So you’re looking to sharpen your mind maybe to make your life easier or maybe to accomplish an intellectual feat and become the envy of your peers. The mind is a mysterious thing, no doubt, and its ever-unquenchable thirst to be better at what it does, I think, can be forgiven as a trait of animal survival.
Perhaps like me, instead of survival you want to outdo the rest of mankind and achieve God-like omniscience! It’s a bit far-fetched, but what if I told you that it was possible?
Before I get down to the brass tacks of achieving or even considering something as ridiculous as omniscience, let’s begin with the first step and understand what exactly is intelligence and how one can go about improving it.
Intelligence is, as Oxford Dictionary defines it, the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills. So, in other words, we can say that intelligence basically combines the abilities of memorizing information and accessing it to solve problems and answer questions. But then what’s the difference between a genius and an intelligent person? A genius, I believe has the ability to not just access clear memories of information, but also combine that information creatively, from the dozens of permutations and combinations possible, and come up with the perfect combination of information suited to solve a problem. Simply put, when confronted with a problem, an intelligent person will take the most legitimate route from A to B step by step, while a genius will intuitively find a shorter and smarter route from A to B and possibly create more knowledge in the process.
This intuitive creative ability of a genius to connect seemingly unrelated scattered pieces of information into new knowledge and efficient solutions is the key to omniscience. You see, if you really think about it, if all the devices of communication – alphabets, numbers, symbols – were to be rearranged into the millions of permutations and combinations that are possible with them, we are bound to happen upon sentences, equations and even books that contain knowledge that has been lost, known, or yet to be known. Just as it was envisioned by Jorge Luis Borges in his short story “The Library of Babel” (Here’s the modern day version of it: libraryofbabel.info) and Kurd Lasswitz before him, if we could somehow trigger our minds to do this very permutation and combination with the tons of information it absorbs every day, rejecting the unnecessary gibberish and singling out the coherent pieces we could have the answer to every question.
Sounds all fine and dandy but is this even possible? Can your mind perform this feat consciously or even subconsciously? I think your mind does that every night when you go to sleep. Your dreams are results of weird combinations of information it has absorbed over the course of your lifetime. Sometimes you see things in your dreams that are completely ingenious; you see stories that would put even Shakespeare to shame, you hear thoughts that give you a whole new perspective on life and you wake up as a completely different person. This is nothing but pure permutation and combination in effect.
But how do we replicate this consciously? Is it possible to voluntarily enter into that deep sleep REM state of mind on command and unlock your mind’s true potential while you’re wide awake? Well not unless you have sleep apnea like hip-hop artist Bill Ray who sleeps in the recording booth to wake up with rap lyrics on his mind (https://youtu.be/xmkx1_Jv03Y). Otherwise, there are tried and tested ways to improve your brain function, strengthen your neural networks, and produce more brain cells that you could start with before you enter into the realm of yogic omniscience. For instance:
1. Research has shown that running and aerobic exercises done for prolonged periods of time can trigger the production of new brain cells.
(https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/02/160208083606.htm)
2. Reading books will transform your brain, improve your working memory, social intelligence and what not. (https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/metacognition-and-the-mind/201804/can-reading-help-my-brain-grow-and-prevent-dementia)
3. Learning a musical instrument can do wonders by strengthening the connections between the two hemispheres of your brain and more.
4. Solving math problems, playing puzzle games and even some video games will also enhance the way your brain handles real life problems. Being smart in real life basically means being creative with the way you solve problems/challenges that life throws your way and you do that with a brain that can organize and access information gathered in the short-term memory. Many video games encourage players to tackle problems and challenges in creative ways which helps improve memory function.(https://www.techtimes.com/articles/206644/20170504/playing-video-games-can-help-boost-memory-and-prevent-dementia-in-elderly-people-study.htm)
Basically, if your brain has the capacity to store more information in the short-term memory, it’ll have more elements to play with while solving a certain problem. And this is why knowledge is power. If you know more about things, your brain will be more competent at being smart in general because it will always have enough information to play with to handle problems. Keep feeding your brain with information, be hungry for knowledge. Stay curious. Eventually, you’ll realise people keep contacting you for problems they get stuck in just because you always seem to know the solution to everything.
Moreover, problem solving is not an end in itself, because sometimes knowing how one problem is solved can turn out to be a more creative approach to another unrelated problem, so your curiosity will put you in this virtuous cycle of problem solving.
Having an attitude that’s always curious will teach you how to dissect a problem and you’ll know where to look to find better insight into the problem. Moreover, you wouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel; you’ll already know ways to tackle a problem by drawing inspiration from someone else’s approach to a similar problem. Besides, you’ll know what other information can be used to your advantage because you already knew it beforehand.
Even though trying to absorb all the information of the world may seem daunting, I don’t believe that we have to consciously store information in our brains. Just be in the present, enjoy the information that comes your way and don’t worry about your ability to remember it a couple of hours or days later, because, I believe, that our subconscious stores everything anyway and when the need arrives all the information will connect in a eureka moment. And like I mentioned before, you’ve already experienced your subconscious’ ability to connect obscure long-forgotten data together to form unfamiliar faces and situations, and uncanny ideas that you come across in your dreams. Sometimes it’s the permutation and combination of data and sometimes it’s solid data you acquired long ago or even recently.
Finally, I’d like to mention one of humankind’s often underappreciated superpowers – concentration. The ability to pay undivided attention to something, the ability to focus is what sets us apart from a lot of animal species and honing it can give us an edge over other people. I think this is what makes us the smart beings that we are. We can focus on a problem and work towards solving it. Therefore, meditation becomes a powerful tool to help you become a smarter individual by helping you focus and in a way making you one with the problem which will make solving it as easy as looking into yourself. Meditation is also known for its endless benefits and long-time meditators have been observed to have larger volumes of grey matter. (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/05/090512134655.htm)
But being a devout supporter of the Ying and Yang philosophy, I’d recommend that too much of anything is bad. Too much concentration is bad because it might blind you to a simpler solution, a solution that could be easily ignored in your concentrated dedication to a particular approach. Sometimes you need to break your concentration to be creative and stumble upon the answer you’re looking for.
However, this does not undermine the power of meditation, because aside from improving your ability to concentrate, meditation is known to produce alpha waves which are related to creativity, and deep meditation is known to induce theta waves, which are also produced during sleep (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100319210631.htm).
If you can practice deep meditation and gain the ability to will these brain waves whenever you want, I believe that is when you’ll happen upon omniscience, because if you could use the same power of the subconscious to make efficient use of permutations and combinations, then imagine the amount of knowledge you can create and discover from even basic information like alphabets and numbers.
Touching on the topic of the subconscious again, I believe that if you maintain the desire to be a genius then you’ll subconsciously tend towards being smarter and achieve your end goal. Your subconscious mind works in mysterious ways but keeping this desire in the back of your mind as much as you can might, among other things, make your brain notice the little smart things you do and reward you for them with dopamine. And dopamine is basically what everyone is in the pursuit of; the happiness hormone will keep you dedicated and you’ll automatically default to behaviour that makes genius genius, and will have you well on your way towards omniscience.
Best of luck! Make humanity proud!
Additional References:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3004979/
Concentration
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/amp/magazine-35688048
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4862243/
A talk by Richard J. Davidson on meditation and brain plasticity
A website that lists meditation benefits with sources to verify its claims
https://eocinstitute.org/meditation/141-benefits-of-meditation/
A Tipsy Quill 