• 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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• Learn how to get things done more effectively – from initial analysis to final action
• Sharpen your mind – banish distraction and irrelevance and achieve laser-like focus when you need it
• Think your way through any problem or dilemma confidently and creatively, no matter how complex or confusing
• Master the art of beating stress when working under pressure, so your thinking is calm and right ‘on-the-button’
• Do more work in less time by using your brain more effectively

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“The Soul of the New Consumer is likely to shape the marketing messages you see, hear and read in the first years of the new century. For anyone in the business of sending those messages, it’s an enlightening and compelling guide.”
– BookPage, US – March 2000

(Various international editions)

My first book, co-authored with David Lewis, was released in 2000. It covers trends in consumer behaviour driven by, in part, the emergence of the Internet. Published in six languages.

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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 span of absolute judgment and the span of immediate memory impose severe limitations on the amount of information that we are able to receive, process, and remember.” Psychologist, George A Miller.

Seven bits of information seems to be the natural limit of our mental ‘desktop’ on which we do our thinking. Increase this memory space and reap the benefits.

Humans seem to have a predilection for the number seven, it crops up again and again through history. We talk of seven deadly sins, seas, days of the week, wonders of the world, ages of man and so on. It seems Humanity never met a number seven it didn’t like. Could this be related to some in-built feature of the way we think?  In 1956, the psychologist, George Miller published what became one of the most famous psychology papers of all time: ‘The magical number seven, plus or minus two’. Miller reasoned that most people can hold in their minds between five and nine ‘bits’ of information. This is why telephone numbers are typically seven digits long, as this about the limit of what people can remember in one go.

This limited amount of information is referred to as our digit span, or working memory. Working memory is like the desktop of the mind: it’s where our brains do their conscious thinking work. Information is constantly flowing into and out of our working memory. It is also referred to as short term memory, as it rarely lasts more than about 30 seconds. In order to make judgements and calculations we need to use our working memory. When asked to distinguish between musical tones, for example, people can distinguish between no more than about 6. This is nothing to do with our hearing abilities, it seems that we can typically only distinguish between about 7 categories of items at once due to our working memory. Equally, if you quickly flash up a number of dots on a computer screen and ask people to tell you how many there were, once you use more than around 7 dots, people start to make errors: fewer than seven dots and they accurately count them, more than seven and they will guess.

So, is this an in-built limit of our brains? It seems it might be. The explanation is technical, but it seems that its to do with the interplay of two frequency-patterns in our cortex (the uppermost part of the brain, which is more developed in Humans than animals). One frequency, called theta, is the neurons firing at around 5 times per second, another, called gamma, fires at around 35 times per second. One theory is that the number of gamma pulses you have for every theta pulse is what determines your digit span. In other words, thirty-five divided by five is seven. The theory seems to make sense, but no-one really knows at the moment if its actually true.

The implications of this is that its best to organize information – both for yourself and others – into no more than seven categories. Think of them as seven boxes which you can use to put information in. If you can pack the information tightly together, then you can get more than one thing in each box. For example, if you have two or three bits of information that are closely linked in your mind, such that the mere mention of one of them will trigger the other bits, then that one group will only use up one of your seven boxes. Therefore you can increase the amount you can hold in your working memory by making close associations between individual bits of information.

Working memory varies between individuals, and seems to account for between about a quarter and half of the variation in intelligence between individuals. In other words: the greater your working memory capacity, the greater your intelligence is likely to be. There’s also evidence that suggests by training yourself you can increase your digit span, and therefore increase your intelligence and ability to concentrate on information. To train your digit span, write out series of numbers, gradually increasing their length, read each series out once, then look away and try to recall it in reverse order. Start with around 7, and make sure you can easily handle that, before moving onto 8 and so on.

How did it go?

Are there any other ways to improve my working memory in everyday life?
Yes, cut out distractions. If you need to concentrate when you are working, seek out a quiet environment. You can also try making notes and talking to yourself to increase your ability to hold information in mind. Writing things down releases a bit of the pressure of holding information in mind all at once.

How can I keep information in my working memory?
It seems that maintaining information in working memory mainly works in terms of sound, rather than images or concepts. In other words, you imagine the sound – such as the sound of yourself speaking the information – over and over in order to hold onto it. You’ve probably experienced this when trying to remember a phone number you’ve just heard, whilst searching for something to write it down on!

Here’s an idea for you:
Keep an eye out for games that will help you to train your digit span. There are many card games and video games which require the player to memorise a number of bits of information. Practice at these will enable you to increase the volume of information you can hold at once in your working memory, whilst also having fun!

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.