In his bestselling book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell wrote that it takes approximately 10,000 hours of practice to become a master in a particular field. Gladwell based this claim on several studies, including one by German psychologists who researched violinists during the 1990s. The study found that, over their lifetimes, elite violinists averaged 6,000 more hours of practice than non-elite ones.…
Some people have a knack for memorizing things. Consider the card counters who play blackjack in Las Vegas. They beat the house by keeping track of played cards and calculating the odds of being dealt a winner from what’s left. This is a minor feat compared to achievements in the USA Memory Championship. In 2013, entrants in this annual competition…
Imagine accurately making an object move left, turn right, stop, and back up, all without touching it or moving any part of your body. This astonishing feat is made possible by the technology of brain-controlled interfaces, also known as BCIs, which can send commands from your mind to a device and instruct it to perform various actions. If you can…
Our understanding of how heart function affects mental and emotional well-being has been advanced by leaps and bounds thanks to the Institute of HeartMath (IHM). Studies conducted by this pathbreaking research organization show that signals sent from the heart to the brain via the nervous system dramatically affect how we think and feel. As the IHM notes, “These heart signals…
Ever go to bed with the name of someone or something on the tip of your tongue? You just can’t quite remember it. Then you wake up the next morning, and bang! Mystery solved. This often happens to me after I watch an old movie on TCM, the Turner Classic Movies cable station. I’ll recognize an actor from the 1930s,…
It was with me at the beginning, almost before I was here myself. It will be there at the end, gently easing me closer to the secrets of the universe. It provides escape from daily stress. It makes all my problems disappear, at least for a little while. It helped me grow into what I am today. It is sleep.…
We tend to think of our internal organs as specialists, highly refined machines that work 24/7 at specific tasks. The one exception is the brain: the ultimate supercomputer that can make a multitude of decisions and manage our behavior with incredible speed and efficiency. Now research shows that the brain doesn’t have a monopoly on intelligence. The heart and stomach,…
I’m at one end of the couch, my 88-year-old father at the other in the living room of his condo in Fountain Hills, Arizona. We could easily pass for strangers, but not because of our limited contact since he moved here from New Jersey 28 years ago. Encroaching dementia has estranged my father from me as well as from himself.…
Few things unleash memories as vividly as a favorite song from our past. We don’t just remember the tune; we can often recall exactly where we were, whom we were with, sometimes even what we were wearing when we first heard a tune on our personal Top Hits list. There are a number of reasons for this powerful recollection, including…
