Learn Braille

In most developed countries, new public elevators and ATMs have Braille instructions for blind or visually impaired individuals. In today's world, it's sighted people who suffer "tactile deprivation." Use your fingers to learn the Braille numbers for different floors of your office building or for controlling the elevator doors.

When you learned to read, you learned to associate a very specific visual stimulus—a letter or number—with a sound, then with a word, and eventually with meaning. Learning to make distinctions and associations with your fingers—such as between two dots and three dots—activates a whole new set of pathways linking the cognitive regions of your cortex (those parts that know what a letter or number stands for) to the sensory regions. By the time you're able to "read" the button for your floor, using just your fingertips, you'll have built quite a bit of new circuitry in your cortex.