Here’s a mental warm-up exercise that requires no preparation:

Depending on your memory, your skills at mental math, and how long you feel like warming up, you might want to repeat this process when you get stuck, picking a new small number each time.

The initial calculations might be trivially easy, but the difficulty increases as you go along, until you are juggling several numbers in your head and attempting to carry digits without dropping them. Don’t worry about getting the answers right; the process is more important than the result. It will enhance the value of the exercise, however, if you are reasonably sure that your answers are correct. When you are unsure of a result, write it down and start the series again, double-checking your result when you get to the same place. The point here is that satisfaction is the stimulus that warms up your thinking.

Doubling numbers is essentially a mechanical process, so the mental challenge lies in remembering numbers as you apply the process. If doubling numbers bores you, you can try other forms of mental math, such as calculating second powers (i.e., squares). Memory games in general are a good source of mental warm-up exercises. If you are not naturally good with remembering names, for example, you can practice recalling names of casual acquaintances that you haven’t seen in years. If you have used the Dominic System of mnemonics [Hack #6], you can practice it by picking a four-digit number and working out the mnemonic visualizations that go with that number and each successive number until you are warmed up.

Wordplay is another domain with mental-warm-up value. Try composing a limerick or a haiku to get your mental juices flowing. Puzzling out some rhymes or finding just the right words to fit syllable constraints can give you a small challenge and motivate your thinking. Another idea is to form anagrams using words you discover in your immediate environment.

In his book Flow,¹ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes the feeling of happiness you get when you engage in an activity that is challenging, but not beyond your abilities, and involves a continuous cycle of effort and success. The feeling of accomplishment motivates you to continue your efforts. This is true regardless of the level of challenge, as long as you do feel some sense of actual effort. Even a trivial success rewards your efforts and makes you more inclined to continue. As with the Swiss cheese technique [Hack #65], it is the small bursts of success that kick you out of your lethargy.

The distinction between a mental warm-up and hacks like the Swiss cheese technique is that a mental warm-up has no requirements. It is like stretching before you exercise. You can stretch at any time, and you need no equipment.

Karl Erickson

To play board games, you obviously need other players and games. There are a lot of ways to find other players. You can start the old-fashioned way, by asking friends and family to play. See if any of them are interested in having a regular gaming session, once a month or more; it’s a lot easier to sustain interest and build skills by working out regularly.

If you can’t get your current friends to play games regularly, there are established gaming clubs and groups all over. If you live in a reasonably large metro area, you can almost certainly find more than one group to choose from, and even many smaller towns have a group or a game hangout. Try checking the bulletin board at your local game store, or asking the people who work there. If you live near a university, check the bulletin boards there or the student newspaper. You can also place ads or flyers yourself to attract other players; this is how the established groups get started, after all.

As it is with many other things, the Internet is also a terrific source of information about gaming groups. Use your favorite search engine to search the Web for your town and "board games", look under board games in directories like the Open Directory Project, or check blog and email group sites (such as Yahoo! Groups) for board-game players.

When you find players, you’ll also need games to play. There are a dizzying number of games to choose from nowadays, so this can be daunting for someone trying to get a feel for what’s available. Fortunately, when you find gamers, they’ll usually have favorite games to suggest, so you can try those first to help narrow down your preferences. Nonetheless, once you get some idea of what you like and dislike, start branching out and trying new games on your own. You may well find a game you love that doesn’t fit your other friends’ tastes. You can’t rely on other gamers, though, if you’re starting up with your own friends and all of you are clueless.

Never fear, I’m here to help you out. Many board games fall into a few broad categories. Some fall into multiple categories at the same time. You’ll probably want to try games from all of them to see what you enjoy:

There are many, many other ways to categorize games, and this is just a start; I considered including sections about financial and auction games, race games, deduction games, and more, organized by game mechanics, themes, or subjective groupings. As you learn more games, you’ll learn what you like and how other games are similar and different, and you’ll have your own opinions about how to group them. There are also lots of wonderful games that don’t fit into categories easily, but I hope this is enough of a map to get you started.

