Am I Naive? How to Tell (And Fix It)
Dec 08, 2021
Show notes
We are all naive sometimes. And make no mistake: That can be a very good thing in the right context. Why? Because the core of scientific, philosophical and personal progress requires the ability to see the world with fresh eyes. By the same token, being naive can also be incredibly destructive. It can force you to miss out on so many of life’s pleasures because it can make you: Irrational when rationality is needed Skeptical when active participation is required Emotionally destructive when only reason can save the day But here’s the very good news: When it comes to learning how to be less naive, the improvement process could not be simpler. And this post covers how to increase your wisdom in precise terms. Ready? Let’s get S.M.A.R.T.E.R together! (I’ll tell you what the acronym means later. I promise!) Am I Naive? The Top Seven Signs of a Naive Person Scientists have shown that being naive is essential to our cognitive development as kids. We literally cannot tell the differences between things without allowing curiosity to help us distinguish the difference between things. For example, as kids we scientifically test the world. We learn to avoid hot surfaces by being naive about what they are and how they harm us. This means that the number one way to know if someone is being naive is pretty simple. One: Lack of Experience If you want to know how to stop being naive, ask this simple question every time an opinion floats to your mind: Do I actually have the experience required to make my opinion valid? Questioning everything in this way will instantly make you a smarter person. You’ll certainly stick your foot in your mouth much less often. This is true because intelligent people ask questions – or at least acknowledge that a topic is in question – before making final statements about it. But naive people? Not so much. You can often tell by the speed of their answers that they simply lack the background knowledge required to give an intelligent response. Two: Lack of Self-Awareness Some people suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect. This takes place when a person is not smart enough to know that they aren’t educated in a particular topic area. It’s very destructive, and one need only look at the comments on various social media sites to see how rampant this problem is. Three: Poor Vocabulary Did you know that scientists have warned that the vocabulary of our young people is rapidly shrinking? This connects to our first point about how experience helps us differentiate different things in the world. We rarely do this through experience alone. Our language helps us process the experience and deepen it through communication with others. But if we don’t know the words for objects and experiences, our ability to understand and connect them with other aspects of reality shrinks. Four: Gullibility Having a larger vocabulary has been shown to help you read faster, which helps you avoid being easily cheated or deceived. The more you know, the more you can know. Yet, there are people out there who talk for hours about things like the Mandela Effect with zero evidence that it exists. Watch out for people who misuse scientific-sounding terminology to take advantage of the gullible. They don’t realize that other people exploit their lack of scientific literacy. They do this by showing them ads to sell them products packed with other sensational material. Entire industries direct themselves at consumers with limited mental processing power. Five: Lack of Critical Thinking Skills Now, I don’t mean to put only a few people on the spot. Incredibly smart people also display gullibility from time to time. Desperate health situations, lack of time to think and other situations can cause even people with very high IQ scores to blunder. However, people with critical thinking abilities often realize their mistakes much quicker. Often, they’re able to reverse course before any significant damage has been done. They can do this because they’ve had some training in critical thinking, like the kind you can get on this blog. Here are some resources if you’d like to beef up your brain so you can think through important issues faster and make fewer mistakes: 9 Critical Thinking Strategies Analytical Thinking Abstract Thinking Concrete Thinking Logical vs. Rational Thinking 14 of the Best Critical Thinking Books Six: Lack of Willingness To Change They say that the only constant is change. But one of the top signs of a naive person is inflexibility. Nietzsche put it best when he said that asking someone else to change is like asking the entire universe to change. But isn’t that often what naive people do? As I suggested in my TEDx Talk, which centered on a naive passage of my own life, we know that we can’t change others: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvtYjdriSpM But we can change ourselves. So if you want to stop being so naive, make sure to check out the various ways that you can change yourself in the section below. Seven: You Do Not Put Time Aside For Thinking Believe it or not, thinking is not a natural activity. We descend from animals and our autopilot instincts are geared for survival. This means that thinking not only has to be learned, but in order to keep it sharp, it also has to be practiced. A sure sign of a person being naive is when they say that they made a “snap decision.” Some people will even brag that they are “impulsive” or like to “rely on intuition.” True, life sometimes forces us to make choices on the fly. We may have to listen to our gut. But it’s never ideal and it’s naive to think so. As Chip and Dan Heath point out in their book, Decisive, much research shows that not taking a time to think things through harms us much more than we think. Yet, societies around the world are so collectively gullible that we valorize impulsive celebrities and spend hours following the trainwrecks of their lives. Luckily, you can avoid belonging to the herd, so let’s turn our attention to simple ways to get more experience, become