The Power of Forgetting (6 page)

Now that I’ve given you a more technical view of the brain and the role of memory, let’s turn back to the broader perspective and consider how you’re going to go about tuning your brain to a channel where it can operate maximally. I’ll preface this discussion by sharing one more misunderstood fact about the brain: It’s not true that we use only 10 percent of our brains. Again, let’s apply some logic here: If this were true, it would certainly make brain damage a lot less worrisome. The goal isn’t so much to tap impenetrable areas of your brain as it is to use all that you’ve got access to at its fullest capacity—in much the same way you’d turn the volume up on your stereo. There certainly are parts of our brains that we can’t ever reach or use, but that doesn’t mean that we cannot develop those parts that we can in fact tap, including latent areas that need to be woken up. Igniting those undeveloped and underappreciated parts is what my exercises and lessons are all about.

Tapping into these parts of your brain is what will take you from average to awesome—and unleash your hidden productive thinker.

Each part of the brain serves a special, defined purpose. Being able to wiggle our toes, make plans, dream, see, smell, talk, walk, solve complex problems, cry, know which way is up or down, remember our friends’ birthdays, maintain balance, breathe, sweat, blink, flex our muscles, sense fear or danger, feel pain, and even keep our hearts beating are capacities that all originate in certain regions of the brain. We can do many of these tasks at the same time, too. Perhaps you’re reading this book, drinking a beverage, digesting your lunch, thinking about your Saturday-night plans, and breathing, among many other things, all at the same time.

But you already know that I’m not here to teach you the exact biochemistry and topography of the brain. Rather than trying to understand the inner workings of your brain from a medical perspective, I want you instead to simply view it as a single room with certain compartments, as well as an entrance and an exit.

The secret to making this room power up and perform seemingly magical feats is to train it to operate like a computer—that is, to receive information, store it in the right compartment, and memorize all of the relevant information while ignoring the unnecessary information. In other words, to
forget
when it’s appropriate so you can use your memory more effectively when necessary.

This last part is critical. Most people try to remember everything, and in doing so, remember little or nothing at all. The brain is ill equipped to handle an abundance of data all at once. It craves order and a streamlined flow, and that is exactly why optimizing its power entails training two
different brain “regions” to work simultaneously yet independently of each other. One part absorbs information while another part is sorting and processing new information. Some of this sorting and processing no doubt entails a lot of “forgetting”—disregarding frivolous details immediately or discarding details once the brain has made quick use of them before moving on to the next important detail. These two processes are the heart and soul of memory—the foundation of all learning.

With the one-two punch of absorbing and processing—memory creation—your mind can then begin to work much more efficiently and become more powerful, giving you a huge advantage throughout your life. You can think of it as creating an assembly line for your brain. First, you compartmentalize the raw materials—the data—and then you input the data, one piece at a time, through a sequence of processes, sending the pieces onward to various places depending on how they need to be treated and whether they should be deposited in your short-term memory, put in your long-term storage tank, or entirely forgotten and tossed out to the junkyard.

Every chapter in this book is going to help you build and successfully run this assembly line like a well-oiled machine. It’s not something you can do overnight, and it’s also not something you can just build once and leave alone. Have you ever been amazed by a waiter’s ability to take the orders of a table of six or more people without writing anything down? How does he or she get it right? It’s even more impressive when people complicate their orders with personal requests—“Dressing on the side, please,” “Can I substitute a baked potato for some fries?” “No cheese,” and so on. How
do they remember it all? Waiters are good at what they do because they do it a lot! Practice. Practice. Practice!

Knowing that brains require constant maintenance and the occasional repair, I work my brain every single day to keep it up to speed and stay ahead of the pack. My hope is that you will work your brain with the exercises in this book and that some of the strategies you learn here will become second nature. I don’t expect you to become as obsessive about number and letter crunching as I am, but I do expect that you’ll create new mental habits that will ultimately strengthen and expand your brain so that it can do incredible things. You’ll find yourself in the car, for example, playing mind games with yourself or your passengers. You’ll read street signs, license plates, and storefronts differently. You’ll look at the whole world from a new perspective. And in doing so, you’ll break away from your own pack.

Remember, I’m not here to make you just “average.” This is not about trying to catch up. This is about blowing everyone else away. All of us enter school as youngsters and are surrounded by classmates with a variety of talents and strengths. That is when some of us find ourselves way ahead of others because we’re mixed in with a wide range of ability levels. But as we grow older and mature into adults, we often find ourselves surrounded by peers—people who share our general characteristics, values, and intelligence. The pool of talent gets smaller and more similar to us in our particular environments, and that’s when we can find ourselves fenced in by people who are just as sharp as we are—or even sharper. It becomes harder and harder to edge ahead of others and make ourselves stand out. We have to work so much harder to get that A, obtain that job or promotion,
achieve that acceptance letter, succeed in the business world, or generally move forward in life the way we want to. And it’s these moments that can come to define the rest of our lives.

Yet when we stop and focus on our brains, we have the potential to do just that—to leap ahead. You can accelerate your success whether you’re in school, working a job, starting a business, or seeking a whole new career. You can get more done in less time, juggle competing demands with ease at work and in your personal life, and take multitasking to new heights that allow you to take care of true priorities effortlessly (and not feel guilty for letting a few things slide). You also can break out of your status quo and elevate your socioeconomic position to a loftier position. Imagine, for instance, being able to walk into a room and remember everyone’s name. Or being a business owner or retail employee who can recall the name of every customer who has ever walked into your store (and thus keep them coming back). Or always adapting quickly to changes in your life that threaten your livelihood and ability to make a living.