While you’re exploring, there are a few things you should probably avoid, if you want to game with the goal of improving your brain. You probably won’t get much out of “roll the die and move on the track” games; they generally have very simple mechanisms and high luck factors, and really won’t challenge you much. These include the familiar games Sorry and Parcheesi, most popular themed games (such as games based on TV shows), and pretty much anything ending with “-opoly.” You can learn basic facts and random information from trivia games, but most of them have a minimum of strategic potential and won’t challenge those skills very much. Some games of chance are deep and can teach you a lot about strategy and deduction if you learn them seriously—poker is a good example—but many just revolve around the excitement of luck, and those won’t build brain power either.

Gaming, as an aspect of play, is rarely taken seriously as an important activity and a worthwhile way to spend time, but research in anthropology and psychology shows that play is an important method for learning and socialization throughout a person’s life.^1,2 Why is it such a powerful way to learn?

First of all, gaming is fun. Rose and Nichols, among others, have shown that the brain is most efficient when it’s enjoying an activity, and that activities that stimulate emotions as well as sensory input (such as shape, color, sound, and texture) are most effective at conveying information so that the brain retains it.³ The colors, stories, laughter, and excitement involved in gaming open your mind to what it can learn as you play.

Gaming also provides a means for people to repeat situations safely and easily so that they can try out different decisions to see if they work. By studying academic courses that were based on games, Knotts and Keys determined that people who honed their skills in games, by trying out different decisions and getting immediate feedback about whether they were good decisions, developed more valid and sound skills than those who learned by more abstract methods.⁴ By participating in the simulation-type situation that games provide, players also become actively involved with the information as they get into the game. This produces a “mindful” state in which people make more effort to think about what they’re doing and not to rely on automatic reactions, which helps anchor information in their minds. Information also becomes easier to integrate because it’s connected to a concrete situation and given a context, making it meaningful rather than inert.⁵

Playing games almost intrinsically encourages self-regulated learning, which is one of the most effective learning modes. Self-regulated learners are intrinsically motivated—they seek out learning experiences for their own value—and they participate actively in choosing and modifying the learning situation so that it best suits their needs.⁶ Because games are fun, we want to play them, and the learning and intellectual challenge are built in as part of the fun. Games also provide a wide selection of attractive learning situations, and choosing them for stimulation as well as fun allows players to provide themselves with the best learning situation.

Much research about games and learning focuses on children, but one body of research related to self-regulated learning provides an important and relevant framework for adult learning and its motivations: the Flow Theory of Optimal Experience developed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.⁷ Flow theory gets its name from a particular state of extreme happiness and satisfaction produced by an activity. Flow occurs when people are so engaged and absorbed by an activity that they seem to “flow” along with it in a spontaneous and almost automatic manner, as if they are “carried by the flow” of the activity.

Flow comes from activities that provide enjoyment (as opposed to pleasure), which comes from one or more of the following factors:

This could be a verbatim list of reasons that dedicated gamers might give you if you asked them why they play. Achieving flow state takes a certain amount of effort and dedication, but its rewards in psychological growth and happiness are great, and they’re only compounded by letting the pleasure of the flow state motivate you toward gaining the other intellectual benefits of gaming.

Finally, there is evidence that board games are among the mentally stimulating leisure activities that are associated with a lowered risk of dementia in aged people.⁸ While the correlation doesn’t prove a protective effect, gaming might have long-term benefits, which only adds a cherry on top of all the other positive effects.

As you might have guessed, I’m an avid board-game player myself. I generally play a minimum of one gaming session a week with my local group, and I often pick up a few games between meetings as well. I’ve played games since I was a child but have really only become deeply involved with them in the past five years or so. It has become such a rewarding and pleasurable experience for me, though, that I never intend to stop playing as much as I can.

One of my favorite games is Age of Renaissance. It’s a long and complex board game, which follows a group of European cultures through several historical eras. Along the way, each develops technologies, endures calamities and bad luck, acquires trade markets and resources, battles and makes deals with the other cultures, and tries to accumulate the highest point score as measured by cultural and technological advancements.

This game challenges just about as many skills as I can bring to the table with me; I often lose, but it’s so interesting and engaging that I’m still eager to play over and over. Playing Age of Renaissance has taught me how to build a long and complex strategy, how to use tactical moves to avoid sudden pitfalls and take advantage of good luck, how to negotiate wisely, how to assess probability and manage risk, and how to keep my focus on a goal instead of being distracted by side issues that might look interesting. I have taken every one of these skills and used it in other parts of my life, to my advantage.

