Reading — 2026 May–Aug Recall Set 18

A The working day has just started at the head office of Barclays Bank in London. Seventeen staff are helping themselves to a buffet breakfast as young psychologist Sebastian Bailey enters the room to begin the morning’s training session. But this is no ordinary training session. He’s not here to sharpen their finance or management skills. He’s here to exercise their brains. B Today’s workout, organized by a company called the Mind Gym in London, is entitled “having presence”. What follows is an intense 90-minute session in which this rather abstract concept is gradually broken down into a concrete set of feelings, mental tricks and behaviours. At one point the bankers are instructed to shut their eyes and visualize themselves filling the room and then the building. They finish up by walking around the room acting out various levels of presence, from low-key to over the top. C It’s easy to poke fun. Yet similar mental workouts are happening in corporate seminar rooms around the globe. The Mind Gym alone offers some 70 different sessions, including ones on mental stamina, creativity for logical thinkers and “zoom learning”. Other outfits draw more directly on the exercise analogy, offering “neurobics” courses with names like “brain sets” and “cerebral fitness”. Then there are books with titles like Pumping Ions, full of brainteasers that claim to “flex your mind”, and software packages offering memory and spatial-awareness games. D But whatever the style, the companies’ sales pitch is invariably the same: follow our routines to shape and sculpt your brain or mind, just as you might tone and train your body. And, of course, they nearly all claim that their mental workouts draw on serious scientific research and thinking into how the brain works. E One outfit, Brainergy of Cambridge, Massachusetts (motto: “Because your grey matter matters”) puts it like this: “Studies have shown that mental exercise can cause changes in brain anatomy and brain chemistry which promote increased mental efficiency and clarity. The neuroscience is cutting-edge.” And on its website, Mind Gym trades on a quote from Susan Greenfield, one of Britain’s best known neuroscientists: “It’s a bit like going to the gym, if you exercise your brain it will grow.” F Indeed, the Mind Gym originally planned to hold its sessions in a local health club, until its founders realized where the real money was to be made. Modern companies need flexible, bright thinkers and will seize on anything that claims to create them, especially if it looks like a quick fix backed by science. But are neurobic workouts really backed by science? And do we need them? G Nor is there anything remotely high-tech about what Lawrence Katz, coauthor of Keep Your Brain Alive, recommends. Katz, a neurobiologist at Duke University Medical School in North Carolina, argues that just as many of us fail to get enough physical exercise, so we also lack sufficient mental stimulation to keep our brain in trim. Sure we are busy with jobs, family and housework. But most of this activity is repetitive routine. And any leisure time is spent slumped in front of the TV. H So, read a book upside down. Write or brush your teeth with your wrong hand. Feel your way around the room with your eyes shut. Sniff vanilla essence while listening intently to orchestral music. Anything, says Katz, to break your normal mental routine. It will help invigorate your brain, encouraging its cells to make new connections and pump out neurotrophins, substances that feed and sustain brain circuits. I Well, up to a point it will. “What I’m really talking about is brain maintenance rather than bulking up your IQ,” Katz adds. Neurobics, in other words, is about letting your brain fulfill its potential. It cannot create super-brains. Can it achieve even that much, though? Certainly the brain is an organ that can adapt to the demands placed on it. Tests on animal brain tissue, for example, have repeatedly shown that electrically stimulating the synapses that connect nerve cells thought to be crucial to learning and reasoning, makes them stronger and more responsive. Brain scans suggest we use a lot more of our grey matter when carrying out new or strange tasks than when we’re doing well-rehearsed ones. Rats raised in bright cages with toys sprout more neural connections than rats raised in bare cages—suggesting perhaps that novelty and variety could be crucial to a developing brain. And neurologists have proved time and again that people who lose brain cells suddenly during a stroke often sprout new connections to compensate for the loss—especially if they undergo extensive therapy to overcome any paralysis. J Guy Claxton, an educational psychologist at the University of Bristol, dismisses most of the neurological approaches as “neuro-babble”. Nevertheless, there are specific mental skills we can learn, he contends. Desirable attributes such as creativity, mental flexibility, and even motivation, are not the fixed faculties that most of us think. They are thought habits that can be learned. The problem, says Claxton, is that most of us never get proper training in these skills. We develop our own private set of mental strategies for tackling tasks and never learn anything explicitly. Worse still, because any learned skill—even driving a car or brushing our teeth—quickly sinks out of consciousness, we can no longer see the very thought habits we’re relying upon. Our mental tools become invisible to us. K Claxton is the academic adviser to the Mind Gym. So not surprisingly, the company espouses his solution that we must return our thought patterns to a conscious level, becoming aware of the details of how we usually think. Only then can we start to practice better thought patterns, until eventually these become our new habits. Switching metaphors, picture not gym classes, but tennis or football coaching. L In practice, the training can seem quite mundane. For example, in one of the eight different creativity workouts offered by the Mind Gym—entitled “creativity for logical thinkers”—one of the mental strategies taught is to make a sensible suggestion, then immediately pose its opposite. So, asked to spend five minutes inventing a new pizza, a group soon comes up with no topping, sweet topping, cold topping, price based on time of day, flat-rate prices and so on. M Bailey agrees that the trick is simple. But it is surprising how few such tricks people have to call upon when they are suddenly asked to be creative: “They tend to just label themselves as uncreative, not realizing that there are techniques that every creative person employs.” Bailey says the aim is to introduce people to half a dozen or so such strategies in a session so that what at first seems like a dauntingly abstract mental task becomes a set of concrete, learnable behaviours. He admits this is not a short cut to genius. Neurologically some people do start with quicker circuits or greater handling capacity. However, with the right kind of training he thinks we can dramatically increase how efficiently we use it. N It is hard to prove that the training itself is effective. How do you measure a change in an employee’s creativity levels, or memory skills? But staff certainly report feeling that such classes have opened their eyes. So, neurological boosting or psychological training? At the moment you can pay your money and take your choice. Claxton for one believes there is no reason why schools and universities shouldn’t spend more time teaching basic thinking skills, rather than trying to stuff heads with facts and hoping that effective thought habits are somehow absorbed by osmosis.