more intelligent and enjoy reality at an increasingly mature level. How to Stop Being Naive in Eight Steps Fortunately, there are many ways to reduce gullibility and become an accurate thinker on a quest for constant improvement. Let’s have a look at some of the best. Step One: Take Time To Analyze Things Thoroughly Snap decisions are deadly. And once you’re in the habit of making them, it can be hard to change. However, it actually doesn’t take that long to make intelligent decisions. But you do need to take the time it requires to think things through. One model I love is the W.R.A.P. technique in Decisive. This approach applies to many situations where you will benefit from thinking things through. It works like this: Widen your options Reality test Attain distance Prepare to fail To give you an example, let’s say you hear about repressing your subvocalization from a so-called speed-reading expert. Before you take this expert at his or her word and plunk down your hard earned cash on their training, you can widen your options by looking up what credible scientists say about this issue. Then, you can reality test the person’s claims by seeing what they’ve accomplished in life with their approach. Finally, you can take a break to get some distance between yourself and the topic and let your brain ruminate on autopilot through a process called diffuse thinking. If you decide to go ahead and invest in the idea after taking time to deliberate, be willing to fail. By the same token, you should accept that in some areas of self-education, it pays to fail. If you don’t go through a course or two created by charlatans, you risk not sharpening your BS-detection skills, which also requires you to prepare for failure. In sum, taking time to think in a structured manner is a great way to suffer less from being naive in life. Step Two: Take Personal Responsibility Gullible people often avoid seeing how they steered themselves into harm’s way. But that’s an avoidance strategy and one that prevents you from growing. Even worse, you can wind up trapped in learned helplessness. As researcher Martin Seligman has shown, it’s easy for humans to accept and even come to love the things that hold them back. But it’s also readily possible for anyone to learn to reject the limiting factors in our lives. Studies have shown that feel good dopamine increases when you take actions that increase your mental strength. In order to become more resilient and learn from your naivety, you need to acknowledge its presence in your life, accept it and then plan to do better. Getting some time on the calendar to study critical thinking or improve your memory through a program like the Magnetic Memory Method Masterclass is a great way to do that. Step Three: Reduce Screen Time & Mindless Consumption There was a time when people thought that intelligence was fixed. But research that identified what has come to be known as the Flynn Effect showed that in the 20th century, people were in fact getting smarter and smarter in each and every generation. This trend continued until recently, but now some researchers think that intelligence may be spiralling downwards. They even call this a reversal of the Flynn Effect in some areas of human knowledge and skill. One explanation for why this downward trend is taking place is digital amnesia. As the Internet moves closer and closer to creating zero latency online environments, people become increasingly hooked to their devices. Indeed, the CEO of Netflix once said that their only competitor is sleep. By spending more time reading books, even if you’re a slow reader, you’ll give your mind for reflective thinking that fast-paced online environments usually train your brain to avoid. They are designed to keep you clicking without thinking, whereas reading offline is all about connecting with the thoughts of others in a sustained way. Step Four: Improve Your Vocabulary In More Than One Language A lot of people will tell you to travel to give you more life experience. But let’s face it: the beaches and areas of historical interest around the world are packed with as many naive people as your hometown. A better way to gain world perspective is through language learning. This is because working with languages is what James Hordern calls knowledgeable practice. The best part is that memorizing vocabulary is fast, easy and fun. I regularly review my copy of Word Power Made Easy to keep my English sharp and read in other languages at least 3-5 times per week. Step Five: Design Your Own Long Term Learning Projects A lot of people randomly pile books into their Amazon shopping cart, or collect suggestions on Goodreads. But savvy lifelong learners are curators of their knowledge. They may read broadly, but usually within highly concentrated areas of interest for dedicated periods of time. I took so many courses at university, my brain has been trained to think in terms of semesters. To this day, I search the Internet not for lists of the best books on a certain topic, but for university syllabi put together by experts. I try to find the biggest and most authoritative textbook on a topic that I can, and then read at least 2-3 of the books it discusses within. This style of learning allows me to lean on the curation process of experts as I develop my own expertise. Then, when I throw in wildcard discoveries along the way, I automatically read them at a higher level and avoid falling into gullibility because a critical foundation for understanding the topic has already been established. For any topic I’m studying, I seek to include books from at least these categories: History of the topic Theory of the topic Practical applications of the topic Critical biographies related to the topic If you seek the best possible books from each of these categories and spend 3-6 months focused on them and supplementary materials, you won’t be naive about that topic for long. And stick with your reading plan. Remember: Variety definitely is the spice of life, but the truth in the cliche won’t help if you keep changing disciplines. You