by Denis Bukin
Since 60% of your brain matter consists of fats, do not try to eliminate all fats from your diet. Of course, not all fatty food is useful. Hydrogenated fats like margarine are bad for nerve cells, because they prevent the removal of waste products. Try not to eat foods containing vegetable fat. Unrefined vegetable oils, however, are useful. They clean the blood vessels and improve blood circulation.
One important biological function of the brain is to help us search for food. Brain activity depends on how hungry a person is. With a full stomach, brain activity slows down, causing drowsiness. Before you take on an important task, do not have a large meal, because mild hunger stimulates mental activity.
There is a lot of debate about the benefits and dangers of stimulants such as coffee and tea. Of course, a cup of coffee revives and improves mental ability, but long-term usage of large amounts of coffee leads to addiction and has harmful side effects. Perhaps the wisest advice in using natural stimulants is to practise moderation.
Drink plenty of fluids. Dehydration drastically reduces mental and physical performance.
Test Yourself
What is the name of the British psychologist who invented mind maps?
A) Miles Hewstone
B) Michael Rutter
C) Tony Buzan
D) Alexander Haslam
Physical activity
The value of physical activity for mental health is widely recognized. It contributes to well-being, improves blood flow and strengthens blood vessels, keeping them elastic. Regular exercise improves the functioning of the endocrine system and mitigates the emotional state, relieving stress. All of these benefits have a positive effect on mental performance. Complex movement also trains mind and memory. The association cortex of the brain, responsible for a person’s cognitive abilities, is located next to the motor cortex that controls the contraction and relaxation of muscles. Motor cortex stimulation activates the association cortex, so movement makes us smarter. It is especially noticeable with children – motor skill development usually correlates with intellectual growth.
Physical activity invigorates. If you are overcome by drowsiness, do some exercise: turn your head, do a couple of arm swings, a dozen knee-bends or push-ups. If you reach an impasse in solving a complex problem, just go for a walk. While the consciousness will stop usual thinking, the subconscious keeps on searching for solutions. Unexpected associations and new ideas emerge.
There is a method that will be familiar to martial arts fans, that helps to quickly invigorate the mind and body. Stand up. Take a deep breath, slowly raising your hands, then exhale and quickly bring your hands down, sucking your stomach in. Blood will move from the internal organs to the limbs and the head; oxygen and nutrients will be brought to the brain.
Schedule and memory
When planning your day, consider the individual rhythm of your body. Some psychologists argue that the natural circadian rhythm of all people is about the same. In the morning, after sleeping, activity is high and in the evening it drops. However, breaking from a natural cycle, such as waking up later and staying awake past midnight, leads to a shift of activity to evening and night. ‘Morning’ people with a modified circadian rhythm become ‘night’ people. Even if you are used to being a night person, experiment with your schedule. Maybe the morning hours will be more productive for you.
To avoid getting out of the natural rhythm of your body, do not deviate from your usual schedule over the weekend. When there is no need to get up early the next morning, the temptation to stay up late is strong. Try to resist it. You may run the risk of missing the most productive hours of your personal time!
Studies of the circadian rhythm of a large sample of people shows that the mental capacity of a human reaches a maximum in the morning from about 8 to 12 o’clock. After lunch, it falls off steeply, then it gradually grows and falls again in the evening. This pattern is typical for most people, but others may have their own individual characteristics. The best way to know your circadian rhythm is by observation and experimentation.
Sleep greatly affects health, performance and psychological state. A sleep-deprived person can have difficulty controlling behaviour and emotional responses. They become irritable and less reasonable, making more mistakes.
The ability to remember also depends on sleep quality. There is a theory that the processing of information received during the day and its retention in long-term memory occurs during sleep. Experiments confirm that during sleep, complex motor skills are also stored, not only learned information. Good-quality sleep is a prerequisite for effective education and training in all professions.
To sleep more deeply, and to be able to relax, do not overload the brain before bedtime. Read a book or take a walk. Do not work on the computer or watch TV, because these activities can irritate the nervous system so that sleep is superficial and does not provide complete relaxation.
Often, intelligence officers do not have enough time for sleep. This can cause sudden drowsiness, and there is a special method that can be used in such cases. Get comfortable and take a 20-minute nap, but not longer. Immediately after falling asleep, the brain goes into a stage of light sleep, which can be clearly seen on an encephalogram as high-amplitude theta waves. In this stage of sleep, it’s very easy to wake someone up. About 20 minutes after falling asleep, a deep sleep with a predominance of slow delta waves sets in. A person who is woken up in a slow-wave sleep stage then feels sluggish and frustrated. Set the alarm for 20 minutes, or ask someone to wake you up. In most cases, such a short sleep will be enough to remove fatigue and enable you to complete urgent work. After waking up, have a cup of strong tea.
