitive brain regions, overrides
the prefrontal cortex, which handles working memory and executive
function. "When those deep brain areas are active, they shanghai
your cortical neurons," says psychiatrist Edward Hallowell, author
of CrazyBusy. "Your IQ plummets. Your creativity, your sense of
humor -- all of that disappears. You're stupid." How to quiet your
inner caveman? By slowing and synchronizing your pulse and
respiration, thus sending a message to your brain that everything is
cool. Yoga or power napping could do the trick. Or try the
StressEraser, a biofeedback device that suggests a target breathing
rate to help you calm down. That should help you nail that Daily
Double.

9.  Embracing Chaos Could Bring Order to Your Memory

One way to learn Better: Mix yourself up. That's advice from Robert
Bjork, chair of UCLA's psychology department and a leading expert in
memory and learning. Volunteers in his experiments exhibited
superior recall when they learned information in randomly ordered
chunks. For example, he asked subjects in one group to memorize
five-letter sequences on a computer keyboard. First they learned one
sequence, then moved on to the second, and then the third. Compare
that to a second group of volunteers, who practiced the five-letter
combos in a random order. When tested, the random group had much
better recall -- something to remember when you sit down to memorize
stolen-base success rates before your next fantasy baseball draft.

10. Take on Any Map by Getting Visual

Want to impress your posse by locating both Guinea and Equatorial
Guinea? Memorizing the map of Africa is easier than you think, says
Daniel Montello, who teaches geography and psychology at UC Santa
Barbara. Here's how.
1. Break It Up
Divide the continent's 47 nations into five regions: north, south,
east, west, central. Focus on one region at a time.
2. Give Them an Identity
Create silly associations for the shapes of the countries. Think
Niger looks like a drumstick? Imagine Niger the Tiger eating the leg
of an antelope. The more unique the association, the easier it is to
remember.
3. Put Them Together
Connect the associations in a memorable sequence--like Niger the
Tiger chasing a guy named Chad (who looks like a Venetian nobleman)
right into a mouse named CAR (Central African Republic). Make the
images detailed and full of action to cement the associations in
your mind.
4. Conquer the World
You've mastered Africa. Now you're ready for a real geographic
challenge: Central Asia from Azerbaijan to Uzbekistan.

11. Up Your Intelligence by Choosing Your Exercise Wisely

Can exercise make you think better? In some cases, yes. Here's what
works best.

Aerobic Training
Don't cut that PE class! In 2006, Arthur Kramer of the University of
Illinois used MRIs to prove that aerobic exercise builds gray and
white matter in the brains of older adults. Later studies found that
more aerobically fit grade-schoolers also perform better on
cognitive tests.
Impact on intelligence: Strong

Lifting Weights
When weight lifters talk about getting huge, they aren't referring
to their hippocampus. Researchers have found only the most tenuous
link between heavy resistance training and improved cognitive
function. Got that, meathead?
Impact on intelligence: Negligible

Yoga
When facing a stressful situation or even a scary email, people
often hold their breath. Yoga can break that habit. Under pressure,
"most people breathe incorrectly," says Frank Lawlis, a fellow of
the American Psychological Association and author of The IQ Answer.
The result: more stress and less oxygen to your brain. "So the first
thing that goes is your memory."
Impact on intelligence: Possibly strong

Studying on the StairMaster
A spinning class may rev up your mental muscle, but that doesn't
mean you should study while huffing and puffing on the StairMaster.
Research shows you'll just confuse yourself. "It's like doing
something while you're driving," says Charles Hillman, a kinesiology
professor at the University of Illinois. In other words, you won't
do either task well.
Impact on intelligence: Negligible

12. Comprehension Climbs When You Slooooow Doooown

It should take you two and a half seconds to read this sentence. Any
faster and you won't absorb its meaning. The motor response of the
retina, and the time it takes the image of a word to travel from the
macula to the thalamus to the visual cortex for processing, limits
the eye to about 500 words a minute. (That's peak efficiency; the
average college student can expect a rate about half that.) "There
is no such thing as speed reading," says Keith Rayner a cognitive
psychologist at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. "Not if
your definition of reading is comprehending text." Studies show that
fast readers fare worse than slower ones when questioned about the
text. So, to get smarter, slow down. It's even OK to move your lips.