can dive deep into topics and connect them a lot better if you spend periods of focused time on fewer topics in more detailed ways. The best part is that your focus will compound in value because you’ll have learned the meta skills of how to learn and see many more connections thanks to your depth of study. Step Six: Carry A Notebook Everywhere I can think of few things that have helped me more than carrying a notebook 99.9% of the time. Although it’s true I use memory techniques, there’s nothing better than working thoughts out on paper and planning with my hands. Plus, having a journal is very helpful for quickly creating Memory Palaces (a powerful tool for remembering things quickly). Besides planning and keeping track of ideas that emerge, notebooks are great for self-assessment, gratitude journaling and generally expanding your mind. Step Seven: Practice Objectivity One of the hardest things for chronically naive people is to realize that reality exists independent of their thoughts and opinions. This mistake happens because they are primarily subjective when they would benefit from being objective thinkers. No doubt about it, being objective is hard. Fixing this issue starts by understanding that your brain practically forces you to be emotionally invested in everything you see and do. We are driven to navigate the world by the laws and forces of evolution in the same way that gravity holds us fast to the earth. To become more objective despite having the chips stacked against you, you can make objectivity one of your first learning projects. Study the sciences of psychology, decision making and game theory. Make a concerted effort to become a philosopher. As part of this project, build a network of people around you who can help stress test your ideas. I suggest joining paid groups rather than free ones. Whereas many of the free ones are filled with low quality posts that will trap you in naive thinking, a solid investment in a discussion group based around deep dives into challenging content will serve you very well. If you’d like to be part of one of my upcoming groups, consider letting me know! Step Eight: Know Your Personality Type One of my own experiences of being gullible revealed a lot to me about an area I’d never thought about in the context of investing. For years, I’d been so focused on academic matters and later developing this blog, I had spent almost no time thinking about or studying the different ways I might retire one day. Because I practice what I preach, I followed a lot of the steps I’ve discussed above. For example, I looked for the foundational books on investing and spent months focused on reading them thoroughly. I also took courses and spent time with a topic expert to go over my plans. He said something very interesting to me: “If you invest in a way that goes against your personality type, you’ll always be miserable.” I listened deeply to what this expert had to say about personality types when it comes to investing. I journaled about it in my notebook, talked with yet other people and these processes helped me make the right decisions. I know now that I avoided being gullible around a lot of decisions that so-called experts in the field call wise investing, but what actually amounts to uneducated greed. This particular topic is not very interesting to me, but I’m glad I planned time for it and spoke directly with the experts themselves to help formulate my plans. To make sure you avoid the traps of naivety, I suggest you do the same. You Don’t Have To Stop Being Naive 100% As I mentioned in the introduction, we benefit from keeping an open mind and cultivating curiosity. By the same token, we don’t want to keep our minds so open that our brains fall out. Instead, we want to strive to be what I call S.M.A.R.T.E.R or serious, mature and ready to emb…
Concrete Thinking: What You Need to Know (and How it Differs From Abstract)
Nov 03, 2021
Show notes
Want to know why concrete thinking is so difficult to define? It’s because people use the term in many different ways. I observed this for years while teaching critical thinking as a professor. To this day, I observe multiple uses as people regularly ask me for help in making their minds more practical and their memory skills sharper. Here’s something else a bit strange that I’ve encountered as a memory expert: People will ask me to help them remember “abstract” concepts, thinking that abstract thinking is somehow the opposite of concrete thinking. But is that really the case? Not always. You actually can experience some incredibly concrete abstractions. Flags, for example, represent entire countries at an abstract level. Yet flags are also incredibly concrete. So what gives? If you’re confused, don’t worry. We’re going to get to the bottom of things on this page. That way, when people say things to you like “concrete thinking is literal thinking,” you’ll be able to respond… “Yes, it is that, but also so much more.” Are you ready? Let’s dive in! What Is Concrete Thinking? The first thing we need to understand is that thinking is always about representing knowledge. The world is a very complex place, but for the sake of simplicity, we can boil our experience of it down to three kinds information: Material Conceptual Experiential When it comes to the experience part, many people cite Jean Piaget as an expert in concrete thinking. However, I believe this is a false attribution. Here’s why: Piaget was really talking about something called concrete experience. In the first of his four stages of development, he discusses Sensorimotor development, which takes place between birth and the age of two. There is not necessarily anything related to thinking as we normally mean it going on during this period of life. Rather, the goal of the child during this stage is to establish what is called “object permanence.” In other words, the child “remembers” that objects exist even when they are outside of awareness. Concrete experience with objects is needed for this to take place. It’s only during stage 2 that symbolic thought, which