Moreover, I have gotten an intuitive idea of how European culture developed and the cultural, economic, and geographical factors that influenced European history (and thereby the history of much of the world). I find now that when I am exposed to news about world politics, I have a very different view of its implications, which springs from my experiential knowledge of these historical simulations.

From other games, I’ve experienced more different simulated experiences than it would ever be possible for me to have in real life, and I’ve taken away something useful from almost all of them. I find new ways every day in which playing board games has improved my mind and changed my life for the better, and I can’t wait to see what new adventures I’ll have next week.

Marty Hale-Evans

Comparing the attentional blink of people who have played video games for four days a week over six months against that of people who have barely played games at all finds that the games players have a shorter attentional blink.

The attentional blink comes about in trying to spot important items in a fast-changing sequence of random items. Essentially, it’s a recovery time. Let’s pretend there’s a video game in which, when someone pops up, you have to figure out whether they’re a good guy or a bad guy and respond appropriately. Most of the characters that pop up are good guys, it’s happening as fast as you can manage, and you’re responding almost automatically—then suddenly a bad one comes up. From working automatically, suddenly you have to lift the bad guy to conscious awareness so that you can dispatch him. The attentional blink says that the action of raising to awareness creates a half-second gap during which you’re less likely to notice another bad guy coming along.

Now obviously the attentional blink—this recovery time—is going to have an impact on your score if the second of two bad guys in quick succession is able to slip through your defenses and get a shot in. That’s a great incentive to somehow shorten your recovery time and return from “shoot bad guy” mode to “monitor for bad guys” mode as soon as possible.

Subitizing—the measure of how many objects you can quantify without having to count them—is a good way of gauging the capacity of visual attention. Whereas counting requires looking at each item individually and checking it off, subitizing takes in all items simultaneously. It requires being able to give a number of objects attention at the same time, and it’s not easy; that’s why the maximum is usually about four, although the exact cap measured in any particular experiment varies slightly depending on the setup and experimenter.

Green and Bavelier found the average maximum number of items their non-game-playing subjects could subitize before they had to start counting was 3.3. The number was significantly higher for games players: an average of 4.9—nearly 50% more.

Again, you can see the benefits of having a greater capacity for visual attention if you’re playing fast-moving video games. You need to be able to keep on top of whatever’s happening on the screen, even when (especially when) your attention is stretching.

Given these differences in certain mental abilities between gamers and nongamers, we might suspect the involvement of other factors. Perhaps gamers are just people who have naturally higher attention capacities (not attention as in concentration, remember, but the ability to keep track of a larger number of objects on the screen) and have gravitated toward video games.

No, this isn’t the case. Green and Bavelier’s final experiment was to take two groups of people and have them play video games for an hour each day for 10 days.

The group that played the classic puzzle game Tetris had no improvement on subitizing and no shortened attentional blink. Despite the rapid motor control required and the spatial awareness implicit in Tetris, playing the game didn’t result in any improvement.

On the other hand, the group that played Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (Electronic Arts, 2002), an intense first-person shooter, could subitize to a higher number and recovered from the attentional blink faster. They had trained and improved both their visual attention capacity and their processing time in only 10 days.

Green and Bavelier’s results are significant because we continuously use processes like subitizing in the way we perceive the world. Even before perception reaches conscious attention, our attention is flickering about the world around us, assimilating information. It’s mundane, but when you look to see how many potatoes are in the cupboard, you’ll “just know” if the quantity fits under your subitization limit, and you’ll have to count them—using conscious awareness—if it doesn’t.

Consider the attentional blink, which is usually half a second (for the elderly, this can double). A lot can happen in that time, especially in this information-dense world: are we missing a friend walking by on the street, or cars on the road? These are the continuous perceptions we have of the world, perceptions that guide our actions. And the limits on these widely used abilities aren’t locked but are trainable by doing tasks that stretch those abilities: fast-paced computer games.

