The Power of Forgetting (8 page)

You may not have any interest in playing the stock market or gambling, which also encompasses a lot of pattern recognition if you’re good at it, but being able to read other people really well is a huge asset no matter what you’re doing or trying to achieve. Most people are going to behave the same in every situation. Those who can detect the patterns in people’s behavior can benefit from being able to predict how they will act and what they will respond to. You can understand your boss, your colleagues, your clients, your teachers, and your opponents in ways that allow you to maximize those relationships to your benefit. In fact, this ability is what separates amateur athletes from professional athletes. If you are acutely aware of patterns in your opponents, you can leverage your strengths and weaknesses against those patterns. Professional athletes don’t depend on ability or physical strength alone—they need more than that to reach such a high level of success (and get paid for it!). It’s the patterns they pick up from their opponents that ultimately help them plan their plays and achieve victories. For instance, batters know the patterns in the pitchers they face. Tennis players know the patterns in their opponents’ serves, forehands, and backhands. Basketball and football players, and especially their coaches, know the patterns in the opposing teams’ movements on the court and on the field. In his book, Duhigg covers how football coach Tony Dungy propelled one of the worst teams in the NFL to the Super Bowl by focusing on how his players habitually reacted to on-field cues.

In the business sphere, CEOs and business owners know the patterns in their industries’ business cycles, as well as the
patterns in their own companies’ internal rhythms throughout the year. This awareness allows companies to predict and manage their cash flow in the best way and to weather the storms that are inevitable from month to month. Much as a weatherman predicts the weather from patterns in the sky, clouds, barometric pressure, and temperature, so can business owners use their awareness of patterns to predict when their businesses are going to suffer a serious revenue drought or enjoy a windfall of revenues. The most successful leaders and business owners are the ones who can make good predictions based on patterns and adjust their plans accordingly to meet shifting needs and issues. And as we just saw, being able to predict buying habits allows companies to maximize their marketing strategies and capture more customers.

Clearly, being able to recognize patterns isn’t just a means to leverage your assets in a business setting or against someone else’s assets to outsmart them. As much as patterns can give you an advantage in a competitive environment, they can just as easily help you enrich your personal relationships. Most all of us behave in predictable, or patterned, ways when it comes to what we like and don’t like and our general personality traits. It helps to surround ourselves with people who take note of our patterns and respond to our needs and preferences accordingly. By the same token, having an awareness of the patterns in others is what equips us with the knowledge we need to best tend to their desires. Awareness of patterns in others ultimately helps us become better mentors, teachers, parents, caretakers, entrepreneurs, colleagues, and leaders. It also inspires us to become the best, most ideal version of ourselves.

Patterns uniquely tie into our habit forming, including the
habit of forgetting. When we find patterns in our thoughts, work, and daily duties, we can develop habits to streamline our lives and further shape and establish those patterns. And the more efficient habits we create, the more brain space we have on reserve to take on tough tasks and train our focus. The more we can leave to the automatic devices of our “forgetful,” habituated minds, the more room we can reserve for higher levels of concentration on and thinking about new incoming information.

In the grand scheme, our relationship and interaction with patterns can essentially determine which direction we take in the world. Why? Our ability to recognize and capitalize on patterns ultimately heightens our awareness while revealing important insights that enhance our capacity to succeed.

Such a statement may sound obscure and somewhat philosophical, but not when we consider the fact that success itself follows a pattern.

Yes, there are patterns to success, whether it’s building a successful business, working effectively with other people, or exploiting a trend for profit. Trends, after all, are patterns in themselves. Those who can predict trends make our brightest inventors, entrepreneurs, marketers, advertisers, fashion designers, Hollywood directors and producers, writers, Internet sensations, and trendsetters.

When
Big Brother
and
Survivor
became phenomena around the turn of the last century, reality television was born (and many old TV programming models were forgotten). Soon enough, dozens of imitators followed (surely you can name a few), each of which reflected a pattern—a formula—that had clearly worked and proved successful.
Not every reality show survived to live another season, but the overall lesson remains: Patterns can be great teachers as well as leading indicators of not only successful trends but also what’s worthy of forgetting. Pay attention to them. The exercises later in this book will help you to do that.

Being able to see patterns—and making a habit of it—at a very early age is critical. Babies pick up on patterns quickly as parents follow the ritualistic patterns that are inherent in caring for a child. Pattern recognition explains why a baby can see a blanket and associate it with sleep or know that food is coming just by being placed in a high chair. It’s astonishing to think that we humans create associations not only throughout our lives but starting the moment we are born, though we aren’t always conscious of them. As we grow older, patterns become background noise that we ignore and “forget” for the most part, and yet those who notice and try to stay exceptionally attuned to patterns are typically the ones who get ahead more easily in life and find solutions to problems more quickly. They also are the ones who can take the most advantage of the power of forgetting. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

In a later chapter, I’m going to teach you how to alphabetize the letters within a given word. It’s arguably the best mental exercise to perform on a regular basis. Why? Because it entails some hard-core pattern recognition where you wouldn’t think there would be a pattern. You’ll take in bits of seemingly abstract information—in this case, a bunch of letters—and switch them around using a simple rule: alphabetical
order. This is harder than it may seem, because most people don’t know the alphabet as well as they think they do. So when they are told to spell “thought” in alphabetical order, they commonly spell it erroneously as “h-h-g-o-t-t-u,” rather than correctly as “g-h-h-o-t-t-u.” Why does this happen? It turns out that the mind often mixes up a few letters in the alphabet; it’s difficult to know quickly, for instance, whether
g
comes before or after
h
. For this reason, it’s much easier to spell “feedback” in alphabetical order than “knight.” We’ll explore why, and I’ll reveal how to cement the alphabet in the brain for faster, more accurate recall.

