It Is Actually Possible To Train Your Brain
An EcoChi Vital Abstract
This article was posted July 4, 2018 by Zat Rana, Quartz.
There are many rumors about the strange habits and capabilities of inventor Nikola Tesla. He was said only to need about two hours of sleep per night, supported by occasional naps. He apparently died without ever marrying and, possibly, without any intimate relationships, deeming them a distraction to work. He once spent $2,000 to treat an injured pigeon. He was quite cultured, speaking multiple languages, and he was very exact about his time. The most fascinating claim about him, however — and if true, this is likely the cause of his genius — is that he could visualize his inventions with such precision that when it came time to construct them, he didn’t need drawings, or require more than one try to get them right. Given that he is responsible for some of the most innovative engineering feats of the 20th century, this is beyond impressive. In fact, it may well explain how he did what he did. The reality we live in is incredibly complex. Yet, it’s clear that some people, like Tesla, for example, are far more effective than others at working with these limitations. In his research on expert performance, K. Anders Ericsson has found that what all experts have in common is a mental representation of their movements. For example, a professional golf player can visualize the perfect shot in her mind due to years and years of practice, and she can use this image to then recreate that shot in real life. Many things we deal with in life, we have dealt with before, and each experience we have, gives us new information that we can use to better interact with similar ones in the future. Just as an athlete or an inventor are experts in their domain, we can be experts at living. The most effective way to think is to combine all of the individual mental representations you use to deal with your life into one large, universal representation that captures your whole knowledge of how the universe works — a living, moving image of reality as you know it. When most of us learn something new and important that may be relevant to our lives, we create a condensed shortcut of it in our mind so that we can apply it to a future situation. We do this intuitively, but it can also be done deliberately, and when it is, it speeds up our ability to improve our decision-making. Words and sentences are static. Even when they are clear and refer to concrete symbols in the world, they operate rigidly, limiting their usefulness. Mental representations help us overcome this. They capture the fluidity of the world by making use of our visual logic. Everything in life connects to everything else. While there is a place for only applying what is needed for a given context, it’s also important to always reference that to something larger. Reality is textured and nuanced. To see it for what it is, we first need the right mental tools.
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