Entertaining Your Brain? 222
Spencer Wilson asks: "I'm constantly told that I have an extremely high intelligence. I always feel like I should know so much more, though. Do you, the Slashdot readers, know of any ways to improve ones brain power? Perhaps books, Web sites, etc., that provide questions that involve ways to increase memory, creativity, mental agility, logic reasoning, intelligence, etc. Are there any diets/exercises that really help?"
Memorizing Pi (Score:4, Interesting)
http://theory.cs.iitm.ernet.in/~arvindn/pi/ [ernet.in]
I've tried it, and it probably would increase memorization ability, but I'm actually too lazy and busy to keep it up.
Wikipedia (Score:5, Interesting)
hmmm... (Score:3, Interesting)
Meditation. (Score:4, Interesting)
There are plenty of resources online, but I wouldn't be a
As for what to do with that hour, that's up for debate. I'm a Buddhist, and many of us believe in meditating on something rather than nothing.
An actually on-topic post... (Score:3, Interesting)
Some years back, I actually did some digging around about all of the 'smart supplements' and such.
The upshot is that a lot of them DO work...but in inverse proportion to how much you NEED them. That is, they don't do much of anything for people who are already reasonably smart, but they are a noticeable help for people with mental deficiencies.
Personally, I think the best way to get intellectual stimulation is to try to get as many varied experiences as possible. I like travel, myself. Dig out a map, find somewhere a few hours away you've never been to, and go for a drive. Bring the map in case anything looks interesting along the way and you decide to change your itinerary...
If you're so smart... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm going to assume you're not stupid. Probably a safe assumption, since you're obviously smart enough to see that you don't know as much as you should. So that leaves ignorant. So why are you ignorant.
Steve Allen tells this story about a young, smart assistant he had who was dismally ignorant. He had to explain to her that her boyfriend was not a kind of Protestant (the guy was a Catholic!) and that the U.N. wasn't in Los Angeles (small schedule issue!). He blamed her ignorance on a sloppy education. But I have to ask, How do you grow up without learning where the U.N. HQ is? Answer, lack of curiousity.
There's more to knowing stuff than memorizing lots of facts. It's an active thing. You read lots of books, journals, and newspapers. And you think about what you've read. Which means talking about it with others, writing about it, finding a place for it in your mental landscape.
So, short answer to your question: there's no one book that will make you more knowledgable. What you should do is go to a library or a bookstore. Avoid the aisles with the recreational reading you normally go for. Than browse around until you find a book that looks interesting. Try to get into it. If you can't, put it back on the shelf and look for another book. If you can, read it, think about it, discuss it with other people who've read it.
Repeat until you feel sufficiently smart. Which, if you're really smart is never.
Re:Meditation. (Score:4, Interesting)
Most westerners (like myself) are very goal oriented. There's no "point" or "goal" to Zen, or meditation. By that, I mean "I'm going to improve my concentration by at least a power of 2 in the next six weeks!" Results are also not instant. I was fairly capable in high school, but my grades were terrible. I didn't see much improvement until later in that school year (and since it was my senior year it didn't really affect my overall GPA), but now that I am in college I have a good GPA and no problem "finding time" to do homework.
I also don't think that 1 hour a day is reasonable for most people. If you can meditate for an hour a day, great! If you can manage 15, perfect! If you can manage 5, wonderful! The point is, you should just meditate for the sake of meditation. It's true that it is relaxing, calming, peacful, and it helps with focus, concentration, etc, but unless you meditate for the sake of meditating (with no goal or "time limit") you will probably find it too difficult to reliably do every day.
If you would like more information on meditation or Zen, you can always try your local Google. There are also MANY good books out there too that introduce the beginner concepts of Zen and meditation. I would suggest heading to your local book store/library and read through some of the books on Zen.
As a final note, Zen can be practiced outside of any religion. The day-to-day practices of Zen has very little to do with religion.
Relative Intelligence (Score:5, Interesting)
I really think that intelligence just boils down to the equivilent of system registers in the brain. Being able to hold more of an understanding of what's going on than those around you makes you more intelligence. This can be applied as social intelligence, mathematical intelligence (understanding the systems behind the numbers), scientific intelligence (understanding larger portions or more detail in the natural world than most), etc. Its a curiosity.
I tend to have a social intelligence. I just think of it as common sense, but apparently others see it as something nice. Which helps, I guess.. but is weird. I look at a mathematically intelligent person and get intimidated. Or I look at the linguistically intelligent people who appear to be flaunting their intelligence by using ridiculously arcane words in common speech. It's more than likely they just know the words and use them without thinking.. but to people who don't it seems intelligent.
So I guess to answer your question, Intelligence isn't about what you know. It's about what you CAN know, and what you can process successfully.
Now, if you are looking for wisdom, you may want to make with the learning.
