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Mindhacker: 60 Tips, Tricks, and Games to Take Your Mind to the Next Level
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.
Hacks include: Remember to Remember Build a Memory Dungeon Mix Up Your Facts Space Your Repetitions Recall Long-Ago Events Establish Your Canon Write in Your Books Read at Speed Learn by Teaching Play the Learning Game Pretend You're a Grad StudentStudy Kid Stuff Polyspecialize Integrate Your Interests Sift Your Ideas Ask the Hive Mind Write Magnificent Notes Keep a Mental Datebook Tell Time Who's Boss Meet MET Get Control of Yourself Locate Lost Items Huffman-Code Your Life Knock Off Work Manifest Yourself Woo the Muse of the Odd Seek Bad Examples Turn a Job into a Game Scrumble for Glory Salvage a Vintage Hack Mine the Future Dare to Do No Permanent Damage Make Happy Mistakes Don't Know What You're Doing Ratchet Roll the Mental Dice Abduct Your Conclusions Think Clearly about Simple Errors Notate Personally Notate Wisely Engineer Your Results Enter the Third Dimension Enter the Fourth Dimension Spell It Out Read Lips Emote Precisely Streamline Your Shorthand Communicate Multimodally Mediate Your Environment Acquire a Taste Try Something New Daily Metabehave Yourself Train Your Fluid Intelligence Think, Try, Learn Take the One-Question IQ Test Cultivate Beginner's Mind Take a Semantic Pause Retreat and Reboot Get Used to Losing Trust Your Intelligence (and Everyone Else's)
Visit the Mentat Wiki at www.ludism.org/mentat/Mindhacker for more information on tuning your brain to peak performance.
416 pages, Paperback
First published July 26, 2011
77 people are currently reading
1031 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
April 14, 2016
A really good one-off guide to mindworks. The personal favs here would be: the 'Woo the Muse of the Odd' hack (welcoming weirdness), 'Knock Off Work' (for structured procrastination)
Q:
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 (good)
Chapter 2: Learning
Hack 6: Establish Your Canon
Hack 7: Write in Your Books
Hack 8: Read at Speed (superb!)
Hack 9: Learn by Teaching (good)
Hack 10: Play the Learning Game
Hack 11: Pretend You're a Grad Student (superb!)
Hack 12: Study Kid Stuff (good for languages and totally new stuff)
Chapter 3: Information Processing
Hack 13: Polyspecialize (superb!)
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
20: Meet MET
21: Get Control of Yourself
Hack 22: Locate Lost Items
Hack 23: Huffman-Code Your Life
Hack 24: Knock Off Work (superb!)
Chapter 5: Creativity and Productivity
Hack 25: Manifest Yourself
Hack 26: Woo the Muse of the Odd (superb!)
Hack 27: Seek Bad Examples (superb!)
Hack 28: Turn a Job into a Game
Hack 29: Scrumble for Glory
Hack 30: Salvage a Vintage
Hack 31: Mine the Future (superb!)
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 (wacky much)
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)
Q:
By focusing on the weird in your work and in yourself, you can break new ground, and have a lot more fun doing it.
Lafcadio Hearn, the nineteenth-century fantasy writer, vowed to draw attention to his writing by emphasizing the exotic and outré in his work. He must have done something right, because Amazon's page for him currently shows 54 books available for sale by or about him. We can attest he could certainly write a good Japanese ghost story: exotic, yet with enough historical context for a twenty-first-century Westerner to grasp. His fantasy most reminds us of his approximate contemporary Lord Dunsany, and that's a high compliment. Hearn wrote in an 1883 letter:
By purchasing queer books and following odd subjects I have been able to give myself the air of knowing more than I do; but none of my work would bear the scrutiny of a specialist; I would like, however, to show you my library. It cost me only about $2,000; but every volume is queer. Knowing that I have nothing resembling genius, and that any ordinary talent must be supplemented with some sort of curious study in order to place it above the mediocre line, I am striving to woo the Muse of the Odd, and hope to succeed in thus attracting some little attention.1
Perhaps by following strange avenues, you too can increase the appeal of your work. That is a good reason, but we will examine others: Weirdness helps you learn, helps you focus, sets the rules for your work and the work of others, and refines your unique aesthetic.
