Brainpower

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our brain is like a sleeping giant. During recent years, research has shown that the brain is much more intelligent than we ever imagined. Even the commonly-heard statement that, on average, we use only one percent of our brain may well be wrong. It now seems that we use even less than one percent, which means that an enormous amount of our brain can still be developed.

            A good example of what the brain is capable of is a man calles ‘S’. He was famous for having a perfect memory. If you asked him what happened to him on a particular day fifteen years before, he could not only tell you but would pause for a moment and then ask, “At what time?”. His extraordinary ability was studied for many years by a psychologist who finally concluded that, at a very early age, S’s brain had the power to remember every detail about his life. Apart from that, S was like any other human being.

            Another example is a young man called Dario Donatelli. He recently graduated from a university in Pittsburgh, where he specialized in techniques for remembering numbers. He describes himself as quite normal, stating, “Mu memory is just like anyone else’s. There are probably hundreds of thousands of people whose memories could work faster than mine if they had the same interest in numbers as I have.” He has become one of the great memorizers of all time, and has broken the world record for memorizing the largest amount of numbers. He recently memorized a number of seventy three digits. When asked how he did this, he replied, “I group the numbers into pairs, or threes or fours, and I link them with something I am familiar with, for example, my brother’s age, a date of birth, a month of the year, etc.” He can now remember almost 100 numbers at any one time.

            However, realistically, could we all do the same? The important thing to remember is that our brain actually improves with time and practice. The more we do to encourage it to learn, the more successful it will be. So, perhaps the best advice might be to take a trip to the local library or bookshop, buy a book about something that has always interested us but which we know very little about, remember to read it regularly, and see how quickly we can train our minds to learn something completely new and different. We may be surprised by what we can achieve!!