One implication of this is that location-based services are gradually appearing. These are apps that know where you are, and therefore which businesses and services you are near, or how far away people in your social network are. How far these will go is anyone’s guess. It depends on what numbers of people are comfortable with what level of sharing of their personal location. Many, perhaps particularly women, might feel uncomfortable with this. Nevertheless, the possibilities are huge. Imagine having a profile of yourself, including details on your interests, ambitions, habits, tastes etc., stored on a personal device, then as you walk about during your daily life, the device could constantly be alerting you for opportunities to meet people who you’d really benefit from meeting, and try new products and services that it knows you’d like, as you walk past them. The apps and technology for this are already in existence, all that’s needed is for them to be developed further and adopted more, before the true potential of this is seen.

Where are personal computers heading next? Undoubtedly even more mobile. Already we’re seeing wearable computing devices. Bracelets and belt clips are available for tracking your activity levels, storing the information online for health tracking, watches that can communicate with your cellphone, and devices such as hearing aids that are getting increasingly smarter. Nokia have even just patented a type of metallic tattoo that vibrates when your phone rings or a text message arrives!

As devices become more personal and mobile, the need for them to look aesthetically pleasing increases. The archetypal PC was basically a large beige brick, boring and somewhat ugly. But the archetypal mobile device is the iPhone: a sleek beautiful design classic.

The next big category of device could be ‘smart glasses’. These would be spectacles which have displays built into the lenses, like a lighter-weight version of the heads-up displays worn by pilots. Then, as you walk around in your daily life the lenses can overlay information on the world around you. Can’t remember the name of that person you’ve just bumped into? No problem, the glasses would be displaying information on them, including their name, where you last met them, when their birthday is etc., all only visible to you. These devices could also enhance our world in more personally creative ways. Imagine you set a profile on your own glasses, which then broadcasts colours, graphics, and information that hovers on and around you when others look at you through their glasses. The educational and commercial potentialities are considerable. Imagine, for instance, being able to walk around a city and instantly see historical information overlaid on buildings and monuments. Again, the technology to make this happen is just around the corner, the limiting factors will be human. Can we make sure smart-specs work in a way that is safe, and doesn’t constantly cause car or pedestrian accidents? Will people be tolerant of not knowing when others are viewing information about them? Or what about the inevitable built-in video cameras: would people be happy interacting with others knowing they are being constantly filmed?

Whatever the next decade brings in terms of personal computing it should be fascinating to watch, and is sure to tell us as much about the ‘personal’ as about computers!

In the second half of the 20th Century, we have gradually learnt to talk and think of each other and ourselves less as workers, citizens, parents or teachers and more as consumers. Yiannis Gabriel and Tim Lang, The Unmanagable Consumer

American author and poet Shel Silverstein has coined the word Tesarac to describe those periods of history when momentous social and cultural changes occur. During a Tesarac, society becomes increasingly chaotic and confusing before reorganizing itself in ways that no one can accurately predict or easily anticipate. It is an era when, in the words of MIT’s Shelley Turkle: “Old things are dead or dying and one cannot make out what will happen next.”

Silverstein believes that the changes taking place as society travels through the Teserac are so profound that nobody born one side of this ‘wrinkle in time’ will ever be able to understand fully what life was like before it occurred. A similar view has been expressed by Peter Drucker who, in his book Post-Capitalist society, describes how, every few centuries, western society crosses what he terms a ‘divide’. He cites the changes that took place in eighteenth-century Europe when the center of communal life moved from the countryside into the city. Craft guild members became the dominant social group, scholarship abandoned isolated monasteries for new universities at the heart of urban life, Latin gave way to the vernacular and Dante laid the foundation stones of European literature. ‘Within a few short decades, society rearranges itself,’ says Drucker, ‘it’s world view; its basic values; its social and political structure; its arts; its key institutions. Fifty years later there is a new world. And the people born then cannot even imagine the world in which their grandparents lived and into which their own parents were born.’

We are passing through a Tesarac and cannot accurately predict what the outcome will be. What is already apparent, however, is that manufacturers and suppliers trapped on the wrong side of this wrinkle in time will find themselves increasingly overwhelmed by the vastness of the changes it portends. Their more flexible, better informed and astute competitors who have moved through the Tesarac and understand the nature of the new economy will be able to tap into the change and sweep onward to undreamed-of levels of success.

From Chapter 4: Tastespace, the ultimate mall

Outside Pheonix, Arizona, is a low-rise building flanked by verdant lawns and surrounded by a chainlink fence, which appears so similar to any of the city’s other high-tech office blocks that a casual passerby might easily mistake it for just another corporate headquarters.

Appearances are deceptive.

All the gleaning windows are false and the structure is a concrete iceberg, mostly buried deep beneath the ground. Located directly beneath the Phoenix airport flight path, it was designed to withstand the direct impact of a crashing jumbo jet.

That apparently ordinary chain link fencing would stop an assault by a speeding car; the vehicle would simply bounce straight back off it. Should some more powerful intruders, such as terrorists driving a tank, manage to penetrate the outer defences, they would be in for a shock. The neatly manicure lawns cover deep, concrete lined trenches into which the trespassers would plunge.

What extraordinary secrets could demand such a high level of costly and intricate defences? Nuclear missiles or the designs for a new stealth bomber?

The surprising answer is something far less warlike and, in many ways, considerably more valuable – detailed information on the spending habits of millions of American Express card holders around the world.

This is the AMEX decision sciences Centre, worldwide computer HQ for the American Express organisation and the place in which data on every one of its members is stored. The building’s mainframe computers know just about everything there is to know about the members: where they most like to shop, what and when they most frequently purchase, the destinations to which they travel on business or pleasure and they’re preferred means of transport, the restaurants that patronise, and even the economic conditions of their home countries.

By making use of this detailed personal information, American Express is able to make its members offers they find hard to refuse. Precisely targeted mailings are sent to groups of carefully selected card owners, encouraging them to invest some scarcest time and attention by ensuring that each precisely corresponds to their individual interests. ‘this moves us closer true micro marketing,’ notes Daniel Miller, of University College, London. ‘some offers have gone to have as few as 20 people.’

