Synopses & Reviews
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.
About the Author
Ron Hale-Evans is a writer and game designer who earns his daily sandwich with frequent gigs as a technical writer. He has a bachelor's degree in psychology from Yale, with a minor in philosophy. Thinking a lot about thinking led him to create the Mentat Wiki at http://www.ludism.org/mentat, which led to this book. His multifarious and nefarious other projects can be accessed from his home page, http://ron.ludism.org, including his award-winning board games, a list of his Short-Duration Personal Saviours, and his blog. His wife Marty is a better man than he is.
Table of Contents
Credits; About the Author; About the Developmental Editor; Contributors; Acknowledgments; Preface; Why Mind Performance Hacks?; How to Use This Book; How This Book Is Organized; Conventions Used in This Book; How to Run the Programming Hacks; Using Code Examples; Safari Enabled; How to Contact Us; Got a Hack?; Chapter 1: Memory; 1 Remember 10 Things to Bring; 2 Use the Number-Shape System; 3 Make Lots of Little Journeys; 4 Stash Things in Nooks and Crannies; 5 Use the Major System; 6 Use the Dominic System; 7 Visit the Hotel Dominic; 8 Dominate Your Memory; 9 Memorize Numbers with Carroll's Couplets; 10 Tune In to Your Memory; 11 Consume Your Information in Chunks; 12 Overcome the Tip-of-the-Tongue Effect; Chapter 2: Information Processing; 13 Catch Your Ideas; 14 Write Faster; 15 Speak Your Brain's Language; 16 Map Your Mind; 17 Build an Exoself; 18 Pre-Delete Cruft; Chapter 3: Creativity; 19 Seed Your Mental Random-Number Generator; 20 Force Your Connections; 21 Contemplate Po; 22 Scamper for Ideas; 23 Deck Yourself Out; 24 Constrain Yourself; 25 Think Analogically; 26 Enjoy Good, Clean Memetic Sex; 27 Play Mind Music; 28 Sound Your Brain with Onar; 29 Keep a Dream Journal; 30 Hold a Question in Mind; 31 Adopt a Hero; 32 Go Backward to Be More Inventive Going Forward; 33 Spend More Time Thinking; 34 Extend Your Idea Space with Word Spectra; Chapter 4: Math; 35 Put Down That Calculator; 36 Make Friends with Numbers; 37 Test for Divisibility; 38 Calculate Mental Checksums; 39 Turn Your Hands into an Abacus; 40 Count to a Million on Your Fingers; 41 Estimate Orders of Magnitude; 42 Estimate Square Roots; 43 Calculate Any Weekday; Chapter 5: Decision Making; 44 Foresee Important Problems; 45 Predict the Length of a Lifetime; 46 Find Dominant Strategies; 47 Eliminate Dominated Strategies; 48 Don't Overthink It; 49 Roll the Dice; Chapter 6: Communication; 50 Put Your Words in the Blender; 51 Learn an Artificial Language; 52 Communicate in E-Prime; 53 Learn Morse Code Like an Efficiency Expert; 54 Harness Stage Fright; 55 Ask Stupid Questions; 56 Stop Memory-Buffer Overrun; Chapter 7: Clarity; 57 Learn Your Emotional ABCs; 58 Avoid Cognitive Distortions; 59 Use the Fourfold Breath; 60 Meditate; 61 Hypnotize Yourself; 62 Talk to Yourself; 63 Interview Yourself; 64 Cultivate the Naive Mind; 65 Employ Mental Momentum; Chapter 8: Mental Fitness; 66 Warm Up Your Brain; 67 Play Board Games; 68 Improve Visual Attention Through Video Games; 69 Don't Neglect the Obvious: Sleep, Nutrition, and Exercise; 70 Get a Good Night's Sleep; 71 Navigate Around the Post-Lunch Dip; 72 Overclock Your Brain; 73 Learn the Facts About Cognitive Enhancers; 74 Snap Yourself to Attention; 75 Assemble Your Mental Toolbox; Colophon;