Brain Trust (4 page)

And again, these tips generalize. Interleaving and varying your study location will help whether you’re mastering math skills, learning French, or trying to become a better ballroom dancer.

So too will a somewhat related phenomenon, the spacing effect, first described by Hermann Ebbinghaus in 1885. “If you study and then you wait, tests show that the longer you wait, the more you will have forgotten,” says Bjork. That’s obvious—over time, you forget. But here’s the cool part: If you study, wait, and then study again, the longer the wait, the more you’ll have learned
after this second study session. Bjork explains it this way: “When we access things from our memory, we do more than reveal it’s there. It’s not like a playback. What we retrieve becomes more retrievable in the future. Provided the retrieval succeeds, the more difficult and involved the retrieval, the more beneficial it is.” Note that there’s a trick implied by “provided the retrieval succeeds”: You should space your study sessions so that the information you learned in the first session remains just barely retrievable. Then, the more you have to work to pull it from the soup of your mind, the more this second study session will reinforce your learning. If you study again too soon, it’s too easy.

Along these lines, Bjork also recommends taking notes just after class, rather than during—forcing yourself to recall a lecture’s information is more effective than simply copying it from a blackboard. “Get out of court stenographer mode,” says Bjork. You have to work for it. The more you work, the more you learn, and the more you learn, the more awesome you can become.

“Forget about forgetting,” says Robert Bjork
.

“People tend to think that learning is building up something in your memory and that forgetting is losing the things you built. But in some respects the opposite is true.” See, once you learn something, you never actually forget it. Do you remember your childhood best friend’s phone number? No? Well, Dr. Bjork showed that if you were reminded, you would retain it much more quickly and strongly than if you were asked to memorize a fresh seven-digit number. So this old phone number is not forgotten—it lives somewhere in you—only, recall can be a bit tricky.

And while we count forgetting as the sworn enemy of learning, in some ways that’s wrong too. Bjork showed that the two live in a kind of symbiosis in which forgetting actually aids recall. “Because humans have unlimited storage capacity, having total recall would be a mess,” says Bjork. “Imagine you remembered all the phone numbers of all the houses you had ever lived in. When someone asks you your current phone number, you would have to sort it from this long list.” Instead, we forget the old phone numbers, or at least bury them far beneath the ease of recall we give to our current number. What you thought were sworn enemies are more like distant collaborators.

Forget just learning
. University of California–Davis psychologist Dean Keith Simonton knows how you can become a genius. First, pick the definition of “genius” you’re aiming for—superior IQ, prodigious talent, or exceptional achievement. OK, let’s be realistic: You’ve either got Marilyn vos Savant’s 228 IQ or you don’t, and if you had prodigious talent, you’d already know it.

But the “genius at” category can be trained. Anyone can be Michelangelo at something. “Sometimes it just takes more than the usual amount of time to find your thing,” says Simonton. If you haven’t got it yet, keep searching. Once you find it—be it topiary, competitive Rubik’s cube-ing, folding proteins, or painting creation scenes on inverted domes—“it takes about a decade of hard work to develop domain-specific skills,” says Simonton.

Get aggressive in your far-and-wide search for your talent. Then retreat to that cave high in the Himalayas, where you can spend ten years perfecting it. When you emerge—BAM!—you’ll be a genius.

Who hasn’t needed to bluff? In business, sports, and romantic pursuit, it’s often useful to seem more powerful—or more vulnerable—than you really are. Sure, you can try flashing a smile or a frown or a come-hither, but “we’ve learned to control our faces,” says David Givens, director of the Center for Nonverbal Studies, in Spokane, Washington. And so people have learned to be wary of them. If you want to bluff convincingly—and figure
out what others are really thinking—you’ll need to focus on another body part.

“Our shoulders are much less tutored,” says Givens.

For instance, the shrug is reflexive, and because it’s unfiltered by the scheming brain, it’s telling.

This is because the shrug comes from your inner lizard. And this lizard part of the brain knows how to show subordination—it crouches. Specifically, lizards duck their heads while rotating their lower arms outward, thus lowering their bodies. Mammals do it too—witness my yellow Lab in the second after I’ve caught him neck-deep in the Thanksgiving turkey. We call this cowering. In humans, it’s the knee-jerk response to “Look out!” and also the who knows? gesture that shows subservience and uncertainty in classrooms and boardrooms around the world.

Opposite the cringe is what Givens calls “the antigravity sign.” This is humans’ palm-down speaking gesture or the high-stand display of a dominant lizard. “People in the military or business try to mimic this gesture by augmenting the shoulders and squaring them with uniforms and suits,” says Givens. Again, witness my yellow Lab, whose shoulder hackles flare threateningly when he’s confronted with intense danger in the form of squirrels on the porch or (for some reason) pumpkins. Make your shoulders bigger, and you’ll look badder.

