Making the Most of Your Brainpower
In this post I talk a little about using your brain to the maximum. I’ll explain how Mind Maps can help you think more efficiently and make sense of complex issues. When you’re in the right state of mind ideas flow quickly and easily. Although progress is often step-by-step, creative insights and leaps forward can be encouraged and facilitated by freeing yourself from self-imposed barriers and misplaced conventional wisdom.
It is sometimes said that you use only 10% of your brain. This is nonsense! There is not one little bit busily working away while the rest is just atrophying. You use most of your Brain all of the time.
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging shows which parts are most active for specific tasks. However, due to its plasticity and dynamic nature, having faith in localisation of function is misplaced. The best we can say is that certain brain regions play a greater or lesser role in certain aspects of learning, thinking, memory and behaviour.
It’s a bit like if you’re deliberately driving a car down the road at 30 miles an hour, you don’t say only 30% of the Engine is working. Obviously, you’re just using the gears and the accelerator to extract enough power to travel at your chosen speed. So, I think what is really meant when it’s said that you only use 10% of your brain is that you are using 10% of the maximum power available if you were fully using your brain at peak efficiency.
The great geniuses had the same mental hardware as you. They weren’t born with abnormally big or differently organised brains. Einstein is said to have had a greater density of connections in his brain but this is most likely a consequence of using it than any innate propensity for Genius. Studies on London taxi drivers have shown them to have significantly larger hippocampi than control subjects, suggesting that extensive practice with spatial navigation affects the growth of brain cells and memory.
So what does peak efficiency feel like?
It’s what athletes call ‘The Zone’. It’s being so immersed in an activity — be it athletics, work, or a creative project — that all distractions are shut out. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi coined the term “flow” to describe the phenomenon. A key feature of the flow experience is a distorted sense of time — typically a feeling that time has passed faster than usual.
“Time flies when you’re having fun”
Nature may slow our sense of time. In studies, people perceived time moving more slowly in nature compared with urban settings. Individuals in nature reported feeling more relaxed than those in the urban condition. Having previously worked in London, I love now living in rural tranquillity. I have views of green hills, trees, sheep and cows from my office window.
Loops
Using more of your available brainpower is a feedback loop.
- Step one – define the problem
- Step two – put effort into thinking
- Step three – record, analyse and structure your thoughts
- Step four – return to step two
Mind Maps help you to fully explore the problem. They promote generative thinking so you can come up with more ideas. A Mind Map is the best way to structure, summarise and interlink these ideas to create understanding and insight.
Success
I’m sure you’ve heard the old adage “If at first you don’t succeed try, try again.” It is of course, about the importance of persistence. However, I disagree. Trying the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is madness. I would prefer to say, “If at first you don’t succeed, analyse why, and try something new.” This is smart persistence.
When Edison was trying to perfect the filament lightbulb, he had many unsuccessful attempts but each trial was not a failure – it just revealed another non-solution which he could eliminate from the prototype design or adapt. Edison said, “Success is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration.”
This is usually how science works. You propose a hypothesis, design an experiment to test it and analyse the results. If the results disagree with what was predicted then you create a new hypothesis. If the results support the hypothesis you can suggest additional studies. Research is published so others can corroborate results
and explore further.
Creative Flashes
Sometimes flashes of Inspiration can help you jump forward from the normal step-by-step process. Daydreaming and reflection enable memory consolidation and promote non-linear associations. This helps you to break down issues and look at them from a new perspective.
Einstein was a daydreamer. His pioneering theories often came to him through his ‘thought experiments’. Charles Darwin and Friedrich Nietzsche have attributed much of their genius to the many hours they spent lost in their mind. Darwin had a “thinking path” that he would walk down to ruminate, and Nietzsche is said to have strolled around in nature for hours and hours on end to make sense of his ideas.
Warren Buffet is one of the best-known and most successful investors. As of June 2023, his net worth was $117 billion, making him the fifth-richest person in the world. He says, “I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. I read and think. So I do more reading and thinking, and make less impulse decisions than most people in business.”
Creative insights do not have to be rare, random events. Creativity is not, as some so-called ‘creatives’ would tell you, a natural God-given gift. It can be taught. It’s simply a matter of exhausting the obvious, stepping outside the norm and looking at a problem from a different angle. Most important is removing self-imposed barriers.
“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.” ~Bertrand Russell
We have been conditioned from an early age to classify ideas as good or bad and right or wrong. At school, giving an answer which differs from what is expected is penalised. In business, giving answer which differs from what is expected can lead to innovation and a competitive advantage. Challenge what you think is certain and you can release untapped potential to increase the power of thinking.