The Einstein Factor by Win Wenger & Richard Poe

• IQ is only one measure of intelligence and not necessarily the best.
• Our subconscious minds spew forth streams of images, hunches, and subtle perceptions almost 24 hours a day, many of them charged with insight and premonition.
• EInstein attributed his scientific prowess to what he called a “vague play”, with “signs”, “images” and other elements, both “visual” and “muscular”. “This combinatory play”, Einstein thought, “seems to be the essential feature in productive thought.”
• Einstein ascribed his ingenious insight to a “combinatory play” of sense impressions, “muscular” feelings, emotion, and intuition. Only in the final stages of thought did Einstein translate his theories into words and equations.
• In fact, all of us possess hidden talents, often in the very areas where we think ourselves least capable.Study, practice, and hard work can bring about incremental improvement. But if we wish to unleash the full power of our genius, we must find that crucial catalyst, that simple trick or knack that will bring our bodies, senses, and minds into critical focus. I call that catalyst the Einstein factor.
• Conventional education and job training are notoriously effective at crushing our confidence and squelching our most brilliant thoughts. Most of learn early to suppress our natural geneious.
• We have far more ability than we commonly realize to engineer our consciousness. The phenomenon of dream recall offers one of the clearest illustrations of this ability.
• Every time you write down your dreams, you reinforce the behavior of dream recall. Your recollection thus becomes stronger. Likewise, every time you fail to write down a dream, you reinforce the behavior or forgetting your dreams, and your recall correspondingly weakens.
• The procedure of Image Streaming is deceptively simple. You sit back in a comfortable chair, close your eyes, and describe aloud the flow of mental images through your mind. Three factors are absolutely crucial. I call them the Three Commandments of Image Streaming:
• You must describe the images aloud, either to another person or to a tape recorder. Describing them silently will defeat the purpose of the exercise.
• You must use all five sense in your descriptions. If you see a snow-covered mountain, for example, don’t just describe how it looks. Describe its taste, its texture, its smell, and the sound of wind howling across its peak.
• Phrase all your descriptions in the present tense.
• Memories are stored not in the cells themselves but in the overall pattern of electrical signals firing between cells.
• Key portions of our brain don’t distinguish between dream and reality. When we see, touch, taste, smell, or hear things in a dream, the corresponding sensory portions of our brain light up, exactly as if we had sneezed those things in real life. Physical movement in dreams likewise activates the corresponding motor mechanisms that would drive such movement in waking life.
• Everyone has an Image Stream. You simply need to learn how to stop squelching yours.
• Evidence is growing that this commingling of the senses--called synesthesia--may be a normal function of the mind that is simply suppressed in most people. Image Streaming seems to draw much of its Pole-Bridging power from this hidden mechanism, playing upon links between sense that most of us think of a sqlite distinct and separate.
• Your brain is wired in such a way that vision will always tend to dominate the creative process. That’s all right. But when we describe mental images into a tape recorder, we should take care to include in our descriptions other senses as well especially taste, scent, and touch (texture), which are most often neglected.
• Multisensory description builds up the neural connections between your sense and widens your neurological contact with the Image Stream. The effects of such exercise will be seen quickly in stronger, clearer, more solid-looking mental images.
• The strength and vividness of mental imagery are potentially limitless. Sights, sounds, and sensations, if imagined to their full potential, can solidify so strongly as to be indistinguishable from real perceptions.
• The more absorbed you become in describing an image, the more intently your mind focuses on it and the clearer, sharper, and more solid it becomes.
• In general, the more you describe something, the more of it you get. Your descriptive monologue forms part of a feedback loop. It both follows your Image Stream, and helps create it.
• When you describe any object, real or imaginary, at the same time you are observing it, the very act of description focuses your attention in such a way that you perceive more and more detail about the object being described.
• Vision is the strongest of all the senses, and you will tend to rely on it disproportionately. Practice describing your Image Stream using your non visual senses exclusively. Touch is probably the most important non visual sense.
• There are no hard and fast rules. Indeed, a cardinal principle of Image Streaming is that it doesn’t matter how you get the image started. Once the stream starts flowing, it takes you where it will. It transports you swiftly to the precise psychological space in which you most need to be.
• It can hardly be an accident that researchers in the field of high intelligence have long regarded the habit of compulsive scribbling as one of the tell tale hallmarks of genius.
• A sizeable portion of our brains’ physical development depends not on genetic inheritance, or even on outside stimulus, but rather on the feedback from our own spontaneous and expressive activity.
• By harnessing the power of self-expression and sensory feedback, we can actually change the physical form of our brains.
• Whenever you write down a perception or an idea, you reinforce the behavior of being perceptive or creative. Whenever you fail to describe or recorder such insights, you reinforce the behavior of being unperceptive and uncreative.
• Unfortunately, feedback loops do not always promote brain development. Bad feedback will stunt the brain as powerfully as god feedback helps it. Ingenious expression is all too often punished in our society with mockery, envy, and adult disapproval.
• It is no accident that the greatest geniuses share a profound reverence toward conventional opinion. THe courage to be different is a cornerstone of high intellect.
• Most of our problems are only exacerbated by the things we know. ONly when we shift our attention away from what we know to what we are actually perceiving are most problems resolved.
• By and large, people see and hear exactly what they expect to see and hear, even if it differs from their actual perception. Psychologists call this “set thinking”, because the mind perceives what it is set to perceive.
