Sure, thanks to the hacks in this chapter on memory, you'll be able to remember all the U.S. presidents and world capitals, but maybe you'll still forget your keys and your cell phone when you leave the house. What good are mnemonic tricks if you can't apply them to daily life?

You can make a practical difference in your preparedness for daily life and the efficiency with which you live it if you memorize a list of items without which you never leave the house. If you run through this checklist when leaving work, school, a restaurant, or a friend's house, you need never leave anything important behind wherever you go. You can also use this hack to get out of the house quickly in the morning, by ensuring that all of the items on the checklist are gathered in one place before you go to sleep.

If you've learned how to remember 10 things to bring when you leave the house [Hack #1], you've already learned the number-rhyme system: associating numbers like 1 and 2 with words that rhyme with them, like gun and shoe, and using those associations as pegs on which to hang items you wish to remember.

The traditional number-shape system works in a similar way. Instead of visualizing images whose names rhyme with the names of numbers, however, you visualize shapes that look like the numerals in question. For example, the numeral 2 looks like a swan to many people, so you can use the image of a swan as a mnemonic peg.¹

Practically every system of mnemonics relies on a series of pegs on which to hang information. For example, "Remember 10 Things to Bring" [Hack #1] associates the numbers 1 through 10 with rhyming objects (one = gun, two = shoe, three = tree, and so on) and then hangs the things to remember (such as medication, keys, and cell phone) on these mnemonic pegs by putting the peg objects and the things to remember in the same vivid mental picture.

An even older mnemonic technique—perhaps the oldest—uses places as memory pegs. By places, I mean ordinary, concrete places, such as the rooms of your house or apartment. If you mentally organize these places into a sequence that is the same every time, you will be able to walk through the places in your mind and retrieve the information you have stored there.¹

The Renaissance practitioners of the ancient ars memorativa (art of memory) referred to such journeys as memory palaces. Orators in classical times would prepare their speeches by stashing complex images that represented the things they wanted to talk about in the loci (places) of a remembered or imagined building, such as a palace. In fact, this practice is said to be the origin of today's expressions "in the first place," "in the second place," and so on.

"Make Lots of Little Journeys" [Hack #3] explains how to remember information by associating it with places along the way in an imaginary journey. (If you haven't read that hack, please read it now.) But each place on a memory journey contains other places: rooms typically have four walls, four corners, a floor, and a ceiling, for a total of 10 sublocations. In other words, if you have already memorized a journey through a building, you can now make your memory journey hold 10 times as many pieces of information.¹

The Major System was introduced in the 17th century by Stanislaus Mink von Wennsshein and was improved in the 18th century by Dr. Richard Grey.¹ While the Major System is probably the most established mnemonic schema, I prefer the Dominic System [Hack #6], invented by Dominic O'Brien in the 20th century. Nevertheless, you might find that the Major System works well for you, and knowing something about it will contribute to your understanding of advanced mnemonic techniques.

Dominic O'Brien, World Memory Champion, can memorize the order of a full deck of playing cards in less than a minute. To help him achieve amazing memory feats like this, he created the Dominic System of mnemonics. Some people who find the Major System [Hack #5] espoused by most memory experts to be too dry and restrictive find they can stick with the Dominic System.

You might need to memorize a table or list with more than 100 elements, such as the periodic table of elements, but find that you can't do it with only the 100 numbered items of the Dominic System [Hack #6]. You could use a memory journey [Hack #3], but how are you going to remember that element 52 is tellurium without visiting the 51 previous rooms first?

This memory hack, which I call the Hotel Dominic (in honor of Dominic O'Brien, the inventor of the Dominic System of mnemonics upon which it's based), is both random access (like a CD, as opposed to a cassette tape) and indexed by number, making it ideal for remembering long, numbered lists and tables, or many smaller lists, or both: up to 10,000 basic items. Each basic item can, in effect, be elaborated with nooks and crannies [Hack #4], creating the potential for many more than 10,000 items.

"Visit the Hotel Dominic" [Hack #7] mentions a Perl script that will make memorizing large chunks of information with the Hotel Dominic method much easier and will also help you refresh your memory periodically. This hack contains that script.

With this new script, dominate, you will be able to print out as large a swath of the Hotel Dominic as you wish—hundreds or thousands of rooms—and mark it up with a pen or pencil, assigning each item you want to remember to a room. Then you will be able to review your marked-up version of the hotel at leisure and commit the items to memory.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w



$in_file = $ARGV[0];

$domstart = $ARGV[1];

$domend = $ARGV[2];



if ($domstart > $domend)

{

    die "Start number not less than or equal to end number\\n";

}



open (IN_FILE, "< ./$in_file")

    or die "Couldn't open input file: $!\\n";



$index = 0;

while (defined ($line = <IN_FILE>)) 

{

    $line =~ /([^;]*)\\:([^;\\n]*)/g;

    $domarray[$index][0] = $1;

    $domarray[$index][1] = $2;

    $index++;

}



close IN_FILE;



for ($domnum = $domstart; $domnum < = $domend; $domnum++)

{

    $domstring = sprintf "%0004.0d", $domnum;

  print "$domstring: ";

    $domstring =~ /(\\d\\d)(\\d\\d)/g;

    print "$domarray[$1][0]\\,$domarray[$2][1]\\n\\n";

}

In the 1870s, Lewis Carroll devised a mnemonic system for numbers that he called the Memoria Technica, after an earlier system. Carroll's system is little remembered by us postmoderns. Like today's more common Major System [Hack #5], it relies on converting numbers into consonants and filling them with vowels to make words; unlike the Major System, it uses rhyming couplets to help you remember the words that are created, instead of simply having you remember them "naked," and in this sense it is an advance on the former.

It's common for people to hear a particularly catchy tune and hum it in their head for hours, or sometimes days. While this phenomenon can be annoying, it can also be used as a great tool for memorizing information. Making up a song or poem about a topic can be an extremely effective way to remember dates, lists of items, events and stories, and many other things.

This hack works in three ways to stick information in your mind. First, hanging information on a melody or rhyme scheme that you already know helps piggyback new information on information that you've already acquired. Second, remembering the rhythm of a tune or one or two rhyming lines can help bootstrap your memory; bringing one to mind will often bring up the rest of the associated information. Third, the active process of fitting the information into the tune causes you to concentrate on the information and turn it over in your mind, which also helps it to stick there.

There are a few different types of learning songs, and some may work better than others, depending on your own mental makeup or the information you're trying to memorize.

A parody is a song written using an existing song's tune, often satirizing or making fun of something. The parody might or might not play on the theme of the original song, but the new words often follow a rhyme or phonetic scheme similar to the original lyrics. They are also generally written based on a popular song rather than a folk or traditional tune. Matching the information you're trying to memorize to a song you already know, by theme or some other association, can further help you to remember the information.

If you need to learn a story, such as an event in history, putting the story to music with a story song will help you remember it. This hack has been used by people around the world for thousands of years, of course. Story songs are often similar to parodies, but may be more freewheeling and nonsatirical, and will probably use an original tune or traditional/folk tune.

Psychologist George A. Miller concluded in a classic 1956 experimental survey that human short-term memory can hold only seven items at a time, plus or minus two.¹Short-term memory bears the same relation to long-term memory in humans that RAM does to mass storage in a computer: short-term memory, which is temporary, is the gateway to human long-term memory, which is semi-permanent. Short-term memory is also where information that is currently being processed is stored (such as a phone number you're calling). Thus, it's important for not only short-term memory itself, but also long-term memory and information processing, to maximize the ability to use short-term memory.