Exercise
Observe yourself for one or two weeks. Evaluate your performance on a seven-point scale ranging from -3 to +3, and record the data several times a day, making a graph. Summarizing this, you will get a cycle of average daily performance. After that, experiment with your schedule, observing the changes in your well-being. Maybe you will establish a more productive schedule.
Create a schedule so that the most complex tasks will be performed at the peak of your performance cycle.
★ Train your brain – Matches. Level 4
The exercise with the matches is more difficult: now you are paying attention to the pattern of the matches and which way the match head is pointing. Memorize both their positions.
Studying to be an intelligence officer is difficult. But the Disciplinary Code of the Soviet Military states: ‘The soldier must endure all the hardships and privations of military service steadfastly and courageously.’
How not to leave things ‘for later’
The intelligence service is not just a job; it’s a way of life with high requirements. In particular, there is no place for procrastination. An agent cannot watch the news, read a book or prepare a cup of coffee or tea instead of completing their work.
In order not to waste time, it is useful to master techniques of self-organization. Here are some of them.
1. Lay down a goal for the task. Specify it and say why you are doing it. Imagine the result. Is it useful for you?
2. Divide the work into tasks with easily trackable results. Do not make them large. It is better to perform two or three tasks. It is important to experience pleasure in completing work. Reward yourself for these victories. Explain to yourself what you have done for the day and what you have achieved.
3. Perform only one task at any given time.
4. Reduce the number of external stimuli. Turn off your phone. Do not watch TV while working. Experiments clearly show that the human voice is distracting and reduces productivity. Put on headphones. Pick music that helps you focus on the job or work in silence.
5. Turn off e-mail and social networking notifications and social media. If you do not control the flow of information, it controls you.
6. Before work, tidy your desk. Preparation psychologically attunes you to efficient work.
7. Set aside time for work and time for
fun and relaxation. Do not mix them; if you fully dedicate yourself to the work, you will free up time for a good rest. Checking e-mail and surfing the internet is not restful, especially when you need to work.
8. If you find it difficult to get down to work, try the following technique. Try to work for 30 minutes without distraction. If during this time you do not get into the rhythm of the task at hand, take a break or work on something else for the next 15 minutes, then try to work for 30 minutes again. If you get caught up in your work, and most likely you will, allow yourself to work for longer.
Effort is required in order to focus and hold attention, but when you get caught up in something, it is easier to concentrate. Focal attention will be replaced with automatic attention.
9. Celebrate productive days and weeks. Give yourself presents for achievements. Allow yourself to buy a good book or to go to a restaurant at the end of a successful week. Positive emotions confirm results.
10. To overcome procrastination, learn to manage your attention using exercises from this book. The better you master the technique of managing attention, the easier it will be to work and the more pleasure you will get from resting.
Exercise
To train the ability to concentrate, try working in difficult, distracting conditions. Turn on the TV, open a window or go to a noisy place. Over time, complicate the task: turn on the TV and radio at the same time.
This is a difficult exercise and at first it will be tedious for you. Give yourself a break when you finish.
Flow
In the course of studying prominent personalities, American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi discovered that while working, everyone enters the same psychological state of being fully absorbed by their work. Csikszentmihalyi called this state ‘flow’.
Someone in a flow state:
• has a clear understanding of the purpose of their work;
• is focused on their task, is not distracted by outside thoughts;
• loses self-awareness, self-evaluation is turned off;
• has a distorted sense of time: sometimes it goes by quickly and unnoticeably, sometimes it stretches out and allows you to complete more than expected;
• receives feedback quickly: results are immediately visible and the course of work can be quickly adjusted;
• feels a balance between skill level and the challenge presented: their work is not so easy that it is boring, but not so difficult that it is impossible to complete;
• feels personally in control of the situation and the outcome;
• enjoys the process of working and does not need to force themselves to perform their task.
Although everyone finds their flow differently, there are some general guidelines:
• set a goal;
• concentrate on the task;
• get feedback: keep track of the criteria of success, acknowledge your progress towards solving the problem;
• if the task seems boring, try to complicate it or to do better than last time;
• if the task is too difficult, improve your skills.
There is no space for procrastination if there is flow. Observe yourself, pick up techniques that help you to find your flow state.
Exercise
Think of a few cases where you have been in a state of flow. What were you doing? Who was with you? Where were you working? What was around you? How did you start working? What happened next? How did you feel? What do the times you entered your flow have in common?
Try to reconstruct these conditions and see if you can get into your flow state.
One thing at a time
When you’re overwhelmed with work and do not have time to do everything you have scheduled for the day, there is a temptation to do more than one thing at a time, especially when you have forced pauses in some tasks.
For example, you need to draw up a report and check your e-mail. Isn’t it logical to switch to e-mail when thinking about a difficult paragraph in the report?
