Mind Performance Hacks: Tips & Tools for Overclocking Your Brain
Ron Hale-Evans
Language: English
Pages: 332
ISBN: 0596101538
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
You're smart. This book can make you smarter.Mind Performance Hacks provides real-life tips and tools for overclocking your brain and becoming a better thinker. In the increasingly frenetic pace of today's information economy, managing your life requires hacking your brain. With this book, you'll cut through the clutter and tune up your brain intentionally, safely, and productively.Grounded in current research and theory, but offering practical solutions you can apply immediately, Mind Performance Hacks is filled with life hacks that teach you to:
- Use mnemonic tricks to remember numbers, names, dates, and other flotsam you need to recall
- Put down your calculator and perform complex math in your head, with your fingers, or on the back of a napkin
- Spark your creativity with innovative brainstorming methods
- Use effective systems to capture new ideas before they get away
- Communicate in creative new ways-even using artificial languages
- Make better decisions by foreseeing problems and finding surprising solutions
- Improve your mental fitness with cool tricks and games
While the hugely successful Mind Hacks showed you how your brain works, Mind Performance Hacks shows you how to make it work better.
use. Again, you should make your own list of characters for your own version of the Dominic System, and then you can tune your list to suit yourself. How It Works The Dominic System is a combination of the innovative (easier mnemonic alphabet, using people rather than inanimate objects because people are easier to remember, etc.) and the tried-and-true (memory palaces, which go back to classical times). It has a couple of advantages over the Major System and its derivatives: The 1 = A,
these names magnet words, because they represent what pulls ideas together. With time, you'll need more than just distance to show structure. Introduce lines. Connect related major ideas by line to see structure. Vary the length, darkness, path, and arrangement of the lines. I like to use color. I recommend four-color pens, if you are doing this with paper. (Bic makes some that are commonly available.) You can establish any sort of coloring convention; I tend to use blue for structural elements
widespread since 1972 and you might find them to be a much more efficient tool. To that end, this hack includes a Perl script called pyro, which is a somewhat streamlined successor to a HyperCard stack for the Macintosh called Inspirograph that I released in the 1980s.3 Inspirograph could generate anything from New England place names (like Lake Nattagoonsucketpocket) to random tabloid headlines. Because the examples I included were humorous, many people who downloaded the stack thought it was
blank, anticipating John Cage's 4'33" by 50 years (ironically so, since the Cage estate sued composer Mike Batt for recording silence on an album, and then settled for a six-figure sum).3 In Real Life Being a great fan of the Oulipo, I have used their techniques many times; for example, in the 1990s, there was an explosion of interest in the artistic form of the Glass Bead Game as imagined by novelist Hermann Hesse. You might like to explore thinking analogically [Hack #25]; my own
word by word, but rather phrase by phrase. Phrases are groups of words that can be bundled together, and they're related by the rules of grammar. A noun phrase will include nouns and adjectives, and a verb phrase will include a verb and a noun, for example. These phrases are the building blocks of language, and we naturally chunk sentences into phrase blocks just as we chunk visual images into objects. This means that we don't treat every word individually as we hear it; we treat words as parts