A According to the United States (U.S.) Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than 80 million American adults are chronically sleep deprived, meaning they sleep less than the recommended minimum of seven hours a night. The resulting fatigue contributes to more than a million auto accidents each year, as well as to a significant number of medical errors. Even small adjustments in sleep can be problematic. On the Monday after a daylight-saving time change in the U.S.—when the clocks are moved ahead one hour—there is a 24 percent increase in heart attacks and a jump in fatal car crashes, compared with other Mondays. B During their lifetimes, about a third of Americans will suffer from at least one of the recognized sleep disorders. They range from common sleep disorders to much rarer and stranger conditions such as sleep apnea and restless leg syndrome. For example, in exploding head syndrome, booming noises seem to reverberate in your brain as you try to sleep. Also, people with Kleine-Levin syndrome will, every few years, sleep nearly nonstop for a week or two. However, insomnia is by far the most prevalent of these problems and the main reason 4 percent of U.S. adults take sleeping pills in any given month. C Evolution endowed us with sleep that is flexible in its timing and easily disturbed, so that attention can be directed to higher priorities. The brain has an automatic override system that can wake us in all stages of sleep when it perceives an emergency like the cry of a child. But the problem is that, in the modern world, our ancient innate wake-up call is constantly triggered by something that is non-life-threatening, like worrying before an exam or the unexpected sound of a car alarm. Before the Industrial Revolution, which brought us alarm clocks and fixed work schedules, we could often counteract a sleep deficit by simply sleeping in. That is no longer possible. D The first segment of the brain that begins to fail when we don’t get enough sleep is the prefrontal cortex, the center of decision-making and problem-solving. Dr Chiara Cirelli, a neuroscientist in the U.S., suggests that, ‘Every cognitive function to some extent seems to be affected by sleep loss,’ and she comments that people are often more irritable, moody, and irrational. For instance, sleep-deprived suspects held by the police will often confess to anything in exchange for rest. Other research has also found that people who regularly sleep less than six hours a night have an elevated risk of developing depression, as well as other mental and physical illnesses. In fact, lack of sleep has been directly tied to obesity: without enough sleep, the stomach and other organs overproduce ghrelin, the hunger hormone, causing us to eat more. However, proving a cause-and-effect relationship in this case is challenging because subjecting humans to the necessary experiments is unethical. E NREM (Non-Rapid Eye Movement) makes up the first of two distinct and repetitive phases of a night’s sleep. As we fall into NREM sleep, our brain stays active and begins an editing process—deciding which memories to keep and which ones to ignore. The first of NREM’s four stages is called the shallow end of sleep and is characterized by a distinctive regular pattern of brain activity, as shown on an EEG (electroencephalogram) device—a machine that measures electrical impulses. In stage two, the EEG measures electric sparks that strike the cerebral cortex (grey matter covering the outer layer of the brain) in regular half-second intervals. Researchers believe that this electrical activity helps the cortex preserve and store recently acquired information. Stages three and four have been described as a deep, coma-like sleep that is as essential to our brain as food is to our body. In stage three, big, rolling waves of brain activity as measured on an EEG are present less than half the time; in stage four, more than half the time. It’s in this deep sleep that our cells produce most growth hormone, which is needed throughout life to service bones and muscles. F REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep was at first believed to be only a variation of a stage in NREM sleep, and not particularly significant. However, once scientists documented the distinctive eye movements in REM, and found that virtually all dreaming takes place during this period, REM sleep was recognized as the second major phase of sleep. Today, scientists believe that the content of our approximately two hours of dreams each night in REM sleep is important in the processing of new memories. Some sleep theorists argue that REM sleep is when we are our most intelligent, insightful, creative, and free. It’s when we truly come alive. ‘REM sleep may be the thing that makes us the most human, both for what it does for the brain and body, and for the sheer experience of it,’ says Professor Michael Perlis. G The problem of sleep loss is not easily solved—whether by power naps or pharmaceuticals. Dr Jeffrey Ellenbogen, a sleep scientist at Johns Hopkins University in the U.S., argues, ‘It’s tempting to manipulate sleep with drugs or devices, but we don’t yet understand sleep enough to risk artificially manipulating the parts.’ Dr Ellenbogen and other experts argue against shortcuts, especially the notion that we can mostly do without sleep. In fact, Dr Steven Lockley, of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, suggests that sleep may be more essential to us than food.

