The Power of Forgetting (12 page)

Each player thinks of a five-letter word and writes it down, keeping their word to themselves. These words must contain five different letters. Each player then writes out the alphabet,
A
to
Z
, at the top of their page. It’s up to each player to guess the other’s word. They do this by saying other five-letter words to their opponent. It’s the opponent’s job to say how many letters this word has in common with the chosen word but not to say what those letters are.

Jotto can get busy: You’ll find yourselves volleying back and forth, suggesting words while keeping an eye on your own word.

And remember to write down your guesses so you don’t repeat yourself. Once you find a letter that you feel isn’t in your opponent’s word, cross it off your alphabet at the top. When you think you’ve found a letter in your opponent’s word, circle it. Jotto is a process of elimination.

Let’s take an example:

Player 1’s word is “brain.” Player 2’s first guess is “shirt.” Player 1 now says how many letters in “shirt” are also in the word “brain.” In this example, those letters are
i
and
r
, so Player 1 says, “Two letters.” Player 1 doesn’t have to state which letters the two words have in common—this is what
keeps Jotto fun. Player 2’s second guess is “short.” Player 1’s response is “One,” because
r
is the only common letter. Now Player 2, having learned that
i
is in the secret word, circles it on his alphabet list and crosses off
o
, having also learned that
o
is not in Player 1’s word. Meanwhile, both players are writing down each word they guess so they won’t use them again. That would waste a turn.

On Player 2’s next turn, he guesses “those,” to which Player 1 answers, “Zero.” Now Player 2 crosses
t
,
h
,
s
, and
e
off his list (he’s already eliminated
o
). He’s eliminating letters to arrive at the correct word. And he’s circled
i
and
r
because he also knows from his first guess that those two letters are part of the word. Two letters down; three to go!

Play continues until Player 2 guesses Player 1’s word. But while this is going on, the opposite has been happening as well—Player 1 has been trying to guess Player 2’s word. Both players have been very busy.

Jotto has a few other rules:

Tip: It’s good to guess words that are close to your previous guesses so that they use some of the same letters as these other words.

If you guess more matching letters, you’re headed down the right path.

Now let’s get a little playful and test your “attentional capacity.” I want to show you the power of your mind’s inherent ability to detect certain patterns automatically. This will also play into your mind’s adeptness at automatically focusing, concentrating, and—yes
—forgetting
when necessary.

Look quickly at the following word and see if you can figure out what it would spell if the letters were arranged differently: salttre.

Can’t “see” it? Don’t stare at this word for more than a few seconds, and avoid trying to unscramble it. Just look at it as a whole.

If you’ve got the answer, pat yourself on the back. But don’t beat yourself up if you haven’t decoded it yet. Before I reveal the answer, let’s move on to one more exercise. Take a look at the following box and begin reading:

Or rather …

Like some of the other exercises in this chapter, the content in these boxes may not seem to have anything to do with patterns, but in fact the ability to read the first paragraph—where the words are scrambled (with the exception of the first and last letter in each word)—has everything to do with patterns and, more specifically, associations that the mind can make in an instant. (And for the record, this text circulated through the Internet—and many people’s e-mail in-boxes—in the fall of 2003. Although some have suggested that the original research may not have come from Cambridge University, it’s nonetheless intriguing. Because this text has been passed on so many times, it has mutated along the way. What you see here is merely one version.) The first scrambled word on page 100, by the way, is “startle.” Or maybe you saw “rattles” or “starlet.” Why was it easier to decipher a whole paragraph than a single word?

As the next chapter will illustrate in rich detail, all memory, whether trained or untrained, is based on association.

When you see the single word mixed up, it’s much harder to make an association in your mind than it is to see a pattern amid the medley of mixed-up words in an entire
paragraph. The pattern in the paragraph reflects a series of associations. There’s a hidden system to the way the letters are scrambled in each word, and the brain can start to pick up on that system by looking at a whole batch of words that follow its rules. Another thing to note is that the brain has an enormous capacity to adapt quickly. Once it sees a few words scrambled a certain way, it can adapt to seeing those words as it picks up on the concealed pattern. At the same time, the mind is “forgetting” the details in the scrambled words (i.e., the individual letters) and instead focusing just on the overall pattern to decipher the meaning of the paragraph.

To really understand how easy it is for the brain to suddenly “click” and dial into a certain pattern or way of looking at something while forgetting the nonessentials, try playing any classic video game such as Pac-Man, Tetris, or Minesweeper. Surely you’ll recall the first time you played such games and found yourself working hard to remember which keys matched which actions. Then at some point, quite instinctively, your fingers could find the keys when they needed to without your really “thinking” about it. As your mind adapted to the game’s intrinsic patterns, you were able to play the game much faster and allocate less brainpower to paying full attention to what your fingers were doing. After much practice, you could probably play any of these games while performing other tasks, such as talking on the phone or with another person in the room—or any other task that didn’t require the use of your playing hand!

