The Power of Forgetting (21 page)

It may seem odd to end this chapter with a few anagram and palindrome exercises. These are not problems to solve as you would solve a math equation or a rebus puzzle. But they are helpful in tapping those areas of the mind that are eager to take an uncharted path and get creative. They also help turn on the productive thinker in you. Just having an awareness of what these devices are will help you see words and numbers
differently in the world and reinforce the whole purpose of this chapter: to get outside of your box!

An anagram is a word or phrase that is formed by rearranging the letters of another word or phrase, such as “teacher” and “cheater” or “woman Hitler” and “mother-in-law” (hence, what mother-in-law and Hitler have in common). The word “anagrams” is an anagram itself of
ars magna
, Latin for “great art.” As someone once said, “All the life’s wisdom can be found in anagrams. Anagrams never lie.” It’s also been said that the right to lampoon royalty and politicians using anagrams was enshrined in English law when King John signed the Magna Carta (“Anagram Act”) in 1215.

Clever anagrams are all around us—if you stop to notice them. Japan’s former capital city (Kyoto) and present capital city (Tokyo) are anagrams of each other. The name of the synthetic fiber “spandex” is an anagram of “expands.” The Toyota Camry is an anagram of “my car.”

Here’s a list of the most famous anagrams in English. Can you figure out their counterparts in a crafty rearrangement?

Anagrams are great for bending the mind. I once saw an anagram made from a few paragraphs of Lincoln’s Gettysburg
Address. Now, that’s thinking outside the box! Seriously, it’s not that you need to “know” anagrams or memorize the examples given here. It’s all about training your mind to look at words differently. Once you begin to switch letters around and create new meanings, you’re engaging your brain in exactly the way that makes you the most productive thinker you can be. You’re igniting new neuronal pathways. You’re working the “muscles” of your mind that, when strong, will allow you to advance profoundly in life because you’re forcing yourself to flex them when most people aren’t exercising their brain that way.

I should also point out that playing with anagrams improves logical thinking. You can think of them as similar to geometry proofs: You don’t need to
know
a geometry proof to get along in life, but working through such proofs helps to improve your logic skills. And anything that enhances your logic skills boosts brainpower. Logic is how we ultimately make sense of the world, solve problems effectively and quickly, organize our thoughts, maximize our memories, and intertwine our imaginations with reasoning to come up with new ways of doing things or arriving at answers. When we improve our logic skills, we in turn enhance all of our skills, because logic plays a role in each one of them. Logic skills can even give a boost to your focus and concentration. Don’t for a second think that just because you’re tapping the wildest or silliest side of your imagination or forcing yourself to think as far outside the box as possible you are not using your logic. Logic is always an undercurrent. It in fact
informs
your imagination, intuition, and ability to think outside the box.

For those looking for a more practical application for anagrams, consider using them for the sole purpose of generating
your various passwords. It’s a good idea to have a different password for each e-mail account, online account, and so on. What’s difficult is having to remember all those passwords. Try using various anagrams of your favorite words or phrases as passwords.

Palindromes, which date back to at least AD 79, are words or phrases that read the same way forward and backward. The most familiar palindromes, in English at least, are character-by-character ones: The written characters read the same backward and forward. Here are some examples of common palindromic words: civic, radar, level, rotor, kayak, reviver, race car, redder, madam, toot, pop, and noon. Some well-known palindromic phrases and sentences are:

And “Rise to vote, sir” was once featured in an episode of
The Simpsons
.

Some palindromes use words as units rather than letters. For example: “Fall leaves after leaves fall,” “You can cage a swallow, can’t you, but you can’t swallow a cage, can you?” “First Ladies rule the State and state the rule: ladies first,” and “Girl, bathing on Bikini, eyeing boy, sees boy eyeing bikini on bathing girl.” The command “Level, madam, level!” composed only of words that are themselves palindromes, is both a character-by-character and a word-by-word palindrome.

Even though many palindromes seem like nonsense, some people have written entire palindromic passages thousands of words long! Very cool, but hard to figure out. Here are some shorter ones to decode:

Again, you’re probably wondering why you’d ever want to play with palindromes. Like anagrams, they are an excellent way to give your brain a workout that draws from both your logical brain and your imaginative, outside-the-box brain. Having to think about and manipulate words and letters exercises areas of your mind that strengthen and support your problem-solving skills. Try to come up with a few on your own.