I’m reminded of Douglas Engelbart’s classic paper “Augmenting Human Intellect,”² on his belief in the power of computers. He wrote this in 1962, way before the PC, and argued that it’s better to improve and facilitate the tiny things we do every day than it is to attempt to replace entire human jobs with monolithic machines. A novel-writing machine, if one were invented, just automates the process of writing novels, and it’s limited to novels. But making a small improvement to a pencil, for example, has a broad impact: any task that involves pencils is improved, whether it’s writing novels, newspapers, or sticky notes. The broad improvement brought about by this hypothetical better pencil is in our basic capabilities, not just in writing novels. Engelbart’s efforts were true to this: the computer mouse (his invention) heightened our capability to work with computers in a small, but pervasive, fashion.

Subitizing is like a pencil of conscious experience. Subitizing isn’t just responsible for our ability at a single task (like novel writing); it’s involved in our capabilities across the board, whenever we have to apply visual attention to more than a single item simultaneously. That we can improve such a fundamental capability, even just a little, is significant, especially since the way we make that improvement is by playing first-person-shooter video games. Building a better pencil is a big deal.

Matt Webb and Tom Stafford

You can take some simple and practical steps with respect to sleep, nutrition, and exercise to improve your mental performance.

The link between brain function and sleep, nutrition, and exercise is still only partially understood, so the recommendations for healthy daily amounts change over time as new research emerges. Keep up with the latest in health advice to make sure you can tune your life for optimal brain function.

One consistent finding is that middle-aged and older adults tend to show a greater detriment in mental function due to poor diet, sleep patterns, and exercise than younger adults do. If you are middle-aged or older, paying particular attention to these health issues will ensure you keep your edge well into old age. If not, there’s no time like the present to establish healthy habits that will bring you benefits for the rest of your life.

Vaughan Bell

Really, this is a story about associations. Your brain constantly scans the environment and puts things together in memory. Mental connections are made between things that occur at the same time, or in the same place, or that are followed by good or bad consequences. Continuously, often unconsciously, your brain is associating.⁴ We can use this to help get a better night’s sleep and to understand some of the bad sleep habits that you might have fallen into.

The key idea here is sleep hygiene, which means keeping those things you associate with sleep totally separate from those things you associate with being awake. We’ll assume that, being a sensible person, you already do all the obvious things that will help you sleep. As a reminder, some of those are:

So, if your sleep isn’t being artificially affected, and the physical conditions are ripe for a good night’s sleep, the best way to ensure that you get it is to strongly associate when and where you sleep with sleep, and sleep only. You train the associations by your behavior, so your brain picks up the regularities in your experience and ingrains them as habit. Three kinds of associations to think about are those relating to object and location, time, and behavior.

Our perception of time is radically distorted when we are asleep or close to sleep.⁷ By attaching electronic monitors to insomniacs, it is possible to show that many who report sleeping only two or three hours a night are actually asleep for an average of seven hours—only 35 minutes less than the average for non-insomniacs! So, for insomniacs, or the rest of us on a bad night, when we feel like we “hardly slept at all,” we were probably asleep for most of the night but only remember vividly, and exaggerate, the time when we were trying to get to sleep. Not only this, but if you tell insomniacs that they actually slept better than they did, they then feel and perform better during the day.⁸

Other results show that it is impossible to prove an extra effect of broken sleep beyond the amount of sleep time you lose from being awake.⁹ In other words, if a screaming baby wakes you up in the middle of the night for 20 minutes, there’s no reason that this should make you feel any worse in the morning than going to bed 20 minutes later than normal would have. Any discontent you do feel is probably due to stress, rather than lack of sleep per se.

This means that it’s how you feel about how much sleep you got, as well as how much sleep you actually got, that matters. If you can avoid worrying about it, avoid watching the clock and counting the hours, that’s as useful as actually getting a few more minutes. Obviously, most insomniacs don’t want to worry about not getting enough sleep, so does knowing this help? Well, hopefully it helps a little bit. When you think you haven’t slept enough, you probably have. As long as you cover a core minimum of sleep, which is probably a couple of hours less than you normally get, you might feel tired but your performance won’t suffer. If you know that awakening in the middle doesn’t have to matter that much, you are free not to worry excessively about how much sleep you get. And the beautiful thing is that if you don’t worry about it, you’ll sleep better and you truly will require less sleep overall.