Q:
Accepting Your Weirdness Enables You to Focus
Most of this hack has been about the benefits of doing weird things and freeing yourself to make things that are weird, but now we're going to shade into the benefits of simply being weird. If one can avoid the opposite extreme of becoming a self-obsessed dilettante, letting one's freak flag fly concentrates the mind wonderfully.Mindhacker contributor John Braley used to play in chess tournaments at a high level, ranked as an International Master. He sometimes found that in high-pressure tournaments—and almost only then—he would feel compelled to engage in OCD-style behavior, such as touching every other linoleum tile in a long hallway with his foot.
When John allowed himself to succumb to what he thought of as weird, superstitious behavior, it became a kind of outlet for his stress; not worrying about it let him focus on his game and play better, in his own estimation. Perhaps this is akin to the technique of “ubiquitous capture,” which means getting everything obsessing you down, onto paper or into computer memory, out into the world, anywhere but in your head, so you can retain “mind like water.”
It's hard to be weird, but it's even harder not to be, if you are.
Q:
Here are a few pioneers to whet your weird and inspire you to make your own. We'll let Bruce Sterling have the last word:
Follow your weird, ladies and gentlemen. Forget trying to pass for normal. Follow your geekdom. Embrace your nerditude … don't read Shakespeare. Read Webster's revenge plays. Don't read Homer and Aristotle. Read Herodotus where he's off talking about Egyptian women having public sex with goats. If you want to read about myth don't read Joseph Campbell, read about convulsive religion, read about voodoo and the Millerites and the Munster Anabaptists. There are hundreds of years of extremities, there are vast legacies of mutants. There have always been geeks. There will always be geeks. Become the apotheosis of geek. Learn who your spiritual ancestors were. You didn't come here from nowhere. There are reasons why you're here. Learn those reasons. Learn about the stuff that was buried because it was too experimental or embarrassing or inexplicable or uncomfortable or dangerous.
Q:
Seek Bad Examples
Let others make your mistakes for you by experiencing their astoundingly bad works, and take courage from the fact that few works are so bad that they have no merit at all.
We presume you know how to find good examples of art, culture, and technology, and that you're taking the time to experience and analyze them. It's easy to find inspiration and guidance from the best, and it's crucial to see how things are done well when you're learning how to do them. However, the power of this hack comes from being able to compare the good with the bad, and to broaden your thinking beyond the conventional by seeing the broad spectrum of human creativity, instead of only a few shades.
War isn't peace, freedom isn't slavery, and ignorance isn't strength, but sometimes things are so bad they're good. You can learn from others' mistakes in a variety of ways, and you can find the grain of goodness in the worst work. Go forth into the sewers of human culture, and be not afraid.
Q:
The ideas described in this section come from science fiction, but they can all be implemented to some degree today in the real world. In fact, they are some of Ron's favorite science fictional ideas, and every one of them has had a profound effect on his life.
The Mentat
Frank Herbert's concept of the mentat, from his Dune novels,7 has influenced Ron a great deal, but because we've written about it elsewhere, this section just highlights some implications it has had for him. This book wouldn't exist without the mentat concept, for one.
The mentat deliberately, systematically, and comprehensively hones skills like those of an autistic savant, to become a kind of human computer (in the Dune universe, electronic computers are under religious interdiction). On the hunch that a lot of people are interested in feats of memory, mental calculation, and so on, Ron created the Mentat Wiki (www.ludism.org/mentat). This led to a book deal, and the successful publication of our first book made it easier to find an agent and sign a contract to publish Mindhacker. Thus, you're holding one of the practical upshots of the mentat idea: a book that promotes the ethic of becoming a better thinker. We don't know yet what the readership of Mindhacker will be, but our first book has sold tens of thousands of copies. If you count pirated copies, borrowing from friends and libraries, and so on, possibly hundreds of thousands of people have been influenced to become better thinkers because of Herbert's original idea of the mentat and our attempt to embody it.
The Asarya
Just as Frank Herbert's concept of the mentat inspired the Mentat Wiki and our first book, so David Zindell's concept of the asarya from his Requiem for Homo Sapiens series,8 which has a lot in common with Herbert's Dune series, inspired Mindhacker. Danlo wi Soli Ringess, the slightly transhuman protagonist of the Requiem, aspires to become an asarya, which Zindell defines as a “completely evolved man (or woman) who could look upon the universe just as it is and affirm every aspect of creation no matter how flawed or terrible.”
