5 Ways to Hack Your Brain into Awesomeness

Article Summary

Brain is interesting and the fact we are using brain to find more about brain itself, more so. Joe DB, in this article explains how we can hack our brain into awesomeness and make it do what we want.

#5. Think You Got a Good Night's Sleep (After Only Two Hours of Actual Sleep)

Because of internet and all other various reasons, we barely get to sleep at night and the morning sadly doesn’t really waits for us. But there is one way to sleep less and still look as fresh as a daisy the next day.

It's called the Uberman Sleep Schedule, and it is not only the name which looks interesting. Its working is fascinating too. It is a schedule which consists of 20-30 minute power naps, every four hours during the day. It certainly is not easy, but can very effectively increase your waking hours.

It works by providing brain, only the REM sleep which is hour and half of our normal sleep, and is the most essential as it is what actually keeps our brain active and sharp. However, by taking these power naps we’re actually providing brain with two hours of REM sleep which is half hour more than normal. It is definitely a tough but worth it schedule to follow.

#4 Hallucinate Like You Just Took LSD, Legally

How to get legally high? Joe explains, in these simple five steps –

Step 1: Turn the radio to a station with just white noise (static), and put on your headphones.

Step 2: Cut the ping-pong ball in half and tape each half over your eyes.

Step 3: Turn the red light so it's facing your eyes.

Step 4: Sit there for at least a half an hour.

Step 5: Follow Ben Franklin and your new friend, Harold the unicorn, into the gumdrop forest, and live happily ever after.

It's called the Ganzfeld effect, and it works by blocking out most of the signals that go to your brain. The sound of the white noise and the light from the outside of the ping pong ball are ignored by our brain. With all those signals not reaching our brain, it has to create its own, and this is where the hallucinations actually begin.

#3 Dream Whatever You Want to Dream

But dreams are out of our control? Well, not really. It is where the Lucid Dreaming comes in. It is an ability to control our dreams, once we realize it is actually a dream and many of us are not unfamiliar with it. But how do we do it on purpose? Joe narrows it down to the following point –

1. Keep a Dream Journal. Joe says, that as soon as you wake up from a dream, write down every little thing you can remember about it. Writing it down can help you can recall them easily.

2. Think about exactly what you want to dream right before you fall asleep.

3. According to Joe, the best time to have a lucid dream is either right before you regularly wake up, or right after.

It works on the fact that in a dream state, our mind mostly loses the ability to criticize because dreaming just doesn't involve the critical part of our brain.

But if we try to change our mental state even if slightly, that critical part of our brain can keep functioning even while dreaming. And it can actually make us dream whatever we want to.

#2 Learn More While You Sleep

Minor changes in sleeping pattern can actually benefit us. But how do we do it? The way Joe suggests is to not study right up until the time for the exam. Study at least 24 hours before, and sleep on it.

It works on the fact that our brain can reform information in mainly three forms namely, acquisition, consolidation and recall. The first and last occur while we're awake, but the middle one is what happens during sleep. It is because our brain often process information during sleep which it couldn’t during the day’s chaos. Totally worth the try.

#1 Believe Something Happened (That Totally Didn't)

Our memory more often than not is not exactly reliable, especially the one we used to have as a child. Most things we remember from childhood are either inaccurate or just plainly false. Our brain just makes up events, they’re just elaborate constructions of our memory.

So what if there’s a way to do this on purpose? To hack our brain into believing (and actually "seeing") a completely made-up event that never actually happened?

The trick is to let somebody else do it for you. It is very easy to manipulate our memories. Just talk about one instance and even if it didn’t happen, one will certainly have some memory related to it.

It works on the fact that our brain has no certain speed when it comes to memorizing. It remembers what it wants to and creates memories whenever it wants to. Our brain simply remembers more important stuff, and as for the less important stuff we can simply manipulate them into becoming happy memories.

Ruchika Verma

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