Tom Stafford

People vary a great deal in their chronotype: the way specific times of day affect them. As a rule, older people tend to be morning types and younger people more alert in the early evening, but this is only a general trend. However, the post-lunch dip, a low point of wakefulness in the circadian rhythm that coincides with the process of body chemistry switching to digestion after a meal, is something many people experience.

Here are a few suggestions for dealing with the post-lunch dip:

Taking time to learn how the mind changes during the day allows one to plan for it. The simple act of taking a walk at lunchtime can have much more benefit to thought than it might seem. It is quite effective in reducing work-related stress. Unloading such stress has a positive effect on clarity of thought. The post-lunch dip is an almost ideal time for unwinding. It’s a time of naturally reduced alertness, so it becomes easier to shake off stress than when the body is on alert.

Scheduling tidying-up tasks for after lunch works for similar reasons. Because the tasks aren’t highly demanding of attention, the mind can tidy itself in the background at the same time, making it easier for the tidied mind to be more efficient an hour later.

The variation in mindset within a day also suggests why writers should find a writing routine that suits them, a standard time of day during which to write. I’ve been part of an amateur fiction writers’ group for many years. One problem I’ve often had was picking up a story I’d partly written earlier and continuing it in another session. I’d find the pieces “didn’t join up” at the point where I’d put down the writing and then picked it up again. I was writing in a different mood when I started again.

A factor in this became clearer when, for a couple of months, I started waking early and writing for an hour each morning. My hope was that by writing just after waking, I would be more creative than normal. I found that when I wrote this way I had no problem with the pieces joining up. Unfortunately, at that time in the morning, my style of writing was too surreal and whimsical. It was consistent, but not in a way that I wanted. Although the experiment didn’t work the way I had hoped, it showed me that the principle is valid: mindset changes during the day.

James Crook

One of the most reliable findings is that increasing available glucose and oxygen seems to have a beneficial effect on memory. Importantly, the effect is usually found for memory encoding but not memory recall. If you are not familiar with this distinction, think of it in terms of the mental activities involved in memory. Encoding is when you encounter the information and try to commit it to memory, and recall is when you want to retrieve previously committed information.

Increasing glucose and oxygen supplies to the brain seems to allow information to be committed more accurately and fully to memory; in other words, you learn better. This means when you come to recall it at a later stage, you will undoubtedly do better, because the information there is clearer and more comprehensive. The reverse does not seem to be true, however. If you first encoded something without the aid of extra oxygen and glucose, suddenly making more oxygen and glucose available when you try to recall it will not improve your overall memory performance.

Optimize glucose supplies

Glucose has a much longer-term effect, as shown in Figure 8-1.² Here the maximum available glucose peaks at about an hour, although it rapidly becomes available after it has been ingested. All energy-giving foods are broken down into glucose at some stage, although at different rates. This graph charts the rate of pure glucose absorption, so it best matches the effects of sugary drinks.

Figure 8-1. Graph of glucose absorption in the body

Glucose is important as a simple fuel, but it is also used in the creation of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. This brain chemical is particularly linked to memory, and it’s no accident that, like oxygen, extra glucose is linked to an increase in memory and learning ability.³ Again, timing is crucial, but not so much effort is needed to constantly maintain glucose levels. A well-timed sugary drink, 30 minutes to an hour before you want to remember or take notice of something particularly closely, should improve how well you remember it.

Vaughan Bell

Some foods and over-the-counter drugs may significantly enhance your mental performance, if taken in moderation.

Education and information are the key to the safe and smooth running of your brain. Make sure you are fully informed about the things you put into your body and how they affect your thoughts and behavior, whether they come from multimillion-dollar drug companies or the local grocer. Also, don’t overlook the everyday maintenance [Hack #69] of your body that can keep your mind optimally tuned.

Vaughan Bell

Break down your task into accomplishment units. If you’re a Getting Things Done ⁴ fan, you can define these units as being the size of a next action, which is a single task of a few minutes or less that you can easily do to further a project.

When you accomplish one of these task subunits, reward yourself. Here are a few examples of rewards you can give yourself, paired with typical accomplishments you might want to reward:

If you fail to accomplish one of the units of accomplishment, or exhibit some unwanted behavior, you can punish yourself, although you might find a reward-only system to be effective as well.