Recent research suggests the magic number that short-term memory can hold might be somewhat lower than seven, at least for intellectually demanding tasks. Researchers at the University of Queensland found that 30 academics given a task of analyzing statistical interactions among variables—a task at which they were already expert—did not perform better than chance at analyzing interactions of five variables in timed tests. Also, they were not only worse at analyzing four-variable interactions than interactions involving three or two variables, but less confident of their answers as well.²

Whether the magic number is five or seven, people normally find it hard to remember more than a few small bits of information. If they recode the bits by clustering them into larger, more meaningful chunks, however, they can remember many more of the bits. In the next section, we will show that you can remember a large number of literal bits ( binary digits) by grouping them into more meaningful and comprehensible numeric chunks.

You are sitting with your friends, discussing the latest movie releases, when someone asks the name of a performer who starred in a recent film. Frustratingly, you can remember what she looks like, the fact that you saw her film from last year, and even that her name has three syllables and starts with an A, but the name just does not come to mind.

This experience, in which a memory seems to be "on the tip of the tongue," is exasperating if you're trying to remember a particular fact, but intriguing if you're interested in how memory works.

One of the most fascinating things about the tip-of-the-tongue state is that it demonstrates how sometimes we know that we know something, without actually being able to recall it. This is part of what psychologists call metacognition, which allows us to realize that we should keep trying even though our memories might be failing us at a particular moment. Much research has focused on metacognition and memory, because experiences like the tip-of-the-tongue state are relatively common in everyday life.

Studies have shown that tip-of-the-tongue states happen about once per week on average and get more common as we get older. Other research has focused on conditions that affect the likelihood of successful recall, suggesting some good techniques for overcoming tip-of-the-tongue when it occurs.

Interesting thoughts can come to you at any time. Perhaps you're getting groceries, in aisle A4, and suddenly you have an idea for a program you're writing. Or you're driving, and a point in an argument comes to you. Or you're in the shower, and you realize something about life.

But later, you simply forget. The very next day, you're tasked with writing that program, or giving your side in the argument, and you ask yourself, "Now what was it I was thinking?" Perhaps you are stuck living the same day over and over again. "Didn't I have a thought about a different way I could think and live?"

In this hack, you're going to collect your thoughts using a catch. This is not a simple diary; this is an advanced system for collecting every thought, from everywhere in your life, and bringing them together.

Dutton Speedwords is an artificial language [Hack #51] developed by Reginald Dutton in the early 1920s and improved over the following few decades. Dutton intended Speedwords both as an international auxiliary language like Esperanto, which could be written or spoken by people who did not speak the same native language, and as a shorthand system.

The advantage that Speedwords has over most other shorthand methods is that you do not need to learn a special alphabet to use it (as you would, for example, with the Gregg or Pitman shorthand methods). This feature not only makes Speedwords easy to learn, but also means that it can be typed, entered into PDAs with handwriting recognition systems, and generally used anywhere the Roman alphabet can be used. It's also great for quickly catching information [Hack #13].

If you have to drive somewhere new, how do you figure out how to get there? Perhaps you like to consult a web site and get a step-by-step list of driving directions that details each turn and street name. Maybe your dad prefers looking at a map and tracing out his route there. If you asked your friend, she'd tell you she likes to call someone and ask for directions, including landmarks and possible pitfalls she might encounter on the way. Maybe you've even had arguments about this, with each side claiming the only "good" way to be sure you get there, and secretly thinking that the other ways are for idiots.

This argument happens because each person has a different learning style. A learning style is a way of taking in and assimilating information, and different people's brains do this in different ways. So, each method of finding out how to get where you're going might be right for the person who favors it, and for him it might really be idiotic for that person to use a method that's less effective.

If you can tune in to the best way for your brain to learn, you can apply that knowledge intelligently to learn faster and retain more of what you learn. Knowing a little about learning styles will help you "speak your brain's language" so that it works better for you.

Are your thoughts organized? Most of the time, people live in a river of thoughts and sensations, like the story line of a movie. Our thoughts arrive as events in a sequence.

But we can map out our thoughts on a plane. When we see them side by side, we can compare them with one another and organize them. Observing the whole picture, all at once, we make startling realizations and discover an order to our thoughts, a top-down understanding of them.¹

Alternatively, we find a disorder, and gain insight into tensions and confusions in our life. As soon as we see them clearly, though, our mind starts cranking away, working to resolve them—or, at the very least, to understand the subtlety behind the tension.

Science fiction writer Greg Egan explores the concept of the exoself in some of his novels. In Permutation City, he defines it as "sophisticated, but nonconscious, supervisory software which could reach into...brain and body and fine-tune any part of it as required."¹ In a later novel, Diaspora, he describes the exoself's outlook component: "software that could run inside your exoself and reinforce the qualities that you valued most, if and when you felt the need for such an anchor."²

Pretty exciting! I'd give a lot for a mental exoskeleton that I could program one day to make me less lazy the next day, and keep me from getting sucked into a cult or pyramid scheme the day after that. Needless to say, however, we lack the technology necessary to build a true exoself today. Of course, it's a lot easier to reprogram yourself when you've been uploaded into a computer, as in Egan's fiction.

This hack creates a simpler system for repatterning your thinking, by using a Hipster PDA (made from a deck of index cards) and a periodic alarm device such as the MotivAider. Compared to Egan's fictional exoself, it's almost embarrassingly primitive—but it's a start.

Computer desktops overflow with icons. Inboxes are filled with ancient email. Real desktops overflow with paper: mail, magazines, printouts, notebooks filled with old notes and sums, waiting to be integrated someday (when we have the time) into some master Tower of Babel, stepping us into the stars.

Face it: it's mostly junk, even when we've tried to weed it out along the way. We imagine that we'll use it, and if we think we'll need even a small fraction of it one day, we think we'd better keep it. Some of us are deeply attached to old brilliance and are convinced that our mountains of ideas will be reviewed, collected, prioritized, turned into plans, and converted into fruitful action somehow. Or we worry that at some point we're going to need one of those little notes, and we're going to be sorry that we don't have it. Or perhaps we're worried that we're going to have good ideas for only a limited time, so we start to squirrel them away and hoard them. We spend so much time hoarding them—stacking them, sorting them, working around them, feeling bad about them—that we don't get to implement any of them.

Whether you're attached to your ideas or you're simply having problems with your clutter (a.k.a. cruft), here's a little trick that will quickly wipe out most of your future clutter. It's called pre-deleting, and it's simple. The only hard part is adjusting your mind into the state where you're willing to do it.

"But I don't want to destroy anything, ever!" Don't worry, we'll address that later in this hack. "But I've got a computer, and it can remember things forever!" We'll talk about that later also. "But it's got terabytes of—" Yes, yes, I know. We'll talk later

Too often, brainstorming meetings take place in sterile, empty conference rooms with bare walls and nothing to look at anywhere else. They are almost like the industrial clean rooms where microchips are manufactured and not a speck of dust is allowed to gather. Is it any wonder that so many bad ideas come out of these rooms? The truth is that brains need "dust." Brainstorms, like rainstorms, need nuclei around which (b)raindrops can form. If you start with no ideas, you will end with no ideas.¹

Think of your mind as a desktop computer faced with the problem of generating a random number out of thin air. Such a computer cannot generate truly random numbers; it can only perform a series of rigid calculations. From the human point of view, randomness enters the computer only when it is programmed to consult its real-time clock for some real-world quantity, such as the number of milliseconds since January 1, 1970. Given this unpredictable input, the PC can then go on to generate output that looks quite random—and even creative. In other words, the computer needs input from an outside source to break out of its rigid patterns.