• To be an Original Observer is not far from being a genius. If we encouraged children to ask questions and seek answers freely, their natural genius would astonish us. Indeed, all children are Original Observers up to the age of four, when they start learning to set their minds at a lower level of curiosity.
• Obviously, it is impossible--and even physically dangerous--for a child to learn everything by trial and error. Our ability to learn from others’ experience is one of the things that makes us human.
• Generally, the best ideas come at the end of brainstorming sessions, after participants have loosened up and allowed their subtler perceptions to come into play.
• The more complexity we bring into our thought process, the more room we create for dramatic state changes. Complexity actually widens our “Surprise!” Space.
• A sense of confusion is the surest sign that your Squelcher has been effectively squelched. When your internal Editor is up and running, you don’t feel confused at all. On the contrary, everything seems very clear and simple. Only when an ingenious thought is bubbling in the pot do you feel as agitated and perplexed.
• Associations are simply those secondary thoughts that the images bring to mind. Think back over your Image Stream. Each image will evoke some clear association as you think about it. Write down that association as it comes to mind, even if it seems silly.
• No rules are so sacred that they should not be broken from time to time.
• Truly ingenious thought occurs in a realm wholly unlike that which our conscious minds can grasp. Great geniuses routinely disengage from rules of ordinary perception that most of us think unbreakable, playing havoc with commonplace notionas of time, space, and form.
• The power of Hidden Questions lies in its efficiency. In other Image Streaming methods, much of our time and effort is spent trying to squelch or right the inner Editor. Hidden Question bypasses the Editor entirely by presenting questions directly to the right brain, giving the left brain no chance whatever to contaminate the data.
• Contrary to popular myth, great geniuses are not necessarily great mnemonists or memorizers. They do, however, know how to find out what they want, when they want it. It call this a metaskill--a fundamental skill from which other skills derive.
• Strong evidence suggests that all of us possess, photographic memory so some degree. Only a few people, however, seem gifted with the ability to retrieve and examine their mental “photographs” at will.
• Success in today’s turbulent new economy is won not by those who have learned a particular skill but by those who can learn new skills quickly.
• The roster of traditional metaskills includes such abilities as reading, writing, speaking, reasoning, and calculating. Your ability to learn more specialized skills-such as using a computer--depends in large measure on how well you have grasped these fundamentals. Yet even these metaskills grow from a deeper and more powerful antecedent--your ability to retain and retrieve data from your memory.
• Information perceived subconsciously impacts the brain for more powerfully than conscious information.
• Most of us never plan our reading. We pick up books and magazines at random and simply start reading. This behavior is terribly inefficient. Reading a book can take days, a long article more than an hour. Such time-consuming tasks should be managed as carefully as any other important job you do.
• THroughout history, great minds have used the power of association to jog their memories. This means linking the information you want to remember with some imagined object, color, or sing-song rhyme. Freenoting will automatically increase your memory of the lecture by associating key points with your own depressive thoughts. The crazier, funnier, and more bizarre those thoughts are, the more memorable they will be.
• This principle [the Principle of Articulation] holds that the more you express or articulate a given perception, the more you will perceive and understand of that ahd related perceptions. The principle of Articulation provides the underlying rationale of both Socratic Method and its corollary, Freenoting.
• The sheer act of persistently expressing our thoughts on some subject causes us to learn more about that subject, even when no new information has been provided from without.
• What enhances our knowledge, in such cases, is not the addition of outside facts, but rather our own perceptions about our perceptions, feeding back into our minds in an ever-growing snowball effect. I cannot emphasize too greatly the awesome--and all-too-often neglected--power of the Principle of Articulation to enhance performance in virtually every field of human endeavor.
• In general, what is expressed by the learner is a hundred times more productive learning than what is expressed to the learner--a statement to which Socrates himself would have heartily assented.
• Our brains, in which reside all that we think of as the human spirit, are totally dependent upon oxygen. Fully one-third of all the oxygen used in our bodies goes directly to the brain. Evidence suggests that the more oxygen we receive, the better our brains function.
• Your breath is, in affect, a pacemaker for your attention. If you take short breaths, you will tend to have short bursts of attention and to speak in short sentences. Deep, full breaths will enable you to speak in longer, more complex sentences and to form deeper thoughts.
• We humans are, at root, social creatures. Our brains seem to function best when they are working with other brains toward some common purpose.
• You are, in fact, never too old to increase your intellect. Still, there is little doubt that very young children are more susceptible than others to brain enhancement techniques.
• The critical years between conception and age five therefore present an invaluable window of opportunities during which we can “jump-start” the brains of our children, giving them an unparalleled early advantage.
• The secret of the Montessori Method is the Feedback Principle. Montessori children receive constant feedback from their acts of spontaneous self-expression.
• Playing and listening to music are not only powerful Pole-Bridging techniques in their own right, but in experiments have been shown to stimulate the brains image-generating faculties.
• Flow increases mental intensity by raising the signal-to-noise ratio in our minds.
• The difference between success and failure often lies in daily actions that are easy to do--and also easy not to do...The slight edge is always at work, either for you or against you.
• The secret of genius appears to lie not in our genes, but in our memes--those patterns of thought, habit, and emotion woven into our minds by the people and events around us.
• Our instinct for group survival is a powerful force that drives us to look past our narrow self-interest.