Mindhacker E-Book

Ron Hale-Evans

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 696

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Compelling tips and tricks to improve your mental skills Don't you wish you were just a little smarter? Ron and Marty Hale-Evans can help with a vast array of witty, practical techniques that tune your brain to peak performance. Founded in current research, Mindhacker features 60 tips, tricks, and games to develop your mental potential. This accessible compilation helps improve memory, accelerate learning, manage time, spark creativity, hone math and logic skills, communicate better, think more clearly, and keep your mind strong and flexible.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Memory

Hack 1: Remember to Remember

Hack 2: Build a Memory Dungeon

Hack 3: Mix Up Your Facts

Hack 4: Space Your Repetitions

Hack 5: Recall Long-Ago Events

Chapter 2: Learning

Hack 6: Establish Your Canon

Hack 7: Write in Your Books

Hack 8: Read at Speed

Hack 9: Learn by Teaching

Hack 10: Play the Learning Game

Hack 11: Pretend You're a Grad Student

Hack 12: Study Kid Stuff

Chapter 3: Information Processing

Hack 13: Polyspecialize

Hack 14: Integrate Your Interests

Hack 15: Sift Your Ideas

Hack 16: Ask the Hive Mind

Hack 17: Write Magnificent Notes

Chapter 4: Time Management

Hack 18: Keep a Mental Datebook

Hack 19: Tell Time Who's Boss

Hack 20: Meet MET

Hack 21: Get Control of Yourself

Hack 22: Locate Lost Items

Hack 23: Huffman-Code Your Life

Hack 24: Knock Off Work

Chapter 5: Creativity and Productivity

Hack 25: Manifest Yourself

Hack 26: Woo the Muse of the Odd

Hack 27: Seek Bad Examples

Hack 28: Turn a Job into a Game

Hack 29: Scrumble for Glory

Hack 30: Salvage a Vintage Hack

Hack 31: Mine the Future

Hack 32: Dare to Do No Permanent Damage

Hack 33: Make Happy Mistakes

Hack 34: Don't Know What You're Doing

Hack 35: Ratchet

Chapter 6: Math and Logic

Hack 36: Roll the Mental Dice

Hack 37: Abduct Your Conclusions

Hack 38: Think Clearly about Simple Errors

Hack 39: Notate Personally

Hack 40: Notate Wisely

Hack 41: Engineer Your Results

Hack 42: Enter the Third Dimension

Hack 43: Enter the Fourth Dimension

Chapter 7: Communication

Hack 44: Spell It Out

Hack 45: Read Lips

Hack 46: Emote Precisely

Hack 47: Streamline Your Shorthand

Hack 48: Communicate Multimodally

Hack 49: Mediate Your Environment

Chapter 8: Mental Fitness

Hack 50: Acquire a Taste

Hack 51: Try Something New Daily

Hack 52: Metabehave Yourself

Hack 53: Train Your Fluid Intelligence

Hack 54: Think, Try, Learn

Hack 55: Take the One-Question IQ Test

Chapter 9: Clarity

Hack 56: Cultivate Beginner's Mind

Hack 57: Take a Semantic Pause

Hack 58: Retreat and Reboot

Hack 59: Get Used to Losing

Hack 60: Trust Your Intelligence (and Everyone Else's)

Appendix A: The Unboxed Games Manifesto

Appendix B: 3D Visualization

Introduction

Chapter 2

Learning

The “Learning” chapter bridges the “Memory” and “Information Processing” chapters, because it's related to both. Learning is the skill and activity that brings memory and information together, synthesizing them into knowledge and, if you're diligent and lucky, eventually wisdom. Our learning hacks range from understanding the learning process at its most basic (Hack 10, “Play the Learning Game”), to expanding how you use your written resources (Hack 7, “Write in Your Books”), to finding new resources you might not have thought were available (Hack 11, “Pretend You're a Grad Student”).

Whether you're officially enrolled in school or a free-range academic, this collection of techniques aims to help you learn as much as you can. Learning is growth for the mind, growth is life, and like it or not, learning never really ends. Why not go for the A?

Hack 6: Establish Your Canon

“Great books” are the books that teach you more every time you read them. “Sacred books” are the books that made you who you are. What are your personal great books and sacred books, and what can you still learn from them?

Whether they know it or not, all literate people have a canon of books that they treasure, learn from, and return to over and over. You can choose your own canon in many ways, from picking books because they're fun, to picking them because they're difficult, to picking them because they always offer something new.

Besides examining how to establish a canon of great books and why you should, this hack cites a few examples of great and enduring books and authors. Bear in mind that they're from our canons, not yours, so you might find reading them to be like wearing someone else's shoes, but you never know—we all might wear the same size, or close enough.

In Action

This section discusses a few criteria you can use to select which books to establish in your canon.

Adler's Hierarchy

Mortimer Adler was perhaps the twentieth century's greatest advocate for the concept of great books. He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago who also served on the board of editors of the Encyclopedia Britannica and founded their Great Books of the Western World program. Adler claims with Charles Van Doren in How to Read a Book that the number of truly great books, or at least the number for any given person, is less than 100. This might seem extremely low until you consider their definition of a great book. They say that great books

cannot be exhausted by even the very best reading you can manage … you discover on returning that the book seems to have grown with you. You see new things in it—whole new sets of things—that you did not see before… [The] book was so far above you to begin with that it has remained above you and probably always will remain so…

Our point … is that you should seek out the few books that can have this value for you. They are the books that will teach you the most, both about reading and about life.1

The principle of general intelligence, as described in Hack 60, “Trust Your Intelligence (and Everyone Else's),” can be summed up in the idea that most mature human brains are, functionally, about equally intelligent, although some take more time to process information than others. If this holds true, then there must be few books indeed that will remain beyond you, no matter how long and diligently you study them in your finite lifetime.

Adler and Van Doren also describe what they call good books, beneath the level of the great books. Good books stretch your mind the first time you read them, but seem to have shrunk when you return to them. Adler and Van Doren claim these make up less than 1 percent of all books published, and possibly as little as .01 percent. The other 99 percent or more are useful only for “amusement or information.” This ranking of books into the categories of great, good, and possibly amusing or informative is what we call Adler's pyramid or Adler's hierarchy (Figure 6.1