Similarly, a lot of the hacks in this book are “asarya hacks,” meant to help you say yes to your world, and to learn the basic human skill of wanting what you have. Among the asarya hacks are Hack 27, “Seek Bad Examples;” Hack 28, “Turn a Job Into a Game;” Hack 50, “Acquire a Taste;” Hack 59, “Get Used to Losing;” and Hack 60, “Trust Your Intelligence (and Everyone Else's).”
Q:
What's important in this hack is to both respect rational fear and disrespect irrational fear, using your knowledge to assess risk clearly and override emotional reactions. It's not about dispelling fear completely and being foolhardy; fear has an important evolutionary purpose when it helps you to identify danger. However, fear can be attached to many things that don't warrant true caution, through over-imagination, bad experiences, and so on. The skill of respecting true danger and determining how to avoid it frees you to confront and dispel the fears that keep you from risk-taking that can really pay off.
The bugaboo that seems to grab most people is the fear of embarrassment. Many people miss out on a plethora of interesting and unfamiliar experiences simply because they're afraid to look foolish. Yet everyone looks foolish from time to time, so anyone watching can probably sympathize. We fear that onlookers will make fun of us, although this rarely actually happens after middle school. In fact, your audience is more likely to be thrilled if you succeed, be touched if you fail, and respect you for having tried something difficult. It's a no-lose situation. Once you wrap your mind around this, it becomes easier and easier to dismiss that fear.
Q:
People with Asperger's syndrome can also use lip reading to great effect; one symptom is difficulty separating conversation from background noise, and even normal levels of background noise make it extremely difficult for them to parse what someone is saying. In addition, people with Asperger's syndrome often have trouble interpreting facial expressions and other social cues, so learning to focus on noticing and using all the available information in a conversation together can greatly increase their ability to understand it.
Q:
Mediate Your EnvironmentIt's fun and productive to willingly suspend judgment on what people are literally saying long enough to find out what they mean. Build a mediator module, in your brain and in your browser, and watch some of the gibberish around you resolve into perfect sense.
...
The principle that states we should give the benefit of the doubt to people we're talking with is called Miller's Law (www.adrr.com/aa/new.htm). It was stated by psychologist George Miller and popularized by linguist and science fiction author Suzette Hadin Elgin. It is simply this:
To understand what another person is saying, you must assume that it is true and try to imagine what it could be true of.
Elgin expands:
In order for other people to understand what you are saying, you must make it possible for them to apply Miller's Law to your speech.
Also relevant is a proverb called the Robustness Principle (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc761), which was originally meant for Internet software but is just as relevant to human communication protocols. Formulated in 1980 by computer scientist Jon Postel, it advises the following:
Be conservative in what you do; be liberal in what you accept from others.
Miller's Law tells us to focus on the intent of what someone is saying, and ignore its surface expression, while Elgin's Corollary encourages us to be as clear as we can ourselves. The Robustness Principle elegantly sums them up. You can apply these ideas directly to your own thinking and interpretation (see the “In Real Life” section), and you can use software to apply them to translating online content so that you can absorb it more easily.
Q:
If you would like to create a portable mental toolbox of these behavioral techniques, Ron suggests making a mnemonic acrostic of them. THOTCRIME works well, as it ironically alludes to the Orwellian quality of some early behaviorist writing that denied the existence of consciousness or thought.
>` Tracking
>` Homework First
>` Organizing Your Environment
>` Truncation
>` Commitments
>` Reminders
>` Inspiration
>` Momentum
>` Extremes
Q:
Here are some concrete games and techniques for stimulating the beginner's mind viewpoint:
- Be aware of the language you use. Ask more questions, make fewer statements.
- Pretend you're an alien or an archaeologist: How would you report on your situation? Describe it in the present tense and in the moment. Teach somebody else about it (Hack 9, “Learn By Teaching”).
- Note specifically what you know about your situation or object, then ask yourself “what else” repeatedly until you can't add anything to your list. This seems to be dwelling on what you already know, but when you exhaust those things and push yourself to keep looking, you find new things you hadn't noticed before.
- Try to solve a problem incorrectly, or come up with the worst possible solution (Hack 27, “Seek Bad Examples”).
- If you're trying to get to know an object, try to approach it in a novel way. Try drawing it. Explore it as a small child would: Put your face on it, or your foot. See if it makes a noise or has a smell. Call it by a different name. Make it into a character and have a conversation with it.
- Find a real child or someone else who doesn't know anything about your problem, and ask them what they would do. Be serious and listen carefully and respectfully to the answer you get.
