by Denis Bukin
Start a stopwatch.
Turn over two cards at a time. If they match keep them turned over, if they do not, turn them back face down. Your task is to turn over all of the cards as quickly as possible.
If you remember cards that are face down you will be able to do the task faster. Imagine cards with numbers you have already seen as turned over. Try not to turn a card over again until you find its match.
This exercise trains working memory and attention, accelerating the process of perception. Having learned to trust your gut and strengthened your working memory, you will not need to double-check items you have already seen.
21 January 1955
I lead a strange life. By day, I work in the dean’s office, and by night, I study at the KGB school.
I thought it would be easier. My head hums and feels like it’ll burst after classes. Some exercises (constant, methodical!) make my eyes hurt and water . . . But the results speak for themselves! I was never stupid, but I didn’t stand out. I noticed some things (what I wanted to notice and what I was used to noticing) and missed others. I would forget to do things pretty often, could say too much in conversation, walk past someone I knew and not recognize him. Now I notice more and remember things better than before. It helps me understand people better and faster, evaluate and predict situations. I stopped forgetting chores, I barely open my phone book and can do two jobs better than I used to be able to do one. Not to mention how delightful it is when you notice something new and interesting about them . . .
Our most unusual classes are the ones on agent work. They’re taught by ‘old-timers’, who are in their fifties and sixties. I’ve heard that during the war, a lot of them spent long periods of time behind German lines, but no one knows where exactly. They teach us to strike up conversations with various people, from railroad conductors to company executives. They teach us to code and decode messages, do surveillance, break off a tail, navigate in an unknown city, make invisible ink, take photos and develop microfilm, and a lot of other stuff.
They expect us to notice and memorize a lot of details. For example, they’ll take us around the city for an hour, and then ask us what colour the sign over the bakery was, what was posted on the door of the bookstore: ‘back after lunch’ or ‘closed for repairs’. I went back to check afterwards. Turns out it just said ‘Closed’. Red paint on grey cardboard.
Unfocused observation
When attention is focused on one item or event, it is likely to miss something important. Therefore, one of the skills necessary for an intelligence officer is unfocused observation. Often, he or she must be able to see the whole picture without concentrating on any specific details. Building on the comparison made earlier between attention and a spotlight, unfocused observation is like diffuse daylight. In order not to miss anything, attention should be focused on the object of observation, and at the same time should be distributed all around.
Exercise
Try watching something without setting any specific goals. For example, you are sitting in a cafe and waiting for someone. Pay attention to the environment without concentrating on anything specific. If you see something interesting, take note of it, but do not narrow your field of view, continue observing all of your surroundings. Do not judge, do not praise, do not criticize – watch indifferently as if everything that is happening is separated from you by thick glass.
★ Train your brain – Matches. Level 1
This exercise has been used to train the visual memory of fighter pilots and intelligence agents for over half a century.
Below, there is a photograph of matches scattered on a table. Memorize their position. After 4 seconds, arrange the matches following the pattern on the page.
There is nothing better for training than old proven methods. If you can remember the location of matches, you will be able to remember a map or drawing at a glance, give a verbal description, or notice that you’re being followed.
If you find this exercise interesting, carry a few real matches in your pocket and use them to train during boring lectures and meetings, using a handkerchief to cover up the random arrangement of matches and trying to recreate it on a table. It won’t be long before you get results!
2 February 1955
Went to the movies with Z. yesterday, watched The Anna Cross at the Striker. It’s funny how differently we saw the movie. Z. cried when Anna was getting married, and the modest fellow (she couldn’t remember his full name) made fun of her. But when the heroine of Larion was swept off her feet by a carousel of balls, receptions and speeding carriages, Z. breathed quickly, she couldn’t look away, her jaw dropped. She loved the film.
Meanwhile, I, among other things, recognized almost all the real Moscow streets and interiors where the film was shot, memorized all the names from the credits, the costumes and accessories of the characters, the musical theme, the small discrepancies, and then the mass of faces that flashed across the screen in an hour and twenty minutes.
Here it is, the result of all of my training. We were taught to do more than focus on one thing, and to diffuse our attention during observation. This was much harder for me. It seems this time, Z.’s presence heightened my abilities. Suddenly, everything worked, and now I can’t get enough of my observational skills.
By the way, we were being watched while we walked along the river after the movie. I guess they’re still testing me. We managed to break away by the metro station: it’s a bit embarrassing, walking with a girl while under surveillance.
Z. is very attractive, of course, but I doubt it’ll work out between us.
★ Train your Brain – Letter pairs, 5×4
This exercise is similar to the one where you were looking for pairs of numbers with playing cards, but instead you use tiles from a word game. Pick any ten letters twice and muddle them face down. Arrange them in five rows of four. Then try and match them. Time yourself and see if you can improve.
