- 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.

Jaron Lanier, the iconoclastic inventor of ‘virtual reality’, has a different perspective which he outlines in ‘You are not a gadget’ (Penguin, 2010). His target is the so-called ‘Web 2.0’: the latest developments on the web which emphasise the individual users putting up their own content and sharing content directly with other users (e.g. Facebook, file-sharing, YouTube). Lanier believes in the power of technology to enhance Human creativity, but he just doesn’t think our current web 2.0 model is doing that. For example, of Wikipedia and Linux he writes: “Let’s suppose that back in the 1980s I had said, “In a quarter century when the digital revolution has made great progress and computer chips are millions of times faster than they are now, humanity will finally win the prize of being able to write a new encyclopaedia and a new version of Unix!” It would have sounded utterly pathetic.”

Also, he argues that that through creating an expectation of information being free we are making it harder and harder for many creative people (musicians and writers/journalists in particular) to make a decent, middle-class income from their work.

There are three other major criticisms he makes in the book:

CROWDSOURCING DIMINISHES INDIVIDUAL CREATIVITY

Sites like Wikipedia and Rotten Tomatoes are based on the notion that if you aggregate the opinions of many people, you will eventually alight on the truth. However, Lanier argues that: “Emphasizing the crowd means deemphasizing individual humans in the design of society, and when you ask people not to be people, they revert to bad moblike behaviors.”

In some instances the average opinion of the crowd may be useful, but in others it merely hides individuality. For example, he argues that web 2.0 has had a bad effect on the creativity of pop culture. Every decade of the 20^th Century, up to the 90s, had its own unique musical style; even to the extent that you can hear a piece of music for the first time and pretty accurately guess which year it came from. But this has, he argues, now ended, and popular music is largely derivative of earlier styles:

“Pop culture has entered into a nostalgic malaise. Online culture is dominated by trivial mashups of the culture that existed before the onset of mashups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media. It is a culture of reaction without action. Where is the new music? Everything is  retro, retro, retro.”

LOCK-IN

As we digitise more and more aspects of life we are forced to define them in ways a computer can understand, and by having to rigidly define what a thing is, you also have to leave out what it is not. The problem is that such definitions can become entrenched and almost impossible to get rid of. For example, the width of 19^th Century railway tracks defined the width of the tunnels in the London Underground system, which are now too narrow for modern needs (such as the installation of air-conditioning).  As another example, he talks about how the electronic music format MIDI has narrowed the range of music sounds available to us: “Before MIDI, a musical note was a bottomless idea that transcended absolute definition. After MIDI, a musical note was no longer just an idea, but a rigid, mandatory structure you couldn’t avoid in the aspects of life that had gone digital. A thousand years from now, when a descendant of ours is travelling at relativistic speeds to explore a new star system, she will probably be annoyed by some awful beepy MIDI-driven music to alert her that the antimatter filter needs to be recalibrated.”

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE OR ARTIFICIAL STUPIDITY?

However, it’s not just standards that are restricting, the ways we relate to technology are diminishing our humanity. For example, he argues that by assuming that computers are (or can become) ‘intelligent’ we diminish our conception of intelligence, and our humanity. It’s hard to yet see the big consequences of this, but it does lead to bad technology design:  software such as Microsoft’s Bob which tries to anticipate a user’s behaviour (i.e. trying to act intelligently) often just ends up being irritating and often just forces the user to change their behaviour in order to fit in with the software’s assumptions!

‘You are not a gadget’ is a fascinating and thought-provoking book and I definitely recommend it.

Surprisingly, these technologies already exist. During the past decade we have learned more about the workings of the brain than during the whole of recorded history preceding it. Now, neuroscientists are poised to unleash practical applications based on these revelations. The question for us is will this forthcoming ‘brain-tech’ revolution usher in an era of greater mental powers for all, or will it trigger a totalitarian society in which our very minds are brought under push-button control?