Humans, too, can become stuck in creative ruts. Everyone has a certain set of interests, ranging from things about which they are mildly curious to those about which they're completely obsessed. Choreographer Twyla Tharp calls this our " creative DNA." Sometimes, this hardwiring leads to repetition in our creative output. At that point, we, too, need to seed our mental random-number generators with new data to kick us out of our ruts.

The process of morphological forced connections is fairly old; the picture books for children that allow you to combine the head of a giraffe with the body of a hippo and the tail of a fish are one example. The process was formalized by Fritz Zwicky at Caltech in the 1960s¹ and was popularized in 1972 by Don Koberg and Jim Bagnall in their book The Universal Traveler.²

Most other books that discuss the technique seem to derive their discussion of it from The Universal Traveler and even use the same example: creating a new design for a ballpoint pen. We'll take a somewhat different approach.

Creativity expert Edward de Bono invented the word po to shake up people's thoughts. He listed several etymologies for it. One is that it can be seen as "arising from such words as hypothesis, suppose, possible, and even poetry"; another is that it stands for provocative operation, a kind of mental hack to get ideas "unstuck" and move them forward.¹

Wherever the word comes from, po is a great tool for playing with ideas and seeing the potential surrounding them, without getting too caught up in the details.

The SCAMPER (Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to another use, Eliminate, Reverse) technique is a highly portable creativity toolbox. It was developed by Bob Eberle as a unified set of brainstorming tools with a simple mnemonic and was first published by Michael Michalko in his book Thinkertoys.¹

You can't get data off a computer with a blank hard drive, and you can't get creative ideas out of your brain without having put something into it first. SCAMPER is a structured way of seeding your brain's random-number generator [Hack #19] to produce creative output when you feel uninspired.

Many hacks in this book use some form of randomized input to stimulate creativity or to break deadlocked decisions, such as seeding your mental random-number generator [Hack #19], rolling the dice [Hack #49], not overthinking it [Hack #48], and forcing connections [Hack #20]. This should not surprise you. Human use of random stimuli is ancient, ranging from staring at the clouds, to reading entrails, to poring over Tarot cards. The human brain is well adapted to finding patterns in a wide range of stimuli, so it's smart to use this natural functionality to focus conscious thought and capture less-conscious thoughts.

In recent years, a new genre of random stimulus has been developed that I'll call the creativity deck. Designers of creativity decks aim to fill them with ideas and strategies that are good in themselves and don't require so much dreamy dissociation to work—as cloud gazing does, for example. These decks have become enormously popular, so there are now many to choose from. And they're available in many different formats, so you can select a deck and format to suit your tastes and needs.

Because the word constraint has such negative connotations in our culture, and because this book is about freeing your mind, you might be wondering if I'm about to attempt an Orwellian war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength reversal. Examples of paradoxically productive, even freeing constraint familiar to people in our culture aren't hard to come by, however: for example, it is actually easier to write good poetry with rhyme and meter than good free verse, because rhyme and meter force your pen to interesting places it would never normally visit—a potent mind performance hack bequeathed to us by the ancients!

Some French artists known collectively as the Oulipo ( Ouvroir de Littèrature Potentielle, or Workshop for Potential Literature) have brought the theory and practice of creative constraints to a refinement never before experienced. Unconstrained writing, such as free verse or ordinary prose, is of no interest to the Oulipo. Rules and games as applied to literature are the sole reason for being of the group, which was founded in 1960. Even rhyme and meter are considered insignificant as constraints by these pioneers, who prefer to write enormous palindromes, novels without the letter E, and farces whose structure is determined by the mathematical principles of combinatorics.

There are many media to which constraints can be applied besides literature, so you can still use this hack even if you are not a writer. Oulipian offshoots for different art forms include the Oubapo (for bandes dessinèes, or comic strips), Oucinepo (cinema), Oucuipo (cuisine), Ouhistpo (history), Oumupo (music), Oupeinpo (peinture, or painting), and Ouphopo (photography); experiments have even been performed in Oulipian computer programming and mathematics.

In "Enjoy Good, Clean Memetic Sex" [Hack #26], I compare thinking to sex and explore the consequences of that analogy. However, I don't explore the process of comparison itself and how to elaborate the analogy derived. Making analogies is an excellent thinking hack, and the techniques for doing so are worth exploration.

Recent studies indicate that much creative thought is the result of cognitive blending—mapping the elements of one idea onto another—a primary form of which is analogy.¹ Thinking analogically can help you to create more prolifically,² and recent advances in formalization of analogical thought mean that you can understand the richness available ever more rigorously.³

Memes are self-reproducing ideas. According to the theory of memetics, they act like genes by using our minds to replicate themselves, just as our genes use our bodies to do so. The idea of memes was independently discovered by British ethologist Richard Dawkins and several other thinkers. Dawkins, who coined the term meme, explains memes this way:

Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperm or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.¹

There are many similarities between genes and memes. Just as genes are transmitted during sexual intercourse in the biosphere, so are ideas transmitted during social intercourse in the mental realm, or ideosphere. shows some examples of correspondences between the genetic and memetic realms.

The memetic realm also has some important differences from the genetic realm. Memes combine, recombine, mutate, and reproduce much more flexibly and rapidly than genes do. This is one way that genetic sex does not map completely to memetic sex. For example, the memetic counterparts of gender and sexual orientation are complicated. From a memetic standpoint, we are all intersexual beings: everyone is able to both transmit and receive ideas, although some people have a stronger tendency toward one than they do toward the other. I'll just suggest that a memetic equivalent of the Kinsey Scale might be called for, and then move on.

Practically everyone has worked to music at one time or another, from late-night college study sessions to the night shift at a fast-food joint. Consider the beat of a drum to encourage a crew pulling at oars, or the fife and drum corps of an army. Music has always been used to change people's moods and get them to work together; it coevolved with ritual drama, which was also used to change people's state of mind.

However, what is appropriate for one situation might not be appropriate for another, and the same music that gets a team working in synchrony might be completely distracting for someone who is trying to think in solitude. The converse holds true, of course. Some kinds of music are appropriate for thinking that would probably be a drag on physical work.

Hypnagogia is the mental state between waking and sleep, the "half-asleep" state. The word comes from the Greek hypnos (sleep) and agogeus (leader or conductor); hypnagogia is the state that leads us into or out of sleep.

Many thinkers throughout history have found hypnagogia to be a fathomless well of creative black gold. For example, the surrealist painter Salvador Dali developed a technique to help him visualize dream landscapes of bizarre beauty, which he would paint upon awaking.

Dali is also said to have trained himself to doze in a chair with his chin resting on a spoon that was held in one hand, propped by his elbow, which rested on a table. In this position, when his muscles relaxed and he was on the verge of falling asleep, his chin would drop and he would wake, often in the middle of a hypnagogic dream or vision which he would then proceed to paint.¹ For instance, this technique likely inspired his painting "Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bumblebee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening."²

Such techniques can also be useful to hardheaded businesspeople and inventors. For example, Thomas Alva Edison was known to use a similar technique. He put the hypnagogic state to work when he was an adult and had an unusual technique: he would doze off in a chair with his arms and hands draped over the armrests. In each hand, he held a ball bearing. Below each hand on the floor were two pie plates. When he drifted into the state between waking and sleeping, his hands would naturally relax and the ball bearings would drop on the plate. Awakened by the noise, Edison would immediately make notes on any ideas that had come to him.

Dreams can be amazing things and can offer incredible creative riches in the form of beautiful images, plotlines for fiction, even ideas for new inventions. If you want a connection to the activities of the dream world, this is the easiest way to do it.