ONLINE EXTRAS

Find Your Inner Spock: Jonny Magic's Logic Tips
By Alexis Madrigal

If being smart were gunslinging, where speed matters as much
accuracy, Jon Finkel would be a stone-cold killer.

Finkel is arguably the best Magic: The Gathering player ever, became
a scourge of Vegas, and now runs money-betting on stock market
options. Wired's own David Kushner even immortalized him in a book,
Jonny Magic and the Card Shark Kids.

Not bad for a kid from Jersey who grew up playing a game more
associated with black trenchcoats than sharp suits. We recently
caught up with Finkel by telephone in New York to find out how he'd
gotten so much better at making quick decisions than everyone else

To hear Finkel tell it, there is only one golden rule to making
decisions: a rigorous faith in logic.

"On a deep psychological level you have to know that you can make
the right decision 10 times in a row and have it not work out and
make the same decision the 11th time," Finkel said. "A lot of people
understand that intellectually, but don't have it hard-wired into
their systems. You have to have this very deep-seated belief in
probability and not looking at results."

Making the right decisions, for Finkel, is about mentally training
yourself so that when faced with imperfect information, the
decisions you naturally make, like the throws of a veteran
quarterback, are intuitive -- and correct.

"The human mind is designed to come up with answers to many things
we think can't be reasoned or rationalized with a disturbing degree
of accuracy," he said.

So, step one, internalize your private Spock. When you're done with
that, Finkel has three tips for playing the game, be it magic, poker
or the market.
* Divorce your sense of self from your play. The key is to examine
what you've done, in an unbiased way and critically, but not
make yourself feel bad emotionally or crappy. Obviously, this is
easier said than done.

* With anything in the world, find people who are better than you,
but don't forget the people who aren't as good as you. Michael
Jordan had a lot to learn from Phil Jackson, but he also had a
lot to learn from Steve Kerr about shooting jump shots.

* Accept that if you want to be really good at something, you will
need to do a lot of work. You look at people who are really good
at Magic, they did it a real, real, real lot of times. They
cared about it a lot, and they studied it a lot.

+++++++++++++

Sleep Hacking Produces Results -- For a Time
By Alexis Madrigal Email April 21, 2008 | 10:54:04 AMCategories:
Brain

Filmstrip2_2 Rachel McConnell suffers from the curse of a creative
mind. She's always running out of time for projects. Outside her
work at how-to site Instructables, she couldn't manage to wedge in
enough hours for welding, crafting, and the projects spinning out of
her hacker collective. "I have 50 million side projects," she said.
"I'm learning electronics hacking right now."

So she did what any self-described "antisocial geek" would do: She
found a way to stop sleeping. Or more specifically, she attempted a
so-called polyphasic sleep pattern, in which a couple hours' worth
of short, timed naps throughout the day are supposed to replace a
whole night of sleep.

There are various types of sleep regimens floating around the
internet, but the one Rachel tried was called the Uberman (though
she's not much for the name).

It works like this: you break up the 24 hours of the day into 4 hour
chunks. At some point in each 4 hour set, you take a twenty minute
nap; the total amount of sleep adds up to about two hours. The
schedule meant she'd have to sleep some during the workday, which
her bosses approved, as long as she documented her progress on the
how-to site. Her boyfriend was even up for trying to match their
schedules.

McConnell began her sleep regimen, and at first things went well.

"I was able to get more done. I was up at three in the morning
thinking, 'Ok, what can I do now?'" she said. "I was able to make
significant headway on my enormous to-do lists. I would go out on
bicycle rides in the middle of the night."

But by day five, her experience was already starting to deteriorate,
even as she held out hope that her body would acclimate to the new
sleep schedule.

"Despite the feeling awful part of the time, I am definitely getting
things done," she wrote. "If I don't acclimatize and feel crappy
half the time like now, it is not worth it."

Indeed, she made a few changes to her regimen, adding sleeping time,
but about 17 days in, McConnell got sick and decided to quit the
sleep experiment. In her farewell note, she summed up her
experience, "My current belief is that polyphasic sleep is a method
for handling sleep deprivation as well as possible, but that it
likely does not provide enough sleep for an average person."