Q:
Douglas Adams said, “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” Perhaps as a consequence, he was locked in a hotel room by his publishers to finish writing novels on no less than two occasions.
Q:
In almost every situation—even situations overtly defined as competitions—there are benefits you can gain if you don't win. You can recognize them, and change your actions so that you increase them, by determining what's really important and what's broadly available to gain.
One way to do this is to perform a cost-benefit analysis. Every victory has its cost. Is winning at whatever you're doing going to cost you more than you're likely to get out of it? If getting that startup job you want means behaving unethically toward the other candidates, and you learn the “prize” consists of vicious superiors, 60-hour workweeks, and hypertension, maybe you should take a fall in this match, champ.
Q:
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 (good)
Chapter 2: Learning
Hack 6: Establish Your Canon
Hack 7: Write in Your Books
Hack 8: Read at Speed (superb!)
Hack 9: Learn by Teaching (good)
Hack 10: Play the Learning Game
Hack 11: Pretend You're a Grad Student (superb!)
Hack 12: Study Kid Stuff (good for languages and totally new stuff)
Chapter 3: Information Processing
Hack 13: Polyspecialize (superb!)
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
20: Meet MET
21: Get Control of Yourself
Hack 22: Locate Lost Items
Hack 23: Huffman-Code Your Life
Hack 24: Knock Off Work (superb!)
Chapter 5: Creativity and Productivity
Hack 25: Manifest Yourself
Hack 26: Woo the Muse of the Odd (superb!)
Hack 27: Seek Bad Examples (superb!)
Hack 28: Turn a Job into a Game
Hack 29: Scrumble for Glory
Hack 30: Salvage a Vintage
Hack 31: Mine the Future (superb!)
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 (wacky much)
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)
Q:
By focusing on the weird in your work and in yourself, you can break new ground, and have a lot more fun doing it.
Lafcadio Hearn, the nineteenth-century fantasy writer, vowed to draw attention to his writing by emphasizing the exotic and outré in his work. He must have done something right, because Amazon's page for him currently shows 54 books available for sale by or about him. We can attest he could certainly write a good Japanese ghost story: exotic, yet with enough historical context for a twenty-first-century Westerner to grasp. His fantasy most reminds us of his approximate contemporary Lord Dunsany, and that's a high compliment. Hearn wrote in an 1883 letter:
By purchasing queer books and following odd subjects I have been able to give myself the air of knowing more than I do; but none of my work would bear the scrutiny of a specialist; I would like, however, to show you my library. It cost me only about $2,000; but every volume is queer. Knowing that I have nothing resembling genius, and that any ordinary talent must be supplemented with some sort of curious study in order to place it above the mediocre line, I am striving to woo the Muse of the Odd, and hope to succeed in thus attracting some little attention.1
Perhaps by following strange avenues, you too can increase the appeal of your work. That is a good reason, but we will examine others: Weirdness helps you learn, helps you focus, sets the rules for your work and the work of others, and refines your unique aesthetic.
Q:
Accepting Your Weirdness Enables You to Focus
Most of this hack has been about the benefits of doing weird things and freeing yourself to make things that are weird, but now we're going to shade into the benefits of simply being weird. If one can avoid the opposite extreme of becoming a self-obsessed dilettante, letting one's freak flag fly concentrates the mind wonderfully.Mindhacker contributor John Braley used to play in chess tournaments at a high level, ranked as an International Master. He sometimes found that in high-pressure tournaments—and almost only then—he would feel compelled to engage in OCD-style behavior, such as touching every other linoleum tile in a long hallway with his foot.
When John allowed himself to succumb to what he thought of as weird, superstitious behavior, it became a kind of outlet for his stress; not worrying about it let him focus on his game and play better, in his own estimation. Perhaps this is akin to the technique of “ubiquitous capture,” which means getting everything obsessing you down, onto paper or into computer memory, out into the world, anywhere but in your head, so you can retain “mind like water.”
It's hard to be weird, but it's even harder not to be, if you are.
Q:
Here are a few pioneers to whet your weird and inspire you to make your own. We'll let Bruce Sterling have the last word:
Follow your weird, ladies and gentlemen. Forget trying to pass for normal. Follow your geekdom. Embrace your nerditude … don't read Shakespeare. Read Webster's revenge plays. Don't read Homer and Aristotle. Read Herodotus where he's off talking about Egyptian women having public sex with goats. If you want to read about myth don't read Joseph Campbell, read about convulsive religion, read about voodoo and the Millerites and the Munster Anabaptists. There are hundreds of years of extremities, there are vast legacies of mutants. There have always been geeks. There will always be geeks. Become the apotheosis of geek. Learn who your spiritual ancestors were. You didn't come here from nowhere. There are reasons why you're here. Learn those reasons. Learn about the stuff that was buried because it was too experimental or embarrassing or inexplicable or uncomfortable or dangerous.