There are five main areas in which brain science could have the most influence on our lives:

1. EEG- interfaces

In Arthur C. Clarke’s sci-fi novel ‘3001′, society 1000 years in the future is depicted as having ‘brain caps’ which people can wear that will read their thoughts, and even allow direct brain-to-brain communication. However, we probably won’t have to wait a thousand years for this kind of technology, prototypes of the brain cap are already in existence. EEGs, which can monitor brain activity through sensors placed over the top of the head – usually embedded in a cap – are now being used to control electronic devices. The technique is difficult to master, and (at the moment) of limited use, but with practice a person can control a cursor on a screen, and use it to spell out words.

Although fairly primitive and clunky at the moment, these EEG interfaces are likely to develop exponentially in the coming years. The continued growth in computing power will speed up these developments as ‘neural networks’ (software that can search for extremely complex patterns in sets of data) are able to discover more of the secrets of how the brain works.

2. EEG – neurofeedback

Another EEG technique, neurofeedback, has already been demonstrated in scientific studies to successfully treat ADHD and epilepsy, and the latest findings are suggesting that it could even help us to increase our intelligence and creativity. EEG neurofeedback (also called biofeedback) is a technique for training your brain to produce certain desirable patterns of activity, just like a person can train their muscles to increase their strength or subtleness. However, the reason why we find it possible to learn to control our limbs when we grow up, but less easy to learn to control our own brains, is because we can see the activity of our limbs, so we easy learn to make the connection between our efforts to move them, and how those efforts actually make the arm or leg move. In other words, we have visual feedback, which helps us learn.

In neurofeedback, the person wears an EEG cap and their own patterns of brain activity are turned into the movement of a character or object on a computer game on a screen. For example, if a brain-scan reveals that a person is producing an abnormal frequency at a certain part of the brain (such as in ADHD),the game is set so that the character moves in the desired direction whenever the person makes the more normal frequency pattern. Eventually, after many sessions, the person learns to produce the desired frequency. Its champions point out that, unlike alternative drug treatments, the benefits of neurofeedback are permanent and do not have unwanted side-effects.

3. Magnetic mind control

In 1896, the journal ‘Popular science monthly’ published a photograph produced by the scientist David Starr Jordan, which he claimed was a ‘Sympsychograph’ or an image formed from a device he claimed could transform an image from a person’s mind onto photographic film. Unfortunately the claim turned out to be a hoax, yet a century later the idea no longer seems quite so implausible.

Using very powerful electromagnets, the technology called MRI can take 3-D ‘x-ray’ style images of a person’s brain. Now, the more sophisticated version, fMRI, can image the brain while in action. The latest research using this technology can pinpoint which of a range of images a person has looked at – essentially reading the person’s brain and revealing what image they are thinking of! Who can say where this technique might lead in the years ahead?

If this seems far-fetched, well there are other even more amazing possibilities for enhancing the mind with magnetic control. About one in ten people who suffer from autism are what psychologists call ’savants’, they have extraordinary mental abilities in very specific areas. For example, some can look at an object or view, and then draw it in incredibly accurate detail. It seems the reason for this is that areas of the brain that in non-autistic people summarise information into its ‘gist’, and help us deal with the subjective meanings of things, are damaged. Without these functions – which are usually useful to help us make sense of the world, particularly the social world – the autistic person is able to have a very literal and objective perception of what they are seeing. So, rather than perceiving, for example, the general idea of a building, its feel and mood, they will remember the lines, angles and shades from which it is composed, and be able to replicate them in a drawing with an ease that they rest of us can only marvel at. Of course, in order to access these narrow but amazing skills, very few people would be willing to deliberately have those parts of their brain that are ‘blocking’ these skills damaged – particularly as they are important for other areas of life. However, using sophisticated electro-magnets, researchers have managed to temporarily switch off these areas, successfully releasing the latent abilities that we all appear to have within us. When this technique becomes more sophisticated, maybe we will all be able to own devices that can safely enhance our memories and objectivity at the press of a button.

4. Smart drugs

We’re all aware of the mood altering effects of such drugs as caffeine in tea and coffee, or nicotine in cigarettes (not to mention the effects of illegal narcotics), but scientists are developing drugs that can enhance memory, concentration and intelligence without any unhealthy side-effects. There are even drugs that are claimed to control impulses to engage in addictive behaviours, such as gambling. Developments in this area will probably increase due to our ever growing knowledge of bio-chemistry and genetics.