Test Yourself
To which Department of the Moscow State University does A. N. Simonov belong?
A) Psychology
B) Philosophy
C) Physics
D) Biology
1
CHIS
(COVERT HUMAN INTELLIGENCE SOURCE)
A CHIS (Covert Human Intelligence Source) agent collects data about people for intelligence services. They find out names, addresses, connections, jobs, positions, lifestyle factors and habits. This data is then collected into documents called ‘profiles’.
Most commonly, CHIS agents are recruited from pools of people who have access to personal information about others: public and civil servants, doctors and employment specialists. Valuable information can also be provided by those who see the right kind of people every day, without drawing attention to themselves. They may have the opportunity to view others’ desks and . . . their garbage. Pay attention to the concierge at home and the cleaning lady at the office. They may know much more about you than you think.
Many agents begin their career as CHIS. It’s a job, a place to train and a test of your abilities.
Memory and imagination
The ability to perceive and remember images is evolutionarily much older and more developed than the ability to understand and remember speech. This is simply because, for our ancestors, a crouching wild animal was more dangerous than a cursing neighbour. It means that any picture, especially a bright, colourful and moving picture, will be perceived faster and better than any text.
How can this be used to improve memory? Try to visualize what you want to remember. For the brain, there is little difference between what is imagined and what is actually seen. An image can be remembered better than text, especially if you imagine it brightly, vividly and in detail.
Here is an example. Your friend explains to you how to get to her or his apartment; they dictate the address: the street name, building and apartment number. Have you memorized it? Then they tell you that they live in a building with a pet store on the ground floor
. That’s better! Imagine your friend standing behind the counter of the pet store and selling three goldfish to three cats. The apartment number is 33. Yes, it’s not real, it is absurd, but it’s bright, vivid and unusual, so it’s easy to remember.
Exercise
Look at the objects on your desk. Pay attention to all of them. Where are they? How are they arranged? What are the features of each object: colour, texture, wear marks, scratches?
Now, close your eyes. First, imagine the desk, and then start picturing objects one by one. Imagine each of them in detail. If you cannot do it, open your eyes for a while, take a look at the object you had difficulty imagining, then close your eyes and keep picturing.
This exercise can be performed not only with the objects on a table, but with a room, with the view from a window, with people sitting in front of you as you travel.
★ Train your brain – Dice. Level 1
A useful resource for memory training is a selection of different-coloured dice, which can be purchased cheaply, or ‘borrowed’ from old board games.
This dice exercise is designed to train visual memory and imagination. For this first exercise use two different-coloured dice. Shake the dice out onto a table. Looking at them for only 15 seconds, memorize the colour and number before covering them up or looking away. Without checking, write down both the colour and number.
Taking a mental photograph of the dice on the table and using that to remember should help with this task.
The man who remembered everything
The story of Solomon Shereshevsky, a man with phenomenal abilities, has made its way into all psychology textbooks. Soviet psychologist A. R. Luria was lucky enough to study his memory abilities for three decades, from the 1920s to the 60s.
S. Shereshevsky, or ‘S’, as Luria called him in his books, could remember any amount of information. He had seemingly unlimited memory. He could recall anything: pictures, concepts, words or meaningless combinations of letters, as if he were reading a book. In addition, it was found that the information he memorized was never erased from his memory. He could effortlessly remember words dictated to him during experiments ten or fifteen years earlier.
Since Shereshevsky’s memory could not be measured, Luria tried to describe the way it worked, the mechanisms of remembering and reproducing information.
He found the following:
1. To store information, Shereshevsky encoded it into images. For example, the number 1 was a proud, well-built man, number 6 was a man with a swollen foot, and number 8 was a very stout woman. His ability to encode information into images was innate. Shereshevsky even remembered what he saw and heard in the first months of his life.
2. Shereshevsky had extreme synaesthesia – an intertwining of sensations. People with synaesthesia can clearly distinguish the colour of letters, feel the roughness of sounds and taste shapes. In Shereshevsky’s synaesthetic perception, all of his senses were connected, except smell. The images created by the other four of his five senses were very vivid and strong.
3. To remember the order of numbers or items in a long list, Shereshevsky mentally walked down a street in his home town and set images up along the way. Sometimes he ‘lost’ items from the list. This happened, for example, when the mental image was placed in a dark place, or melted into the background. At other times, Shereshevsky would imagine his images going on adventures, which evolved into unusual and therefore memorable stories.
The attributes of Shereshevsky’s memory that Luria described are used in modern mnemonics.
Exercise
While reading a book, stop and try to conjure up what the author is describing: faces, appearances, objects, interiors, landscapes . . . On the one hand, it will help you to develop your imagination, and on the other to enjoy a good book more deeply and remember its contents better.
