Sort Your Brain Out. Адриан Вебстер

to optimize the capabilities of brains, Jack and I are going to share with you all the practical advice that he had to offer me and, at the same time, draw on our diverse experiences to give you some helpful suggestions about how you, too, could improve the performance of your brain. Hopefully you'll take them on board, start using them and see what a difference they make to you.

      For more information about Adrian – please visit: www.adrianwebster.com or tweet @polarbearpirate

Where Jack's coming from

      Biology was by far my favourite subject at school. My fascination with what makes us tick took me into the realms of neuroscience, first at the University of Nottingham, then University College London (UCL) and later at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics. The latter involved post‐doctoral research using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to plumb the depths of the multisensory human brain. By the time I published my research in a decent scientific publication (Journal of Neuroscience) I realised that the time had come to move away from doing my own research – as I'd discovered my true calling.

Since starting my doctorate at UCL in 2002, what started out as a minor frustration had blossomed into an itch that I just had to scratch. The neuroscience literature is full of fascinating revelations about how the mysterious organ between our ears does what it does. Hidden between the lines of the various neuroscience research papers I was reading on a daily basis (and still do) were pearls of wisdom that I'd started using to get more out of my own brain. It seemed a shame to keep this all to myself. And as nobody else seemed to be doing it, I was determined to do everything I could to get these insights out into the real world: practical tips and tricks regarding what we can do, every day, to nudge our brains closer to our own personal maximum potential.

      To date, I've shared insights into how our brains work with millions of viewers across the world via TV series on BBC1, BBC2, BBC World, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, Sky One, National Geographic, Discovery Science, TLC, MTV and most recently two series on Insight TV. I've also written two other popular science books as well as this one. And since that fateful day in Tenerife, I've now given over a hundred talks at individual businesses, and various industry conferences, helping all sorts of audiences improve their health, happiness and productivity.

      For years I had a burning ambition to write a book that explained to everyday people how their brains work and how to get them firing on all cylinders. Thanks to Adrian, who'd already established himself as a best‐selling author, I finally got the chance to write this book. Ever since we got together to write the first edition, merging the worlds of neuroscience and business motivation, we've been passing on compelling, much‐needed, some might even say essential brain user information to thousands of people all over the world.

      I've been absolutely blown away by the positive feedback we've received over the past few years! Whether from people who'd read the book and found it really helped them or those who hung out with us at the end of a talk to ask a brain question or two, it has been extremely rewarding to hear how much people got out of the first edition. Given how well the first edition went down and with so many exciting new insights to have emerged in the scientific research literature since then, we're hopeful that this second edition will go even further in helping everyone to get the most out of their brain at work, rest and play.

      For more information about Jack, please visit: www.drjack.co.uk or tweet @drjacklewis

Your Amazing Brain

      The word “amazing” seems to be used pretty loosely these days to describe a lot of things, many of which often turn out to be disappointingly mediocre, but in the case of your brain there really is no other word that does it justice.

      This wrinkled pink lump of pulsating wetware has a texture not dissimilar to blancmange, is composed of around 80% water, 11% fat, 8% protein, 3% vitamins or minerals and weighs in at around about 1.5kg. It is a densely woven meshwork of 86 billion brain wires (neurons) along with a further 86 billion support cells (glial cells), all neatly packed away in the cavity between your ears. It is truly amazing.

As the ultimate supercomputer, your brain is currently light years ahead of anything that humans have so far managed to create. It works relentlessly, nonstop, around the clock, continuously reshaping to adapt our skills and behaviours to suit an almost infinite variety of different real and potential future circumstances, receiving and delivering data, analysing information, performing billions of complex, multifunctional tasks in parallel and monitoring millions of functions, all at a breathtaking speed. Its capabilities really are quite staggering.

When it comes to high performance, what does your brain look like?

      The map in the illustration above shows some of the stops on the underground system that runs right down the middle of your brain, level with your nose. This particular image is referred to as the “Inward‐Facing Brain Tube Map” because it shows the inner brain surface, where the left and right hemispheres rub up against each other along the midline. It's duplicated at the back of the book – in the Appendix – so you can find it again more easily. You'll also find an “Outward‐Facing Brain Tube Map” there too. Both maps are also available at www.sortyourbrainout.com for anyone listening via audiobook.

No benefit would come from overloading you with unnecessary information by talking about every area of your brain, but it would be useful to start by pointing out three key areas that are most relevant to what we'll be discussing in this book. The hippocampus includes the DG (Dentate Gyrus stop) and EC (Entorhinal Cortex stop) on the lower part of the Limbic Line, a particularly dense area of networked brain wires connected with virtually every other part of your brain.

      Why a seahorse?

      You may be wondering why there is a seahorse in the illustration of this medial surface (inward‐facing) tube map of the brain. If your brain's hippocampus was surgically removed from the inward‐facing surface of each of your temporal lobes, you'd see that they actually look very much like a seahorse. Indeed, the word “hippocampus” comes from the ancient Greek hippos (“horse”) and kampos (“sea monster”).

      This part of your brain performs three key roles:

      1 It helps you to keep track of where you are – a GPS system of sorts that gives you a sense of where you are and how to get where you're going.

      2 It enables you to create and recall memories of events and pieces of information, so it's essential for the accumulation of knowledge and the ability to learn from experience.

      3 It's even vital for our ability to imagine the future!

The first two of these functions are intimately related, as many of our memories of life events are closely intertwined with the places in which they were experienced. This is why, when you return to that place, the most relevant memories will be triggered. Hence a visit to your old primary school can produce a surge of long‐forgotten memories. The hippocampus cluster of tube stops in your brain is buried deep down within each of your temporal lobes. These run along the left and right sides of your brain, from just above and behind the ears to the temples of the skull.

      Taxi!

      The drivers of London's famous black cabs spend, on average, 2.2 years learning “The Knowledge,” a seemingly unconquerable mountain of information to commit to memory by anyone's standards. Without looking at a map, they need