The famous inventor and physicist Nikola Tesla often stretched his toes. Each night, he repeatedly "squeezed" his toes, 100 times on each foot, according to writer Mark Cypher. While it's not entirely clear what else his exercise involved, Tesla himself said it helped him stimulate his brain cells. What other strange habits can scientists have? More than 10 hours of sleep and not wanting to wear socks - is that enough to think like a genius?
The most prolific mathematician of the 20th century, Paul Erdos, preferred a different kind of stimulant: amphetamine, which he used to make 20-hour calculations. When a friend argued with him for 500 bucks that he would not be able to quit taking amphetamine for a month, Erdos won the bet, but complained: "You dropped math a month ago."
Newton, meanwhile, boasted of the benefits of being celibate. When he died in 1727, he forever changed our understanding of the natural world and left 10 million words in notes; by general belief, he also remained a virgin (Tesla, by the way, also remained celibate, although he claimed to have fallen in love with a dove).
Many brilliant minds in science were fantastically strange. Pythagoras hated beans. Benjamin Franklin took "air baths" naked. The path to greatness is lined with very strange habits.
But what if there is something deeper behind these superficial facts? Scientists are increasingly realizing that intelligence is less dependent on genetic luck than we are inclined to believe. According to the latest set of evidence, about 40% of the differences between thinkers and dullards can be attributed to the environment, habitat. Whether we like it or not, our daily habits have a profound effect on our brains, shape their structure, and change the way we think.
Of all the great minds in history, Albert Einstein was the true benchmark for combining genius with eccentric. Why not study his habits to try and transfer them to yourself? He taught us how to squeeze energy out of atoms, maybe he can teach us how to squeeze everything out of our weak mortal brains? Could there be any secrets in Einstein's sleep, nutrition and even the choice of clothes?
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10 hours of sleep and a second nap
Sleep is known to be good for your brain - and Einstein took this advice more than seriously. They say he slept at least 10 hours a day - almost one and a half times more than the average person today (6.8 hours). Can you sleep to a genius state?
Writer John Steinbeck once said: "It is common knowledge that a problem that was difficult at night is solved in the morning after the sleep committee works on it."
Many of the most powerful breakthroughs in human history, including the periodic table, DNA structure, and Einstein's special theory of relativity, are said to have occurred to their creators in dreams. Einstein realized his theory when he dreamed of cows being electrocuted. But is it really so?
In 2004, scientists at the University of Lübeck in Germany tested this idea in a simple experiment. First, they trained the volunteers in a number game. Most of them gradually improved in practice, but the fastest way to improve was to reveal a hidden rule. When students were checked after eight hours, those who were allowed to sleep were twice as likely to find the hidden rule as those who were awake.
When we go to bed, the brain goes into a series of cycles. Every 90-120 minutes, the brain goes from light sleep to deep sleep and a state that is associated with dreams, the phase of rapid eye movement (REM). Until recently, it was believed that she plays a leading role in learning and memorization. But this is not the complete story. “Non-REM sleep has always been a bit of a mystery, as we spend 60% of our night in this sleep phase,” says Stuart Vogel, a neuroscientist at the University of Ottawa.
Non-REM sleep is characterized by bursts of rapid brain activity called "sleep spindles" due to the hairpin zigzag that is displayed on the EEG. A normal night's sleep will include thousands of these, each lasting no more than a few seconds. “This is truly a gateway to other stages of sleep - the more you sleep, the more of these events you will have,” he says.
Sleep spindles start with a burst of electrical energy created by the rapid activation of structures deep in the brain. The main culprit is the thalamus, an oval-shaped region that acts as the brain's main "switching center", sending incoming sensory signals in the right direction. While we sleep, it acts as an internal earplug, keeping out external information so you don't wake up. During the sleep spindle, the burst reaches the surface of the brain and then returns, completing the cycle.
Interestingly, those with more sleep spindles have more "fluid intelligence" - the ability to solve new problems, use logic in new situations, and identify patterns - which Einstein was fluent in. "They don't seem to be associated with other types of intelligence capable of remembering facts and numbers, so they are specific to thinking ability," says Vogel. This goes well with Einstein's contempt for formal education and his advice to "never memorize anything you can look at."
Although the more sleep you get, the more sleep spindles you will have, this does not prove the benefits of sleep. This is a chicken and egg scenario: do some people have more sleep spindles because they are smart, or are they smart because they have more sleep spindles? There is no answer yet, but a recent study found that sleeping at night in women and taking short naps in men improved reasoning and problem-solving skills. Importantly, the acceleration of intelligence is associated with the presence of sleep spindles, which appeared only during nighttime sleep in women and during daytime sleep in men.