Besides discovering the principles of gravitation, Sir Isaac Newton discovered a basic principle of human thought: if you want an answer to a question, simply hold the question firmly in mind. When Newton was asked how he had discovered the laws of gravitation, he answered, "By thinking about it day and night." He also said, "If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been due more to patient attention than to any other talent," and "I keep the subject constantly before me and wait 'till the first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into a full and clear light."¹

In his book The Laws of Form, mathematician and philosopher G. Spencer Brown writes about Newton's insight in this regard:

To arrive at the simplest truth, as Newton knew and practised, requires years of contemplation. Not activity. Not reasoning. Not calculating. Not busy behavior of any kind. Not reading. Not talking. Not making an effort. Not thinking. Simply bearing in mind what it is one needs to know. And yet those with the courage to tread this path to real discovery are not only offered practically no guidance on how to do so, they are actively discouraged and have to set about it in secret, pretending meanwhile to be diligently engaged in the frantic diversions and to conform with the deadening personal opinions which are being continually thrust upon them.²

The more intently you hold the question in mind, the closer the answer to the question will come to you.

However, Newton's quotations and Brown's commentary require interpretation. People frequently reply, "It can't be like that. Just holding a question in mind doesn't help. You have to do stuff."

That is true. You do have to read. You have to work and think. You have to pay attention. Most importantly, you have to be ready to receive results, instead of pursuing them aggressively.

Suppose you are writing a screenplay. Here are some examples of questions you might ask yourself when you are stuck:

Some of your most fruitful thinking can occur when you deliberately switch to another way of looking at things. You can think of these switches as being like key changes in a piece of music. For example, you can obtain useful effects by unexpectedly switching "keys" in the middle of a work of fiction from space opera to soap opera.

Modulating from the sublime (such as sainthood) to the ridiculous (such as platform shoes in a 1970s disco) is a comic effect known as bathos, but it's equally possible to modulate from the ridiculous back to the sublime. James Joyce's book Finnegans Wake often fuses chords of the sublime, the ridiculous, and the grittily political not just within a paragraph or a sentence, but often within a single word. (You can, too, if you put your words in the blender [Hack #50].)

Changing conceptual keys works for all forms of art—at least, in some situations. Imagine that you're an architect or an interior decorator. You might decide that you want the entry to a house to have Gothic sweep, but that a more intimate interior meditation room should be styled after a Japanese zendo.

The most useful key change for problem solving, as well as certain art forms, might not be adopting another style, but adopting the entire worldview of another person, creature, or even inanimate object.

When you next have an idea that solves a problem or that you are pleased with for some other reason, take the time to review the process by which you got there. Doing so can help you refine the idea, and it also helps you to have more good ideas in the future.

I've suggested elsewhere that sometimes it's useful not to overthink things [Hack #48]. Sometimes, however, it is useful to chew a topic over and over until you know it like the taste of your own mouth.

As part of a recent job, I had to spend up to an hour twice a day commuting on a bus. I spent a lot of time reading. I also spent a lot of time meditating [Hack #60], because if you can meditate on a noisy, crowded bus and not just in a tranquil zendo, you're getting somewhere, and I don't mean downtown. But the thing I did the most by far was stare into space, and I don't regret it at all.

What I was really doing was thinking, pure thinking. Thinking is a wonderful way to spend your free moments. Thinking is portable, inexpensive, and environmentally safe; it requires no equipment, and you can do it even with a serious physical disability. Best of all, since thinking is universally applicable, you can make progress on any problem of interest simply by directing your attention toward it.

The kind of thinking I'm describing is extremely focused. I'm not talking about daydreaming here, although experiments at Yale have shown that daydreaming can increase your self-control and creativity.¹

What I am talking about is setting some time aside for an extended course of directed thought, which can be hard work but is usually more fruitful than woolgathering.

If you're lucky enough to be self-employed or independently wealthy, you can make your own schedule for directed thought. The rest of us can still grab time on the bus, at the doctor's office, in the car while driving the kids to soccer practice, or in line at the grocery store. If you give yourself the gift of this time for purposeful, directed thought instead of (say) ogling soap opera stars in the tabloids at the checkout counter, you will enrich your life considerably.

When translating text from one language to another, you might need words that seem to lie somewhere between the available words. When you apprehend new concepts, you might face a similar problem. Visualizing the spectrum of meanings that lie between two words can help you form new concepts and work with them more easily.

Most people need a calculator to do even simple arithmetic. There's nothing wrong with that, but if a calculator isn't available, it can become a problem. And even if you don't count the time to find the calculator, mental arithmetic can actually be faster than a calculator, too.

 1100000

  270000

 3300000

+  30000

 3300000

 1100000

  270000

+  30000

Just like a face in a crowd, a number such as 1,729 probably doesn't mean much to you. But 1,000,000 looks like a friendly face. With some effort, more numbers can look like friends. Here's how to get started making their acquaintance.

314 × 1000 = 314000

2030 / 100 = 20.3

217 / 25 = (4 × 217) / 100 = 868 / 100 = 8.68

Before decimals such as 3.5 were invented, people had to use numbers with fractional parts instead, such as 3¹/². In many division problems, they had to reduce fractions with large numbers—for example, 243 / 405—to their lowest terms—in this case, ³/⁵. Knowing rules to determine divisibility by the integers from 1 through 12, or from 1 through 15, was very useful in that precalculator time.¹

If you want to strengthen your mental math powers, knowing the same rules can be useful to you today. In particular, these rules are helpful with math tricks that involve factoring numbers, such as simplified mental multiplication. Sometimes, knowing that a number is evenly divisible by another number goes at least halfway toward knowing what the answer is.

It's important to have some way to check your mental math that doesn't take as long as solving the problem did originally, and ideally is much shorter. It's easy to check your math for the four basic operations of arithmetic (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division) by calculating digit sums for the numbers involved. A digit sum is a special kind of checksum or data integrity check. Checksums are used all over the world of computing, from credit cards to ISBNs on books, to downloads you make with your web browser. Now your brain can use them, too.

Finding the digit sum of a number is easy. Just add all the digits of the number together. If the result is greater than 9, add the digits together again. Continue to do so until you have a one-digit result. If the result is 9, reduce it to 0. The result is the digit sum of the original number.¹

For example, the digit sum of 381 is 3:

3 + 8 + 1 = 12

1 + 2 = 3

Similarly, the digit sum of 495 is 0:

4 + 9 + 5 = 18

1 + 8 = 9 (same as 0)

A number's digit sum is actually that number modulo 9—in other words, the remainder when that number is divided by 9. See "Calculate Any Weekday" [Hack #43] for a refresher on modulo arithmetic.

This technique is also known as casting out nines. Casting out nines and a similar technique known as casting out elevens (discussed in the following section) are all you need to check your arithmetic calculations rapidly and to a high degree of accuracy.

Chisenbop is an ancient Korean technique for calculations with the human hand. The classic text on Chisenbop in English is The Complete Book of Fingermath.¹ Unfortunately, it is expensive, aimed toward children, and takes hundreds of pages to explain principles that an educated adult can learn in a few minutes. One important thing that the book can offer you, however, is page after page of drills. Chisenbop should become a motor skill, not something you have to think about.

Fingermath also uses many full, detailed drawings of hands in action, which is another reason the book is so long. Fortunately, the Wikipedia presents a notation that can radically compress Chisenbop diagrams on the page, as shown in .²

-

@ 

. 

o 

^ 

v 

You can combine the finger notation across two hands, as shown in the examples in .

....-  -....

oooo@  @oooo

....@  @....

oooo-  -oooo

....-  -o...