However, it’s not only in terms of synthesising new drugs that the biological revolution could enhance the brain: there is the possibility that in the near future we might start genetically engineering our children to be more intelligent. The evidence seems to be that at least to some extent our levels of intelligence are inherited. In other words that they are genetic.

5. Brain chips

Chips that can be implanted into the brain itself have been in existence since the 1960s. However, it’s only within the last five years that they have become sophisticated enough to offer real hope to those who are disabled and have lost control over their limbs.

For example, the ‘brain gate’ chip, developed in 2003 uses 100 hair-thin electrodes to monitor brain activity in areas associated with muscle control, and then turn those activity patterns into electrical signals to move the person’s muscles. More recent research has even managed to get brain cells to grow onto a computer chip – the ultimate mind-machine interface.

Whenever I speak to people about memory, the one question always crops up: how can I get a photographic memory?

What do they mean by photographic memory? Mostly people mean the ability to use your eyes and brain as a sort of camera. So that you can just look at something for a split second, and….click! Take a mental photograph of it. Then, days, weeks, or years later you can then just retrieve this mental image from your memory and look over every detail of it, perfectly, as if you were still looking at it.

Most people would love to have this skill!

However, the truth is this: photographic memory, as described above, does not exist! Human memory never operates in this camera-like way. We are not so objective, our memories are affected by our emotional states and what we are looking at. As does our level of interest in what we’re looking at (we tend to remember more of the aspects of an image that we’re most interested by).

There are some rare cases of people through the years who’ve seemed to have photographic memory, but in reality it turns out that their memories – whilst exceptionally good, are not quite photographic. They don’t just look at the item for a split second, but usually look at it carefully for many seconds, or minutes, studying it. Also, they tend to be highly focused in how they concentrate on the thing to be remembered, and they almost always use some kind of memory techniques rather than being born with a natural photographic memory.

However, what *does* exist – and often gets confused as being photographic memory – is something called eidetic imagery. Eidetic imagery is like a kind of afterimage. If you’ve ever stared at something very bright – such as a flame – and then looked away, you might have experienced being able to still see the thing, albeit in a ghostly form. This is an afterimage, and it usually isn’t very detailed, and fades very fast. However, about one in ten children have a more enhanced version of this, called eidetic imagery, whereby they can look at something, then close their eyes or look away and still see the exact image for a number of seconds. Sadly, most of the children who have this ability grow out of it, and its therefore very rare in adults.

So, while it’s a waste of time to search for the ‘holy grail’ of photographic memory, we shouldn’t despair as we can all improve our memories by simply using memory enhancement techniques. And the fact that some people can improve their memories so much using those techniques that others think they have a photographic mind just shows how powerful they can be!

However, if we could see a broaderrange of frequencies, no doubt we could see new colours. Try to imagine that! It’s very difficult to imagine a totally newcolour without just imagining a different shade of a colour we already know. Probably the only way we could do this isin a dream.

Also, not all animals perceive as many colours as us, some perceive more, and some only perceive black andwhite, or none at all! Equally, some people are colour blind, meaning that they are unable to distinguish between somecolours.

Men are more likely than women to suffer from this, in fact almost one in ten of the world’s men (8%) are colourblind (although men are more likely to be superior in other areas of visual perception).

It is thought that women probably evolved a more exact ability to distinguish between different colour as during the vast majority of our history, ashunter-gatherers, women would have needed to be very careful about which fruits and berries to pick, and a good ability to distinguish between different colours is obviously of benefit in that.

However, to ask whether the ancients didn’t see the same colours as us may seem ridiculous.

• Brilliant techniques for remembering names and faces
• Great ideas for recalling lists – no more writing reminders on the back of your hand
• How to ensure you never forget where you parked the car or lose your keys again
• How eating well, exercising and certain (but not all!) supplements can help keep your brain in tip-top shape
• Why its never too late to learn new information, from skills for work, to languages
• Amazing memory party tricks
• How to memorise all your computer/Internet passwords
• The 300-year old system that will enable you to store vast amounts of information in your memory

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