CONTENTS
Why You Won’t Remember the Contents of This Book—Thereby Retaining the Most Important Information
Why We Are Bad at Rote Learning, but Better at Understanding the World
Why a False Memory Is Better Than None at All
Why We Choke under Pressure and the Secret Formula for Fending Off Stage Fright
5TIME
Why We Always Misjudge It—Thereby Forging Valuable Memories
6BOREDOM
Why We Have Trouble Switching Ourselves Off—and How Daydreams Evoke the Muse
7DISTRACTION
Why We Are So Flighty and Which Distractions Can Lead to More Creativity
8MATHEMATICS
Why the Brain Calculates Best without Numbers
9DECISIONS
Why We Risk Too Much—Yet Still Choose Wisely
10SELECTION
Why Selecting Is So Agonizing—and How We Still Manage to Choose the Best Option
11PIGEONHOLING
How Prejudices Can Help Us, How They Can Harm Us—and How to Avoid Stereotypical Pitfalls
12MOTIVATION
How Our Inner Deadbeat Holds Us Back—and How We Can Inspire Others
13CREATIVITY
Why We Can’t Be Innovative at the Push of a Button— Yet We Always Have New Thoughts
14PERFECTIONISM
Why We Need Mistakes in Order to Improve
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
THIS IS NOT a book that describes how great the brain works. At least, not at first glance. It’s also not a book about how perfectly the brain works. Because it doesn’t.
And if, after reading this book, you are hoping to improve your brain’s ability to think or concentrate, I’m afraid I have to nip that notion in the bud right from the start. That’s not going to happen either because the brain is anything but precise or good at calculating. It’s a dreamy scatterbrain, often distracted and unfocused, never one hundred percent reliable; it miscalculates, is frequently inaccurate, and forgets more than it retains. In short, the brain is an approximately 3.3 pound mistake. You carry this head full of sloppy blunders around with you wherever you go—and I would like to congratulate you for that.
Now that I’ve been permitted to scare most of my readers off, I would like to let you know that there is, in fact, a reason to continue reading this book. I mean to show you that it is precisely these seemingly inefficient imperfections and bloopers that help your brain to be so exceptional and successful.
We are all familiar with this from our own lives. The brain makes mistakes—sometimes big ones, sometimes small ones, and not a day goes by that our brain doesn’t concoct some foolishness, misjudgment, or just plain messes up. You underestimate the time, forget what it was you were just reading, or allow yourself to get distracted by your mobile phone. And this is a great thing. Because these supposed weaknesses and imperfections are what make your brain so adaptable, dynamic, and creative.
Do you think I am exaggerating? All right then, let’s test your mental abilities:
Imagine you’re in a race and you overtake the guy in fourth place. What is your position now?
Third place?
Well, no—but don’t worry. Your brain easily creates mental boxes (see chapter 11) and mixes up numbers (see chapter 8). Never mind. Literally. Even simple addition can get complicated. How often is the letter M repeated in the next line?
MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM
Enough hemming and hawing. It’s not quite as easy as it seems, is it? What this shows us is that the brain doesn’t seem geared toward processing pieces of information that are indistinguishable from each other. On the contrary, it often gets bogged down with such information.
“Making mistakes is what makes us tough, so making just one is never enough,” my chemistry teacher once said. And then he proceeded to ignite silver acetylide and blew a crater in the schoolyard. Take note: trial and error is not always the method of choice. Sometimes it is, however, as exemplified by my neighbor. My neighbor is a truly extraordinary character. At two years old, he is already a pretty clever guy with the ability to master things that would bring any supercomputer to its knees. He is able, for instance, to identify his mother’s face among a crowd of people and be aware of his own reflection in a mirror. After playing only a single time with a toy car, he knows what a car is. He can point out smoke detectors on the ceiling and thinks potatoes are yummy—tasks which no modern computer could undertake. At the same time, he is constantly making little mistakes. He could barely walk without stumbling a few months ago, his movements are clumsy, his speech fragmented, and he sleeps for more than half of the day—during which time he is completely inoperable. It would be enough to make an engineer put his head in his hands: “What a defective design. Two years old and it still doesn’t run smoothly.” A bit like a Windows operating system.
Nonetheless, my neighbor is making tremendous progress day by day, at a pace unmatched by any calculator. Every mistake, every imprecision is an incentive for him to try it differently next time and maybe even to get a little bit better. His brain is anything but perfect—and it never will be. Over time, it will of course improve at adapting to its environment, but it will never be immaculate and absolute because it will always retain its ability to err. Only someone who builds mistakes into their actions will be able, at some point, to develop something innovative and new. Whoever attempts to always think as “correctly” as possible, by contrast, puts themselves on the level of a computer: efficient, precise, and speedy—but also uncreative, boring, and predictable.
As adults, we develop an even more obvious form of intellectual drivel. We forget names and faces. We allow ourselves to become easily distracted by WhatsApp messages or lose our plan for the day in the flood of distracting morning emails. We have names on the tip of our tongues that don’t ever fully come to us. We misjudge the time as poorly as we do probabilities or numbers. We struggle to choose from among several options. We go blank right before we are supposed to speak in front of an audience. We find it hard to quiet our minds after an exhausting day at work and are the worst at retaining information and learning under pressure.
On the other hand, there is no organ or system, let alone a computer, that is able to solve complicated problems as playfully as we can: 35 x 27 = ?—that’s tough without a calculator. But are you able to recognize the latest Taylor Swift song? No big deal, right? Though the above math problem is relatively simple, we can barely solve it in our heads, and yet we can immediately recognize a song, the face of a loved one, or their voice. And we can do this even though it technically takes much more effort to recognize a certain singer on the stage.
It seems as though our brain is particularly bad at carrying out those tasks