Q:
Seek Bad Examples
Let others make your mistakes for you by experiencing their astoundingly bad works, and take courage from the fact that few works are so bad that they have no merit at all.
We presume you know how to find good examples of art, culture, and technology, and that you're taking the time to experience and analyze them. It's easy to find inspiration and guidance from the best, and it's crucial to see how things are done well when you're learning how to do them. However, the power of this hack comes from being able to compare the good with the bad, and to broaden your thinking beyond the conventional by seeing the broad spectrum of human creativity, instead of only a few shades.
War isn't peace, freedom isn't slavery, and ignorance isn't strength, but sometimes things are so bad they're good. You can learn from others' mistakes in a variety of ways, and you can find the grain of goodness in the worst work. Go forth into the sewers of human culture, and be not afraid.
Q:
The ideas described in this section come from science fiction, but they can all be implemented to some degree today in the real world. In fact, they are some of Ron's favorite science fictional ideas, and every one of them has had a profound effect on his life.
The Mentat
Frank Herbert's concept of the mentat, from his Dune novels,7 has influenced Ron a great deal, but because we've written about it elsewhere, this section just highlights some implications it has had for him. This book wouldn't exist without the mentat concept, for one.
The mentat deliberately, systematically, and comprehensively hones skills like those of an autistic savant, to become a kind of human computer (in the Dune universe, electronic computers are under religious interdiction). On the hunch that a lot of people are interested in feats of memory, mental calculation, and so on, Ron created the Mentat Wiki (www.ludism.org/mentat). This led to a book deal, and the successful publication of our first book made it easier to find an agent and sign a contract to publish Mindhacker. Thus, you're holding one of the practical upshots of the mentat idea: a book that promotes the ethic of becoming a better thinker. We don't know yet what the readership of Mindhacker will be, but our first book has sold tens of thousands of copies. If you count pirated copies, borrowing from friends and libraries, and so on, possibly hundreds of thousands of people have been influenced to become better thinkers because of Herbert's original idea of the mentat and our attempt to embody it.
The Asarya
Just as Frank Herbert's concept of the mentat inspired the Mentat Wiki and our first book, so David Zindell's concept of the asarya from his Requiem for Homo Sapiens series,8 which has a lot in common with Herbert's Dune series, inspired Mindhacker. Danlo wi Soli Ringess, the slightly transhuman protagonist of the Requiem, aspires to become an asarya, which Zindell defines as a “completely evolved man (or woman) who could look upon the universe just as it is and affirm every aspect of creation no matter how flawed or terrible.”
Similarly, a lot of the hacks in this book are “asarya hacks,” meant to help you say yes to your world, and to learn the basic human skill of wanting what you have. Among the asarya hacks are Hack 27, “Seek Bad Examples;” Hack 28, “Turn a Job Into a Game;” Hack 50, “Acquire a Taste;” Hack 59, “Get Used to Losing;” and Hack 60, “Trust Your Intelligence (and Everyone Else's).”
Q:
What's important in this hack is to both respect rational fear and disrespect irrational fear, using your knowledge to assess risk clearly and override emotional reactions. It's not about dispelling fear completely and being foolhardy; fear has an important evolutionary purpose when it helps you to identify danger. However, fear can be attached to many things that don't warrant true caution, through over-imagination, bad experiences, and so on. The skill of respecting true danger and determining how to avoid it frees you to confront and dispel the fears that keep you from risk-taking that can really pay off.
The bugaboo that seems to grab most people is the fear of embarrassment. Many people miss out on a plethora of interesting and unfamiliar experiences simply because they're afraid to look foolish. Yet everyone looks foolish from time to time, so anyone watching can probably sympathize. We fear that onlookers will make fun of us, although this rarely actually happens after middle school. In fact, your audience is more likely to be thrilled if you succeed, be touched if you fail, and respect you for having tried something difficult. It's a no-lose situation. Once you wrap your mind around this, it becomes easier and easier to dismiss that fear.