...v-  ^^^^^

This remainder of this hack describes the basic operations of Chisenbop.

You probably already know that you can use Chisenbop [Hack #39] to count to 100 or more and do simple arithmetic on your fingers. If you switch from the decimal numeral system to binary, however, you can use your fingers to count to about 2²⁰, which is 1,048,576—more than a million!¹

4309 = (4 x 1000) + (3 x 100) + (0 x 10) + (9 x 1)

               10011 = (1 x 16) + (0 x 8) + (0 x 4) + (1 x 2) + (1 x 1) = 19

An order-of-magnitude estimate is an estimate to the nearest power of 10. For instance, an order-of-magnitude estimate of 400 means the true value is closer to 400 than 40 or 4,000. The estimates we're discussing in this hack are called rough order-of-magnitude (ROM) estimates because we're not completely sure we're within an order of magnitude.

Other terms for this kind of estimate are ballpark estimates (as in, "Are we even in the ballpark?") and educated or scientific wild-ass guesses. As all of these names suggest, the idea is to determine roughly how large a number is, or whether a task is trivial, possible, or absurd.

It's often useful to compute the square root of a number, especially when you want to visualize areas or compute diagonal distances. There are a few methods for computing square roots on paper, some of which are not widely known. If all you have is your brain, however, it's still possible to come up with a quick estimate that's reasonably accurate.

50 00 00

The imperfect Gregorian calendar, when combined with the imperfect Earth year—which is an even multiple of neither 12 (the number of months) nor 7 (the number of days in the week), but instead an icky 365.24237404 days long (approximately!)—means that, for most of us to find what day of the week a meeting falls on, we have to consult a wall calendar or our PDA.

But what if you had your own perpetual calendar in your head? What if you could, with practice, take just a few seconds to calculate any day of the week from centuries ago and into the distant future, when they finally nudge the Earth into a more reasonable orbit?

You can. Here's how.^1,2

(YY + (YY div 4)) mod 7

This decision-making hack is similar to the technique known as bulletproofing¹ but with a much finer resolution and ability to compare concerns. The idea of bulletproofing is to do "negative brainstorming" about all the things that could possibly go wrong with a project, and then to rank them by priority on a chart labeled "Minor problem" and "Major problem" on one axis, and "Unlikely" and "Very likely" on the other axis. ranks four things that could go wrong for an average smoker.

In , "Getting struck by a meteor" and "Dying from smoking" are on the "Major problem" side of the chart, but "Getting struck by a meteor" is on the "Unlikely" side and "Dying from smoking" is on the "Very likely" side. The goal is to attend to the potential problems that are major problems if they occur and are very likely. Sneezing is, of course, very likely, but also not much of a problem; having to scratch the back of the prime minister of Thailand just isn't worth thinking about, because it will probably never happen, and if it did, who cares?

What if we want a resolution that is higher than this simple binary measurement? That's where the Likert Scale comes in. In the early 1930s, the psychologist Rensis Likert (pronounced lick-ert) developed the Likert Scale for questionnaires intended to measure attitudes. Attitudes are rated on either a five-point or a seven-point scale; the seven-point scale is considered more accurate, since it has a higher resolution.^2,3

Physicist J. Richard Gott III has so far correctly predicted when the Berlin Wall would fall and calculated the duration of 44 Broadway shows.¹ Controversially, he has predicted that the human race will probably exist between 5,100 and 7.8 million more years, but no longer. He argues that this is a good reason to create self-sustaining space colonies: if the human race puts some eggs in other nests, we might extend the life span of our species in case of an asteroid strike or nuclear war on the home planet.²

Gott believes that his simple calculations can be extended to almost anything at all, within certain parameters. To predict how long something will be around by using these calculations, all you need to know is how long it has been around already.

Some situations in life are like games, and the mathematical discipline of game theory, which studies game strategies, can be applied to them.

In game theory, a dominant strategy is a plan that's better than all the other plans that you can choose, no matter what your opponents do. In other words, a dominant strategy is better than some courses of action in some of the possible situations, and never worse than other courses. Look for a dominant strategy before looking for any other kind of strategy.¹

In sequential games, such as chess or Go, players take turns. You consider your opponent's previous moves, look ahead to anticipate her best moves, and extrapolate to find the optimal move to counter her; the initiative then passes to your opponent, who does the same.

On the other hand, in simultaneous games, where players' moves are planned and are executed at the same time, seeking a dominant strategy is helpful. For example, in a presidential debate, you can only guess what your opponent will say and do. In such a situation, using a dominant strategy to know the best possible move regardless of your opponent's move, which you cannot know, is indispensable—if a dominant strategy exists.

We've already seen that it's important to find dominant strategies [Hack #46] when you make decisions, if possible. If you're lucky enough to have a single dominant strategy, your choice is clear.

Sometimes, however, neither opponent has a dominant strategy. In that case, the opponents should try to eliminate strategies from consideration that are dominated and to continue eliminating weaker strategies until a single strategy emerges as clearly superior. When each opponent has settled on a single strategy, they have reached a pure strategy equilibrium, which is the best that either opponent can rationally hope for.¹

On our third trek through the foothills of game theory, let's leave the wilds of Titanium Chef behind. Instead, imagine you are playing a game in which you hold a black Go stone in one hand and a white Go stone in the other. Your opponent must choose the hand holding the white stone. If she chooses correctly, she wins $1 from you; if she does not, she pays you $1.

Now imagine that your opponent is super-intelligent and will always outguess you. If you intentionally hide the white stone in your right hand, she will choose that hand. If you decide that she knows you will hide the stone in your right hand, and you try to outsmart her and hide it in your left, she will know that you know she knows, and she will decide to pick your left hand. No matter which hand you decide to hide the stone in while trying to outthink her, she will always be able to outthink you and pick the correct hand.

In this situation, the optimal strategy is to shake the Go stones in your cupped hands so that even you do not know which is which, and randomly take one in each hand. In fact, that is always your optimal strategy in this game against a rational opponent, and you must usually assume your opponent is rational. Similarly, your opponent's rational strategy is to flip a coin to determine which hand to pick. You can never expect to do better than 50:50 against a rational opponent in this game, no matter which side you are on, and your optimal strategy is always a randomly chosen 50:50. Therefore, sometimes it's simply best not to overthink things!

Dicing, or dice living, is a decision-making technique developed by "Dice Man" Luke Rhinehart (pen name for George Cockcroft). While dicing is not a panacea, it is a many-sided remedy. It can:

As Rhinehart writes:¹

Dicing is simply one of many ways to attack seriousness. If you list six options, some moral, some immoral, some ambitious and some trivial, some spiritual and some lusty, and let chance decide what you do, then you are in effect challenging the seriousness of your acts, you are saying it doesn't matter what I do. When the die chooses an action I choose to do it with all my heart—that is the dice-person's controlled folly.

Controlled folly is a term that Rhinehart appropriated from the fiction of Carlos Castaneda. To act with controlled folly is to act with the belief that your actions are useless, but to do them anyway, and to care about them. This is the essence of dicing.

James Joyce wrote his last book, Finnegans Wake, in a language for the third millennium, a language of dreams. He called it nat language, a phrase that blends night language and not language. I call it Blnder, a blend of blender and blunder, because it mixes up words and people sometimes speak it by mistake.

