Mindframe

The inventor of the airplane seatbelt was a man ahead of his time. It's an over-used expression but in this case, it applies: engineer and inventor Sir George Cayley was born in 1773 and died in 1857, before the Wright brothers were even born. If you haven’t visited earth in the last 157 years or so, and/or if you’re an extraterrestrial  who's never boarded a commercial airliner, don’t panic. The use of the seatbelt will be most adequately demonstrated to you. This is for your own safety. You’ll master it in no time. It turns out the simple technology has changed very little since the days of Sir George. Along the same lines, if you’ve been in a coma since 1992 and you’ve just awakened at your work desk from a deep slumber, there are a couple of other things that haven’t changed. The person in the cubicle next to you is 22 years older, but still annoying. The lunchroom still smells like fish, and the half-eaten Twinkie you left on the counter in the beginnings ...

Q: What did the Zen master say to the hotdog vendor? A: “Make me one with everything...” Central to the premise of this old joke is the Zen notion of reaching a higher level of consciousness, where one’s sense of self dissipates, becoming indistinguishable from the rest of the universe. This is pretty heady stuff for many raised in the western thought tradition, where metrics are king, and we’re taught from a young age that if it can't be measured, it doesn't exist. So what do jazz players and Zen masters have in common? I’m sure there’s a pun in here somewhere, but the truth is, they may share a lot, according to Johns Hopkins neuroscientist Dr. Charles Limb. Around 2008, Limb began doing experiments with jazz pianists , trying to understand what was happening in their brains during musical improvisation. Limb had them improvise music while lying in an fMRI; the tool of choice for many neuroscientists. It’s a machine that measures blood flow to a given brain area...

“It is estimated that most human beings only use ten percent of their brain,” Morgan Freeman intones in the movie Lucy . Central to the plot is what happens when a freak accident occurs and a person, in this case, Scarlet Johansson, gains access to more and more of her brain: as that percentage grows, she can operate a handgun with no prior training, teach herself “Chinese” (although you’d think she’d know it’s called Mandarin), psyche out police dogs, change her appearance at will, and even manipulate the world around her. “What happens when she reaches 100 percent?” a man asks in the trailer as exciting music plays in the background. “I have no idea,” says Morgan Freeman solemnly. So just what does access to 100% of your brain look like? No spoiler alert necessary. In the real world, using all your brain at once allows you to unlock special skills like: read a street sign, remember someone’s name, prepare your own food, do your taxes, or wash the dishes while humming a son...

In sports, it’s called being in the zone . I’m talking about those moments when self vanishes, time seems to slow down, and you are operating with maximum confidence. A sense of calm pervades, even though you might be surrounded by a frenzy of activity. Your focus intensifies and your actions and decisions seem to meld. This is the psychological state known as flow , researched and pushed into the spotlight by University of Chicago professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. You might know what flow looks like from the outside if you’ve ever experienced a great jazz player riffing, or a skilled comedian doing improvisation.  And you probably know how flows feels if you meditate. If you’re in sales, it’s those times when you and your customer seem to be synced up in perfect harmony. A writer experiencing flow has the sense that the words on the page are being dictated by some outside source. When you and your best friend are so deeply engaged in conversation that an hour feels lik...

Decision making: there are countless books about it because, lets face it, decisions are at the epicenter of what we humans do. Make the wrong choice and it can kill you, or at least cause a lot of sweat and tears. One major crossroads for many involves mate selection. Some knock it out of the park—we’ve all seen the heartwarming stories of couples still in love after 50 years—and then there are the marriages that crumble after a few months, or even days. So what can we learn from the long-term lovebirds? What’s their secret? How did they find each other? When you first meet someone, what are the telltale signs to look for and, perhaps more importantly, to avoid? It’s classic advice column fodder, and people make a tidy living doling out their strategies for selection. But at the crucial moment, how much strategy is really involved? In his book Incognito: the Secret Lives of the Brain, neuroscientist David Eagleman shares an unlikely experiment done in New Mexico. Scienti...

A number of years ago I had the amazing good fortune to meet the legendary blues piano man Cornbread Harris. Though severely hampered by arthritis, this 86-year-old phenom still makes his living playing some of the most soulful music you’ll ever hear. Although he didn’t—and still doesn’t—teach piano, I managed to talk him into giving me a few lessons. As you might expect, I ended up learning far more from Cornbread than just piano music.  Once I showed up at his house on a particularly bone-chilling Minnesota winter afternoon, knocked on his door and waited. And waited. And waited. After what seemed like an eternity, Cornbread finally opened the door. I rushed inside only to find Cornbread clad in nothing but a pair of boxer shorts. He summed it up thusly: “Hey, I can either open the door or put on my pants, I can’t do both.” What Cornbread had articulated was a perfect example of binary selection. One of the reasons it’s so hard sometimes to order off a menu or pick a...

Breaking through barriers: we humans love it! Not necessarily putting ourselves at risk, but living vicariously through someone else, especially if we can do it far out of harm’s way. Not so long ago, it was said that running a sub four-minute mile was impossible. After all, human endurance had its limits. The lungs and heart could only produce so much blood-rich oxygen, and the muscles could only metabolize what the lungs and heart could deliver. For many years, a good number of athletes had tried to defy the presumed laws of human mechanics and squeak out a mile in less than 240 seconds. The net result was always the same: failure. Which is why nobody’s name comes to mind when we think of the almost four-minute mile crowd. Then on May 6th, 1954, a tall unassuming lad from Great Britain named Roger Bannister came along and blew the impossible goal away with a time of 3 minutes, 59.4 seconds. It made international news. He became an overnight sensation. But here’s what’s int...