Maps codify the miracle of existence. And the man who wrote the codes for the maps we use today was Gerard Mercator, a cobbler’s son born 500 years ago on a muddy floodplain in northern Europe. Mercator was a humble man with a universal vision. In his own time he was ‘the prince of modern geographers’, his depictions of the planet and its regions unsurpassed in accuracy, clarity and consistency. More recently, he was crowned by the American scholar Robert W. Karrow as ‘the first modern, scientific cartographer’. Where his predecessors had adopted a piecemeal approach to cartography, Mercator sought to wrap the world in systematic overlapping maps. Along the way he erected a number of historic milestones. He participated in the naming and mapping of ‘America’, he constructed the two most important globes of the 16th century, and the title of his pioneering ‘modern geography’, the Atlas, became the standard term for a volume of maps. Mercator also devised a new method - ‘a projection’ - of converting the spherical world into a two-dimensional map. Mercator was born in 1512 and died in 1594. His world was one of military conflict, social upheaval, religious revolution - and geographical discovery. He was ten years old when the survivors of the world’s first circumnavigation returned to Spain in their leaking caravel. No better example is required of genius arising from turmoil. He knew poverty, plague, war and persecution. He was imprisoned for his ideas yet patronised by an emperor. His life was one of brilliant breakthroughs and abrupt reversals. In its telling, his is the story of the poor boy made good: the pauper who embraced the world, found fame, faced death, yet triumphed through fortitude. Variously described by his peers as honest, calm, candid, sincere and peaceable, Mercator wore an aura of calm in troubled times. His attitude to his geographical calling was described by his friend and neighbour, William Ghim, as ‘indefatigable’. Some 40 or so of Mercator’s letters have survived, together with examples of virtually all of his printed maps and globes. Mercator’s most significant work was a project of cosmic proportions. A multi-part cosmography, the work would include a section on astronomy, a chronology of world events and a modern geography, which would eventually contain over 100 maps. Before he commenced the great work, Mercator produced in 1569 an enormous world map on a new projection. His method for converting the spherical globe into a two-dimensional map helped to solve the greatest cartographic riddle of the day: how could the course of a ship following a constant compass bearing be represented as a straight line on a map which had been constructed on a grid of latitude and longitude? Mercator’s solution was to progressively increase the space between his lines of latitude, away from the equator. The effect was to straighten the lines of constant compass bearing (also known as rhumbs or loxodromes). Unfortunately, straightening the rhumbs caused areal distortion: at the map’s northern and southern extremities, the polar regions occupied the full width of the map, while North America appeared to fill half the circumference of the world. Few of Mercator’s contemporaries understood what he was up to, despite the map’s title explaining that it was intended ‘for use in navigation’. Mercator knew that his projection was unsuitable as an areal description of the world, but it would be several decades before the map’s true navigational value would be recognised. Meanwhile, Mercator was marshalling and editing all the geographical data he needed for his modern regional maps of the world. His sources were wide-ranging and multitudinous, including an imperial physician in Vienna and his competitor, the Viceroy of Holstein. He was still working on these maps when he died. The great cosmography that Mercator had already titled ‘Atlas’ would never be finished. In the Atlas, Mercator had embodied the principles of future mapmaking: his italic lettering, his identical map overlaps, his complete coverage of regions at more than one scale, his consistent use of grids of latitude and longitude, his singular editorial control, were all adopted as cartographic standards. ‘Atlas’, the cosmography, became ‘atlas’, the (Oxford English Dictionary) term for ‘a collection of maps in a volume.’ The projection assumed a life of its own. So powerful a cartographic tool did it become that Mercator the man became subsumed by his own device. By the 20th century, Mercator’s Projection had been adopted by state cartographers to map the land that he had named ‘North America’. In 1938, Mercator’s Projection was selected by the Ordnance Survey to map Britain anew. And in 1974, the American cartographer Alden P. Colvocoresses used the Space Oblique Mercator Projection for the first satellite map of the USA. When the Jet Propulsion Laboratory sent Mariner 8 and Mariner 9 to map Mars, they undertook their Martian cartography on a standard Mercator Projection. One by one, the mappable orbs of our solar system are appearing on the worldwide web, flattened for our screens according to Mercator’s cartographic principles. Mercator’s Projection succeeded in reconciling the sphere and the plane, while his Atlas enveloped the world with an integrated system of maps.