And once you’re done being big and bad, perhaps you’ll take a second to reconnect with your softer side. Just as there are evolutionarily programmed signals for dominance and subservience, there are hardwired signals of love (admit it—these signals are why you’re still reading this entry). You know about the neck-revealing hair adjustment and the one-eyebrow-raised smoldering smile. But did you know about pigeon toes? Givens points to it as a sure sign of attraction. Toes in means “come hither” and toes out—reminiscent of a soldier at rest—means “not today, maybe not ever.” Also on a spectrum from inviting to denying is head
angle: Forehead down, eyes up should make you recall Lauren Bacall’s famous come-hither to Humphrey Bogart. And on the flip side, chin up with eyes looking down is bad, bad news—a sure sign of disdain.

If you’re seeing pigeon toes and downward forehead along with the vulnerable lizard shrug, your evening is looking up. All together, you know what it looks like? Well, it looks exactly like Betty Boop. That naughty minx.

Givens is quick to point out that not only can you learn to recognize these signs in their natural habitat and thus know things you might otherwise not, but you can learn to control them for your own evil purposes (my words, not his). These collected signals not only function as subconscious conduits of information, but they can create reciprocity, too.

You want a better chance with that special someone you glimpsed across the bar? Get your pigeon-toed, forehead-tilting, shoulder-shrugging groove on. You might want to practice in the mirror first.

David Givens’s books include
Love Signals
and
Your Body at Work
. His nonverbal dictionary is online at
www.center-for-nonverbal-studies.org
.

Body language isn’t solely the domain of the
living. Cynthia Breazeal of MIT’s Media Lab creates robots that rock nonverbal communication. “We’ve seen that if doctor-patient or teacher-student nonverbal behavior is compatible, health and learning outcomes are improved,” says Breazeal, and she’s seen the same with her ’bots—her robots that guide users’ weight loss or education are most successful when their choices to remind, persuade, cajole, or bully their humans gels with users’ personalities. Going a step further, she says, “We’re experimenting with robots that have a version of mirror neurons,” referring to the cells in the human brain that allow us to internally imitate others’ behavior, thus inferring their feelings and intentions. Similarly, Breazeal’s robots now learn to imitate the gestures and interaction patterns of their users, making themselves both more liked and more persuasive.

In American culture, “Choice is more than a decision,” says Sheena Iyengar, social psychologist at the Columbia Business School. The desire for choice is so strong in our culture that the word’s become an adjective describing something good—as in a choice chicken breast.

“At the most basic level, we’re born with the desire for choice,” says Iyengar. “But we’re not born knowing how to make a choice.” Instead, culture teaches us how to choose.

To make a broad comparison, American culture teaches people to make choices as individuals, whereas Asian cultures teach people to make choices in consultation with a group. “We can decide what we’re going to be, whom we’re going to marry, what
we’re going to eat. But if you go to Japan, what you’re going to wear or whom you’re going to marry is seen as such an important choice that it’s made in consultation with important others,” says Iyengar.

In a TED talk (
www.Ted.com
), Iyengar illustrates this point with the following story. In Japan, Iyengar ordered green tea with sugar. No, the waiter informed her, one does not take sugar with green tea. Iyengar persisted in her desire for sweetened tea and eventually pushed her request up the food chain (as it were) to the restaurant’s manager, who informed her that, unfortunately, the kitchen was out of sugar. In that case, Iyengar asked for a cup of coffee instead. The coffee arrived on a saucer with a small pitcher of cream … and two packets of sugar.

In this case and in this culture, the decision to embarrass herself with the improper addition of sugar to tea was not Iyengar’s alone—it was the group’s responsibility to ensure she made what was so certainly (unbeknownst to Iyengar) the best choice.

This was one of the original roles of religion, says Iyengar—to help us inform our decisions with input from our significant prefrontal cortexes, rather than depending on some willy-nilly demand for sugar from our id. In order to conquer this classic self-control problem, we gave God the right to make our choices for us about killing, coveting, watching football on Sunday, and how we prepare and eat many of our foods.

The problem is that we American neo-heathens have the tendency to let our ids run wild, unbound by the wise words of elders or the dictates of proscriptive religion. For example, Iyengar was
this close
to taking sugar in her green tea, and certainly would have if it weren’t for the swift and decisive intervention of the restaurant staff. That’s a trivial example, but the implications are real. All by your lonesome, without similar wise oversight or religious dictates, how can you be assured of doing the right thing?

One way is to make your own commandments. “We can make
our own rules—look at Confucius,” says Iyengar. These may include “I will not have cake in the house,” or “If I fail to exercise three times in the course of a week, I will donate twenty dollars to the most egregious cause I can find,” or “I will not date my friends’ exes, no matter how attractive and charming they may seem.” These rules can overrule choice and used enough, they become habit.

This reminds me of eminent physicist and jokester Richard Feynman, who wrote in his autobiography (which remains one of my all-time favorite books) about his decision while studying at MIT to always, from that point forward, eat chocolate ice cream for dessert. In his opinion, this rule eliminated an unwanted nightly choice—what to have for dessert—and left him free to focus on more important matters, like how to pick locks and convince his colleagues that he spoke every possible language.

So ask yourself, Does a choice lead to beneficial/delectable variety, or does it include a clear winner in competition with attractive but detrimental alternatives? If it’s the first, keep the choice as a choice. But if it’s the second, delegate/relegate it to your rulebook. In a world in which choice knows no cultural or religious bounds, the best rules to live by may be your own.