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Updated: October 21, 2026
Skip the Brain App. These Are the Mind Exercises Einstein, Feynman, Darwin and Leonardo Really Did, and What the Evidence Says.
The famous scientists used plain notebook habits, not puzzles. Einstein put an imaginary person inside a problem and asked what they would feel. Feynman kept a notebook of things he didn’t know. Darwin wrote down every fact against his theory at once, because those facts slipped from memory first. Leonardo kept a running list of things to describe. Each takes 10 to 15 minutes. Most have never been tested on ordinary people, so treat them as experiments and keep a one-line log.
Why brain apps leave you where you started
They make you better at the app. A 2016 review led by psychologist Daniel Simons looked at the evidence the companies themselves cited. People clearly improved on the trained tasks. For everyday thinking, the evidence was thin.
A 2016 review of 87 working memory training publications found far transfer to measures like intelligence was essentially zero in studies with active control groups (Melby-Lervåg, Redick and Hulme, 2016).
That does not mean your mind cannot change. It means you get better at what you actually practice. If you want to think more like a scientist, the useful move is to practice what scientists did on real problems.
Why “think like a genius” lists don’t help either
Many of them are built on quotes nobody can trace. A real story about a real person gets stretched until it says something that person never did. You end up copying a legend, and a legend has no steps.
So ask two questions of any method. Did they actually do it, according to their letters, notebooks or a careful biography? And does it work for the rest of us? The book this page draws on labels every drill with one of four badges based on those answers.
SOLID. Tested on people more than once, and the results held up. Often a review pools many studies.
PROMISING. Real human evidence, but not much of it: one good study or a few small ones.
STORY ONLY. A famous thinker really did it, or it is built from a documented idea, but nobody has tested it on groups of ordinary people.
MYTH. A popular claim that turns out to be false or traces back to no source.
One notebook is all you need. On page one, write a problem you are stuck on, a subject you want to understand better, and one habit of mind you would like to change. The drills below use those three.
Five drills from what they actually did
Each block gives the documented record first, then the evidence badge and the reason for it, then steps you can do today. Do every step the first time, and write the log line when you finish.
Drill 1 · Einstein · 10 minutes
The Person Inside the Box
What they actually did
In 1907, still a clerk at the patent office in Bern, Einstein realized that someone dropping off a roof would feel weightless on the way down. He followed that thought until gravity and acceleration looked like two faces of one thing. In an unpublished 1920 manuscript he called it “the happiest thought of my life.” The famous elevator is a later teaching version.
What the evidence says: STORY ONLY
The move is well documented in Einstein’s own writing. Nobody has tested it as an exercise on groups of ordinary people, so your notebook is the experiment.
Try it
Pick a situation you usually see from outside: your team, a family argument, your budget.
Picture a tiny observer shut inside it, blind to the outside, noticing only what happens to them.
Ask what that person can actually detect. Make one column for what they can sense and one for what stays hidden from them.
Look at the hidden column. Which real person sits in that blind spot today? Maybe a new hire, a child or a customer.
Log it:Box I sat in / One thing they can’t detect that I can.
Preparing for his oral exam at Princeton around 1940, Feynman opened a fresh notebook titled “Notebook Of Things I Don’t Know About,” according to his biographer James Gleick. Students usually review what they know. He went looking for the holes. When his Caltech blackboard was photographed in 1988, it still carried a list headed “TO LEARN.”
What the evidence says: STORY ONLY
The habit is documented by Gleick and by the Caltech Archives photo. The habit itself has never been studied. Its close cousin, explaining a topic from scratch to find your gaps, has strong evidence behind it (more below).
Try it
Open the back cover of your notebook and title the first page “Things I Don’t Know About.”
Write five things you don’t know but feel you should, such as how interest rates actually work.
Next to each, write the smallest step that would teach you something: one article, one question to one person, one experiment.
Once a week, take one step, then cross the item off or rewrite it as a sharper question.
Log it:Item I worked on this week / What I learned / New question it raised.
Drill 3 · Darwin · 5 minutes to set up, 30 seconds each time
The Golden Rule Page
What they actually did
In a short life sketch written in 1876 and published in 1887, Darwin described a “golden rule.” Whenever a fact or thought went against his general results, he wrote it down “without fail and at once.” His reason: facts against him “were far more apt to escape from the memory than favourable ones.”
What the evidence says: STORY ONLY
A documented practice, with Darwin’s own reason attached. No study has tried it on ordinary people. It is one of the easiest drills in the book, and the Against column often teaches you something within a week.
Try it
Write one belief you rely on at the top of a page, such as “my Saturday specials bring in new customers.”
Draw a line down the middle. Label the columns For and Against.
For two weeks, write every fact that cuts against the belief in the Against column right away. No “but.”
You may add to For only on a day you also added to Against. At the end, count both columns.
Log it:Belief / For count / Against count / Most surprising Against entry.
Drill 4 · Leonardo da Vinci · 10 minutes to start, 2 minutes a day
The Woodpecker List
What they actually did
One entry in Leonardo’s notebooks reads, in full: “Describe the tongue of the woodpecker and the jaw of the crocodile.” It sits alone as section 819 of J. P. Richter’s 1880s English edition. The historian Toby Lester, as reported by NPR in 2011, says Leonardo carried a small notebook on his belt and wrote down whatever caught his eye.
What the evidence says: STORY ONLY
The notes and the belt notebook are well attested. Whether a curiosity list makes anyone more creative has never been measured, so note which entries actually led somewhere.
Try it
Start a list called “Describe” where your hand already goes: your main notes app or a card in your wallet.
Each day, add one thing you noticed but can’t explain, phrased as a command: “Describe why my dog circles before lying down.”
At least one item a week must have nothing to do with your job.