The basic idea is that of not trying to analyse a problem but instead analyse glimpses of the solution and expand on them. For example, in an interview Mark McKergow describes a person who suffered from an anxiety disorder. The therapist asked them to recall times when they NEVER felt anxious. They realised that on a certain day of the week they were never anxious, and further analysis of this day revealed a range of things that they did which helped to eliminate their anxiety. Thus solutions were uncovered.

I think that this approach is really superb. I’ve long been of the opinion that most problems are unsolvable, in the sense that we look to batter them into submission or eliminate them. But focusing on problems usually makes them worse. You don’t get yourself out of debt by thinking about DEBT 24/7. You get out of debt by concentrating on making and saving more money. As Einstein once said: most problems cannot be solved at the level of thinking which created them. Most therapists and business consultants seem to get their clients to fix all their attention onto the problem and analyse it in great detail, turning it over and over in their minds. Oftentimes, in my opinion, this is not very healthy or helpful.

Here is how you can use this technique in your life. Think of a problem you have. Now, imagine you wake up tomorrow morning and a miracle has happened during the night and the problem has magically been solved all by itself and an ideal state is now in existance.

How would you first realise this had happened? What would be the signs?

What would be the next sign? And the next?

What would be the first sign that your family, or your co-workers would notice?

List as many of these as possible.

Now, imagine a 1-to-10 scale, where 10 equals this perfect state where the problem has been totally solved, and 1 equals the problem at its very worst.

Where are you currently on the scale?

Lets imagine, for example, that you are at ’3′ (a common answer).

Now, this is interesting, because how come you are already as high as 3? You are not at 1. Therefore something has been happening to lift you a little way towards the solution. Write down every little thing that has lifted you as high as a 3. How far up the scale have you gone in the past? Maybe you’ve had a day when you went up to 6 or 7? What was happening then which created that?

As you list these things you will start to see that you’ve already got little peices of the solution to your problem at hand. All that remains is to work out how you can expand on these little peices. Do more of them. Do them more energetically and more often. Or use them as a starting point for thinking of other solutions.

The trick is not to get too hung up on trying to solve the problem in one big move. Most of the time its more practical to inch towards solving it. For instance, if you are at a ’3′ then work out what you could do to get yourself to a 3.5 or a 4.

Therefore you might think that I’d be the last person to convert to e-books. Yet there are several reasons I (kind of) have. Firstly I’ve long been a devote of hand-held electronics, in all their wonderful forms . Secondly I have limited storage space, and travel a lot. When I travel I like to have access to lots of books (ideally all of them !) ‘just in case’.

I’ve bought both the first generation iPad, and the third generation Kindle. I have to say that I never found the iPad to be a good e-reader device. It’s slightly too large, too heavy, and the screen (whilst colour) not comfortable for reading on for any length of time, and basically impossible to read outside in bright sunlight. The kindle is an almost perfect e-reader device given current technology. It’s about just the right size, and pretty light. The page turning mechanism (a button at the side) feels even more natural and comfortable than turning the pages in a real paper book (for example, you can hold the kindle and turn the pages easily with just one hand). One slight downside though is that you can only page forward or back a page at a time. With a physical book its easy to jump forward or back multiple pages at a time. This is slightly strange, as digital devices are usually better at jumping aroud (think of DVDs Vs VHS). I think this will improve when future iterations of the Kindle have touch-screens, and then you’ll be able to  slide your finger along a progress bar to jump to any part of the book. There is also a certain amount of physical feedback you get from books that is absent from e-readers: you can instantly tell how far into the book you’ve read, and you can feel the length of a book by its weight. Perhaps future iterations of the kindle may even have some form of artificial sensory feedback that replicates this? I definitely see great potential for the Kindle to evolve over the coming years. It currently uses e-ink technology which makes it perfect for reading for long periods of time, and in bright sunlight, but it lacks the interactivity and attractiveness of a colour touch-screen. There are already technologies in development which combine the two; when that makes its début, then drops to a significantly low price, e-readers will truly take over.

There are also economic problems with e-readers. For instance, most of the kindle books are not that much cheaper than their physical versions, and are sometimes slightly more expensive. This feels wrong to me, especially since ‘owning’ an ebook isn’t quite like owning a physical book: you can’t lend it, sell it, and the length of time you’ll be able to access it into the far future is far from certain (can you access word processor files you wrote 20 years ago? If not, is it not likely that the current ebook formats could become obsolete and unreadable over time?). Also, some people are worried that the rise of e-readers will mean more physical public libraries are closed, and that the devices are toys for the rich only. The first concern probably has some legitimacy – after all, the rise of Amazon and now e-books has meant lots of bookshops have closed. Nevertheless, I think libraries can not only use ebooks (there are now schemes to let you ‘borrow’ ebooks from your local library, but can adapt and meet community needs to stay relevant. At least I hope so. As for being elitest, e-readers are quickly dropping in price and will soon become effectively free. This will also allow the poor to access for free loads of public domain books, which have fallen out of copyright. In fact, just as with mp3 files, there will be huge pressure for ebooks to become free, simply because they will be easily hacked and shared online. Yet if that happens, what happens to authors and good editors, who need to be compensated for their efforts in creating good books? I think there will perhaps be less pressure though, than with mp3s, as most books are not as ‘mass market’ as pop music, and hence less likely to be hacked.

Amazon now claim to be selling more ebooks than paper books. However, I suspect that a big part of the current surge in people buying ebooks is due to them ‘converting’ over their previous favourite books to the new format. The same thing was seen with DVD sales, which peaked for a few years as people rebuilt their film libraries in the new format, then dropped.

In general, I really like the Kindle: it’s easy to use, convenient to find and download books within minutes, great that you never have to think about 3G charges, and useful to be able to carry around so many books whilst travelling. However, it hasn’t killed off my habit of buying real, physical books. It hasn’t even slowed down the number of physical books I buy, at least not much. There may come a time – when e-readers combine touch-screen, colour and e-ink – when I buy almost no physical books, but until then I like both.

