The human consciousness is the awareness of oneself as a being that thinks and learns.  Consider the difference between your  consciousness and its closest relation, emotional awareness.  Since the time of Freud (who lived from 1856 to 1939), we as a society have become skilled interpreters of how dreams, fears, conflicts and emotional attachment affect our experiences and actions.  In spite of our high level of emotional awareness, few of us achieve a high level of mind consciousness.  Otherwise educated and sophisticated people have virtually no awareness of how they solve problems, discover ideas, assimilate and manage information, or adapt to change.

Is it is important to develop your mental prowess?  A human mind is an instrument of enormous power.  The similarities between the workings of your mind and the mind of a major scientist (such as Einstein) or a revolutionary thinker (such as Freud) are great, while the differences are subtle.  To make the most effective use of your mind, you need to be aware of what it does as you think and learn.  Strange as it may seem, you only have to learn to use the ability the mind that you already possess.  That is why mind consciousness is such a powerful asset.  With the right techniques, you can train your mind and improve your memory and accelerate your learning.

You can never totally be the master of your  mind any more than you could ever totally be the master of your body, but you can guide it.  Your heart keeps beating, your lungs keep breathing, your ears keep hearing, and the rest of our body keeps working, for the most part, whether you tell it to or not.  In the same way, your mind keeps assimilating information and reinterpreting your experience.  But neither are you obliged to let your mind master you.  Think in terms of the analogy with your body.  You can tell your eyes where o look and your feet where to step.  With exercise you can influence how far you can run, and with training you can even affect how rapidly your heart beats.  With memory training, if you observe your mind and understand it, it will exceed your expectations.  If you continually train your mind with the right memory techniques, it will serve you well in years to come.

With subtle change in your observation skills, you can guide your own learning in the same kind of way that a government regulates a country’s economy.  Economists offer methods for the government to avoid both an over heated inflationary economy and economic depression.  They track business cycles and prescribe remedies to contain the excesses that could derail economic growth at any point.

Your mind goes through learning cycles in the same way that the economy goes through business cycles.  If you understand the cyclical patterns of your own mind, you will be able to keep the growth of your own mind magic on trick as well. 

Can brain training help you in the real world?  Definitely!  Tennis Coach Timothy Gallwey has argued for years that you will do better at learning even a sport such as tennis if you become conscious of how your mind naturally learns.  The same principle applies to most domains of experiences.

Adapting to life in the information age will in essence be no different from adapting to any other dramatic change in living conditions.  Futurists such as Alvin Toffler and business experts such as Peter Drucker tell us that power in the information age will come increasingly from the mind.  That can mean only one thing, in the future, even more than before, you will have to rely on your own natural ability  That should not be cause for alarm.  Your natural ability is entirely adequate as long as you are skillful in putting it to good use.