Nootropics (Score:2, Interesting)
Current critical theory in the communications and philosophy fields would probably argue that "intelligence" is constructed by those with social privilege to justify their privilege through the illusion of naturalistic necessity.
The only reason I caution with the above is because I'm highly sympathetic to it.
Another strain of thought I'm highly sympathetic to, but which is incompatible with the above is the biological machine theory of intelligence. The metaphor is almost self-explanatory. Your brain is a machine and will funciton optimally when certain pre-conditions are met.
There truly is a lot to be said for proper diet and exercise in sustaining intelligence. There has been much research done of late that links regular exercise with forstalling age related memory loss. Another recent study found that exercise dramatically improved cognitive skills across the board when sedetary persons were forced to do mild arobic exercise 3 times a week.
The second part of my suggestion is a class of substances broadly called nootropics. (new-oH-trOH-pix) The brain is dependent upon a diverse quantity of chemicals. Many persons are deficient and this has very real impacts for the brain performance.
A lot of persons are intersted in improving their cognitive power through supplements/drugs. Many are safe and proven. I've personally achieved remarkable success. My memory is better than it has ever been. Obscure vocabuary words flow off my tongue. Mathematical proofs take a shorter amount of time to absorb. Latin is my university foreign language. Pre-nootropics I spent 4 hours a week memorizing Latin vocabuary for my classes. The following semester, with a similar workload, I spent 2 hours a week max.
The cheapest/most popular nootropic is called DMAE. Easily one of the reasons why it is popular is that it combats brain damage caused by alcohol use through replacing acetylcholine. A lot of people drink, so a lot benefit from DMAE. But DMAE does more than combat alcohol damage, so it should be considered even if you don't drink.
If you want a site with just un-hyped, straight-up studies, check out [url]http://www.smart-nutrition.net[/url]. I am not associated with them, but after checking out all the science behind the Get-Smart pills I purchased some two years ago and continue to purchase some to this day.
Today I regularly consume the Get-Smart pills, L-Tyrosine (for semantic recall), phosphatydl-Serine (misspelled I know, it's for alertness), and a B-vitamin.
My memory and general acuteness are at all time high levels. Mental clarity is its own reward. If you're curious at all, I highly encourage you to do some reading.
Re:Wikipedia (Score:1, Interesting)
I know SEVERAL people that know their stuff when it comes to software engineering, or hardware design. However, these same people can't reason their way out of any significant problem.
I, personally, feel I'm fairly intelligent. However, I have a mind like a sieve, so I retain facts only if either of two things holds true:
1. I'm interested
2. I'm exposed over, and over again to the material
For example, I routinely scored at about 80% in History classes. However, in a VLSI systems design class (the supposedly "harder" of the two), I did much better.
Please don't do what the parent poster did and assume that people that know stuff are automatically intelligent... please...
It's all well and good that a person might know some facts, but knowing what they MEAN or imply for other facts is another matter.
Exercise your mind. (Score:2, Interesting)
> I'm constantly told that I have an extremely high intelligence.
> I always feel like I should know so much more, though.
Intelligence and knowledge are different things. You gradually lose a lot of your intelligence as you age, but you gain knowledge and understanding and so are able to compensate. You can also gain thinking skills.
> Do you, the Slashdot readers, know of any ways to improve ones brain power?
Brain power? No, not as such. The brain (the physical organ between your ears) is mostly affected by your body chemistry, so apart from the usual medical advice (eat a ballanced diet, get enough sleep, don't do crack, ...) there's not a great
deal you can do.
However, you can exercise your *mind*. Read books that are at or above your reading level, books that make you think. (Specific examples? If you haven't read Godel, Escher, Bach yet, I can recommend that. The Bible is good for a number of readings. Knuth's book on surreal number theory is good. Read some Interactive Fiction, too. Curses, for example, and (if you really want to stretch) Spider and Web.)
Memorization is a learned skill. I don't know how many times people have told me, "I can't memorize". What they mean is, "I've never memorized." Very few people are blessed with a photographic memory; everyone else has to learn to memorize. Pick out a nice five-page passage you like from a good book, and make yourself learn it word-for-word until you can recite it verbatim with no errors. You start out with just the first sentence and work your way up. Oh, and you have to periodically review what you already know (just say it through once each time; if you don't have any trouble, you can double the time until the next review of that materiel).
Memorization gets easier with practice, and continues to get easier with practice the more you practice it. It's possible to get to the point where you can memorize a medium-density page of information in fifteen minutes flat, and this is a *really* useful skill to have. It's also possible to store entire books in your mind. No, your brain doesn't get full and start forgetting stuff. (Short-term memory works that way, but long-term memory doesn't.) There's a girl in my church who can quote all of John, Ephesians, I & II Timothy, Titus, Jonah, and six chapters of Daniel, and she's not even particularly bright (in fact, she's probably LD); she just took the trouble to learn how to memorize and then spent some time doing a bit of it.