But do not try to do two things at once. You might save a bit of time, but you will likely make a mistake in the report or miss an important message. In addition, you will get tired more quickly.
Initial concentration requires significant effort. Once you submerge yourself in work, it’s much easier to maintain attention, which saves significant effort.
To understand how much effort it takes to shift attention, conduct a short experiment. Read the statements below. Evaluate the truth of every statement and remember the first word of each of them.
Dogs can swim.
Frogs do not have a moustache.
Elbows are the knees of arms.
Trains carry passengers.
Elephants do not eat meat.
Fish live in the air.
Frogs cannot breathe underwater.
Repeat the first words without looking at the statements. The correct answer is: dogs, frogs, elbows, trains, elephants, fish, frogs. It was difficult to remember them, wasn’t it? This is because the task of checking the truth interfered with memorizing words.
Moreover, switching between tasks wastes energy, it does not allow you to enter into a flow state and enjoy your work.
★ Train your brain – Letter Pairs, 8×6
Now pick 24 pairs of letters and arrange them in a square 8x6. Train your working memory, trying to find matching pairs of letters. If it is still difficult for you to remember a large number of tiles, break it down into smaller pieces. For example, look for pairs of no more than eight different letters at a time.
1 August 1955
I’ve been in Moscow for nearly a week, and I’m still not over my trip to Argentina. So many experiences, a foreign language, a lot of work, different time zones. I sleep half the day and then don’t sleep half the night. My head isn’t working too well because of it. I feel like picking a fight or something all the time.
A lot of work has piled up in the almost-month I was gone. I’m trying to get through the pile evenly, without overtaxing myself. I’ve moved the most important things to my peak performance time – right now, that’s only a couple of hours, from 9 to 11. I’m trying to find opportunities to sleep 15–20 minutes at a time during the day. I’ve added some physical stress to my routine – I run in the mornings and go to the pool. This lets me stay awake better and fall asleep faster.
Stress and memory
Stress is an intelligence officer’s constant companion. Contrary to popular belief, it is not entirely bad. At just the right time, the body can fall into a heightened state – the senses are tuned, the brain thinks clearly and the body is ready to act. Stress increases mental and physical abilities. However, when it accumulates, it can destroy a person. Prolonged stress without periods of recovery exhausts any organism. Fatigue interferes with work and perception becomes inadequate. Exhausted agents either exaggerate the danger of a situation or underestimate it, making mistakes in either scenario.
Prolonged stress has a negative impact on memory. Experiments on animals indicate that adverse conditions can lead to a decrease in the size of the hippocampus (the structure located in the medial temporal lobe of the brain that is responsible for long-term memory). Studies also confirm that people dealing with prolonged stress will have trouble with memorization and recall, as well as problems with memory interference.
Most methods of post-stress recovery are based on relaxation techniques: autogenic training, meditation, yoga, stretching, etc. All these techniques are well documented in literature. However, the most effective method for managing chronic stress is prevention. Rest regularly, let go of problems you do not have to solve and stop being a perfectionist.
★ Train your brain – Word dictation. Level 4
An intelligence officer often has no second chance to see a document, so he or she needs to remember everything the first time. Increase the number of words you are memorizing, using the loci or story method.
23 August 1955
Berlin.
Goi
ng through RSHA archives that our East German colleagues have got hold of. Trying to figure out what sort of experiments the Germans were doing. It makes me sick. Went to Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen with them. Didn’t help the case, but I had to see it with my own eyes.
Trying to find Dachau survivors. Maybe they’ll help me find new threads tying Bernstein, Kovalev, Alvarez and the missing documents together.
Berlin seems alive and joyful, although you can still see traces of the war in some places. But even the ruins and piles of rubble breathe German orderliness and pedantry. I was advised to abstain from visiting West Berlin.
Age and memory
Unfortunately, memory deteriorates with age. You can slow down the process through proper nutrition, exercise and work–rest balance, but it cannot be stopped. This is true for ‘pure’ memory – memory as a psycho-physiological function. However, practical memory does not deteriorate with age and may actually become stronger (if there are no medical problems).
The ability to remember depends on the richness of associations, which only increases with accumulated experience. With age, people develop practical techniques of processing in accordance with the complexity of the world. They keep a diary, record tasks and thoughts, learn how to work with large amounts of information, and can separate what is important from what is not.
Mnemonic methods are also good for keeping memory strong.
It might be helpful to an agent to know that in old age, people remember what they have learned in a lifetime, but do not recall the recent past as well. Professional skills remain intact for a long time, if not forever. There are many cases when people suffering from memory loss can do the work that they had been performing all of their lives. In this case, they are often unable to explain their actions and do not remember where and how they learned to do it. Professional habits help older people to maintain their identities, even if they left work many years ago. A retired military officer can be identified by his bearing and firm step.