That polyphasic sleep helps the horribly sleep-deprived is the only
positive conclusion about extreme sleep regimens that can be backed
up by the limited scientific literature on the topic. Open-ocean
sailors provided the data for a 1989 study that showed under
continuous work situations, in which a full night of sleep is not
available, "best performance results" were obtained by sailors
sleeping for periods between 20 minutes and one hour and for a total
of about 5 hours a day. A more recent study of truckers found that
irregular shift drivers tended to move into polyphasic sleep as "a
strategy to cope with sleep deprivation."

Still, McConnell hasn't given up on finding the sleep pattern that's
right for her, instead of just the one the rest of the world uses.
Her new plan is to get on a 28-hour cycle, staying awake for
nineteen hours, then sleeping for nine. That would give her an extra
couple hours of waking time and because twenty-eight divides evenly
into 168, the number of hours in a week, six of her days
conveniently translate into seven calendar days for the rest of us.

McConnell is planning to try out the new sleep regimen in the next
couple of months, so keep an eye on her Instructables page if you
want to follow along.

COMMENTS
[Actually, most of these articles garnered comments, but I didn't go 
looking for them.]

I'm sorry, did I miss the part about logic in here? Or was this
supposed to be a puff piece about nothing much at all?
Posted by: Buzz Lightyear | Apr 22, 2008 4:36:44 AM

Breaking news.
Become good at something by practicing alot.
What an incredibly pointless article. It states the obvious and
defies the logic as to why anyone would post it.
Posted by: Pete | Apr 22, 2008 5:40:00 AM

@Buzz,Pete: I know profiles are not what we normally do 'round here.
I think these looks at mental athletes make a lot more sense with
the context that they are online extras for the magazine's Get Smart
package:
http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/gs_intro
Posted by: Alexis Madrigal | Apr 22, 2008 7:08:48 AM

The article is fluffy, but Finkel's story isn't. I saw him play at
the Magic ProTour in Chicago back in 1998 (Tempest Block Draft; my
sole pro tour appearance) and his calm and calculated play style
stood out against the field of hundreds of the world's most clever
nerds, and ten years later he still had the touch and won another
ProTour years after his "prime".
Posted by: James Abele | Apr 22, 2008 7:11:40 AM

Improve your logic, learn to ignore pointless time wasting articles!
Posted by: scott c | Apr 22, 2008 8:02:41 AM

be it magic, poker or the market.
*
Magic is capitalized not only because it is a product, but because
it is the most involving game other than DND, but can be played 1-1
in a few minutes. those champion games can take hours while players
analyze. it should be in all caps... MAGIC: The GAME!
Posted by: djclintoris | Apr 22, 2008 10:13:12 AM

white blue deck, my favorite! i have a flying white weenie deck with
unstable mutation that would whoop anyone but Finkel.
*
39-40 cards on tha table... are we missing ~20??
Posted by: djclintoris | Apr 22, 2008 10:59:22 AM

not look for people who are better than you, or worse than you, but
look for learning. don't compare yourself to others, just learn with
passion, and you will be the best.
Posted by: Canoro | Apr 22, 2008 12:24:43 PM

He hasn't mana shuffled his deck yet dude.

White weenie, meh... my goblins would eat you for breakfast.

They could have dropped the last two tips and just left the first
one. That's the one that actually matters.
Posted by: SW | Apr 22, 2008 12:30:07 PM

We are buy virtual currency gold. If you want sell it. you can
choose us. we will give you a suitable price. Welcome to
http://www.mmofly.com
Posted by: MMORPG | Apr 22, 2008 7:16:11 PM

yeah, I've known a few friends (college students), who've tried
"uberman ," or polyphasic sleep, but in the end they always end up
exhausted and give up. But, I have heard (online) various people
claim success...
Though the people who claim polyphasic sleep is the way we SHOULD be
sleeping, and cite various animals to say "all-night" sleep is just
how society has forced us to sleep... I feel have gone a bit too
far. Sure, many animals nap, but 'possoms sleep 18 hours a day, and
giraffes only 2 hours, dolphin's only sleep with half of their brain
at a time.
So I feel to use a cat, dog, or baby's propensity to nap as a basis
for designing adult human sleep is misguided.
Posted by: Will | Apr 21, 2008 9:08:19 AM