Consider Lewis Carroll's (another master of Blnder) description of portmanteau words:

Take the two words "fuming" and "furious." Make up your mind that you will say both words, but leave it unsettled which you will say first. Now open your mouth and speak. If your thoughts incline ever so little towards "fuming," you will say "fuming-furious;" if they turn, by even a hair's breadth, towards "furious" you will say "furious-fuming;" but if you have the rarest of gifts, a perfectly balanced mind, you will say "frumious."¹

Blnder cannot represent reality perfectly, but it approximates it more closely than ordinary language does. Think of it as linguistic antialiasing or, to mix a metaphor (since we're mixing everything else), a linguistic triangulation on the object of discussion, pinpointing it along a fuzzy word spectrum [Hack #34].

Paradoxically, by blurring the boundaries between words, a portmanteau such as frumious is closer to a certain state of mind (frumiousness) than ordinary English words (furious, fuming) can ever be.

A conlang is a constructed language, more commonly known as an artificial language. Unlike C and Java, which are artificial languages created by humans for computers to use, conlangs are created by humans for humans to use.

Over the centuries, hundreds of conlangs have been created, and certainly many more projects that are private have never been published. Many conlangs were created with a specific purpose in mind, such as J.R.R. Tolkien's Elvish languages Sindarin and Quenya, which were created for their sheer beauty. Others were created for a laugh or to be used in movies or books.

Some languages are working languages, however, designed to liberate and empower human minds in a specific way. Esperanto, for example, was designed to break down cultural barriers between people of different cultures, and Lojban was designed to remove as many limitations on human thought as possible.

Although almost anyone can speak dogmatically without using the verb "to be" and also speak calmly and rationally with it, many people have found that eliminating "to be" from their speech and writing makes it easier to communicate flexibly and nondogmatically.¹

Alfred Korzybski, the founder of the discipline of general semantics, thought that the verb "to be" could lead to confused thought, confused action, and even fascism. Because so much of fascism consists of vilification of the enemy, and because so much of vilification of the enemy consists of calling them subhuman, identifying them with the forces of evil, and so on, fascists might find it hard to write propaganda without "to be."

Korzybski considered the use of "to be" as an auxiliary verb ("I am going next door") fairly innocuous, as well as several other uses. He primarily objected to two uses of the verb "to be," which he called identity and predication.

An example of identity:

An example of predication:

Of course, "I find Fred disgusting" contains an implicit form of the verb "to be":

I find Fred to be disgusting.

Readers might raise other objections. For example, Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy [Hack #57] questions the utility of "rating" human beings at all, instead of their behavior. Even complimenting another person with "to be" can have harmful effects. When you

Frank Gilbreth, the industrial psychologist who pioneered efficiency and time-motion studies in the early 20th century, invented a quick and simple way to learn Morse code. Only the first four letters of his Morse alphabet have survived, but this hack reconstructs the rest.

In their book, Cheaper by the Dozen, two of Gilbreth's children, now grown, describe how they learned Morse code:

For the next three days Dad was busy with his paint brush, writing code over the whitewash in every room... On the ceiling in the dormitory bedrooms, he wrote the alphabet together with key words, whose accents were a reminder of the code for the various letters... When you lay on your back, dozing, the words kept going through your head, and you'd find yourself saying, "DAN-ger-ous, dash-dot-dot, DAN-ger-ous."¹

This might not be the best way to learn Morse code—and understanding it when it is sent to you will certainly take practice—but it is the quickest and simplest method I know of. My family members picked up roughly half the alphabet just by hearing me describe this hack while I was writing it.

.-

-...

-.-.

-..

.

..-.

--.

....

..

.---

If someone walked up to you today and asked you to give a lunchtime talk about your favorite hobby tomorrow, how would you feel? If you're like most people, you'd probably think fast about an excuse to get out of it, and if you couldn't, you'd lose sleep tonight. Public speaking is terrifying to many people, even in such a low-pressure setting and with a topic that we find pleasant.

Because so many people fear public speaking, overcoming and harnessing that fear can give you a distinct advantage. It's a powerful skill, and it comes into play for almost everyone at some time in their lives. Most businesspeople will be called on to give a presentation about something in their careers, for example. Even if you don't have that kind of job and aren't an actor, stage fright can sneak up on you if you attend a meeting of your church or neighborhood association, take a class and need to ask questions, or decide to lead a Girl Scout troop.

Human beings have acquired several different kinds of learning during the course of our evolution. Being able to acquire short-term disposable knowledge (such as where we left our spear) without cluttering up our brain with useless trivia might have been just as important to our survival as learning the long-term skills (such as building a fire or knowing when to plant crops) commonly associated with survival. As modern humans, if we learn something and then forget it before we want to, it might be because our brain never indexed it for long-term use.

Often, this occurs because information is coming at us so fast that our brain just can't keep up. Studies have shown that our short-term memory can in fact hold only between five and nine items [Hack #11], depending on the information.¹ Thus, if your short-term memory is full and you are given new items to learn, your brain will be forced to sacrifice. This hack provides some advice that will help you control the incoming flow of information so that your brain has a chance to index it in your long-term memory.

Learning is something we do, not something we receive. When we are tasked with learning some large, new body of knowledge, it is up to us to control the flow of information we are receiving, to the best that the situation allows. This will allow our brain to process the information and build the deep structures necessary for true comprehension—learning that stays with us, that we can readily recall in the future.

Failure to stem the flow of input can result in frustration, stress, or short-term learning that can't be called up the next time we need to apply it. It wastes not only our own time, but also the time of the person teaching us.

When you're reading a sentence, you don't understand it word by word, but rather phrase by phrase. Phrases are groups of words that can be bundled together, and they're related by the rules of grammar. A noun phrase will include nouns and adjectives, and a verb phrase will include a verb and a noun, for example. These phrases are the building blocks of language, and we naturally chunk sentences into phrase blocks just as we chunk visual images into objects.

This means that we don't treat every word individually as we hear it; we treat words as parts of phrases and have a buffer (a very short-term memory) that stores the words as they come in, until they can be allocated to a phrase. Sentences become cumbersome not if they're long, but if they overrun the buffer required to parse them, and that depends on how long the individual phrases are.

The ABC model of emotion, widespread in contemporary psychotherapy, holds that it is not an activating (A) event, such as rejection by a friend or lover, that causes you emotional consequences (C) such as depression; rather, the linchpin is your invisible beliefs (B) about the event that come in between A and C. Fortunately, it's often easier to intentionally change beliefs than emotions.

Since at least the time of the ancient Stoics, some have believed that our circumstances don't control whether we're happy, but our thoughts about them do. Our reasoned thoughts and beliefs form a kind of buffer between reality and our private selves—in theory. In practice, our thoughts often don't buffer us from events we don't like so much as amplify those experiences, causing us emotional turmoil and suffering. In fact, our thoughts can be so irrational and so removed from reality that they often make us suffer, even when nothing is objectively wrong.

Questioning the irrational thoughts that cause you emotional pain and thereby cloud your reasoning can help you think more clearly and act more effectively. This hack explores the ABC model of emotion pioneered by Albert Ellis, developer of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT). You can use it as a lever to heave off the massive boulders of emotional self-oppression.¹

This hack will help you recognize the kinds of irrational thinking that you, like everyone else, tend to engage in from time to time. Reducing your irrational thinking will often help you to become a happier, and therefore more rational and effective, person.

The techniques in this hack can stand alone—after you recognize these thoughts for what they are, they lose much of their power—but the techniques work better when you use them as part of the ABC model of emotion [Hack #57], so I recommend that you read that hack first. These distorted thoughts tend to occur at the B stage of that ABC model.

The Fourfold Breath, a kind of pranayama yoga, is an effective brute-force method of calming your body by consciously controlling your rate and pattern of breathing. It's simple to learn, and easy to do and remember.