Once a week, pick one item and describe it: look closely, sketch it, look it up, or ask someone who knows.
Log it:This week’s item / What I found / New question.
Drill 5 · Leonardo da Vinci · 15 minutes
Draw to See
What they actually did
Leonardo did not only write about what he saw; he drew it over and over. He compared moving water to curling hair, and later drew small swirls of blood behind the heart’s aortic valve. He wrote that it is useful to “constantly observe, note, and consider.”
What the evidence says: STORY ONLY
The book built this drill from his documented habit of drawing from close observation. Nobody has tested the memory-versus-looking comparison as an exercise.
Try it
Pick an object you see every day: a fork, your shoe, a leaf, your own hand.
Draw it from memory in two minutes, without looking.
Put it in front of you and draw it again for ten minutes, looking more than you draw.
Put the two drawings side by side and circle three things the memory version missed or got wrong.
Log it:Object / Three things I missed from memory.
All five say STORY ONLY. Is that a bad sign?
No. It is an honest one. Most of what great thinkers did has never been put through a study, and well over half the drills in the book carry this badge. It means the answer to “does this work?” is “try it and see.”
The nearest tested habit sits right next to Feynman’s notebook. In a 2002 Yale study, Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil asked people to explain how things like zippers and flush toilets work. Their ratings of their own understanding dropped after they tried. The researchers called it the illusion of explanatory depth.
A 2013 review led by John Dunlosky rated self-explanation moderately useful for learning, above rereading and highlighting. So when the Notebook of Things I Don’t Know feels slow, feed it by explaining a topic in plain words and writing down each spot where you stall.
One myth, corrected: Darwin’s thirty-minute rule
Darwin never set a time limit. Some retellings say he wrote down contrary facts within thirty minutes, which makes a tidy productivity tip. His autobiography says something plainer: he wrote them down “without fail and at once.”
The difference matters because it shows how these stories grow. A real habit picks up a precise-looking number, the number gets repeated, and soon the number is the lesson. The part that held up is better than the myth. He caught inconvenient facts before memory filed them away. He also put the strongest objections inside On the Origin of Species, in a chapter titled “Difficulties on Theory.”
How to run the drills for two weeks
Do one drill a day, fully, on your real problems. A drill on a made-up puzzle is a warm-up. A drill on your own budget or your own stuck project is the experiment.
Set up the Golden Rule Page and the Woodpecker List on day one; both run in the background.
Rotate the Person Inside the Box, Draw to See and one weekly step from the Things I Don’t Know list.
Every seventh day, learn nothing new. Read your log lines and note which drill felt natural and which you wanted to skip.
One rule covers all of it: if a drill makes the world feel unreal, or leaves you feeling worse instead of curious, stop. That is data, not failure. Write down what happened and switch drills.
The Genius Lab by Ada Fenwick has 50 drills from Einstein, Feynman, Darwin, Leonardo, Tesla and others, each with a badge, and sixty popular claims checked and corrected. It runs 233 pages and ends with a 30-day plan.
This page gives you five drills and one myth. The book adds the drills with stronger evidence, such as mental rehearsal, the memory palace and the loaded break, plus an honest table for brain supplements.
How to Use the Lab: the four badges, the notebook setup and the one safety rule
Einstein: Chasing the Light: four thought-experiment drills and a myth check on the light beam and the elevator
Feynman: Play Is a Research Method: the wobbling plate, the explain-it test and the notebook of gaps
Darwin: Write Down What Hurts Your Theory: the Golden Rule Page, a difficulties chapter for your own idea, and a flipped search
Da Vinci: The To-Do List of a Curious Man: the Woodpecker List, Draw to See, and a pattern drill from water and hair
You are stuck on a problem and want a drill to try tonight
You are tired of genius articles built on made-up quotes
You want brain exercises checked against evidence, without supplement hype
Skip it if
You want extreme mind hacks; a late chapter explains which were left out and why
You want medical or psychiatric guidance
You want the famous legends kept intact
Fair doubts
“If most drills are untested, why bother?”
Because the cost is a notebook and fifteen minutes, and the log tells you within two weeks whether a drill does anything for you. The book also marks which drills have real studies behind them, so you can lean on those first.
“I’m not a scientist. Are these too technical?”
None of the five needs math. They run on a bakery’s weekend specials, a fork on the table or a question about your dog. The physics stays in the record; the drill uses your life.
Questions people ask about thinking like a scientist
Do brain training games actually work?
Mostly for the games themselves. A 2016 review led by Daniel Simons found extensive evidence that people improve on the trained tasks, less for closely related tasks, and little for everyday thinking. If you want to focus better on long reports, practice focusing on long reports with fewer interruptions.
How did Einstein think?
By his own account, mostly in images and sensations, some of them “muscular,” rather than words. Answering a survey by the mathematician Jacques Hadamard, published in 1945, he named the shuffling of those pieces “combinatory play.” Then he translated the result into words and math with strict logic. He also liked to place an imaginary person inside a problem and ask what they would feel.
What is Feynman’s most famous quote about learning?
“What I cannot create, I do not understand.” It was chalked on his Caltech blackboard, which someone photographed around the time he died in 1988. The line was a note to himself at work, not his last words, and the same board carried a “TO LEARN” list.
Did Leonardo da Vinci say “saper vedere”?
There is no trace of it in his notebooks. “Saper vedere,” knowing how to see, is the title of a 1933 Italian book by Matteo Marangoni. It is a fair modern summary of his approach, but not a quote. What his notes do show is a habit of writing down questions and then going to look.
Can you train your mind to think like a scientist?
You can copy specific habits: recording evidence against yourself, listing what you don’t know, looking closely before you assume. Nobody can promise these make you smarter, and most have never been tested on groups. Try each one for two weeks with a one-line log, and judge by what your notes show.