Who is Ray Kurzweil?

Ray Kurzweil is a successful American inventor; the chief inventor of the flatbed scanner, the famous Kurzweil electronic keyboard, and devices which scan text and then read it out (useful to the blind). Ray has had three big realisations in his life. Firstly, that for every problem, the correct application of intelligence can provide a solution (a realisation which inspired him at age five to become an inventor). Secondly, that inventions succeed or fail according to their timing. In other words, that the world is constantly changing, not only in its social structures, but in its technical capabilities: certain products were possible to manufacture and sell in 2010 that just weren’t in 2000, or 1990. Therefore knowing what will be technically possible in the near future is helpful to inventors in planning what to create. This second realisation led Kurzweil to study technological trends, which led him to the conclusion that all information technologies develop exponentially rather than linearly. In other words, over a fixed period of time, say 2 years, an information technology will double in performance.

The singularity

This doubling, and then doubling of the doubling, followed by another doubling of the doubling of the doubling can look like normal linear improvements for a while, but then suddenly there comes a point when the improvements increase so massively and so quickly that its like the transition from a flaming match to a nuclear explosion. That explosive change in the development of technology is going to arrive in about 30 or 40 years from now.  This is how he describes the notion in the film:

“If you go back 500 years, not a lot happened in a century. Now a lot happens in 6 months. Technology feeds on itself and it gets faster and faster. And in about 40 years the pace of change is going to be so astonishingly quick that you won’t be able to follow it, unless you enhance your own intelligence by merging with the intelligent technology we’re creating.”

This explosive change has been dubbed the ‘singularity’, a term borrowed from physics to describe a time and place in which, for example, energy and matter becomes so densely concentrated that the usual laws of physics break down and its impossible to see beyond.

In the last 40 years computers have gone from being the size of a building, to the size of something that can fit in your pocket. In the next 25 years, Kurzweil predicts, computers will shrink down to the size of a blood-cell. If we think that we’ve seen an astonishing revolution thanks to personal computers that we can carry around with us, this is clearly nothing compared to the potential revolution to come, when we may carry millions of computers around in our bloodstream, monitoring and enhancing our health and our thinking. This, however, is only the build-up to the singularity. By 2030 he predicts that we’ll have computers as powerful as the human brain. But by the time of the singularity we’ll be merging with computers as powerful as all human brains, and we’ll have already have solved problems which have been intractable throughout history, such as the existence of hunger, and even aging and death.

Expert objections

Yet many find this vision of the future hard to swallow. Neil Gershenfeld, a professor at MIT, says “What Ray does consistently is takes a whole bunch of steps that everybody agrees on, and takes principles for extrapolating that everybody agrees on, and shows that they lead to things that nobody agrees on.”

Why do even some experts disagree with the conclusions kurzweil draws? Some of it seems to be religiously driven resistance. Others think that he is basically correct, but off on the timing of when the singularity will occur, or that he’s wrong to assume these changes will be positive (one commentator raises the possibility that future artificial intelligences, many millions of times more intelligent than us, may simply wipe us out). Equally, we didn’t evolve to be able to intuitively comprehend exponential change in the same way that we did to understand linear change. This means that our intuitions about the future tend to be based on the idea that between now and then things will continue to develop linearly.

Is the film any good?

Whilst I enjoyed the film, it didn’t quite hit the target for me. I think people who are already familiar with these ideas won’t find anything new here, and for those who are coming at them for the first time, I don’t think the film had sufficient depth or was sufficiently good at visualising these ideas. Whilst films tend to be better at communicating emotions than ideas, the documentary does a pretty good job at getting across the basic ideas whilst remaining interesting. Kurzweil himself speaks in a slow, deliberate way, in correctly formed sentences, with no ‘erms’ or ‘ahhs’. This gives his delivery a measured, if slightly soporific tone, which belies the extraordinary significance of what he’s saying. Nevertheless, one of the things that film can do well is turn ideas into powerful images, but that never happens in this documentary.

There are some very significant ideas explored in the film, and some powerful debates can be stirred up around them (about the nature of consciousness, mortality, and what it means to be human), but the film largely shies away from them, which seems like a wasted opportunity.

- Dr Stephen LaBerge, expert on Lucid dreaming

One of the greatest mysteries of the mind is dreaming. Why do we dream? No-one really knows. There are theories, such as that it keeps us entertained while the body rests, or that it helps us form new memories. Whereas current theories as to why we even sleep include the idea that we sleep to conserve energy, or that it’s needed in order to restore the metabolic balance of the brain. Both these theories are backed up by the fact that our body temperature naturally drops during the night (hence lowering our metabolic rate and conserving energy; see chapter two) and that there are repeatable differences in our brain wave activity when we are deprived of sleep. In fact, this is similar (if less extreme) to when mammals go into hibernation through the winter.

Alternatively, some (including the Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick) have suggested that we sleep in order to make sense of information gained during the day and to clear out unnecessary memories from the brain. Support for this theory comes from the fact that we all dream during the night, possibly a way for the brain to process and integrate information. Research has also shown that when we learn a new skill we do not display any increase in performance ability until we have had at least eight hours of sleep. The truth may be that we have evolved to sleep for all these reasons. Whatever the real reason for sleep, it appears to be an essential function that almost all animals engage in (although only mammals engage in the REM sleep which is closely associated with dreaming).

Another mystery of dreaming is this: when we are dreaming our brain-wave activity is the same as when we are awake, yet we don’t seem to realise that we are dreaming. All sorts of strange things may happen in our dreams – we may fly, defying gravity, we may hold conversations with famous people or deceased relatives; in short, you can explore the wonders of your own imagination as though they were real. Yet because we never realise we are dreaming, we never fully enjoy the wonders of our dreams, and we never fully explore the range of possibilities they offer us. However, have you ever had the experience of ‘waking up’ inside your dream and realising that you are dreaming? This is called a ‘lucid dream’ (a term coined by the early 20th Century Dutch doctor Frederik Van Eeden), and can be an amazing experience.