Palindromes needn’t be restricted to words and letters. They can be found in a variety of places where you’d least expect them, such as in numbers, dates, acoustics, music, and even molecular biology and classical music. Joseph Haydn’s Symphony no. 47 in G is nicknamed “the Palindrome”—the third movement is a musical palindrome. This clever piece goes forward twice and backward twice and arrives back at the same place. Similarly, Mozart’s Scherzo-Duetto di Mozart is played by one violinist as written and by a second violinist with the same music inverted. In more recent times, we have Weird Al Yankovic’s song “Bob” (from his 2003 album
Poodle Hat
), which consists of rhyming palindromes and parodies the Bob Dylan song “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” The song “You Can Call Me Al” by Paul Simon features a palindromic bass run performed by Bakithi Kumalo.

While researching this book, I came across some interesting facts about palindromes with regard to our own biology. As it turns out, palindromic motifs are found in DNA sequences and frequently in genetic instructions that code for proteins, which are biological structures we need to survive. But the meaning of “palindrome” in the context of genetics is slightly different from the definition used for words and sentences. Our genetic code—DNA (short for deoxyribonucleic acid)—is formed by two paired strands of molecules called nucleotides, which always pair in the same way—adenine (A) always pairs with thymine (T), and cytosine (C) always pairs with guanine (G). Together these two paired strands make up the well-known double-helix structure of DNA. Now, a
single-stranded sequence of DNA is said to be a palindrome if it is equal to its complementary sequence read backward. For example, the sequence ACCTAGGT is palindromic because its complement is TGGATCCA, which is equal to the original sequence in reverse. Interestingly, I also learned that scientists have proved that many of the bases on the Y chromosome—the male sex chromosome—are arranged as palindromes. What’s even more fascinating is that a palindromic structure allows the Y chromosome to repair itself by bending over at the middle if one side is damaged. Imagine that!

Finally, it’s worth mentioning the semordnilap. Come again? Spell that word backward and you get “palindromes.” “Semordnilap” is the name coined for a word or phrase that spells a different word or phrase backward. Semordnilaps are also known as volvograms, heteropalindromes, semi-palindromes, half palindromes, reversegrams, mynoretehs, reversible anagrams, word reversals, and anadromes. Sometimes they have also been called antigrams, but this term now usually refers to anagrams with opposing meanings. Semordnilaps are very useful in constructing palindromic texts; together, each pair forms a palindrome, and they can be added on either side of a shorter palindrome in order to extend it.

When I wrote the first draft of this chapter, Steve Jobs was being memorialized in the media following his untimely death. He was a visionary who was always thinking outside the box. He was the Thomas Edison of our time—someone who understood early on the power of this important skill to extend the limits of what’s possible. He forever changed how the world listens to music, downloads content, and uses phones, computers, and now tablets. As Jobs revolutionized the face of consumer technology, he owed his success to a mastery of ingenious thinking despite the mistakes he made along the way. He wasn’t always a success, but he never gave up despite enormous failures, from miscues in his business pursuits to being fired from his own company. When he returned to that company later, he transformed it into one of the most valuable companies in the world, becoming one of the business world’s greatest comeback kids.

Anytime you can think outside the box, you’re upping your chances of finding new solutions to old problems. I mean that literally and figuratively. There are typically three or more ways to solve a problem, from equations in mathematics to life in general. When you realize this important truth, you gain the confidence to know that you can accomplish anything. You also increase your chances of standing out while at the same time defending your independence. This is an important point, because all of us like to think that we’re “independent,” but in fact this attribute is reserved for those who can truly stand on their own and who have faith that they can get themselves out of any predicament or disappointment. I witness a lack of independence in both children and adults, many of whom struggle both
to solve their own problems and to make good decisions to carry them forward. There’s no better way to overcome this handicap and boost your autonomy and self-reliance than to foster outside-the-box thinking. Being able to solve your own problems is critical to success in life—tackling not just the problems we encounter in a math class or in a project at work but all sorts of problems we face in everyday life.

Embrace every opportunity you have to think differently and be taken out of your usual routine or surroundings where you follow the same old rules. Always make up ways to do things and arrive at right answers your way despite the critics and naysayers. Give yourself permission to make up your own rules rather than always following someone else’s. This is the essence of thinking outside the box, and it will reward you in innumerable ways—from augmenting your creativity and changing your perspective for the better to refining your logic, common sense, ability to make excellent decisions, and perceptual intuition—the productive thinker’s holy grail.

I’ve given you a lot of ideas in this chapter on how to think outside the box. I encourage you each day to seek as many opportunities as you can find to do so. Make it a goal to hop outside your box from the moment you roll out of bed. Flex your imagination at breakfast as you catch up with the morning news and with family members. Then, as you step outside to start your day, set an intention to find at least three or four things on your way to work or school that will help you think differently. Remember, when you aim to live outside your normal box, you will be stoking your inner genius and making life more interesting.