Q:
People with Asperger's syndrome can also use lip reading to great effect; one symptom is difficulty separating conversation from background noise, and even normal levels of background noise make it extremely difficult for them to parse what someone is saying. In addition, people with Asperger's syndrome often have trouble interpreting facial expressions and other social cues, so learning to focus on noticing and using all the available information in a conversation together can greatly increase their ability to understand it.
Q:
Mediate Your EnvironmentIt's fun and productive to willingly suspend judgment on what people are literally saying long enough to find out what they mean. Build a mediator module, in your brain and in your browser, and watch some of the gibberish around you resolve into perfect sense.
...
The principle that states we should give the benefit of the doubt to people we're talking with is called Miller's Law (www.adrr.com/aa/new.htm). It was stated by psychologist George Miller and popularized by linguist and science fiction author Suzette Hadin Elgin. It is simply this:
To understand what another person is saying, you must assume that it is true and try to imagine what it could be true of.
Elgin expands:
In order for other people to understand what you are saying, you must make it possible for them to apply Miller's Law to your speech.
Also relevant is a proverb called the Robustness Principle (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc761), which was originally meant for Internet software but is just as relevant to human communication protocols. Formulated in 1980 by computer scientist Jon Postel, it advises the following:
Be conservative in what you do; be liberal in what you accept from others.
Miller's Law tells us to focus on the intent of what someone is saying, and ignore its surface expression, while Elgin's Corollary encourages us to be as clear as we can ourselves. The Robustness Principle elegantly sums them up. You can apply these ideas directly to your own thinking and interpretation (see the “In Real Life” section), and you can use software to apply them to translating online content so that you can absorb it more easily.
Q:
If you would like to create a portable mental toolbox of these behavioral techniques, Ron suggests making a mnemonic acrostic of them. THOTCRIME works well, as it ironically alludes to the Orwellian quality of some early behaviorist writing that denied the existence of consciousness or thought.
>` Tracking
>` Homework First
>` Organizing Your Environment
>` Truncation
>` Commitments
>` Reminders
>` Inspiration
>` Momentum
>` Extremes
Q:
Here are some concrete games and techniques for stimulating the beginner's mind viewpoint:
- Be aware of the language you use. Ask more questions, make fewer statements.
- Pretend you're an alien or an archaeologist: How would you report on your situation? Describe it in the present tense and in the moment. Teach somebody else about it (Hack 9, “Learn By Teaching”).
- Note specifically what you know about your situation or object, then ask yourself “what else” repeatedly until you can't add anything to your list. This seems to be dwelling on what you already know, but when you exhaust those things and push yourself to keep looking, you find new things you hadn't noticed before.
- Try to solve a problem incorrectly, or come up with the worst possible solution (Hack 27, “Seek Bad Examples”).
- If you're trying to get to know an object, try to approach it in a novel way. Try drawing it. Explore it as a small child would: Put your face on it, or your foot. See if it makes a noise or has a smell. Call it by a different name. Make it into a character and have a conversation with it.
- Find a real child or someone else who doesn't know anything about your problem, and ask them what they would do. Be serious and listen carefully and respectfully to the answer you get.
Q:
Douglas Adams said, “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” Perhaps as a consequence, he was locked in a hotel room by his publishers to finish writing novels on no less than two occasions.
Q:
In almost every situation—even situations overtly defined as competitions—there are benefits you can gain if you don't win. You can recognize them, and change your actions so that you increase them, by determining what's really important and what's broadly available to gain.
One way to do this is to perform a cost-benefit analysis. Every victory has its cost. Is winning at whatever you're doing going to cost you more than you're likely to get out of it? If getting that startup job you want means behaving unethically toward the other candidates, and you learn the “prize” consists of vicious superiors, 60-hour workweeks, and hypertension, maybe you should take a fall in this match, champ.
June 8, 2019
This is a truly amazing book that could best be described as a power user's manual for the brain. The author has an eclectic range of interests and presents a wonderfully curated collection of techniques to improve problem solving, idea generation and personal productivity.
Reading this and Michalko's "Thinkertoys" a few years ago was an almost life-changing experience and I try to re-read both books every couple of years. Highly recommended.
Reading this and Michalko's "Thinkertoys" a few years ago was an almost life-changing experience and I try to re-read both books every couple of years. Highly recommended.
