Mindframe

Imagine waking up in a hospital room, unable to move. You can hear the doctor telling someone that they're not sure what level of brain function you have, since you appear to be totally unresponsive. You try to speak but your throat is frozen. Your fingers and toes won't move. You can't even control your eyes. It's the worst kind of nightmare: totally conscious but with no way to communicate, a prisoner in your own body. Although situations like this are rare, they have occurred. In most cases, if you found yourself in this kind of personal hell you were doomed to a life of mental torture.  That's until one very intrepid neuroscientist, Martin Monti, found a way to communicate.  The debate about the nature of the mind is, of course, a long and storied one in the world of philosophy. If science tells us that we're made of flesh and bone, what are thoughts made of? How separate is a person's animating mental force from the muscle, blood, an...

Susan Polgar is considered a chess genius; at 21, she was the first woman in the world to become a Grandmaster. Her chess skills are so extraordinary that she can take on five competitors simultaneously—without looking at any of the chess boards. In other words, she is playing all five games in her mind. On some level, this seems like it should be impossible. Playing chess relies on your working memory, that mental scratch pad that holds onto information momentarily as it passes by. And to put it bluntly, the working memory stinks. Most people's can only hold four to seven pieces of information before something gets dropped. Incidentally, this is why phone numbers have only seven digits. Even the brightest among us can get confounded by an eight number sequence. If you've ever forgotten where you put your keys because you were running through a quick grocery list, you understand how it feels when information gets crossed off that metaphorical scratch pad. So how does S...

When we think of legends of comedy, the Marx Brothers might come to mind. In the years leading up to World War II, they were the toast of Hollywood. Their zany antics, ribald double entendre, and disregard for authority proved to be a winning formula—not just for their day, but for generations of college students born long after the war.   Watching the Marx Brothers’ old black and white movies, it’s tempting to believe that Groucho, Harpo and Chico must have been endowed with the magical comic gene, winners in the cosmic, humor lottery. What about poor Zeppo, the fourth, and largely unheralded brother, sometimes shuffled to the side as the romantic lead? In most movies, this would be a plum role, but in a Marx Brothers film, it was akin to sitting on the bench. Zeppo, bored with his lack of star billing and reportedly never really invested in the whole comedy enterprise, eventually dropped out. His lack of interest is a pretty good indicator of why, when we think of ...

Swimmer Michael Phelps, now retired, is one of the most decorated Olympic athletes of all time. Of his 22 medals, 18 are gold. Phelps trained in Ann Arbor, Michigan, under swimming guru Bob Bowman. Swimming is a highly repetitive sport, involving long hours in the water, perfecting the efficiency of every stroke. The tedium of doing laps can be meditative, but over-reliance on routine can lead to complacency. Tiger Woods's father Earl was notorious for creating all sorts of distractions while his young protege was practicing a difficult putt. Earl reasoned that in an actual golf tournament, the players would need to fight for focus, and therefore, the harder he made practice, the more he could prepare Tiger for the glare of TV cameras and noise of the crowd. Earl was attempting to wire Tiger's brain for a deeper level of focus. Along the same vein, one day in practice, Bob Bowman purposely stepped on Michael's goggles, ensuring they would leak. A pair of cracked go...