involves abstract thinking begins to emerge. Later, logical thinking and then scientific reasoning develop at different levels depending on the individual’s context. So with Piaget out of the way, let’s look at what really defines concrete thinking. The Real Definition Of Concrete Thought I believe Maxine Anderson puts it best in a book called, Absolute Truth and Unbearable Psychic Pain: “Simply put, the concrete state of mind relates to reality in terms of sensory perception and sensory experience, defining reality in terms of what the peripheral senses convey. More specifically it is a state of mind in which metaphor and symbolic thought are not available.” Researchers have generally agreed. In this study, for example, the researchers found that you have to bring a “concretizing mindset” in order to help define what you’re experiencing. To better understand the need to literally work at making your thoughts about an experience concrete, try this exercise: Place an orange in your hand. Think about how it feels in your hand and how it will taste. Those are concrete thoughts. Although an abstract thought about how much the orange weighs or what country it comes from might arise, thoughts about feelings and taste are based on your concrete experience of stimuli in your immediate environment. 3 Concrete Thinking Examples Other lists of examples claim that “concrete thinkers” don’t understand phrases like “it’s raining cats and dogs.” Frankly, I’m not sure if that’s true. If some people can’t understand or relate to popular idioms, other issues may be involved, such as literacy levels, reading comprehension and sufficient practice with self-expression. So with the immediacy of your physical senses in mind, let’s look at some more examples. These will help better illuminate the concrete thinking process. One: Visible Thinking Although Visible Thinking is a book for mathematics teachers, I believe its key points apply to all kinds of thinking. The authors basically point out that even the most abstract and conceptual concepts can be made concrete by: Speaking them out loud Hearing others discuss them Drawing them on a chalkboard Writing about them in a journal Memory expert Tony Buzan was a huge proponent of visual thinking. His style of mind mapping has helped thousands of people turn complex ideas and processes into immediately graspable form. Using a mind map is one of the best ways to feel and see anything you find abstract in a concrete manner. One example is how Tony taught the rules that govern memory by having all of his students draw what he called The Most Important Graph in the World. It’s a simple concept, but has a lot of moving parts that can be difficult to understand when conveyed in writing alone. I never fully understood it myself until Tony had me draw it out in my own handwriting. Now this knowledge is very concrete in my mind because something about how visual memory works was amplified by the drawing process. You might think that my experience is an isolated example, but that’s not the case. Researchers have found that creative drawing does indeed assist memory and comprehension. Other researchers are working on ways to have this kind of concretizing learning strategy spread more widely so more learners can benefit. Two: Relationships (In Life And In Art) Ever found yourself attracted to a person but you don’t know why? The philosopher Immanuel Kant called this die Verwandtschaft in German. It means “affinity,” “relatedness” or “kinship.” The German poet and novelist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe even wrote a novel about this concept, Die Wahlverwandtschaften or Elective Affinities. In this novel, Goethe used principles of chemistry to explore whether or not human relationships like marriage follow certain concrete, biological rules. No matter where you stand on such divisive topics, you’ve probably felt your heart race when you’ve been attracted to someone. You’ve probably experienced the instinct to protect a sibling or close friend. The thoughts that occur during such situations are immediate, primal and perfect examples of what we really mean by concrete thinking. We know that Goethe had the concrete in mind because he wrote Elective Affinities using a style of literature called Weimar Classicism. Although abstraction is part of this form, through the principle of Stoff, writers using this style worked assiduously to make sure even the highest concepts were firmly attached to immediate aspects of concrete reality. Three: Concrete Contemplation The goal of Zen and many other contemplative traditions is to live in the here and now. Does it get any more concrete than that? Not really, especially when you read the research showing that people with depression tend to think more abstractly than those who don’t. Whether it’s Zen or Stoicism, thinking concretely for contemplative purposes is very useful for many aspects of psychological health. How does it work? In Zen, the practitioner typically focuses on a koan. It is a question or statement that helps you experience doubt about the authenticity of your mental world. As you reflect on the koan, you become deeply embedded in the physical nature of the present moment. One of my favorites comes from the Blue Cliff Record and you can immediately see how concrete it is: Student: What is an example of an enlightened person? Teacher: Two eyes in a skull. I have personally benefited a great deal from this kind of koan-based concentration meditation. In this case, you have to think a little about what the koan is saying, and there’s more than one possible interpretation. For me, it basically means that all people are enlightened. They just don’t necessarily see it yet. How specifically is concrete contemplation like this helpful? Personally, my mind used to be so undisciplined that I hardly noticed what was going on around me at all. The “object permanence” of my own body was so lost to me that I would forget to eat for hours on end, not to mention other forms of neglect. But then I learned these two questions that stop