Six lessons you can learn from geniuses

Whether it’s designing a supersonic vehicle, helping the blind to see or creating space history, what can we learn from the great minds behind these feats?

Our series The Genius Behind has taken you inside the minds of people who are making the impossible possible. Whether it is designing the fastest ever land vehicle, helping the blind to see or creating space history, success relies on raising levels of knowledge to new heights. What can we learn about genius from these minds? Based on the people and the projects outlined in the series, we’ve come up with six lessons.

Lesson one: New challenges require new ways of thinkingPart car, part jet fighter, part spaceship, Bloodhound SSC aims to be the first land vehicle to break the 1,000mph barrier. One of the key challenges has been to design the wheels. How do you create the fastest wheels in history, make them stable and reliable at supersonic speeds, and with limited resources?

After much deliberation, and devising ideas that pushed the boundaries of material technology, Mark Chapman, chief engineer of the Bloodhound project said the team decided to take a step back and change the way they were trying to solve problems. “There’s very little we’ve actually developed that’s new,” he says, “what’s unique is how we apply technologies.”

They adopted an approach called the design of experiments – a mathematical technique of problem solving through doing lots of little experiments and then looking at the statistics all glued together. “All of a sudden, where we’d been knocking our head against the wall for maybe two, three, four months, we came up with a wheel design that would hold together and was strong enough,” he says.

Lesson two: Let evidence shape your opinionLike his peers, geophysicist Steven Jacobsen from Northwestern University believed that water on Earth originated from comets. But by studying rocks, which allow scientists to peer back in time, he discovered water hidden inside ringwoodite, which lies in the Earth’s mantle, and which suggests that the oceans gradually made its way out of the planet’s interior many centuries ago.

“I had a pretty hard time convincing others,” he admits. Yet two key pieces of evidence uncovered this year seem to support his point of view. Time will tell whether the new theories are true, and there may be further twists to the tale. “But thinking about the fact that you may be the first person to see something for the first time doesn’t happen very often,” he says. “When it does it’s thrilling.”

Lesson three: It really is 99% perspirationSheila Nirenberg at Cornell University is trying to develop a new prosthetic device for treating blindness. Key to this was cracking the codethat transmits information from the eye to the brain. “Once I realised this, I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep – all I wanted to do was work,” says Nirenberg.

“Sometimes I’m exhausted and I get burnt out,” she adds. “But then I get an email from somebody in crisis or somebody who’s getting macular degeneration, and they can’t see their own children’s faces, and it is like, ‘How can I possibly complain?’ It gives me the energy to just go back and keep doing it.”

Lesson four: The answer isn’t always what you expectSylvia Earle has spent decades trying to see the ocean with new eyes. Her “dream machine” is a submarine that could take scientists all the way to the bottom of the deepest ocean floor. What sort of material could best withstand the types of pressure you would encounter thousands of miles below the ocean surface? “It could be steel, it could be titanium, it could be some sort of ceramic, or some kind of aluminium system,” says Earle. “But glass is the ultimate material.” By her estimates, a glass sphere about four-to-six inches (10-15cm) thick should be able safely explore the ocean depths she dreams of exploring.

Glass is the oldest material known to man and one of the least understood, says Tony Lawson, Earle’s engineering director at Deep Ocean and Exploration Research Marine. “It has a higgledy-piggledy molecular structure a bit like a liquid, rather than the ordered lattices often found in other solids. As a result, when glass is evenly squeezed from all sides – as it would be under the ocean – the molecules cram closer together and form a tighter structure.

Lesson five: A little luck goes a long wayIt was hailed as one of the biggest success stories in the history of space exploration – 20 years of planning ended earlier this year with the Philae lander rendezvousing with Comet 67P over 300 million miles (480 million kilometres) away from Earth.

The biggest challenge, says Stephan Ulamec, manager of the Philae lander programme, was how to design a probe to land on a body whose makeup they had little knowledge about. “We had no idea of the size, we had no idea of the day-night cycle, which influences the thermal design, we had no idea of the gravity, so how fast would the lander impact, we had no idea how the surface looked,” he says.

They needed to create design parameters that could cope with an extremely wide range of possible comet structures – but banked on the comet being a relatively even potato shape with enough flat surfaces for the probe to land on. Even then, not everything went to plan, and two decades of meticulous planning could have failed within minutes at touchdown. Philae's anchoring harpoons didn't fire as planned, and it bounced off the comet before settling onto its icy surface and successfully beaming data back to its relieved creators.

Lesson six: Genius is indefinable“It’s a funny word: the word ‘genius’,” says Nirenberg. “I just sort of ignore it and just go on with life. You just do what you do independent of whatever label’s attached to you. I don’t know really how else to explain it.”

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How to enhance your memory

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Want to enhance your memory for facts? Tom Stafford explains a counterintuitive method for retaining information.

Some teenagers appear to show changes in their brains after one season of playing American football

If I asked you to sit down and remember a list of phone numbers or a series of facts, how would you go about it? There’s a fair chance that you’d be doing it wrong.
One of the interesting things about the mind is that even though we all have one, we don't have perfect insight into how to get the best from it. This is in part because of flaws in our ability to think about our own thinking, which is called metacognition. Studying this self-reflective thought process reveals that the human species has mental blind spots.
One area where these blind spots are particularly large is learning. We're actually surprisingly bad at having insight into how we learn best.