You can use the Fourfold Breath as an adjunct to deeper work, such as a warm-up (or a cool-down, strictly speaking) before meditation [Hack #60]. It's also useful as a means of gaining clarity and rationality when you're stressed or panicked, a sort of emergency first aid for clear thinking.

There are many kinds of meditation. The kind described in this hack is called vipassana, or insight meditation. Vipassana is the primary meditation technique of Theravada Buddhism, which you might think of as "orthodox" Buddhism; it is the sect that has remained closest to the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama from 2,500 years ago.

These brief instructions on how to meditate are intended to be useful for insight meditation only; if you wish to try another kind, you will have to consult another source.

The benefits of insight meditation include the following:

The ultimate goal of insight meditation is nirvana or nibbana. Most people suppose that this term means something like heaven or eternal bliss; actually, its literal meaning is something like cooling off, and it refers to eliminating or minimizing the suffering you feel.¹

Naturally, if you're boiling over with hatred and rage, you can't think clearly. Other strong emotional states can distract you as well, as can constant internal monologue. Meditation aims to reduce how often you find yourself in those states.

Hypnosis is an altered state of consciousness that is available to most human beings without the use of drugs. Definitions of hypnosis vary, but most of them emphasize the following characteristics of a hypnotic trance:

This hack will help you motivate yourself, boost your confidence, and achieve a short-term goal. With regular use, self-hypnosis may also allow you to achieve longer-term goals and change other things about your thinking patterns as well. It is quite safe for most people, and since you are hypnotizing yourself in a quiet, isolated environment, you need not fear that anyone will make you think you're a chicken.

Language might be an astoundingly efficient way of getting information into your head from the outside, but that's not its only job. It also helps you think. Far from being a sign of madness, talking to yourself is something at the essence of being human.

Instead of dwelling on the evolution of language and its role in rewiring the brain into its modern form¹, let's look at one way the brain can use language to do cognitive work. Specifically we're talking about the ability of language to combine information in ordered structures—in a word: syntax.

Peter Carruthers, at the University of Maryland,² has proposed that language syntax is used to combine, simultaneously, information from different cognitive modules. By "modules," he means specialized processes into which we have no insight,³ such as color perception or instant numbers. You don't know how you know that something is red or that there are two coffee cups, you just know. Without language syntax, the claim is, we can't combine this information.

The theory seems pretty bold—or maybe even wrong—but we'll go through the evidence Carruthers uses and the details of exactly what he means, and you can make up your own mind. If he's right, the implications are profound, and it clarifies exactly how deeply language is entwined with thought. At the very least, we hope to convince you that something interesting is going on in these experiments.

Interviewers have a range of well-honed techniques that they use to gather information. You can apply the psychology of interviewing to yourself to gain perspective on your own thinking, particularly where you need to make a decision.

The completely objective person is a common trope in science fiction, from the mentats (so-called "human computers") in Dune, to the legal profession of Fair Witness in Robert Heinlein's novel Stranger in a Strange Land, to the character of Mr. Spock on Star Trek. Being dispassionate is also a fairly common geek ideal, and occurs in both Western and Eastern philosophies (the Stoic Sage and the Buddha). However, some postmodern philosophers such as Paul Feyerabend and Richard Rorty have questioned the concept of objectivity, saying that every human being is biased in some way. "You can't be objective" has become a commonplace in certain segments of our culture, such as academia.

The Wikipedia Project, a collaborative web-based encyclopedia that has surpassed the Encyclopaedia Britannica both in the number of articles it contains and in the amount of Internet traffic it receives, recognizes the ubiquity of human bias and the hard problem of objectivity, but has attempted to forge a practical official policy anyway. The project has developed a set of guidelines it calls the neutral point of view (NPOV).

Despite the fact that any casual reader can click the "edit this page" button on a Wikipedia article to fill it with bigotry and nonsense (for any values of "bigotry" and "nonsense" you care to define), the NPOV enables Wikipedians to reach a stable consensus on articles ranging from capitalism to abortion, to the death penalty. These guidelines can be a useful mental-clarity hack because they can enable you to settle arguments, see other points of view, reveal your own invisible biases, and, most importantly, transmute the dung of biased human opinion into the gold of uncontested fact.

Your mind is like your car: it has its own direction and momentum. The momentum is important: once your mind is moving in a certain direction (that is, focused on a certain subject), it will continue moving in that direction until something—either the driver (you) or a concrete embankment (life)—alters its course.

For our purposes, mental momentum comes in two varieties: positive and negative. Positive mental momentum happens when you are caught up in something you ought to be doing; negative mental momentum happens when you are caught up in something you ought not to be doing.

Productivity consultant Alan Lakein developed something he called the Swiss cheese method: breaking up a large project into many small tasks of five minutes or less¹ (this is analogous to the next task concept in the Getting Things Done system²). If you start these tasks with the intention of working on them for only five minutes, not only will you drill a lot of five-minute holes in the cheese of your project, but also—and this is important—you might find that you don't want to stop when the five minutes are up. This is positive mental momentum.

Unfortunately, mental momentum also comes in the negative variety. Unless you're aware of it—and your own predilection toward it—negative mental momentum can prevent intelligent focus. Negative mental momentum is the proverbial human tendency of not seeing the forest for the trees—or becoming entranced with the patterns in the bark of one particular tree of the forest, or the colors of the carapace of a beetle on the bark.... The tendency to engage in small and manageable but irrelevant activities with nice boundaries, and not get around to less well-defined but more important activities, is endless and comes in many forms:

Sometimes the mind simply doesn't want to think. The morning caffeine hasn't kicked in yet, or perhaps it is wearing off. Thought seems like an effort. In this situation, you might normally be inclined to wait until the sluggishness wears off, perhaps by taking a break with someone else's thoughts (browsing the Web, reading a book, or watching TV, for example).

If you would really rather get busy, you might be able to push past the threshold of resistance by doing a little mental warm-up. If thinking is normally a pleasurable activity for you, a small amount of it that requires only a small effort can remind you of this pleasure and motivate you to begin or resume your thinking in earnest.

A good mental warm-up activity is one that is small in scale and gives you at least a small sense of accomplishment. The smallness of scale is important so that the warm-up is easy to begin and easy to end. Ideally, the warm-up will require no preparation so that you can start on a whim.

You must also be able to stop on a whim. Although this might seem like a fast path to abandoning the warm-up in exchange for the web browser, it is important that you be able to stop once you feel mentally alert. This might be difficult if you get too much pleasure out of the exercise or if it involves a goal that you end up wanting to achieve. For this reason, small puzzles (for example, brainteasers) are good for mental warm-ups, but large puzzles are not. A large puzzle (for example, a crossword puzzle) might warm you up (a crossword puzzle is composed of many small puzzles, after all), but it might also suck you in and not release you until you've completed the whole thing.

Maybe you think you know about board games, but if you're thinking of that Christmas present from your uncle with the pictures from your favorite cartoon on it that you had as a kid, stop right now. This is not your mom's Monopoly; board games are enjoying a worldwide renaissance in recent years, emerging in an ever-increasing array of sophistication, complexity, and ingenuity. In Germany, the nexus of modern "designer gaming," board gaming is so popular that a "game of the year" prize, the Spiel des Jahres, is awarded with great public interest. People everywhere and of all ages are getting hip to the fun, challenge, satisfaction, and intellectual development available for the taking by sitting down at a game table.

Modern board games are an excellent way to exercise and develop a variety of mental skills. In almost any game, you can improve your tactical and strategic ability, as well as learn the difference between tactics and strategy, and when to employ both. You can increase your understanding of statistics and probability, learn how to negotiate and make deals with other people, as well as play together toward a common goal, and become more adept at deduction and problem solving.