unwanted, abstract thinking. I’ve been much more focused on the concrete present as a result. Researchers have discussed why meditation might create this effect. In this study, for example, it boils down to how meditation improves our ability to pay attention. Nothing is more concrete than being present to what’s going on around you, it seems. And it makes sense too. You can’t use analytical thinking at all to help reach concrete conclusions you aren’t paying attention. This is a point memory expert Harry Lorayne made countless times throughout his long and successful career. Concrete vs Abstract Thinking: What’s the Difference? The main difference between concrete and abstract thinking is scale. Whereas concrete thinking is firmly located in the immediate here and now, based on the senses, abstract thinking goes much wider. For example, if you are a concrete thinker reflecting on environmental issues, you might focus only on yourself and your family. An abstract thinker will extend to think about entire communities, possibly the entire world population and even compare macro and micro scales at the same time. An abstract thinker will likely also think about different historical periods and compare environmental data and predict future outcomes. This is obviously very different from the concrete thinker who focuses solely on the next few days or weeks ahead. Of course, it’s entirely possible to think at both levels of scale. In fact, we must if we want to survive. Exercises to Help You Improve Your Concrete Thinking Now that we’ve established what concrete thinking is and what it isn’t, let’s look at some ways to improve how you use this most important of all the main types of thinking. Forgive the pun, but this is where we will pour the foundations and cement them into place. Reproduce A Painting In Your Mind What could be more immediate and material than mentally recreating a painting that you’re familiar with? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJbRKxDEHJE The steps are simple: Close your eyes Bring the painting to mind Imagine painting it with your own hand Focus on all the individual colors Verbally describe different contours Imagine moving into the painting and towards the vanishing point Repeat this exercise often with other paintings. And for bonus points, explore art galleries and art books so that you have even more references to use. Hilbert’s Hotel David Hilbert thought a lot about infinity. It’s one of the most abstract concepts we know. The Hilbert’s Hotel exercise asks you to imagine infinity as an endless series of hotel rooms, each one occupied. However, you need to make room for one more guest. To do so, imagine each guest moving one room down, leaving the first room in the hotel empty. As you play around with this: Explore how you imagine this hotel (one floor, many floors?) Physically feel the movement of the guests as they move to the next room Hear the sounds in your ears Experience any emotions (like being disgruntled when you have to move) For bonus points, try to “double” infinity. In this version of the exercise, you have the guests move two rooms instead of one. The Wealth Exercise In a famous story called The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, Ursula K. Le Guin describes a world in which one child suffers terribly so that others might thrive. Read that story and then to complete this exercise, imagine that you are the richest person in the world. Explore the moral dimension of how that feels. What responsibility do you have to help others? What does that responsibility feel like? What responsibility do you feel that others have to care for themselves? Once you’ve explored these ideas, write a 200-250 word essay response to the classic Wayne Dyer statement that all the money in the world will never solve poverty. Is he right or wrong? Defend your answer. The Separate-Less Exercise Greg Goode provides many great concrete sensation exercises in his books. For example, he describes an exercise with an orange where he asks you to find yourself as the observer while examining a piece of fruit. Although this might seem counterintuitive and abstract, it’s very hands one. What Goode is essentially asking you to do is realize that your experience is the most concrete thing any of us has access to. To complete the exercise: Put an orange on a table or in your hand Describe exactly what you are actually seeing in terms of colors and shapes Ask what is it that differentiates the table from the orange Notice that there is nothing in the visual display that says “table” or “orange” Ask yourself, why do you know these terms? As you go through this process of inquiry, different memories might arise about how you have been effectively trained through education to think in particular ways. Don’t be alarmed. You’re using concrete thinking to encounter just how cemented into social conventions your life has been all along. Concrete Thinking Is Consciousness If there’s one major takeaway I hope you’ll get, it’s that you are experiencing the present moment in a concrete way each and every second that passes. However, most of us are lost in a very abstract set of thinking processes that pull our attention away from the concreteness of the present. Or are we? If you take the orange exercise one step further, is it really true that our absent-minded thoughts are somehow the opposite of concrete thinking? Just because we get lost in thought doesn’t mean we’re somehow not experiencing lost-in-thoughtness itself in a non-concrete way. In other words, it’s still a conscious experience in the same way dreaming is an immediate and real experience. When you take this realization into your everyday life and use memory techniques like the Memory Palace, life will feel much more immediate and satisfying. It was more concrete than you realized all along. And if you need more help in making abstract ideas concrete, I suggest you sign up for this free course: So what do you say? Are you ready to start experiencing the world of your mind in a new and more concrete way? Bring it on!