The first written record of lucid dreaming dates back to the 5th century in a letter written by St. Augustine of Hippo from 415 A.D. The first person to write that anyone can learn to lucid dream was the Frenchscholar the marquis Léon d’Hervey de Saint-Denys (1822-1892) in his book ‘Dreams and how to guide them’ (1867).

The Senoi people of Malaysia were reported by one researcher to use lucid dreaming extensively to improve happiness and their general mental health. However, later researchers were unable to confirm this.

For over a millennia, the Tibetan Buddhists have used lucid dreaming as part of their path to enlightenment. They believe that the state of the lucid dream mirrors the illusory nature of reality and contemplating it can help us understand this.

The following instructions are taken from “Doctrine of the Dream State” from Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines translated by Evans-Wentz:

“At the outset, in the process of realizing [the dream] to be maya, abandon all feeling of fear;

And, if the dream be of fire, transform the fire into water, the antidote of fire.

And if the dream be of minute objects, transform them into large objects;

Or if the dream be of large objects, transform them into small objects:

Thereby one comprehendeth the nature of dimensions.

And if the dream be of a single thing, transform it into many things;

Or if the dream be of many things, transform them into a single thing…”

By this process the practitioner of the Tibetan dream yoga learns that the physical properties of objects in dreams are entirely under the control of the dreamer’s mind and willpower.

I can still remember quite clearly the first time I had a lucid dream, such was its intensity. In my dream I was running through a forest, I paused in a clearing, then suddenly I realised I was in a dream, and at that moment everything became extremely vivid and bright. The colours of the forest around me became hyper-luminous and my vision was noticeably sharper. It was like switching from an old 1970s TV set to a 21stcentury state-of-the-art high definition LCD screen. Of course, at that moment I had perfect vision as I wasn’t even using my eyes! I was seeing directly within my own mind. Yet I wasn’t using my eyes in the dream before I became lucid either. It must have been something about suddenly becoming conscious of the reality of my state that heightened my senses.

And what a feeling of exhilaration it is to ‘go lucid’ within a dream! If you’ve never experienced it it is difficult to convey what a rush of excitement and feeling of freedom accompanies the realisation. It’s also deeply weird to feel like you are standing in the middle of a beautiful forest, to feel your body, to feel the ground beneath your feet and the air moving past your ears, yet to know that in reality your body is actually in bed asleep. It raises all kinds of questions about the nature of what is ‘real’. It reminds us that reality is ultimately a construct within our mind. Yes, that construct is usually linked very closely to the sensory inputs from the ‘solid’ world around us (which actually isn’t really solid, but that’s another issue!). But Part of the feeling of freedom is due to the realisation that one need not have any physical fear. Nothing can harm you in a dream. You can jump off a cliff, hit a lion on the nose (if you have the desire to!), or stand in front of a train and none of these things can harm you. The second aspect of the freedom of a lucid dream is the realisation that you can do the impossible, things that are just not possible in the real world such as flying or speaking to a deceased relative. The only limits are those of your own imagination, not those of the laws of physics!

Just think of some of the potentials for lucid dreaming. Someone who has lost the use of their legs could once again consciously experience the freedom of being able to walk and run in their dreams. You could use your dreams to access the wealth of information stored in your unconscious. Psychologists know that it’s possible to absorb way more information than we are consciously able to recall. Perhaps almost everything you’ve ever seen or heard is locked away in your unconscious memory banks, waiting to be rediscovered. There are also potentials for therapeutic exercises, such as saying goodbye to a deceased loved one, or confronting phobias. Likewise, a lucid dream could be used to confront regular nightmares: once the power of our conscious mind is activated we realise that we no longer need to fear the things that plague us in our nightmares. You could also use lucid dreaming as a way to practice or rehearse things such as talking in front of an audience, or going for a job interview. Because it is under the control of your own imagination, and you are in a fearless state, you can use the dream to practice the event going well, helping to make you feel more confident and in control.

How to experience lucid dreaming

I’m afraid that learning this skill is not something you can achieve in 5 minutes. It’s going to take some time and effort on your part. So, the more you read on the subject, the longer you will keep your interest up. We’ve all experienced what I call the ‘Mr Toad’ effect. Mr Toad was the character in the Wind in the Willows children’s stories who was always enthusiastically jumping in to some new hobby, only to burn-out on it pretty quickly and then becoming enthused about something new. I believe most people approach lucid dreaming in this way: becoming very excited about it at first, but then soon forgetting about it when they don’t get instant results.

The first stage towards lucid dreaming is simply to start becoming more aware of your dreams. We are usually so unaware of our dreams that many people believe that they don’t dream at all. Yet they do. They just don’t remember them. Often as soon as we wake up in the morning, our memory of that night’s dreams evaporates like the morning mist under the warmth of the rising sun.

The key to keeping hold of your memories for the night’s dreams is to make it your first thought when you wake up: what have I been dreaming? Do this before you open your eyes, or even before you move. As soon as you start moving around and focusing on the outside world, your memories of your dreams will begin to fade.

It’s a curious thing that there is a barrier in our conscious awareness between our waking mind and our sleeping mind. As dreaming is still such a mystery (psychologists still have no proven explanation of why we dream) it’s anyone’s guess as to why this is. Equally, why should we not be able to lucid dream naturally with ease? Why should we always remain unaware within a dream that we are dreaming. I believe the answer is that the brain doesn’t want us to wake up, it wants us to remain focused inwards. One of the initial problems with your early lucid dreams will be that you become so excited that you wake up. Sometimes just thinking about your sleeping body, and the room you are sleeping in is enough to switch on your senses and shift your focus away from the dream and back to the outside world. You may have experienced this just as you are waking up in the morning. As soon as you realise that you are waking up, there can come a point when you switch your focus to your senses and suddenly your hearing, for example, seems to be flicked on and you can hear what’s going on in your immediate environment. If everyone was naturally born with the ability to lucid dream, there is a good probability that during our first few years of intelligent consciousness we would keep waking up constantly, as we realised we were dreaming.