Sorry for the double post, but I would also like to add that by
sleeping in this manner, even if you DO end up feeling rested and
awake, deprives your body of the phases for healing, fighting
sickness, growing new cells, and repairing muscle.
Posted by: Will | Apr 21, 2008 9:12:33 AM

Polyphasic Sleep Cycles, check it out!
Posted by: ak | Apr 22, 2008 12:31:08 AM

The human body evolved over millions of years to work on a cycle of
roughly 24 hours. And, we also evolved to get a long block of sleep.
Yes, for short periods of time we can use napping strategies and
substances to manage our alertness and sleep. But, in the long run
our bodies need for sleep isn't just about maintaining alertness and
productivity but about meeting other physiological and cognitive
needs.

Ms McConnell seems to be approaching this effort in a responsible
way but ultimately she's going to need to get the sleep or her
health will suffer. And, my concern about an article such as this is
that it may inspire others to try going without sleep -- people who
have not done the research and approach it in a more reckless
manner. Such people not only endanger their personal health and
safety but the safety of others who may work with them or simply be
sharing the road when they're driving in a fatigue-impaired state.

As for modifying her circadian cycle to be 28 hours, that is
possible but requires that she avoid exposure to natural light. This
has been found to be problematic on multiple levels. I suggest Ms.
McConnell make sure she works with her physician as she approaches
this "experiment" and checks in with him or her regularly.

We're posted a number of articles on the National Shiftwork
Information Center blog relevant to alertness, performance, and
sleep. One is
http://shiftworkinformation.blogspot.com/2008/02/drivers-of-human-al
ertness-and-sleep.html.

And
http://shiftworkinformation.blogspot.com/2008/02/drowsy-driving-quiz
-for-shiftworkers.html.

Ed Coburn
Executive Director
National Shiftwork Information Center
www.ShiftworkInformation.blogspot.com
Posted by: Ed Coburn | Apr 22, 2008 6:18:52 AM

xkcd had a strip about a 28-hour day.... http://xkcd.com/320/
Posted by: college student | Apr 22, 2008 6:33:18 AM

We used to do this type of thing when I was in Infantry training.
Used pieces of string running from trench to trench tied to our
fingers so we could take turns and wake each other up without
leaving our trenches. We would get maybe 2 hours of sleep a day if
we were lucky.

I didn't start really hallucinating until day 5.
Posted by: SW | Apr 22, 2008 8:38:53 AM

For everyone's knowledge management...the architect Frank Lloyd
Wright got his sleep this way. 20 minute cat naps on and off
throughout the day on a divan he kept in his studio. My feeling is
that he was predisposed (perhaps on some genetic level) to this type
of sleep pattern and that perhaps most of us would not be up to
doing it that way. I do sort of like the idea, though, of treating
one's body as a science experiment - try different things, see if
they work.
Posted by: Clifford Young | Apr 22, 2008 1:21:25 PM

The real problem is that we have evolved to sleep at night and be
awake during the day. Our bodies have to "recharge" at night and
Traditional Chinese Medicine suggests that this is when our most
critical organs (like the kidneys) receive the daily cycle of
energy.

In theory, a well-balanced human can get by with less sleep in the
summer but more in the winter (to account for the hours of the day),
though that also depends on their latitude.

If you are truly interested in maximizing your productive time, you
must eat healthy (see macrobiotics for good guide lines), stick to a
relatively regular schedule, exercise daily and get to bed before
10:30pm.

All of this assumes that you are genetically capable of operating on
less sleep. My wife found that after 6 months of Macro eating (she
is a macro teacher and chef), she was able to cut over an hour from
her sleep schedule. I seem to need more sleep.