Once you learn how to perform this skill, you’ll find yourself doing it automatically all the time, since words are to be found everywhere—on the highway, in the mail, on television, in conversations with others, and in workplaces. It can be an addictive practice, but one that’s incredibly fun and good exercise for the brain: It utilizes rarely worked areas of the brain whose “muscles,” once trained, can strengthen the mind’s capacity to retain information. It also fortifies the brain’s ability to forget when necessary to handle more information quickly.

What you’re essentially forcing yourself to do is to seek a different pattern by using all the information you’re given and looking at it in a whole different way. We don’t normally like to mentally juggle several pieces of a puzzle at once, but when we make a concerted effort to do so and use the power of forgetting as needed, we tap into greater brainpower. We also advance our perceptual learning skills.

Perceptual learning is a hot new field of study currently gaining momentum in psychological, educational, and scientific circles, and I think it helps explain why habitual pattern recognition is so powerful a factor in achieving greater
success. In the simplest terms, perceptual learning is about being able to use your gut instinct to solve problems and “perceive” certain things. People with well-developed perceptual learning skills—such as the ballplayer who can detect pitches early, the art collector who can instantly spot a counterfeit painting, or the chess master who predicts the best move—have a great “third eye.” This inner source of intuitive wisdom helps them make quick and, in many cases, accurate or correct decisions. It also helps them to organize their thoughts and instantly know, for example, what’s important to remember without wasting precious mental energy and time. And all of this in turn allows them to forget petty details that can cloud their perceptual skills.

It’s no surprise that some cognitive scientists are urging us to take far greater advantage of perceptual learning, especially in schools, where students should be taught how to learn. Benedict Carey wrote a marvelous piece on perceptual intuition for the
New York Times
in June 2011, aptly titled “Brain Calisthenics for Abstract Ideas.” He explains the weakness in traditional schooling’s so-called top-down instruction, especially for topics like math and science. He writes that we’re taught to “learn the rules first—the theorems, the order of operations, the formulas and tables, Newton’s laws, etc.—then make a run at the problem list at the end of the chapter. Yet recent research has found that true experts have something at least as valuable as a mastery of the rules: gut instinct, an instantaneous grasp of the type of problem they’re up against.”

According to cognitive scientists in this new area of study, gut instinct and perception are critical to success because they allow our brains to quickly deepen our grasp of
a principle. They also allow us to make good decisions without really thinking about it—to arrive at conclusions effortlessly. One of the most exciting findings of recent research is that perceptual knowledge builds automatically, like a habit. To use the example provided by Carey in his article: “There’s no reason someone with a good eye for fashion or wordplay cannot develop an intuition for classifying rocks or mammals or algebraic equations, given a little interest or motivation.”

In other words, in subject areas that make us uncomfortable or whose ideas and rules are not easy for us to grasp, being able to rely on our perceptions can change everything. It can turn sciencephobes into scientists. It can help someone who could never before turn math equations into graphical interpretations become incredibly adept at this skill. And it can help anyone accomplish certain tasks more easily by relying more on intuition than on set rules and steps that require precise recall, thought, and consideration.

Carey brings up a good point in his reporting: When you think about it, perceptual learning is really just a way of looking at the world and asking yourself,
How can I solve this problem intuitively? Without really thinking about it, how can I arrive at an answer?
Although we’re not always aware of it, in fact we ask ourselves these questions every single day, many times over. Whenever we’re faced with a real-life problem, our first questions are always “What am I looking at? What’s the problem? Where do I want to go with this? What should my solution or outcome be?” We then consider the facts, try to discern which ones are relevant and which we can forget, and figure out what to do next. All of this activity that our brain performs pretty much below
our conscious radar is a perfect example of our perceptions at work helping us to solve problems. Our “perceptions at work” are what compose our habits. And by “problems” I’m referring to any number of situations, from decoding a serious math equation to deciding whether to turn right or left at a busy intersection. Put simply, our habits shape and hone our perceptions, which in turn streamline our daily duties and workload. The more we can effortlessly perceive throughout our day that’s filled with decisions to make, the more we can save our mental energy.

Perceptual learning is rooted in the very fact that our ability to detect patterns, even the most subtle ones, happens subconsciously and well before we know we are learning. Carey cites a landmark 1997 experiment in which researchers at the University of Iowa found that some people playing a simple gambling game with decks of cards could unconsciously distinguish between the “good decks” (those that led to wins) and the “bad decks” (those that led to greater losses) after just ten cards. The study, which was published in the journal
Science
, proved that nonconscious biases can sometimes guide behavior before conscious knowledge does. In other words, you can perceive something different or special about a certain thing, such as a deck of cards, without any other knowledge or facts to consider.

Although some people, like me, develop sensitive perceptual radar the old-fashioned way through years of practice (and a self-inflicted obsession with recognizing patterns), there is growing evidence that a certain kind of training—“visual, fast-paced, often focused on classifying problems rather than solving them”—can build intuition quickly. For example, in another recent experiment cited by Carey, researchers
found that people were better able to distinguish the painting styles of twelve unfamiliar artists after viewing mixed collections of works from all twelve than after viewing a dozen works from one artist and then moving on to the next painter. “The participants’ brains began to pick up on differences before they could fully articulate them,” Carey notes.

Steven Sloman, a cognitive scientist at Brown University, explains it beautifully in Carey’s article: “Once the brain has a goal in mind, it tunes the perceptual system to search the environment for relevant clues.” Or as Carey describes it, “In time the eyes, ears and nose learn to isolate those signs and dismiss irrelevant information, in turn sharpening thinking.”