So it can take some effort of concentration to keep focused within the dream once you ‘get lucid’.

There is also the fact that if we were born with the ability to lucid dream naturally, many people would become totally confused about the difference between their waking reality and their dreams! This was obviously not a good thing for our ancestors. For example, if you have a Saber-toothed tiger charging at you, standing around thinking to yourself ‘Don’t worry, it’s only a dream!’ is not the best response!

When you first wake up, try to make remembering your dreams your first thought of the day. Do this before you move an inch, before you open your eyes, and before you focus your senses on the outside world. Run through in your mind as many details of that night’s dreams as you can. Then have a notebook and pencil ready by the side of your bed to jot down as many of these details as you possibly can. Just write them all down as quickly as possible, don’t worry about the neatness of your writing, you can always go back afterwards and edit what you’ve written. Just get it all down, out of your head and onto paper.

Pre-lucid dreaming:

Before you experience your first proper lucid dream you will probably experience what I call a ‘pre-lucid’ dream. What is this? Well there are two types.

Firstly, you may have a dream in which you manage to gain control of what is happening, but don’t actually become fully conscious that it’s a dream. I’ve had many dreams like this concerning flying. I become aware in the dream that I can fly, and start to deliberately do it – which can be an exhilarating experience in itself – but I wasn’t actually thinking to myself ‘hey, this is a dream’.

The second type is where you might realise briefly that you are dreaming, or question the logic of what is happening in the dream, but you never allow the realisation to take hold, and you soon go back to the dream state again. This type can take the form of thinking to yourself about something in the dream: “wow, that’s kinda weird!” but not actually then making the ‘ah-ha!’ connection that you are dreaming it.

Nevertheless, even though these are not a full lucid dream, pre-lucid dreams are a step in the right direction. But the trick is to get both of these effects working at the same time:

To become both aware that it is a dream AND take control of it.

It’s also worth mentioning that not all lucid dreams (or ordinary dreams for that matter) are of equal quality. Some will be hyper-realistic, in fact can be more realistic than everyday life (for example, the clarity and vividness of your vision in such a lucid dream can be better than in your waking life). However, some dreams are of lesser quality, they look more vague, and maybe are even kind of black-and-white or ‘washed out’ rather than in vivid colour. Equally, in some lucid dreams you can gain an amazing amount of control, willing yourself to meet certain people, travel to certain places, and basically experience anything you want to. Yet in other lucid dreams you may struggle to control events. Your control on what is happening may be more clumsy, and after a while may slip away completely and you slip back into the ordinary dream-state, forgetting that you are dreaming. I only mention these points so that you will not feel disappointed if your lucid dreams are not spectacular to begin with. They can be, so keep going until you experience one!

So, your first task if you wish to learn to lucid dream is to get into the habit of remembering your dreams and writing them down. During the next week I want you to do this each morning.

Two tips to help you:

1. Get a nice notebook, one with a design or style you really like. This will cause you to value it more, and hence be more keen to use it.
2. Don’t panic if you forget to remember and write your dreams down for one or two days. Just relax, remind yourself that you have plenty of time to accomplish this, and then resolve to begin again the next day

It’s become a modern cliché, but we truly are suffering from information overload these days. Never before have we had to process, keep track of and make sense of so much data. Equally, we are faced with more sources of distraction than ever before: constant checking of email, or facebook updates can rob you of the focus needed to think deeply.

However, there are some steps you can take to help ease the stress of this info-glut:

1. Make use of web-based services

Archiving useful information on a web-based service enables you to access it wherever you are: from a PC, laptop, or mobile-phone. Knowing that you have this easy-access means fewer demands on your memory.

One that i particularly like is Evernote.com. Basically Evernote is like an online storage space where you can upload all type of information: photos, text, audio files, clipped web-pages etc. However, it’s so much more than just a storage space. For example, its search facilities are almost miraculous. Say that you write a page of notes on paper, you can take a photo of it with your phone, upload to Evernote and it becomes part of your archive. Should you then ever want to search for any of the words in the photo, Evernote can find them. This level of visual recognition means that you are free from having to type up text, photo or scan anything, upload it, and its immediately available in a searchable archive.

2. Intelligently use paper and electronic devices

When should you use paper and when digital storage? In his book ‘getting organised in the google era’, Douglas Merrill recommends that paper should still be used for working on information (e.g. When you are brainstorming new ideas) but electronic devices like smart-phones or laptops should be used for information that you merely need to archive and reference in the future. This might change in the future when the touch/handwriting interfaces of computers are better, but for the time-being there is still something very immediate and intuitive about using pen/pencil on paper that seems to aid thinking (at least for most of us).

3. Use speed-reading techniques

There are two techniques that can help speed up your reading, enabling you to extract more information-per-minute!

Read non-fiction books and magazine articles with a soft pencil. Use this to underline or make marks on the paper. Using the pencil will help guide your eyes’ movements and making your reading faster and smoother. By marking bits of text that are of interest, you can then easily find them again.

When reading newspaper or magazine articles concentrate on the first and last paragraph. This is where you will find the highest-density of information content.

4. Don’t multi-task

We all only have a finite amount of attention to devote to what we’re doing. You may be able to perform multiple tasks at once, but you are always lowering the amount of attention you can devote to each if you do this. If something requires thinking, try to concentrate all your attention on it. If you must do multiple tasks at once, try to make them require different thought processes. For example, think about a problem whilst walking, or listen to instrumental music when writing (not music with lyrics, as the language centres of your brain will be divided between comprehending the lyrics and in formulating the sentences you’re writing.

5. Use a system for prioritisation

Just as people can eat too much and become obese, we can graze on too much trivial information and our mental focus can become weakened. Too often our attention is drawn to the apparently urgent but trivial stuff, to the expense of the non-urgent but important stuff! Try to limit mindless web-browsing. If you are in front of screens all day, make time to meditate or do more physically activities out of work hours. I recommend checking out a time-management system called ‘getting things done’. The core philosophy of the system is that you should try to get all information out of your head and captured on paper on electronically as soon as possible. For example, adherents to this system try to either answer an email instantly, or tag/log it so they will have a constantly evolving ‘to do’ list on paper or on a computer so they aren’t putting constant strain on their memory.