Want to read
January 7, 2022REF: Encontrado en el artículo: "The complete guide to indexing your paper notes"
November 1, 2011
Much weaker than the previous effort (which I enjoyed tremendously), this work just falls short. The writing is very uneven across many of the hacks, there are several areas where pseudoscience and inconclusive evidence is presented as fact and a mind-numbing level of repetition that seems reinforced by the structure used for the hacks. I had high hopes for this work (it was on my wish list for months prior to publication), but I'm afraid it just didn't deliver on those expectations.
April 16, 2018
Mindhacker, by Ron and Marty Hale-Evans, is an excellent collection of techniques to improve thinking in everyday moments. It begins with an introduction that provides an outline of what the book is, and what it is not. I found this to be an invaluable inclusion because it both helped me use the book more effectively, and it also gave me an idea of what was where. The book is divided into 9 sections, titled "Memory," "Learning," "Information Processing," "Time Management," "Creativity and Productivity," "Math and Logic", "Communication," "Mental Fitness," and "Clarity." It is important to note that for most people, only a few mind hacks will be applicable, and only one or two are likely to be adopted permanently. I personally found about that only one in twelve hacks was useful; however, that still brought me five new methods for improving my mental game. I especially enjoyed the hacks on three- and four-dimensional thinking in hacks 42 and 43. In addition, although I am not likely to ever use it, "Hack 46: Emote Precisely" was an intriguing look at how to more effectively express emotion through language. It has been found that a person's native language directly influences how they think; for instance, speakers of languages without relative directions (only N, S, E, and W - no to, fro, left, and right) are almost never lost. By adding more precise emotive words to one's vocabulary, it may become easier to think about and process emotions, even if not using the words to express them to others. Altogether, I recommend this book, although I caution readers to not expect the impossible; only expect one or two hacks to fit you really well. If one hack looks interesting, read it and try it out; if not, then skim it or skip it altogether.
January 12, 2018
Meh. I was excited about this one, but most of the "hacks" just ended up being either stuff I already do, stuff that I wouldn't do (like write in my books, are you crazy?! lol), or common sense stuff. I learned maybe one or two things that I'll actually use, but otherwise... meh.
August 4, 2019
I learned a lot of random tricks and was exposed to new authors and new ideas I otherwise would not have been.
May 6, 2012
As with many self help books, "Mindhacker" is a bold attempt to deliver in one text the material a person needs to change their lives. How often do you hear of a self help book claiming to enable the reader to move to the next level of mental capability? Mindhacker was an ordinary read. Although the book did have some good ideas, the ideas alone do not make a cohesive body of work.
May 13, 2012
Read this quickly and enjoyed it. One of the many books I'm going through for research purposes for my next book. It has lots of good suggestions for ways to keep learning as a grown up person out of school. Some of the "tricks" were novel and exciting but it is a mixed bag. Of course, the tricks that appealed to me might be quite different than those that appeal to someone else.
February 27, 2013
A great read full of idea on how to think differently. You definitely won't use all 60 hacks, but I bet at least one of them will end up striking a chord. Since it is broken into 60 discrete chunks it is the perfect book for reading on your phone in a stolen moments.
March 15, 2015
This is a good, useful book, but don't try to read it all straight through, as it's a bit uneven. Read the parts that are useful to you. I read it in pieces in between other books.
Also, check out the author's first book, "Mind Performance Hacks."
Also, check out the author's first book, "Mind Performance Hacks."
February 2, 2015
This book was awesome. Lots of tips for getting organized, improving intelligence, putting your life in order, etc. It also includes plenty of interesting and obscure information - I learned a lot from it.
This book is especially good for geeks and computer programmers.
This book is especially good for geeks and computer programmers.
December 11, 2016
I really liked this. I have been a fan of Ron's for years and years, and although I bought this when it came out, I realized this week I hadn't actually read it!
I really enjoyed the 4D visualization chapter, and the semantic break chapter.
I really enjoyed the 4D visualization chapter, and the semantic break chapter.
September 17, 2011
Read a draft of this book. The guy who wrote the hacks about SRS and Dual N-Back is brilliant ;)
January 3, 2012
This book arrived yesterday and I have started dipping in and exploring.
September 6, 2012
good read, good ideas, read it at several intervals and not completely.
deciding
August 29, 2011saw in B&N on 2011-08-28
http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTi...
http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTi...
May 30, 2012
Lots of interesting ideas most of which i'm sure I'll never use.
January 4, 2018
지적 자극은 받을 수 있지만 해킹기술을 습득하긴 어려웠다.
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