9 February 1955
First they taught us to control our attention. A lot. Finally got that. And to focus on one thing and many things at the same time. My head is full of names, numbers and images. Now they’re teaching us to work with all of that in our heads – to organize what we need and remove what we don’t.
It’s like the first grade all over again! Or, rather, like childhood, learning to walk.
I wish spring would come faster. I wonder if this school has vacations.
Test Yourself
What movie did Simonov take Z to see?
A) The Searchers
B) The Anna Cross
C) The Maltese Falcon
D) North by Northwest
★ Train your brain – Items on a table. Level 1
It’s important for an intelligence officer to remember the location of objects, people, streets and houses – in short, all the little things that are completely uninteresting to most people.
This exercise is used to train and test the memories of young students at intelligence schools. The ability to remember locations of objects is also used by experienced intelligence officers: it helps to determine if anyone was in the room in the absence of its owner.
Take some objects from around your house and place them on a table. Take a photograph. Remember their position. Close your eyes and get a friend or family member to take all the objects off and place them under the table. Try to arrange the items as they were placed earlier. Compare how you did to the photograph.
To perform this exercise, take a ‘mental photograph’ of the table. Call it up in your mind when you see the empty table. Now arrange the items.
Before arranging the items, you need to imagine the whole table. Some people can do this immediately, but others need to use special methods. One method is to tilt the table in your mind. The items will slide sideways. In what sequence will they fall off the table? To which side? What will crack and break and how? What will the floor look like after all the items fall?
This exercise can be done every day. Look at someone’s work desk. Turn around and imagine the position of the items on it. On a bus or train, examine the people sitting across from you. Close your eyes and recreate the picture in your imagination. Look at a bookshelf. Turn around and try to remember the order of the books.
Improving imagination
Imagination might be the most creative function of the brain. With the help of our imagination, we can not only represent what has already been seen, but also create new images. In addition, we can change their size, move them, rotate them, add new elements and remove old ones. It is imagination that people use when coming up with something new: inventors invent, directors make films, writers write books, and artists create paintings.
The creative imagination is used in many mnemonics. As mentioned before, images are easier to remember than text. In order to remember what you have read, you need to see it in your imagination.
Exercise
Spend half an hour blindfolded in your house. Walk around the room. Try, without opening your eyes, to wash your face, dress, or even make breakfast. Turn on some music. Sit in your favourite chair.
Exercise
Imagine a chalk or white board. One that you have seen at school or at home. Imagine the texture of the board, its colour, its frame, the way it hangs on the wall. Maybe it’s black, matte and rough, for writing with chalk, or white and smooth, for markers. Now imagine it changing colour to brown. To orange. To blue. Feel each colour. Make the board exactly the colour you want it to be.
When you get to be good at changing the colour of the imaginary board, write any word on it. Look at it closely. How is it written? What colour is the text? What is the texture of the line? Erase the word from the board with an imaginary rag or eraser and write another one. Spend some time with this imaginary board and the words on it.
Come back to this exercise and gradually increase the amount of text. Write short phrases, numbers and lists. Sketch diagrams. Imagine what is written as clearly as possible.
This technique can be very useful for an intelligence officer. Getting stuck on a problem that cannot be so
lved and returning to it over and over again usually drains mental and physical strength. To break the cycle of unproductive thinking quickly, imagine the problem written on the imaginary board and erase it. Does it pop back up? Erase it! One more time? Erase it! Usually after two or three unsuccessful attempts to return to unproductive thinking, the brain moves on to another topic.
Test yourself
Why was Bernstein’s case taken up by counter-intelligence, not the police?
A) Bernstein was high up in the civil service
B) Bernstein had custody of missing documents containing classified information
C) Bernstein was a KGB agent
D) The police were not able to find Bernstein
★ Train your brain – Crossword 4×4
This exercise is designed to train imagination and visual memory.
You can practise this exercise any time you are near a discarded newspaper with a crossword puzzle.
Draw a square consisting of 4x4 squares at each corner of the crossword. Stare at one of the corners, only paying attention to the pattern of dark and light squares. After 4 to 5 seconds, turn over the newspaper and draw the pattern of dark and light squares on the other side of the paper. This exercise is easier if you take a ‘mental photograph’ of the matrix, and then use it to select the cells. If you can’t take a ‘mental photograph’ right away, group the dark cells into geometric figures.
Once again, it is worth mentioning the importance of spatial reasoning skills. The hypotheses, theories and scenarios an intelligence officer works with have complicated structures. Therefore, the ability to draw them in the form of charts and manipulate them helps keep all the information associated with a complicated assignment in the right frame.