In a sense ’59 seconds’ helps to give us more genuine, realistic and proven techniques. However, it also falls prey to our over-eagerness for quick solutions. Indeed, the subtitle is ‘Think a little, change a lot’ and it promises to provide “a fresh approach to change that helps people achieve their aims and ambitions in minutes, not months”. This desire for ‘quick-fix’ solutions is understandable – many of us lead very busy lives – but can also leave us open to being uncritical. It’s like we’ve kicked credulity out of the front door, only to have in sneak back in through the back. For example, it can be a bit of a stretch to create general lifestyle advice out of the one-off findings of psychology experiments. Many such experiments are conducted with relatively small numbers of participants who are not typical of the general population (i.e. they are young University students). This means that what worked in an experiment might not always work for everyone else. Equally, the participants in an experiment don’t always know the aim of the experiment, and any results found might be dependent on being kept in the dark. When you are fully aware of the intended effect of a technique, it might not be so powerful. Also, things that work in the artificial environment of a University psychology lab might not always work out in the ‘real’ world, with all the complexity of real life. Some of the experiments are also based on quick, one-off results. Who is to say that the results will hold up if you keep repeating the technique over and over? Or that the results will hold up over the long term? However, to be fair, not all the conclusions in the book are made on the basis of one study or small numbers of students, some flow from a whole body of work, or from longer-term studies tracking hundreds of people.

It’s surprising how often papers published in academic journals have flaws in them. There is tremendous pressure on academics these days to publish as much as possible, and sometimes papers make it out the door that have fatal weaknesses. Just because something has been published doesn’t mean it proves what it claims to, and just because someone has the word ‘Professor’ in front of their name doesn’t mean that they are infallible.

Nevertheless, despite these criticism, I think there’s a lot of valuable material in the book. One of the conclusions you can draw from it is that we’re more influenced by our immediate environments than we realise. For example, one finding discussed in the book is that being around plants makes us more creative. Also, despite my warning of over-generalising from single academic studies, I think it’s possible that surprisingly small shifts in behaviour can have apparently disproportionately large effects (a little like the 80/20 law which operates in many areas of life, showing that a majority of results are created by only a minority of causes). For example, it can be far more effective to praise children for their effort, rather than their ability. Giving them the idea that they are naturally very able at something may seem like a good thing, but it can make them lazy as they feel that they shouldn’t need to work hard at something that they have a natural talent for. It can also make them fear failure, as this would seem to disprove their talent. These two consequences can mean that the child then tries less hard. In contrast, praising them for their efforts can encourage them to work hard, and overcome setbacks and failures.

In conclusion, I think that many of the techniques in this book may be limited in their application, due to the artificial nature of psychology experiments, yet Richard Wiseman has done a good job in summarising a whole mass of findings that are potentially both practical and not widely known. Often these kind of books can be valuable even if you only get one idea out of them thats going to be useful to you. In ’59 Seconds’ you are almost certainly going to find a bunch of useful ideas, at the very least, and I wouldn’t hesitate in recommending it.

Here is a summary of some of the advice he gives on increasing your happiness, based on scientific research:

(1) Spending money on material things doesn’t make you happy, but spending money on experiences, such as holidays, shows, or even a meal, does. The key things seem to be that experiences offer the opportunity to interact with others, or having things to discuss with others after the experience. Equally, spending money on others does more to increase happiness than spending it on yourself.

(2) Smiling, sitting upright and generally ACTING happy, can make you feel more happy. The smile can’t be fleeting, it must be for between at least 15 to 30 seconds or more.

(3) ‘positive thinking’, psychotherapy, or even just talking about your problems does not seem to make people happier. Instead, evidence suggests that writing a diary about your problems can be extremely beneficial to your happiness (the theory is that writing encourages one to structure your thoughts whilst chatting about them, less so).

(4) Similarly to (3), even if you don’t have significant problems, keeping a diary in which you express gratitude towards all the good things in your life, positive thoughts about the future (e.g. imagine – realistically – things have gone as well as you can hope, and you have achieved your goals), and affection towards those you love/have loved. Part of the reason for why this works is that the human brain has a tendency to quickly ‘habituate’ to almost anything and thus we take things for granted and must remind ourselves of them.

And heres some of the advice he gives on motivation:

(1) Simply visualising your goals may make you feel good but it’s not always effective. For example, in one study, students who visualised doing well in an exam actually then spent less time revising and preparing for it! Don’t let visualisation take the place of actually working towards an outcome. It could also be that by imagining ideal outcomes you are setting yourself up to be ill-prepared for dealing with the inevitable challenges that meet us on the path to any destination.

(2) Here are the motivational techniques which other books advocate, or which might sound like common sense, but DON’T tend to work: focusing on someone you admire who has done what you want to do (i.e. a role model), thinking about the bad things that will happen if you don’t achieve what you want to, trying to suppress tempting or unhelpful thoughts (e.g. trying to not think about cigarettes if you are trying to quit smoking), relying on willpower, and fantasising about how great your life will be when you achieve your goal.

(3) Here are the motivational techniques that do tend to work: making a step-by-step plan, telling other people about your goal, thinking about the good things that will happen if you achieve the goal (subtly different from fantasising about ‘how great life will be’ if you achieve it), giving yourself rewards for progressing towards the goal, recording your progress.

(4) Avoid procrastination by chopping a task down into sub-tasks, and then telling yourself you will just work on it for only a few minutes. This helps avoid the anxiety we feel at the prospect of starting a task which could take a lot of work to complete.