Of course, there are other useful thinking skills besides (and, some would say, now that we have computers, more useful than) memorization. Practice analysis and discernment. Learn to pick apart everything you read, including fiction, and evaluate it in terms of the quality of the writing, stylistic issues, the author's sociopolitical worldview and how that influences the writing (especially with nonfiction, but yes, even with fiction), the originality (or not) of the plot, the quality of the character development, and so on and so forth. Write in-depth reviews.
Speaking of which... write. I don't mean (necessarily) professionally, but write. Not just "creative" writing, either; write essays. For fun. Make yourself put together and write from an outline, and then make yourself revise your writing repeatedly until the original draft looks like poor writing by comparison. This is good exercise, and it develops another useful skill.
Languages are a great way to go too. Learn computer languages, foreign languages, dead languages, ... Learn ones that are
significantly different from your native language. The (somewhat
old now) book,
How to Learn Any Language [amazon.com] (Barry Farber) is one I would recommend -- but don't
just read the book; learn some la
Re:Whoever told you that (Score:2, Interesting)
I ask because I am considering going to school to teach special education for gifted students, being one myself through school I know the children are often pitted against others for little more than academic sport. Integrated Knowledge based curriculum [nwrel.org] was the enlightenment of my adolescent age where suddenly the basic intellectual tools I had garnered from my parachioal schooling were gathered in force to attack problems that seemed tangible and engaging to someone like myself. I do not pretend I am some super genius aboce 200 but being on the opposite end of the bell curve from autism makes even people with a 100 IQ tedious to interact with at times. Around 130+ IQ typically do not mesh well with the philistines in society in spite of their expanded awareness in most matters they seem even less apt than children with autism to percieve social clues.
Hey, some tips (Score:5, Interesting)
This is because now that I work I am not learning much. Back in school, I didn't have this problem, as my brain was always crunching something.
There's a library near my job. I go there sometime and walk by shelves, and when I see a book that does not sound totally boring while being on a subject I have no idea about, I grab it. In fact, I grab a few of them.
To be honest I rarely finish any of these books, but it constantly gives me more and more data in my head, as I at least become aware of the subjects.
In particular, there's a great book called something like Century of Mind, or something like that, about all the great thinkers of the 20th century, from Picasso and Freud, and Wright Brothers to.. well, I didn't finish the book but you get the point... it was great to get into the heads and the environment during which these great thinkers did their thinking.
Oh, and I didn't finish it because someone put it on reserve when I came to renew it and they took it from me.
Re:Meditation. (Score:4, Interesting)
Meditation is also great for building elaborate mnemonic structures. Is your visualization of yearly or the daily cycles out of proportion? Do you find the breadth of material covered in a book or course a bit much to handle at once? Find a picture (with motion and sound, if possible) that corresponds better than whatever you've got, then just sit there and imagine the thing, explore it, interact with it. Art is another way to focus on the same thing: project conceptual structures into 2 or 3 dimensional space and build them there.
Somewhat related... (Score:5, Interesting)
The first article, however, discusses what it takes to become considered "best" in your area of study. Read through it for a fascinating look at performance and intelligence and how it relates to the amount of practice. The short version, for those who are allergic to reading, is that you can reach a level considered "best" after about 10,000 hours of practice regardless of whether you start out slow or whether you're a quick study.
Want to become a killer programmer? Put in 10 solid hours a day coding (and related research activities) for 3 years (ie: 1000 days). After 18 months, you'll be at a stage where you're qualified to teach. After 2 years you'll be considered very good. And after 3 years, you'll get a call from Carmack. (Okay, maybe I made that last one up.)
Here's a puzzle for you (Score:2, Interesting)
Also, feel free to put any other really good puzzles in this thread!
------------Begin Story------------------
There are 100 prisoners being held captive. One day they are told that some of them will die the next day in a trial. They are told to plan tonight for the following:
The prisoners will be lined up, one behind the other, so that each prisoner can see all of the people in front of him. A red, green, or blue dot will be placed on the back of each prisoner's head, but the prisoner will not know the color on the back of their own head (or, of course, the colors on the heads of the prisoners behind him). Then the captors will start at the back of the line and ask the question "What is the color on the back of your head?". The prisoner must answer with one of the colors, and any other answer, or answering out of turn, will result in everyone being executed. Everyone can hear the answers of the people to come before them. After the question has been asked of every prisoner, the prisoners who answered incorrectly will be executed.
Question: What is the most effective plan that the prisoners can come up with, and how many people will die with this plan?
Extra credit: Expand the plan to include an arbitrary number of prisoners and colors. Now how many people will die?
try playing a musical insturment (Score:2, Interesting)