'Super memory': Why Emily Nash is sharing her brain with science

1. Start with just one point moving around in 3D and changing brightness. Make it move up/down, right/left, forward/back, and in/out (brightness).

Contemplate the points distance from you as it moves around. At median brightness, the point is just its 3D distance from you.

If its bright, it's further "in" to you, if its dark it is further "out" from you, relative to its 3D distance.

2. Once that makes sence, do it with two dots moving around, passing each other in brightness and 3D position, but never colliding unless they are on the same 3D point with the same brightness.

Now move them around separately, but imagine the line between them. If they have the same brightness, that line is the normal 3D line segment between them. But the more their brightness differs, the more the are also offset in 4D.

When they are different brightness at the same 3D location, imagine the brightness line between them getting longer and shorter as their delta brightness increases and decreases.

3. Once that makes sense, now imagine two cubes. They are the same 3D location, but with different brightnesses. When you connect each pair of corresponding corner points together, with "brightness" delta lines, they now form a hypercube..

Any point within their 3D volume AND within their brightness interval, is in their enclosed 4D space. Any point outside their 3D volume OR outside their brightness interval, is outside the hypercubes 4D interior.

That is how I see a hypercube. Just two cubes overlapped in 3D, separated by a brightness (4D) delta.

4. So now you see two of the six cube-sides of the hypercube. One side the lower brightness cube, the other the higher brightness cube. They are x,y,z cubes separated by w (brightness.

You can puzzle out the other six cube-sides. Two x,y,w cubes (separated in z), two x,z,w cubes (separated in y), and two y,z,w cubes (separated in x).

To easily identify them, think of a 3D cube inside another 3D cube. Imagine they are really at the same 3D location, but the inside one looks smaller and inside because its further away from you in brightness.

(This has the same meaning as before, but you are looking at them at a 90 degree different angle now so you can "see" some the brightness difference as position difference. Just like looking at a cube end-on, you see a large square containing another square, but the "inside" square is just the same-sized opposite square farther away.)

That can make it easier to spot all eight cubes. Starting with the inside, outside pair, then each pair of cubes in the six other cube-sides.

Boom! (If that works, ;)

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I have barely played with 5D, but 4D for simple things can get easy quickly. I should create a tool or game for learning this stuff.

"You are in a 3D maze of twisty little passageways, walls and doors appear and disappear as your lantern flickers ..."

"> Pick up the Third Eye Tiara. Put it on"

"Suddenly, your vision expands in a direction you somehow never noticed before. Everything looks normal but different. How have you been overlooking so much around you?"

You are in a 4D maze of twisty little passageways, ..."