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Researchers Jeffrey Karpicke and Henry Roediger III set out to look at one aspect: how testing can consolidate our memory of facts. In their experiment they asked college students to learn pairs of Swahili and English words. So, for example, they had to learn that if they were given the Swahili word 'mashua' the correct response was 'boat'. They could have used the sort of facts you might get on a high-school quiz (e.g. "Who wrote the first computer programs?"/"Ada Lovelace"), but the use of Swahili meant that there was little chance their participants could use any background knowledge to help them learn. After the pairs had all been learnt, there would be a final test a week later.
Now if many of us were revising this list we might study the list, test ourselves and then repeat this cycle, dropping items we got right. This makes studying (and testing) quicker and allows us to focus our effort on the things we haven't yet learnt. It’s a plan that seems to make perfect sense, but it’s a plan that is disastrous if we really want to learn properly.

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Karpicke and Roediger asked students to prepare for a test in various ways, and compared their success – for example, one group kept testing themselves on all items without dropping what they were getting right, while another group stopped testing themselves on their correct answers.
On the final exam differences between the groups were dramatic. While dropping items from study didn’t have much of an effect, the people who dropped items from testing performed relatively poorly: they could only remember about 35% of the word pairs, compared to 80% for people who kept testing items after they had learnt them.
It seems the effective way to learn is to practice retrieving items from memory, not trying to cement them in there by further study. Moreover, dropping items entirely from your revision, which is the advice given by many study guides, is wrong. You can stop studying them if you've learnt them, but you should keep testing what you've learnt if you want to remember them at the time of the final exam.

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Finally, the researchers had the neat idea of asking their participants how well they would remember what they had learnt. All groups guessed at about 50%. This was a large overestimate for those who dropped items from test (and an underestimate from those who kept testing learnt items).
So it seems that we have a metacognitive blind spot for which revision strategies will work best. Making this a situation where we need to be guided by the evidence, and not our instinct. But the evidence has a moral for teachers as well: there's more to testing than finding out what students know – tests can also help us remember.

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The man with two hearts

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When a man was fitted with a new heart, his mind changed in unusual ways. Why? The answer reveals a surprising truth about all our bodies, says a Logistic. 

 

Every second or so, Carlos would feel a small “bump” hitting his tummy. It was the beating of his “second heart”.
The small mechanical pump was meant to relieve the burden of his failing cardiac muscles, but Carlos (not his real name) disliked the sensation. The beat of the machine seemed to replace his pulse, a sensation that warped his body image: as the device throbbed above his navel, Carlos had the eerie feeling that his chest had dropped into the abdomen.
It was a strange, unsettling feeling. But when neuroscientist Agustin Ibanez met Carlos, he suspected even odder effects were to come. By changing the man’s heart, Ibanez thought, the doctors might have also changed their patient’s mind: Carlos would now think, feel and act differently as a result of the implant.
How come? We often talk about “following the heart”, but it is only recently that scientists have begun to show that there is literal truth in the cliche; the heaving lump of muscle contributes to our emotions and the mysterious feelings of “intuition” in a very real way. Everything from your empathy for another person’s pain to the hunch that your spouse is having an affair may originate from subtle signals in your heart and the rest of your body.
And the man who feels two hearts offered Ibanez, who is based at Favaloro University in Buenos Aires, a unique opportunity to test those ideas.

“Cranial stuffing”

Ibanez’s work chimes with millennia of speculation about the heart’s role in cognition – which was sometimes thought to supersede the brain’s. Touching the cool, moist grey matter of the cortex, for instance, Aristotle assumed that the brain’s main function was to chill the passions erupting from the heart – which he considered the seat of the soul. For similar reasons, embalmers in ancient Egyptians made sure to leave the heart in the chest, but happily removed the mere “cranial stuffing” from the head.

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We now take a more cerebral view of thought, even if the view of the heart as the font of our emotions has lingered; just consider the many metaphors we use to describe feelings today. William James, the founder of modern psychology, helped formalise these ideas in the 19th Century by suggesting that emotions are really a back-and-forth feedback cycle between the body and the brain. According to his theory, the brain might be able to register a threat intellectually – but it is our awareness of the racing heartbeat and sweaty palms that transforms an abstract concept into a visceral emotion.
James’ ideas also raised an important question: if everybody has different bodily awareness, would that shape the emotions they experience? The idea was difficult to test, however, but a hundred years later scientists are now on the case.
The studies first asked subjects to count their heartbeats based solely on the feelings within their chest; they weren’t allowed to put their hand on their heart or actively take their pulse. Try it for yourself, and you’ll see that this kind of “interoception” can be surprisingly difficult; around one in four people miss the mark by about 50%, suggesting they have little to no perception of the movements inside them; only a quarter get 80% accuracy. After testing their cardiac awareness, the researchers then gave the volunteers various cognitive tests.