The grim story above was recounted in a book on learning and memory by the Roman rhetorician Cicero four hundred years later. In Cicero’s day, the lawyer and policiticians of the Roman Empire were able to advance their careers by using such techniques to memorise long, and impressive, speeches. The ancients respected memory greatly. When you consider how they lacked the memory storage systems that we currently have at our fingertips – computers, large collections of books and publications, the Internet, databases – it is easy to see how important it was to develop the faculty of memory in the past. Indeed, before the printing press, culture was transmitted by word of mouth. Important knowledge, such as religious books, were routinely memorised whole.

Basically, the memory tricks of the ancients involve harnessing the power of your imagination in order to remember things. The basic rule here is that in order to remember anything you like, you just use your imagination to link it to some fixed or known structure that you are already familiar with, such as numbers, letters of the alphabet, or the layout of a physical location.

In a sense, this technique is using your whole brain: the structured left side, and the imaginative, novel and spatial right side. Psychologist now know that facts are more likely to be remembered if they are given meaning. By using your imagination you are giving meaning to the facts your trying to remember. So, remember that even though I call these techniques “tricks”, don’t let that fool you into thinking that they are somehow simplistic. In fact they are based on a solid understanding of how the Human brain works!

Let’s see what specific tricks the ancients devised based on this idea.

The Greeks

The Greeks worshiped memory. Literally: they named a Goddess after it: Mnemosyne. It’s from this word that we get the word for the Greek’s memory tricks: Mnemonics. The ancient Greeks regarded Mnemosyne as the mother of the nine muses: the goddesses who inspire love poetry, epic poetry, hymns, dance, comedy, tragedy, music, history and astronomy. In other words, the Greeks respected memory greatly and saw it as the wellspring of creativity and culture.  The Greek senators would use these techniques in order to learn vast swathes of information that they could reproduce at will in their speeches, rising to positions of power.

The link system

The link system is very simple and is best used to memorise short lists of items, such as a shopping list. You simply link the items to be remembered into a vivid and dynamic story.

Let’s take an example. Imagine you had to remember the following list of items: A piece of chalk, an umbrella, a pair of scissors and a plastic duck. What you must do is construct an imaginary story in your mind that links an image of each of these items. For example: Imagine standing at the top of a chalk cliff, you open up an
umbrella and use it as a parachute to glade down to the beach at the bottom of the cliff. On the beach is a crab who tries to nip at your toes with claws that
are actually made of scissors. Your attention is only drawn away when you see a giant yellow plastic duck floating past on the sea. A variation on this is to link your list to numbers. First of all you need to make each number into an image. I suggest the following system of images that tend to look like each number, but you can use what works best for you.

0 = A hula hoop
1 = A pen/pencil
2 = A swan
3 = A flying bird (tilt your head to the right!)
4 = A pair of legs with one foot off the ground
5 = A pregnant woman
6 = A monocle
7 = A boomerang
8 = A snowman
9 = A tadpole
10 = A knife and plate

You then use the numbers, in order, as images to connect to your list.

The Romans

The room system

Probably the greatest memory trick devised by the Romans was the Room system. This system is based on the fact that we have a very good memory for the layout of places we are very familiar with. Its based on the way that Simonides, in the story at the beginning of this chapter, was able to remember the guests at the banquet because of their positions around the table.

Choose a place that you can visualise well in your mind and that you are very familiar with its layout. This could be your house, your school, workplace or the local shopping mall. Alternatively you can imagine a room or place that doesn’t exist! Just make sure that you have the layout of this location very clear in your mind. Now, mentally walk through this location and place the items to be remembered at various points. If possible, use your imagination to link them to that position. Then, in order to strengthen the memory, simply imagine walking around this location as often as you can. The beauty of this technique is that you can do it anywhere.

Medieval Memory Masters

If the arts of memory faded from sight with the decline of the Roman empire, they were to rise again across medieval Europe. However, now they took upon the character of the medieval mind and hence can now seem fairly alien to our own way of thinking. In particular, and somewhat harking back to Plato, the memory arts were now closely associated with the devine. Therefore, the line of thought that the medieval practioners were taking was to uncover natural orders which would enable Human memory to operate in harmony with universal laws. The basic philosophy behind this impulse – to uncover natural laws – is not dissimilar to our modern, scientific way of thinking. However, in practice it manifested during this period in more mystical or even magical ways of thinking.

A good example of this is the memory system developed by Ramon Lull, know as Lullism. Lull was a 13th Century Majorcan who spent his youth working as a troubadour and courtier. After a spiritual experience whilst on top of Mount Randa, Lull believed he had perceived the attributes of God and he set out to develop a sort of elemental cosmology of nature inspired by this experience. At their heart, Lull’s arts are based on the nine attributes of God: Goodness, greatness, eternity, power, wisdom, will, virtue, truth and glory. Lull claimed that because these concepts were fundamental to nature, they should form the natural structure for the study of any subject. Such an interest with paying attention to the names or attributes of God may sound strange to the modern mind, but it was similar to the practices of the mystical branches
of both Judaism (the Cabala) and Islam (Sufism) that were contemporary with Lull. Lullism became ever more complex with varied diagrams depicting the inter-relationship of these concepts.

At a practical level, Lull believed in two methods for improving memory. Firstly, medicines, although he does not recommend taking this route. Exactly what medicines he means are now lost to us, as is most of the medieval herbalist tradition. The second method was frequent meditation upon what one wishes to remember. In other
words: repetition; a fundamental, if simple, part of building memory. However, tantalisingly there is a lost work by Lull called ‘The Book of the Seven Planets’ which is said to contain the true method for memory enhancement. Whilst we no longer know exactly what this method consisted of, the emphasis on the number seven seems important. Interestingly, psychologists now know that seven is a fundamental number to our memory system: it’s the maximum number of ‘bits’ of information the average person can hold at once in their short term memory.

The number seven was also important to the 16th Century memory theatre of Giulio Camillo. Camillo (1480-1544) was famous and highly regarded thinker in his time, forgotten not long after his death due to his lack of published materials, and to the fact that his most famous creation, a real theatre of memory, was soon lost forever.