Here are a few examples of punishments you can give yourself, paired with typical unwanted behaviors:

It’s important to keep your reward or punishment immediate, consistent,⁶ and proportionate. Snapping a rubber band every time you bite your nails is OK, but burning a $20 bill every time you do so is probably excessive.

Rewards (such as candy or a kiss) are usually preferable to punishment (such as an electric shock), not only because they’re more ethical, but also because they’re more effective.⁷ However, since you’ll be rewarding and punishing yourself in this hack, and you presumably know how much is excessive, you can use any combination that works for you.

You might need to experiment to hit the effective zone between excessive punishment or reward, and punishment or reward that’s too weak to be motivational. A good place to start is to monitor your anticipatory feelings: do you look forward to your self-administered reward or cringe at a possible punishment? Do you feel motivated to get on with your task? If your punishment is excessive, you might just give up, so don’t be too hard on yourself.

Excessiveness is only one of the problems that can occur if you’re attempting to change someone else’s behavior. If the subject isn’t human, she might also misunderstand which behavior you’re trying to change. However, when you’re working with yourself, the problem of conveying the reason for the reward or punishment is lessened. As you eat your slice of cake, or hang out with your friends at the coffee house, reflect on your accomplishment to connect your behavior with the way you hacked it.

If you find the carrot and stick aren’t working, maybe they’re not big enough, or maybe you’re not applying them consistently enough. Ask your friends to catch you in the act. They might really enjoy watching you snap yourself with a rubber band or burn a $20 bill. They might also have good ideas about what punishments and rewards you can use; it can be even more fun to solve this kind of problem for someone else.

As far as carrots go, my wife Marty and I are comedy junkies, so every time we finished writing and editing a hack for this book, we allowed ourselves a half-hour of video comedy. (For this reward, it helps to have a TiVo and access to some large video collections.)

Half an hour of comedy per finished hack proved highly motivating, but we made a basic mistake. We began lengthening the time we spent watching video and the frequency with which we did it, instead of decreasing our reward or keeping it the same. We started slacking off, and for a few days did little work on the book. It’s not that we watched video all the time instead, but we took such long reward breaks that the reward became a distraction and interfered with our mental momentum [Hack #65]. When we cut back on how much we rewarded ourselves per unit of work, the amount of work we did increased.

As an example of the stick, I have several annoying speech habits, such as repeating myself and saying “um,” “uh,” and “like,” so I’ve tried snapping my wrist with a rubber band when these habits crop up. Initially, I found that the rubber band made me acutely (painfully) aware of what I was saying and how I was saying it. My wife reports that now, every time I snap the rubber band, my bad speech habits stop for up to half an hour. Although I am now much more aware of my slip-ups, I’ve also asked her to point them out in case I don’t catch them myself. Since she’s the one who has to listen to the speech habits most, she’s taken to helping me with a certain amount of glee. Perhaps I’ll be able to completely eradicate these habits by snapping myself to attention.

To create your personal mental toolbox, you’ll need to follow five steps:

Here’s a small sample mental toolbox. Different people have different needs, so they will have different toolboxes. Your own toolbox might look quite different from this list.

The hacks I selected for my toolbox had the initials AFGHHNOPSS. I took these letters and created the anagram GH’S FAN SHOP. Since GH in my personal Dominic System list [Hack #6] is represented by George Harrison, I expanded the mnemonic to George Harrison’S FAN SHOP and represented this mentally as a shop for fans of the late Beatle, with a mechanical George Harrison out front, playing guitar and tapping his foot in his characteristic way.

This imaginary storefront could become the beginning of a memory palace [Hack #3] (as described later in this section), but in my case, it serves only to remind me of the acronym, which stands for the following hacks:

Here are the first three items from a hypothetical memory palace [Hack #3] that you might use as an alternate way to memorize your toolbox, or to reinforce the alphabetic list. In keeping with the GH’S FAN SHOP mnemonic, I’ll assume that the store is called George Harrison’s Crackerbox Memory Palace and Hardware Store.

I walk past the storefront with the mechanical figure into the bright interior. Various tools are tucked into the nooks and crannies [Hack #4] of the shop:

Everyone carries around a set of mental tools that they habitually use to solve problems, collected over many years. This hack enables you to design your toolbox consciously and to always have your tools within easy reach.