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       Introduction

      Your mind is extraordinary. Your mind. The mind that, right now, sees black marks on white paper and effortlessly turns them into bundles of meaning. The same mind that sees the word ‘sunset’ and fluently converts it into an inner vision of colours and shades. Without even trying.

      How extraordinary. How miraculous.

      To perform its amazing feats, your mind has an information-processing capacity greater than the combined power of all the computers, routers and Internet connections on Earth. Did you know, for example, that a tiny piece of your brain, the size of a grain of sand, contains 100,000 neurons and 1 billion synapses all communicating with each other.1 The brain is the mind’s supercomputer. It can connect 100 trillion bits of information.

      So with this amazing capacity available to us, how do we use our minds?

      The simple answer is, not as well as we might. For a start, about half the time we are awake we are thinking about something other than what is going on at the time.2 And we keep trying to multitask – ordering a pizza while walking the dog and Skyping a cousin in Australia. Recent research, however, shows multitasking significantly reduces our overall performance.3

      Then there are all the things our minds do on autopilot. Do you wake up in the morning and reach for your phone, blearily checking your emails while still lying in bed? Do you sit in traffic on your way to work scowling when someone beeps their horn, without even considering that they might be trying to tell you something useful?

      The