Quiz: Mind Space

Picture a three-dimensional object. Now hold that image in your brain and rotate it. Having trouble imagining what it might look like upside down? Your spatial thinking skills might be rusty, but don't despair: Recent research suggests that such skills—which are critical to achievement in science, technology, engineering, and math—can be improved.

Spatial skills are often ignored in school; they're applicable to many subjects, but there's no one class to teach them. "One of the reasons spatial skills tend to be so lacking is that, as a society, we don't deliberately train for them," says David Uttal, a psychologist at Northwestern University who recently published a review of more than 200 spatial-training studies. "But you can improve substantially with a little bit of effort."

Simple exercises can help, and less direct interventions work too. Young children can engage their spatial thinking by playing with blocks, Uttal says, and adults can flex their spatial mind with small tasks like packing a suitcase, rearranging furniture, playing certain video games, or turning off GPS to plot a route in advance.

"We tend to look at this as a deficit problem: Either you have it or you don't," says Uttal. "What we now know is that we can really do something about it."