Abstract Thinking: What It Is and How to Improve It
Oct 27, 2021
Show notes
Abstract thinking is the ability to step away from concrete facts and juggle ideas, symbols and possibilities in your mind. If you’ve ever connected unrelated concepts, predicted how a story might end or spotted a pattern in a spreadsheet no one else noticed, you were thinking abstractly. Still, a lot of people struggle to understand abstract thinking. I know a lot of my students did when I taught critical thinking at university. Also when I taught Film Studies and would show them movies by directors like David Lynch. When I would tell them that many of Lynch’s films still involved the hero’s journey, they would struggle to think about how his plots had anything to do with mainstream cinema. Well, if you want to not only understand abstract thinking better, but also excel at practicing it, this article hands you the playbook. Read on you’ll discover: A full definition of abstract thinking Examples that train your brain to see various types of abstraction How to train your brain to move between concrete ideas and see the big picture on demand By the time you finish the last line, you’ll be on the path to greater mental versatility and be able to tackle even the most intangible problem when it appears. Ready to upgrade your mind and think more abstractly? Let’s get started! What Is Abstract Thinking? We typically hear that abstract thinking originates with the Greeks. Plato, for example, talked about how our material world is a shadowy “copy” of a pure and perfect world of ideals. In this sense, our world is an “abstraction” of the perfect world because “ab” as a prefix means “away from” or “removed.” “Traction,” on the other hand, means to pull away. Thus, an easy way to think about abstract thinking is to realize that it is the act of pulling away and removing yourself from a concrete process or idea. This is very different than how the other types of thinking work. To make this distinction as clear as possible, here’s an example from Plato’s shadowy-world-as-copy concept. A Simple Example of Abstract Thinking Take the word “human.” In a concrete way, we use this term to indicate a person. But when we “pull away” from the concrete meaning as part of the thinking process, we can also see that human means: Mammal Homo sapien A collection of biological cells Stardust This list gets more and more abstract as we move from matters of genus and species to the cosmological origins of life. With this example in mind, you can also think of abstract thinking as existing purely in the mind. Nowhere in nature will you find a sign that says, “this is a biological cell that belongs to a mammal.” Humans have created such concepts and they exist only in our mental lives. “Hold on,” you might be thinking. “What about books and videos?” True, and congratulations on holding critical thinking to be important when people write about topics like this. And you’re right: We have indeed created methods for storing our ideas using words that are imprinted on paper or saved in electronic formats. But how are those recorded ideas brought to life? They only have meaning when a human interacts with them, using a mind trained in abstraction to “translate” the stored words into something meaningful and useful. One of those ways involves committing concepts to memory. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBYBu-Qystc A Broader History of Abstraction Now, I mentioned that typically we think of the origin of being able to abstract ideas as coming from the Greeks. No doubt they made a huge impact. After Plato, Aristotle did a lot of work that helped create many of the classification systems we still use to this day for gathering and organizing knowledge. However, as the scholars of memory Tyson Yunkaporta and Lynne Kelly have shown, indiginous cultures dealt with plenty of abstraction long before the Greeks. Their memory techniques in particular provide great evidence of how prehistoric people “abstracted” ideas from the world and placed them in memory by associating them with objects like the lukasa. They also used processes like Songlines and body parts to help them remember abstract cultural processes. As more and more scholars learn about the past, we find another definition of the term abstract thinking. Whereas we used to think the Greeks were the first to use serious critical thinking strategies in a lot of areas of life, more data helps us think “abstractly” about other cultures and timelines. We are literally removing and pulling away from a territorialized form of thinking and including more history to form a new and more nuanced picture of human development. The more information we need to consider, the more abstract things become. Especially when it comes to matters of consciousness, as you can see play out in this excellent debate hosted by Skeptic Magazine and Michael Shermer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Alz3SD_G-KI More Abstract Thinking Examples As you can already tell, abstract thinking is more than just one thing. Here are more examples that I think you’ll find helpful. Each one shows the different contexts in which abstract thinking is useful. One: Orders of Magnitude Humans find it difficult to think in large numbers. As this study shows, such abstract thinking requires the full development of certain brain parts, and if they don’t emerge correctly, it can be difficult to think abstractly about numbers altogether. As Eliezer Yudkowsky writes in Global Catastrophic Risks: “Human emotions take place within an analogous brain. The human brain cannot release enough neurotransmitters to feel emotion a 1000 times as strong as the grief of one funeral. A prospective risk going from 10, 000, 000 deaths to 100, 000, 000 deaths does not multiply by ten the strength of our determination to stop it. It adds one more zero on paper for our eyes to glaze over, an effect so small that one must usually jump several orders of magnitude to detect the difference experimentally.” This leads us to a problem called scope neglect. We make many poor decisions because we don’t spend enough time thinking about how our problems relate to the big picture. Abstract thinking helps us take more aspects into consideration by understanding what an order of magnitude is and factoring this form of abstract reasoning into the