For what its worth :)
Posted by: Ron Northcutt | Apr 22, 2008 2:01:48 PM

Polyphasic sleep is based on an assumption that your body will learn
to fast-forward to the most important phase of sleep. The only
problem is this is a pretty wild assumption, to either think that
only a percentage of sleep is really necessary, and/or that the body
will learn to skip to it. Maybe if I hold my breath often enough, my
body will learn to skip breathing?
Posted by: Jeramie | Apr 22, 2008 3:17:23 PM

This article, and much of the bad press regarding polyphasic
sleeping, irritate me greatly. This article is about a single person
that spent only 17 days following the schedule before deciding to
quit, yet her opinion makes it into WIRED? At the 17 day mark her
body would still be adjusting to the different cycle, so she would
still be tired and her immune system would be weakened (though the
article is extremely vague about the significance of getting sick at
all). She didn't even finish the transition into the sleep cycle...
how can we value her opinion on the cycle?
I'm not totally sold on the whole "it'll cut out the bad parts of
sleeping!" thing, but the bad press on polyphasic sleeping, like
this, is typically even more unreliable than the good. Whatever, I
guess I'll find out for myself when I give it a go this summer.
Posted by: Cole | Apr 22, 2008 6:28:39 PM

There are a couple of people who have documented their polyphasic
sleep quite well. First Steve Pavlina
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/10/polyphasic-sleep/. Then
http://everything2.com/node/892542. They both mention that the
subject must take 2 weeks of being unproductive and unreliable.
AFTER that point the benefits of the sleep schedule kick in. Both of
these also mention that after 14-21 days they started to feel great
and get lots done. The also both stopped at around 6 months if
memory serves. It isn't meant to go on for years, but if you have a
tough semester at school, or a few short term projects that you want
to make time for, I wouldn't write this off because the person in
this article didn't stick it out. Keeping in mind that I have never
done it myself. (I have made several petitions, but I have yet to
get my wife's approval.Y
Posted by: Barnabas | Apr 23, 2008 8:00:37 AM

Great post. http://www.subconscious-mind.org has great tips and
guides on improving your brain power. You can give your brain power
a boost just by follwing the tips that
http://www.subconscious-mind.org has got to offer.
Posted by: fred | Apr 22, 2008 7:40:05 PM

momo
Posted by: mostafa | Apr 26, 2008 12:07:59 AM

ok
Posted by: sager | Apr 26, 2008 4:57:00 AM

+++++++++++++++

Q&A: Facebook's Biggest Brain Tells All
By Alexis Madrigal Email April 21, 2008 | 11:02:25 AM

Being smart is good, but having everyone know you are smart is
better. Now, a Facebook app is bringing those big-brain bragging
rights to a profile near you.

Playfish's Who Has the Biggest Brain? presents a series of simple
memory, math, and spatial games which are tabulated into a final
score, measured in hypothetical cubic centimeters of brain.

It's one of the hottest applications on Facebook, with over 260,000
daily players. The 13 percent of Facebook users who've installed the
application reduce their intelligence to that single number, sitting
next to their college and job. Your correspondent has a relatively
weak 2,098, while the world's top player, Uri Zoran, weighs in at a
massive 4,546.

Each game takes just one minute, so speed and finger dexterity are
important. Ameen Tayebi, a one-time Google intern who once held San
Francisco's highest score with 3423, said of the game's global
elite, "I don't know how they could go any faster than I do. I'm
going as fast as seems humanly possible."

We interviewed Zoran, a 22-year old Israeli, via Facebook to get his
take on the spoils of mental athletic jockdom.

Wired: Do you believe your high ranking on the Facebook brain app is
indicative of your brain power?
Uri Zoran: I do believe that my high ranking has a lot to do with my
brain power, but also acknowledge that there are few other
parameters... [such as] practice and the ability to control the
mouse at high speed.

Wired: Have you done any special training?
Zoran:I haven't done any "special" training, but I did try to
activate my brain differently and learned which state of mind is the
most effective one for each part of the game...

Wired: How many hours have you spent attaining that score?
Zoran: I played the game around 90 hours in total, but around 20
around were spent on trying to break my current record. I first got
a top 10 score after about 20 hours of playing.

Wired: Are you good at similar games, like Nintendo's Brain Age or
Sudoku?
Zoran: I am very good in Sudoku and any other mathematical, logical
or analyzing riddles, especially those you can randomly find in the
newspaper. I am very good in different kinds of IQ tests as well.

Wired: Now that you are one of the highest scores on the network, is
your life changing? Are people becoming your friends solely because
of your mental athletic skills?
Zoran: I can't say my life is changing, since I do not really take
the game too seriously... I do get many messages and friend requests
every day from random people from different countries. Those who add
me as their friend surely add me because of what you define as
"mental athletic skills" and in some way, they look up to me (which
from my point of view, is hilarious ;) ).