Whilst Camillo’s theatre is now lost, and we lack direct drawings or paintings of it, we can piece together what it was like from various accounts. It was built out of wood, and could admit two people. The person(s) would stand on its empty stage and look out across its circular auditorium – where the seats would be in a normal theatre – a little bit like the design of an ancient Greek or Roman amphitheatre. The person would see seven columns of ‘seats’, each adorned with an array of images, ornaments and even little boxes. The theatre combined the ancient Greek idea of using places to remember concepts, with the medieval idea of a carefully worked-out cosmology to represent the universe. It was said that by just standing on the stage of Camillo’s memory theatre and looking out upon these seven columns of information, one would “be able to discourse on any subject no less fluently than Cicero.”

The theatre was first displayed in Venice, and became the talk of Europe. The King of France was said to have become fascinated by it, and it was later displayed at the French court in Paris. Indeed, the King of France was said to be the only person in the world to whom Camillo had divulged the secret of how the theatre really worked. However, soon after Camillo’s death it was lost, never to be discovered.

Robert Fludd (1574-1637) was a doctor, astrologer and mystic who also devised a memory theatre system. Fludd was also an adherent to the medieval idea that man was a reflection of the overall order of the universe. He devided memory enhancement into two categories: the round and square arts:

“Memory can only be artificially improved, either by medicaments or by the operation of the fantasy towards ideas in the round art, or through images of corporeal things in the square art.”

Fludd believed that the square art – the use of real places in which to imagine one’s memory images – was the superior method. He believed that using imaginary places made memory enhancement more difficult, and may even confuse the memory.

It’s because of this insistence of the need to use real places that suggests Fludd’s designs for a memory theatre were at the least intended to be constructed for real, or perhaps even were. It’s even been suggested that the design of Fludd’s theatre reflected of the design of Shakespeare’s original Globe theatre in London. Fludd’s design incorporated the zodiac, as well as a number of doors and columns to all act as memory loci. The inclusion of images of the heavens was, similarly to Camillo’s theatre, an
attempt to reflect the grand design of the universe in the Human mind, and therefore to align the memory improvement strategy with the fundamental laws of nature.

In a strange way, the approach to memory and way of thinking adopted by the ancient Greeks is closer and more understandable to us than the more recent medieval memory philosophers, with their complex and mystical theories which are now only partially understood.

The cup and ball trick has been used for centuries since by street hustlers to con people out of money. In fact, throughout time magic has often been used to trick people into believing that the magician held some other kind of ‘power’, such as great gambling skill, the ability to make mechanical objects that are ‘alive’, or the possession of almost miraculous skills at lock-picking, psychic abilities or psychological ‘mind-reading’.

Another example of an ancient magic trick is the ‘Indian rope trick’. This trick has been reported to be performed in India for hundreds of years. The trick is performed outside. The magician throws a rope up into the air. The rope surprising stays standing up, reaching up into the air. The Magician’s boy assistant then climbs up the rope and apparently disappears into thin air at the top. The magician then climbs up the rope and also disappears. The audience hear them argue, then the limbs of the boy all fall down to the ground. The magician comes back down, places the boy’s limbs into a basket, and the live boy climbs back out.

Recent researchers have claimed that the whole story may be a myth. But others have claimed it was a genuine trick, and have explained it by the idea that the magician hypnotised all the audience at once, and performed the trick at dusk, with the low sun in the eyes, near a tree with low-hanging branches, which could have held the top of the rope up.

A lot of ancient magic came out of tricks used to cheat people at gambling. Playing cards have long been used in magic tricks. Although their exact origin is a mystery, it’s widely believed that playing cards were invented in China, where they may have originally been a form of money. They would have been both the tools of gambling and the prize to be won. They then arrived in Europe, via Egypt, around the late 13^th Century. The four suits of this pack were different to the ones we have today, they were polo sticks, coins, swords, and cups. The modern design originated in France in 1480.

During the sixteenth Century onwards, magic techniques began to be used to trick people into believing that amazing mechanical beings had been created. The most famous of these was the Mechanical Chess playing Turk. This was a ‘clockwork’ life-sized figure dressed in Eastern costume seated at a very large box with a chess board and pieces on top of it. When it was first publicly displayed in 1770, in the imperial court of Vienna, people were shocked and amazed. The ‘clockwork’ man could move his arms and play chess against a Human opponent. So well, in fact, that he could play it to world-class standards. The mechanical Turk was taken all over the world and played before large audiences, it even played against Napoleon and Benjamin Franklin. Of course, the Turk was really an elaborate trick, a real man was cleverly hidden inside the box, and controlled the mechanical arms.

It was, however, only in the 19^th Century that magic really took off. The inventor of the magic stage show, in the modern sense, was a French clockmaker called Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin (1805-1871), who opened a theatre in which he would display mechanical animals he had created that appeared to be alive. A similar magic theatre, called the ‘Egyptian Hall’ was opened in London soon afterwards. Then came possibly the best known magician of all time, the escapologist Harry Houdini (1874-1926). Whilst Houdini had a range of genuine skills, such as lock-picking, that helped his performances, they were undoubtedly also employing magic techniques for their effects.

The best modern example of the use of magic tricks to fool the public into believing that the performer has some amazing skill is mentalism. Mentalism is the branch of magic in which the performer appears to have mind-reading skills. Sometimes, however, they act like they are not a magician but are genuine mind-readers, using advanced psychological, or even psychic techniques. There are some genuine psychological techniques that can be used to apparently read what a person is thinking of, or to subtlety make them choose one particular option from a list and then pretend that you can read their mind and guess which they picked. However, mentalists often embellish these techniques with props and tricks from traditional magic in order to appear more mentally skilled than they really are.

Of course, you could argue that by hiding the ‘magic’ nature of such performances, greater levels of wonder and amazement are provoked in the audience, and hence more fun is had. Yet I believe even if a performer takes that route, they should eventually ‘come clean’ and reveal to the audience if not exactly how the trick was done, but that at least it was a trick. Whilst we should admire the ingenuity and skill of magicians who put on honestly described performances, I believe we should remain alert to those who claim additional powers when in fact they are just using the traditional effects of trickery.