It is not yet known why sleep spindles should help at all, but Vogel believes it may have something to do with the areas that are being activated. “We found that the same areas that generate the spindles - the thalamus and cortex - support problem-solving skills and logic in new situations,” he says.
Luckily for Einstein, he allowed himself to take regular naps. According to one of the legends, to make sure that he did not oversleep, he took a spoon in his hands and put an iron tray or dish in front of him. As soon as he passed out for a second - bam! - the spoon fell on the tray and Einstein woke up from the sound of the impact.
Daily walks
The daily walk was sacred to Einstein. When he worked at Princeton University, New Jersey, he walked three kilometers back and forth. In this he followed in the footsteps of other diligent walkers, including Darwin, who took three 45-minute walks every day.
These rituals were not only important for form - there is ample evidence that walking can improve memory, creativity, and problem solving. For creative people, walking on the street is very important. But why?
It would seem, what's the point. Walking distracts the brain from more central tasks and forces you to focus more on how to move your legs and not accidentally fall. Let's add "transitional hypofrontality". This strange term means a temporary softening of activity in the central parts of the brain. In particular, the anterior lobe, which is involved in higher processes like memory, reasoning, and language.
By lowering activity, the brain adopts a completely different style of thinking, which can lead to insights that rarely come in ordinary life. There is no evidence to support the walk yet, but the explanation above seems tempting.
Love for spaghetti
What do geniuses eat? Alas, history is not known for certain what Einstein fed his unusual mind, but there are rumors on the Internet that it was spaghetti. One day he joked that he loves most of all in Italy "spaghetti and mathematician Levi-Civita", so we'll just take his word for it.
While simple carbohydrates have a bad reputation, as always, Einstein was right. It is well known that the brain is a voracious creature that consumes 20% of the body's energy, although it takes up only 2% of the mass (Einstein has even less - his brain weighed only 1230 grams, although on average it is 1400 grams). Like the rest of the body, the brain prefers simple sugars like glucose. Neurons require almost constant reinforcement and turn to other sources of energy only when absolutely necessary. And that's the problem.
Despite its love for sweets, the brain is unable to store energy, so when blood glucose levels drop, the brain weakens. “The body can use its own glycogen stores by releasing stress hormones such as cortisol, but they have side effects,” says Lee Gibson, professor of psychology and physiology at the University of Rohampton.
This can include the lightness of consciousness and the confusion we feel when we skip lunch. One study found that low-carb diets reduced reaction time and spatial memory - but only in the short term (after a few weeks, the brain adapts to extracting energy from other sources, such as protein).
Sugars can give the brain a valuable boost, but unfortunately, this does not mean that a passion for spaghetti defines geniuses in us. An excess of hydrocarbons can damage the ability to think, contrary to popular belief.
Pipe smoking
Today the risks associated with smoking are widely known, so it would be unwise to stick to this habit. But Einstein was a heavy pipe smoker, and tobacco smoke permeated all his theories. He was extremely fond of the pipe, saying that it "promotes calm and objective judgment in all human affairs." He even collected cigarette gobies on the street and shook the remaining tobacco into his pipe.
In defense of the genius, we can say that the dangers of smoking, more precisely, about its connection with lung cancer and other diseases, was not known for sure until 1962 - seven years after his death.
Today, the risks are no longer a secret - smoking stops the formation of brain cells, shrinks the cerebral cortex and leads to oxygen starvation of the brain. We can say that Einstein was smart despite this habit, not because of it.
There is another riddle. An analysis of 20,000 teenagers in the United States, whose habits and health were monitored for 15 years, showed that regardless of age and education, smarter children started smoking earlier and more often than others. Scientists still do not know why this is, despite the fact that this is not the case everywhere - in the UK, smokers had a lower IQ.
No socks
No list of Einstein's oddities would be complete without mentioning his passionate aversion to socks. “When I was young,” he wrote in a letter to his cousin and later to his wife, Elsa, “I learned that the thumb always makes a hole in the sock. So I stopped wearing socks. Later, when he could not find his sandals, he put on Elsa's shoes.
As it turned out, supporting the hipster movement did not help Einstein in any way. Unfortunately, there have been no studies directly looking at the effects of "noselessness," but a preference for casual clothing over more formal attire has been linked to poor scores on abstract thinking tests.
And it's best to end with advice from the star of the article. “It's important not to stop asking questions; curiosity has a reason for being,”he told LIFE magazine in 1955. However, you can try to stretch your toes. Who knows, maybe this secret will work.
ILYA KHEL