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James, it turned out, was spot on. People with more bodily awareness tend have more intense reactions to emotive pictures and report being more greatly moved by them; they are also better at describing their feelings. Importantly, this sensitivity seems to extend to others’ feelings – they are better at recognising emotions in others’ faces – and they are also quicker to learn to avoid a threat, such as a small electric shock in the lab, perhaps because those more intense bodily feelings saturate their memories, making the aversion more visceral. “It may quickly clue us in to the relative goodness or badness of the objects, choices, or avenues of action that we are facing,” says Daniella Furman at the University of California, Berkeley. In other words, people who are in tune with their bodies have a richer, more vivid emotional life – including both the ups and downs of life. “We may not be able to describe the particular physiological signature of a pleasurable experience, but we would probably recognise the sensations when they occur,” she says.

Emotional barometer

These secret bodily signals may also lie behind our intuition – the indefinable hunches that you have the winning hand in poker, say, according to an elegant study by Barney Dunn at the University of Exeter. The task was simple: the volunteers were asked to choose cards from four decks, and they would win money if it matched the colour of another, upturned card.

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The game was rigged so that you were slightly more likely to win from two of the decks, and lose if you picked from the other two. Dunn found that the people who could track their heartbeat with the most accuracy would tend to pick from certain decks, whereas those with poor interoception were more likely to choose at random.
The bodily-aware people weren’t always correct – they were the worst losers as well as the best winners – but the point was that they were more likely to follow their hunches.
So the folklore may be right: people who are in touch with their heart are more likely to be swayed by their instincts – for good or bad. All of which prompted Ibanez to wonder what would happen when you are fitted with an artificial heart? If Carlos experienced substantial changes, it would offer important new evidence that our mind extends well beyond the brain.
And that is exactly what he found. When Carlos tapped out his pulse, for instance, he followed the machine’s rhythms rather than his own heartbeat. The fact that this also changed other perceptions of his body – seeming to expand the size of his chest, for instance – is perhaps to be expected; in some ways, changing the position of the heart was creating a sensation not unlike the famous “rubber hand illusion”. But crucially, it also seemed to have markedly altered certain social and emotional skills. Carlos seemed to lack empathy when he viewed pictures of people having a painful accident, for instance. He also had more general problems with his ability to read other’s motives, and, crucially, intuitive decision making – all of which is in line with the idea that the body rules emotional cognition. “It is a very interesting, very intriguing study,” says Dunn of the findings.

“A lifeless shell”

Sadly, Carlos died from complications during later treatments – but Ibanez now hopes to continue his studies with other patients. He is currently performing tests on people undergoing a full heart transplant to see how it could influence interoception. Damage to the vagal nerve should cut off some of the internal signals sent from the heart to the brain, which might then impact their cognition.

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Away from the cardiac clinic, he is also looking at whether a fault in the link between body and brain could lead to strange depersonalisation disorders, in which patients have the eerie feeling that they don’t inhabit their own body. “I feel as though I'm not alive, as though my body is an empty, lifeless shell,” one patient told researchers. “I seem to be walking in a world I recognise but don't feel.” Ibanez has found that they tend to show worse interoception, and brain scans suggest that this results from a breakdown in communication across the anterior insula – a deep fold of the cortex that is, tellingly, implicated in body awareness, emotion perception, empathy, decision making – and the sense of self.
Dunn, who is a clinical psychologist, is more concerned about its relevance to depression. “At the moment therapy is very much in the head – we change what the client thinks and trust that their emotions will follow up,” he says. “But I often hit a wall: they say that they know these things intellectually, but emotionally they can’t feel it.”
Even after therapy has trained more positive thinking, the patient may still struggle to feel joy, for example – a problem that Dunn suspects may come from poor interoception. He gives the example that when you are walking around the park, your body might give you all sorts of pleasant feedback that shows you are relaxed and peaceful. “But depressed clients seem to walk around the park without being engaged with the sensory experience,” he says, “and then they come back and say it was flat and empty”.

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Along these lines, Furman has found that people with major depressive disorder (but without other complications like anxiety) struggle to feel their own heart beat; and the poorer their awareness, the less likely they were to report positive experiences in their daily life. And as Dunn’s work on decision making would have suggested, poor body perception also seemed to be linked to measures of indecision – a problem that blights many people with depression. Furman stresses, however, that there may be many different kinds of depression, and poor bodily awareness may only influence some of them.
It’s not clear why some people may have reduced bodily awareness, but Dunn thinks it can be trained, with practice. He is currently looking into the use of mindfulness-based therapy, which encourages people to focus on the sensations in their body. He says the challenge is to try to recognise the feelings, even if they are unpleasant, without reacting to them in a knee-jerk way. You should then be better equipped to use the body as the “emotional barometer” to inform you about your state of mind and decide how to act. Another group has designed a rudimentary computer game that asks you to tap a key with every four heartbeats, and flashes red when you are wrong, offering feedback that should boost body awareness.
So what are you waiting for? You can enjoy a richer, more emotional life; tune into the sensory pleasures of the world, and make better decisions. And all you have to do is listen to your heart.
 

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