• Modify habits. Wear your watch upside down and on the other wrist.
• Develop other-handedness. Use your other hand to do rote tasks such as brushing your teeth or jotting down notes or numbers.
• Tap into alternative sources of learning. If you gather information mostly by reading, explore books on tape. If the television is where you get most of your news, tap into on-line news.
• Expand your reading universe. Most people stay with a certain type of reading material, usually light fiction and popular periodicals. Pick up a copy of Scientific American or Forbes to read about something completely foreign to you.
• Play work games. Do crossword puzzles or compete with someone to see who can think of the most names in a particular category (e.g., four-legged animals, edible fruits) within a fixed time.
• Memorize a poem. Start wit something short and gradually master longer ones.
• Practice your spatial skills. Buy a Rubik’s cube and work on it. Instead of doodling, try sketching real-life, three-dimensional objects.
• Get a topographical map of an area you know. As you study the contours of the land, mentally picture them as they are in nature.
• Learn about a musical instrument you know very little about, for example, the recorder, harpsichord, or drums. Listen to music hat features this instrument so that you can easily identify its sound.
• Listen to a new kind of music, for example opera, Gregorian chants or blues.
• Don’s use a calculator or computer software program to balance your checkbook. Do the math by hand.
• Watch a television movie with the sound off and try to figure out the personalities of the characters by watching their actions.
• In front of a mirror, practice facial expressions, for example, suspicion or contentment or surprise.
• Reconstruct a conversation that took place at least twenty-four hours earlier. Jot down who said what. Test yourself by asking whoever else was involved about his or her recollections of the conversation.
• Keep a dream diary and think about the emotions and psychological underpinnings they stir up.
• Practice reading upside down. Start with a paragraph in a newspaper, see how long it takes you and gradually add paragraphs as you become more adept.
• As you are drifting off to sleep, pick a year from your past and try to remember as many events from it as possible.
• Keep lists. Use a small pocket notebook to record, for instance, a food log as part of a weight-watching program or purchases you make to manage a budget.
• Whenever you have a hunch about something, write it down in order to test and develop your power of intuition.
• Expand your verbal patterns by arranging unusual sentences and phrases with magnetic word pieces.
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