Maybe you made a living fixing cameras over the past thirty years, but not the digital ones that now dominate the market. You might need to go back to school, become an apprentice, or take other steps to acquire a totally new skill set that will pay your bills.

In a world where it’s increasingly difficult to find and maintain a good job, having an advantage and being able to reinvent yourself whenever necessary becomes all the more critical. Whether you like it or not, most everything in life is a competition. And it goes without saying that we need productive thinkers now more than ever. The good news, though, is that I promise to make this fun!

It’s All About Patterns!

When innovative people with clever minds are asked for their secrets to success, they often talk about the mental habits they keep. These include the ways in which they look at what’s in front of them to generate new ideas and promote creativity. In addition to the obvious traits that help our imaginations, such as asking questions (e.g., What if? Why? How?) and performing experiments, an overarching theme in all things related to mental acuity is simply the ability to establish habits that help us to organize our thoughts and make breathing room for learning new things, which also entails a great deal of forgetting. Habits, after all, are nothing more than activities that we do repeatedly and that follow a certain pattern or rhythm. And habits are patterns of thought; the ones we keep in our thinking processes have everything to do with
whether or not we can remember critical information, forget what’s not important, tap creative areas in our brains, and free up mental energy to engage in complex thinking that requires a lot of focus and concentration.

This chapter is going to take you on what I hope will be a provocative tour of how habits relate to the brain’s capacity and how we can use certain mental habits not only to sharpen our minds, and especially our memories, but also to look at things from totally different perspectives that can inspire insight, help us find new and better solutions to everyday problems, and spur innovative ideas. Our mental habits also play into our ability to forget when appropriate and maintain a clear, clutter-free brain ready to take on more. And at the heart of this lesson is an understanding of how patterns share a powerful relationship with habits.

First things first: What exactly is a pattern? It’s simply a type of theme of recurring events or objects. Patterns exist everywhere we look. They are in numbers, in words, and even in nature. If you pick up any
National Geographic
magazine, for example, you’ll see the most spectacular photographs of patterns found in animals, landscapes, flowers, stars, sand, and so on. Most of us don’t notice patterns unless they scream out to us (as they do from a photograph) or we’re challenged to find them or, like me, we become addicted to identifying patterns in everything.

If I were to ask you to give me an example of a pattern, you’d probably name one of those found visually in decorations, like stripes, zigzags, or polka dots, or on your bedroom’s wallpaper, your favorite argyle socks, or your pinstriped
suit. Or perhaps you’d think of the patterns heard in the rhythms and beats of a song, the striations that make up rock formations, the designs seen in architecture, the flow of traffic and signaling of streetlights, the predictable styles that are emblematic of certain car manufacturers, or the motifs found in artworks—you can detect patterns, for instance, in Monet’s works, as well as in Van Gogh’s and Rembrandt’s. Patterns of hydrogen and carbon make up water, patterns of frozen ice crystals make up snowflakes, patterns of snowfall give us ski paths, and so on. We can consider the cycles of daytime and nighttime a type of pattern, just as our bodies follow biological patterns that mesh with the twenty-four-hour solar day. We often don’t think of patterns existing on our insides, but these biological patterns actually dictate a lot about who we are and how we feel. Each one of us has a circadian rhythm—a biological clock—that maintains a steady, regular pattern twenty-four hours a day. We feel tired after the sun sets and charged when the sun comes up. These patterns often dictate the daily habits we keep. For example, most of us eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner in a predictable pattern. In addition to our consistent habits and behaviors that abide by patterns of sleep and wakefulness, our bodies release hormones at different times of the day to sustain our biochemical activities.

And of course patterns help give us computer programs, stories, and mathematics, which, as a matter of fact, is commonly described as the “science of pattern.” Any sequence of numbers that can be modeled by a mathematical function is considered a pattern. These can be the most difficult patterns to identify, but they make for excellent mind sharpeners, as we’ll see in
part 2
.

You should know the answer to this already: patterns. Although we like to think we live exciting, ever-changing lives, we keep similar habits day in and day out from the time we get up to the people with interact with, the foods we gravitate toward, and the routes we use when we drive. As the old saying goes, humans are creatures of habit. But it’s not just the activities we perform consciously that are driven by habits; our brains can somewhat unconsciously command certain repeat actions that help maintain our survival—governing basic processes such as breathing, digesting, and pumping blood without our having to think about it. When you consider all the tasks you do in a day, you soon realize that you can get a lot done without much mental effort. Your morning routine today was likely a carbon copy of yesterday’s, and you probably managed to get ready for the day, eat breakfast, deal with trivial family stuff, and check off several to-dos quite effortlessly before 10:00 a.m. Most, if not all, of your mundane daily accomplishments are powered by habits—a systematic regimen that your brain is used to and can run pretty much on autopilot. Habits help us push through the day, and they become so ingrained in our lives that they are hard to break or change. They are as much shapers of our lives as we are shapers of our habits. As William James wrote in 1892, “All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.”