Lost Mental Powers

Lost Mental Powers

The danger with writing an ebook and newsletter based on the mind powers of people in the past is that you start to look at the past with rose-coloured glasses, and maybe even start to worship the past and think that the modern world is all bad and everything has gone wrong! This is the approach that many people take who write on these subjects. However, I don’t think this way at all. I think that, overall, we have advanced a lot, and whilst it would be amazing to have a time machine and go back and visit the past, I’m sure I wouldn’t prefer to live there. Nevertheless, having said that, I do believe from my extensive research on this subject that we have genuinely lost certain powers of the mind as we have advanced our civilisation.

It’s often said that there is no such thing as a free lunch. For every gain that is made in life, there is a cost. We have made many gains in the development of our civilisation and in our mental evolution, but there has almost certainly been a cost we have paid.

The central issue is that as we have created ways to automate our thinking, particularly by relying on books and computers, we have to some extent become mentally lazier, and in the process lost some of our earlier mental powers.

For example, I’ve written before about how people in the past had better memories than we do today. Over time, since the invention of writing, then the printing press, and then, more recently, the Internet, we have become more reliant on outside sources for our memories, and we spend less time and effort on cultivating our own memories. For thousands of years information was passed down the generations orally, through stories and song, so a highly trained memory was very important. The ancients could perform feats of memory that would truly astonish us today.

Equally, the ancient Indians developed techniques (described in my book) for performing complex maths in their minds so easily that even children can do it. Today we rely on our calculators and computers to perform calculations for us. However, does this hide the fact that we have hidden, extremely powerful mathematical abilities in our brains that we have forgotten how to use? There are a couple of pieces of evidence that suggest we do. Firstly, in recent years a number of researchers have discovered that the dimensions of ancient stone structures around the world show that ancient man was a sophisticated mathematician, and may have worked out not only complex astronomical maths, but measurements such as the circumference of the Earth, thousands of years before modern measuring and calculating devices. Secondly, in modern times there have been a number of cases of people – often with disorders such as autism – that can perform very complex maths in their heads, very quickly. I’m not talking about the kind of maths that a professor could do in his head either, but calculations that are so complex that for someone to do them in their heads in seconds seems almost impossible, and we have no idea how they can do it.

However, it’s not just through external aids – such as books, calculators and computers - that we’ve automated our thinking, we have also automated much of our own thinking within our own minds. Once something becomes familiar and routine to us, we can do it without giving it much conscious attention. The benefit of this is that it takes up less ‘energy’ for us to perform tasks – such as driving – and we can think about other things. However, some people see a major drawback to this as being that it makes us live our lives as though we were asleep and dreaming. The writer Colin Wilson describes it in terms of us having multiple ‘minds’ within our own head. One of them he calls ‘the robot’. This is the automatic slave we have in our mind that we teach to be able to do the tasks that are routine. While you were driving down the road and daydreaming, then suddenly remember you’re driving but have no memory of having driven the last few miles, who was doing the driving? The robot was. Over time, argues Wilson, we’ve become more and more reliant on the robot for performing tasks for us. And while this has been very useful, even essential for our mental evolution, it has a major drawback. The robot is like our personal assistant, but the trouble is that we’ve given it too much power, and its ended up running our lives for us. The main problem here is that it decides how much mental energy we need at any given moment, when it senses that theres no particular emergency, it only allows us to have a very tiny little bit of energy, because that’s all it thinks we need. That’s why when you are bored, you feel totally drained of energy. This is the root of why we are living way below our potential. We don’t, in Wilson’s words, have the ability to increase our mental pressure to lift us up to our higher potentials.

The good news is that although these skills have been lost, they can be recovered to some extent. Whilst we currently don’t know how to unleash the more astonishing powers of memory and maths that some people have demonstrated, we can re-learn these ancient arts. Equally, we can probably learn to wrestle a bit more control of our own energy levels back from the robot: by deliberately willing ourselves to pay more attention to what we are doing, or to the environment we are in, or by constantly challenging ourselves to learn new things.

Did the ancients see the same colours as us?

Did the ancients see the same colours as us?

One of the mysteries of consciousness is colour perception. For
example, science can never prove whether I experience exactly the
same thing as you when I see the colour red (for example). The
colours we can perceive are our brain's way of categorising
different frequencies of light that are within the range of our
eyes. However, if we could see a broader range of frequencies, no
doubt we could see new colours. Try to imagine that! It's very
difficult to imagine a totally new colour without just imagining a
different shade of a colour we already know. Probably the only way
we could do this is in a dream. Also, not all animals perceive as
many colours as us, some perceive more, and some only perceive
black and white, or none at all! Equally, some people are colour
blind, meaning that they are unable to distinguish between some
colours. Men are more likely than women to suffer from this, in
fact almost one in ten of the world's men (8%) are colour blind
(although men are more likely to be superior in other areas of
visual perception). It is thought that women probably evolved a
more exact ability to distinguish between different colour as
during the vast majority of our history, as hunter-gatherers, women
would have needed to be very careful about which fruits and berries
to pick, and a good ability to distinguish between different
colours is obviously of benefit in that.

However, to ask whether the ancients didn't see the same colours as
us may seem ridiculous. Yet things aren't quite as simple as they
seem when it comes to colour perception.

Whilst we may not be able to ever know whether another person
experiences the same thing as us when they look at the same colour,
to some extent we are able to investigate the subject with how
people describe colours. I'm sure you've had the experience of
calling something one colour, and someone else thinks it's another
colour. This is particularly common with colours that are similar,
such as blue and purple. Studies of the writings of the ancient
Greeks reveals that they didn't have words for pure blue or pure
yellow. Homer describes the 'blue hair of Agamemnon', when he means
black, and the 'wine red Aegean sea' when he means the blue sea.
Does this mean that the ancient Greeks saw colours differently? Or
perhaps it just means that they simply didn't have words for
particular colours, just as today some cultures have words for many
different variations of a colour that we lack in English. Yet, to
me, red is very different from blue, and black is very different
from blue. I can't see how anyone could confuse the two. And if
they simply lacked the words for blue and yellow, but could still
see them, why not invent words for them? If you can see a colour,
would you not want words to describe it?

Of course, our choice of particular words for colours defines how
we see them as separate, whereas in fact colours are not really
separate, discrete things, but points on a continuous spectrum of
light. Nevertheless, having words for a particular colour
undoubtedly draws our attention to it. An example of this is how in
the 19th Century people became aware of the colour Mauve - a form
of light purple. Surprisingly, before then this colour wasn't
recognised and we didn't have a word for it. That didn't come until
1856 when the Chemist William Henry Perkin coined the word, after
inventing an dye of this colour (called Mauveine). The colour
quickly spread as it was used in colouring clothes, and was highly
fashionable in the 1890s. It soon then became associated with
homosexuality, as a number of prominent homosexuals in the arts,
such as Oscar Wilde, took to wearing it. Interestingly, an example
of how our consciousness about colours shifts over time is that by
the 1950s Lavendar was then associated with homosexuality, and by
the 1970s, pink.

Ultimately we probably will never know for sure whether people in
the past saw colours differently, but with more research through
the historical archives we might be able to at least gain some more
insights and clues into this mysterious subject.

Video: How to improve your memory, part 1

Part two is in the post below

Video: How to improve your memory, part 2