You can also learn raw information and gain a deeper, more integrated understanding of geography, sociology, military science, politics, and history. Board games can be the laboratory where you put theoretical mental skills into practice and strengthen them under testing and sparring situations. Board games are the dojo where your brain works out and goes from student to ninja. In short, you might get more out of a box of cardboard pieces and bits of wood and plastic than you might ever have dreamed.

Our visual processing abilities are by no means hardwired and fixed from birth. There are limits, but the brain's nothing if not plastic. With practice, we can improve the attentional mechanisms that sort and edit visual information. One activity that requires you to practice lots of the skills involved in visual attention is playing video games.

So, what is the effect of playing lots of video games? Shawn Green and Daphne Bavelier from the University of Rochester, New York, have researched precisely this question; their results were published in the paper "Action Video Game Modifies Visual Attention,"¹ available online at http://www.bcs.rochester.edu/people/daphne/visual.html#video.

Two of the effects they looked at are the attentional blink and subitizing. The attentional blink is that half-second recovery time required to spot a second target in a rapid-fire sequence. And subitizing is that alternative to counting for very low numbers (four and below), the almost instantaneous mechanism we have for telling how many items we can see. Training can both increase the subitization limit and shorten the attentional blink, meaning we're able to simultaneously spot more of what we want to spot and do it faster, too.

Many tips for mental performance concentrate on extending productivity for a short while after tiredness kicks in, or aiming for a slightly higher peak during a work period. Importantly, all of these increases in performance are relative to your normal or baseline level of functioning. You can often obtain more substantial and more widely effective gains in mental ability by making sure that your baseline performance is at an optimum. Tuning sleep, nutrition, and exercise is one effective way of doing this.

The brain, like any other organ in the body, works best when it is optimally fueled and is given adequate time to recover after periods of extended exertion or effort. Here, fuel does not mean energy in the form of only those foods that are broken down into glucose, but also those that provide essential nutrients needed for a wide range of complex functions. Neuroscience research has now identified a number of brain nutrients that can result in varying degrees of mental impairment if a deficiency exists.

On the other hand, sleep is still a bit of a mystery. Despite the fact that it takes up about a third of our time, we know surprisingly little about why we sleep. The nearest to a current consensus among scientists is that sleep, and particularly REM sleep, makes sense of disparate, emotionally fragmented, or weakly coupled memories and weaves them into a coherent structure that the brain can use more effectively during wakefulness. It is not clear, however, whether this theory is popular because memory is easy to test and so provides plenty of supporting evidence, or whether the function of sleep might be much broader, but evidence for the other functions has thus far been harder to come by. Either way, it is clear that lack of sleep causes a whole range of cognitive problems, suggesting that it fulfills an important role in maintaining the mind and brain at their peak.

Here's the straight dope about getting a good night's sleep. There's no miracle method here, no secret that will let you survive and thrive on less than four hours a night. But hopefully, you should be able to make sure that you spend more of the time you allocate to sleeping actually asleep, and spend less of the time you want to be awake sleepy.

Everybody has slightly different preferences about when and how they sleep. The idea of morning people and evening people is solid fact, not myth.¹ People also vary in how much sleep they need, and how they feel when they don't get it. We don't need to be macho about it. If you need nine hours a night, that's normal; don't starve yourself. Many of the people who supposedly need very little sleep are nappers, such as Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher, two British prime ministers who famously got by on four hours a night or less. Others kept up sparse sleep habits for short periods only when they had big projects going, such as Leonardo da Vinci, who reported that he'd sleep for 15 minutes every four hours.²

Too little sleep is bad for your health and it will make you feel rotten, even if you are awake. That said, too much sleep is bad for you as well.³ The average is seven to eight hours a night, with variation among individuals about how much and exactly when they want to take it. This hack is about quality and efficiency of sleep, about making sure that when you want to be asleep you are, and that when you do sleep it's good sleep.

One function of your biological clock is to adjust your level of wakefulness during the day. As a general rule, concentration and logical reasoning peak between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., and alertness peaks between 4 p.m. and 8 p.m. A sleepy feeling in the early afternoon known as the post-lunch dip is common. A large lunch with alcoholic drinks will clearly contribute to the effect, but the effect is present even without it.

These patterns aren't the only diurnal fluctuations in awareness, which vary from person to person. Mapping your own variation in mindset over the course of the day will allow you to plan accordingly. The intention is to use the pattern to your advantage, instead of trying to maintain some optimal state.

The brain is one of the most energy-hungry of the human organs. Despite making up only about 2% of the average body weight, it uses almost 20% of the normal intake of energy. Although the brain comprises mostly fat, this is mainly used to protect and insulate brain cells and is not available as an energy store. It therefore relies on the rest of the body to provide it with a supply of energy, which consists almost entirely of glucose. The brain uses up its own glucose supplies in about 5–10 minutes if they are not replenished, meaning it is particularly sensitive to changes in blood glucose levels.

As part of this process, oxygen is also needed and is another essential component of the brain's fuel supply. Oxygen is used as part of glucose metabolism to provide brain cells with a number of important chemicals that allow them to support themselves and communicate with other neurons.

Mental performance relies on the functioning of the brain, and like with any other organ, this performance is linked to how many resources are available. Research has shown that in some instances, mental performance is rate-limited by the available glucose and oxygen. In other words, you can increase the rate of mental processing by increasing the available fuel.

It turns out that this effect is not global, and it typically affects some mental abilities more than others. To get the best performance increase, you need to know how quickly glucose and oxygen are metabolized in the body to perfect your timing, and which mental processes are most affected to select your task.

Mind-altering substances have been used for millennia to alter how we perceive and understand the world. Some of these substances have been taken because they are thought to enhance specific aspects of our thought and behavior to enable us to become more productive—caffeine is a popular example.

More recently, advances in drug testing and development and a better understanding of how the brain works have resulted in drugs that are intended to boost intelligence or cognition in specific ways. Often, these drugs have been developed to help with specific illnesses or conditions, but they are now gaining notoriety, as they are being used illegally by people hoping to improve performance during intense work or study periods. Others are still in development and are currently only in the experimental stages:

As a self-aware animal, you can motivate yourself with the techniques of animal training. You can increase the number of your accomplishments by defining measurable units of achievement, breaking down your project into those units, and then giving yourself either a fixed reward per accomplishment or a fixed negative punishment for each lapse—or both, if you prefer.

First, a word about definitions. Behaviorist and animal trainer Karen Pryor has a concise, classic definition of a behavioral reinforcer:¹

A reinforcer is anything that, occurring in conjunction with an act, tends to increase the probability that the act will occur again.

Technically, punishment is not a reinforcer, since it decreases the likelihood an action will occur. (Of course, sometimes that's what you want.) We won't go into the intricacies of the behaviorist definitions of positive and negative reinforcement, which probably don't mean what you think they do.² There is even debate among behaviorists whether self-administered reinforcement, as in this hack, is a coherent concept or is better defined as something like "self-monitoring."³ For the purposes of this hack, we'll just stick with the commonsense definitions of reward and punishment most people already have.

Despite my familiarity with a wide variety of mental techniques, I sometimes forget to use mind performance hacks when I need them most. For example, many times I could have used hypnosis [Hack #61] for self-motivation, but I simply didn't think of it in the moment. Similarly, in the middle of an argument, it's not easy to remember that the neutral point of view [Hack #64] can be a useful tool for settling disputes.

How can you remember to use mind performance hacks when you need them? You will need to do a little preparation in the form of outlining and memorization, but after that, you need to form only one habit: haul out your mental toolbox in moments of perplexity.