decision process. Two: Symbolism We use abstract thinking every time we see a flag. The Canadian flag is a particularly good example. It shows a Maple Leaf while at the same time representing a country. It refers to both an abstract concept and a concrete object at the same time. Everything from traffic lights to literary devices in novels serve as prompts for abstract thinking. To take one classic example of an abstract symbol, think of when Neo accepts the cookie from the Oracle in The Matrix. Because Neo’s “online” in this scene, the cookie is a nice gesture on one level. But at the abstract level, Neo is being “cookied” in the sense of how your device is tagged with identification code that tells advertisers information about your behaviors online. Three: Metacognition Metacognition basically means thinking about thinking. It’s a very important form of abstract thinking. It is literally pulling away from being immersed in your own thoughts so that you can analyze the process of thought itself. Doing so helps you gain perspective from within and create more space for bringing in the perspectives of others. It’s a key tool that has been in use for a very long time, and really got rolling with the introduction of ars combinatoria. As Timothy Perfect and Bennett Schwartz show in Applied Metacognition, metacognition and memory go hand-in-hand. For example, think of a time when you’ve remembered something about your personal life and asked, “Did that really happen?” Reflecting in this way draws upon your autobiographical memory. Asking, “is this memory true?” is stepping away to think abstractly about the nature of the truth and reality of your mind. Metacognition need not be a strictly personal process. As the authors of Social Metacognition show, thinking about the thoughts of others can help you avoid scope neglect. How to Improve Abstract Thinking: 3 Abstract Thinking Exercises Because there are different kinds of abstract thinking, when looking to become a better abstract thinker, it’s important to match the exercises to the goal. For example, if you want to avoid common human errors that involve thinking, you need to look into cognitive biases. Or if you want to improve your mathematical imagination for large numbers, you might want to look into Hilbert’s hotel and various exercises teachers have created for expanding your mind using this paradox. As much as I like learning about those matters to improve my own abstract thinking, here are my personal favorite exercises: The NIMBY Exercise If it’s new to you, NIMBY means “not in my backyard.” It’s used when people of a certain class lobby for environmentally destructive processes, so long as they are built far from home. This abstract thinking exercise involves you writing a simple letter to a community. Here’s the assignment: Think of the richest neighborhood you know or can imagine. Then write a letter you will place in the mailboxes of the wealthiest people convincing them to build a maximum security prison in their own backyards. This exercise will stretch your abstract thinking because it’s very hard on two levels. First, you’ll need to convince them why maximum security prisons are good and why it would be good for them to be located so close to the homes of the wealthy. Good luck! Rules For The Entire World Exercise Imagine that you are the boss of the entire planet. You have all the power. However, in order to maintain this power, you have to create the perfect set of rules that everyone must follow. The rules must be flawless and treat everyone equally. In 500-1000 words, craft a document that lays out the perfect set of regulations that everyone will be able to follow in perfect cheer. This exercise will stretch your thinking because you have to consider the many different personality types and the many ways our personal interests clash with one another. Have fun! The Wordless Exercise We talked about metacognition above. One of the best ways to start thinking about thinking is to try and quiet your mind. To practice, start by sitting on the floor or on a chair in a quiet place. Allow yourself to notice all of the words and images floating through your mind. Practice telling the difference. What’s happening in language and what is pure imagery. Is there any difference? Or do they feel the same? When you start to get a sense for the difference – or lack of difference – see if you can stop your mental content from flowing. One way to help yourself in this task is to imagine every image and word that flows on your mind being written as it appears on a large chalkboard. As soon as they appear, wipe them away. To practice abstraction, go further than imagining that they have been wiped from this imaginary chalkboard. Imagine that your mental content has been removed completely from the world. Keep practicing until all that remains is the “background” of your consciousness itself. For a simple variation, try something suggested by Byron Katie in Who Would You Be Without Your Story? To complete the exercise, imagine that you have no past. This is a lot like the Zen exercise of trying to imagine what your face looked like before you were born. (Note: This is just an exercise. You won’t actually be erasing anything precious from your past.) Abstract Thought Is A Tool For Life Please don’t make these exercises a one time affair. To really expand your abilities with abstraction, you want to revisit this area of mental ability many times throughout your life. If you’d like further help, check out the list of better thinking posts on this blog. You’ll find many critical thinking exercises and resources that will keep you engaged for a long time. And as you’ve seen with the flag example, we think abstractly each and every day. Every icon on your laptop and smartphone involves some level of visual abstraction. The more you think about the various visual symbols you encounter each and every day, the more you’ll be prompted to that metacognitive level that is so precious for achieving life’s most profound offerings. And to help you remember to pay attention to the surrounding world, I’d suggest signing up for my FREE memory improvement kit: It will help you “abstract” your environment and use it as a tool called a Memory Palace. It’s very helpful for remembering all the new things you’ll notice as you improve this level of your mind!