You don’t need to play video games to appreciate this mental experience. If you’ve ever driven yourself to work, the grocery store, a friend’s house, etc., and arrived without really remembering the drive, then you know that your
brain tuned in to the usual patterns of that habitual drive to get you there. You’ve experienced the same phenomenon if you’ve cooked up a meal almost subconsciously while talking on the phone or engaging in conversation with family members nearby: mental cruise control driven by known patterns ingrained in your brain.

In all of these scenarios, it’s as if the mind takes over, in much the same way you can speak English without thinking through every word as you create a sentence. And in fact, you experience a similar process when you learn a new language: In the beginning it’s hard and requires lots of practice, but after a while, as your mind adapts to the new language and learns its structural patterns (yes, all languages have patterns that reflect sets of rules that we call “linguistics” or “grammar”), you begin to speak the language without having to think so intently about how to compose each sentence. You “forget” the nitpicky rules and let your brain work on autopilot, which focuses on the overall task.

Because associations are so key to memory building, providing the foundation for all mental skills, they are essential when you’re trying to remember abstract ideas, which we encounter a lot in real life. Perhaps, for example, it’s linking the year when World War II ended (1945) with the pass code to get into your garage at work. Even when we create bizarre associations between two different things, all associations are about relationships—establishing connections between numbers, words, concepts, images, or pictures. Sometimes these associations are nothing more than substitutions—a method of association that has given us cryptograms, secret codes, and ciphers that date back thousands of years. These are prime examples of patterns in action.

Your ability to focus and concentrate, which in turn helps you to automatically identify patterns, will require routine practice.

As we go through the other skills in the upcoming chapters, you’ll find your focus and concentration tested over and over again.

Every time you’re challenged to learn something new you’ll be simultaneously cultivating, developing, and maintaining your focus and concentration faculties. What I want you to be extra vigilant about as you move forward is to notice any moment when your focus and concentration wane or falter. See if you can stop yourself and ask:
What happened? Why did it happen?
Then center yourself again and bring your focus and concentration back up to speed. Although I have described focus and concentration as two separate skills, we don’t really keep track of when we’re focusing versus when we’re concentrating; often we’re performing these two skills at the same time. This is because we need to enlist both skills to achieve a given goal, such as driving to a destination or cooking a soufflé.

I have a habit—a ritual—of looking a certain way when I intently focus and concentrate at the same time. If you ever watched me solve a really hard equation or rapidly rattle off a series of solutions to difficult problems, you might get the idea that I’ve got a massive headache. That’s because when I’m put to the test, I keep my eyes tightly closed and pinch the bridge of my nose with my fingers.

I look like I’m in pain, but what I’m really doing is forcing myself to go inward—to access the mental file I need
and “download” it to the front of my mind so I can answer the questions. This habit of mine isn’t meant for show, and I didn’t develop it on purpose. This is just my own natural way of becoming very aware of the task at hand so I can retrieve and hold the important information in my brain to then work with it. My point in telling you this is to encourage you to do what’s necessary to focus and concentrate as best you can, especially when you need to focus and concentrate for a brief but critical moment of time. This may mean closing your eyes, as I do, or taking a deep breath to distance yourself from any distractions and summon up a razor-sharp awareness for what your brain is tackling.

One of the chief reasons I wrote this book was to help readers bring a level of consciousness and awareness to their lives that they might not have had before. We have a natural inclination to let our minds lie dormant until we have to use them to do something, and even then we tend to minimize how much we use our brains. We draw from them only what we need to get by, rather than deploying the full extent of their potential. My goal is to make you activate your brain as much as you can and as often as you can. So the next time you’re driving from point A to point B—and I mean this figuratively as well as literally—don’t just drive “subconsciously.”

Instead, make the most of your journey and engage your mind in ways that will make you smarter and sharper by the time you reach your destination.

The exercises in this chapter are designed to be done more than once, and preferably as many times as your schedule
allows. This is a great chapter to save for a Saturday or Sunday afternoon when you have twenty minutes or perhaps a whole hour to play with these mental activities. See if you can go through every exercise in this chapter at least once a month, and more frequently if possible. Pull out your trusty math trick for friends at social events. Remember, the more you practice, the better your brain becomes.

Increasing Mental Capacity Through the Fine Art of Association