Marek Kasperski on Tony Buzan’s Legacy And Mind Map Mastery
Oct 20, 2021
Show notes
Ever heard of a note taking technique that involves vibrant colors and keywords and asked yourself…
What on earth is this mindmapping stuff all about?
I used to ask myself that question too.
Then, one day I started to dig into the topic seriously.
I soon discovered that Tony Buzan had developed a number of laws for mapping the mind well.
So well in fact that he claimed it could to “radiant” thinking.
Sadly, Tony Buzan has left fans of accelerated learning for the great Memory Palace in the sky.
But we’re very fortunate that Marek Kasperski has picked up the mantle.
Thanks to his valiant efforts, we have an incredibly talented instructor who will be taking Tony Buzan’s unique views on mind mapping as a learning, creativity and memory tool into the future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q11rI8A39NA
About Marek Kasperski
Marek Kasperski is Vice President of the Tony Buzan Company.
He’s committed to helping you achieve your highest ideals through memory techniques, mind maps and a wide variety of mental techniques that have been proven time and time again to work.
All you have to do?
Show up and work with the techniques.
Marek is also the Global Chief Arbiter and president of G.O.M.S.A. (Guild of Mind Sports Arbiters) where you can learn more about one of the incredible competitions you can take part in and how to qualify to compete.
Visit Tonybuzan.com for more information about this unique set of skills and learning techniques like the Memory Palace.
You won’t regret it!
Is Intelligence Fixed? The Surprising Answer
Oct 07, 2021
Show notes
Is intelligence fixed? Of course not.
Think about artificial intelligence. It’s been improving each and every year.
And so has human intelligence.
As you’ll see, the rise in human intelligence is easily demonstrated by looking at the improvement of IQ scores over the years.
However, there is a catch. Lately, IQ levels are showing signs of slipping.
Nonetheless, the evidence shows that not only can your intelligence change. There are also guaranteed ways you can improve it.
You just need to be willing to set specific learning goals and then show up to complete them.
Because if you don’t, your intelligence will almost certainly degrade.
So if you’ve been hoping to get smarter, stick around.
On the page we’re taking a deep dive into malleable intelligence and putting the power of change directly into your hands.
In other words, intelligence cannot be fixed because it is the tests that define it, not some intrinsic quality of the brain.
And since tests are changing all the time, this means that the definition of intelligence also changes.
Updated definitions are normal in science. Even the definitions of crystal and fluid intelligence have changed over time as new ways of looking at the topic have evolved.
What Exactly Does “Intelligence” Mean?
Of course, the word “intelligence” needs more definition. According to James Flynn in What Is Intelligence?, we need to look at a bare minimum of six categories:
Mental acuity (dealing with problems you’ve never seen before)
Mental habits (ability to learn new things and apply them, like memorizing new vocabulary and using it in context)
Mental attitudes (the willingness to apply oneself to developing mental habits)
Knowledge accumulation (the more you know, the more you can know)
Assimilation speed (as you develop pattern recognition, you’ll learn faster)
Memory (ability to access information)
Taking on new challenges and learning new things automatically changes your intelligence. The more you take on over time, the more flexible your intelligence can become.
In each of the definitions of intelligence Flynn lists, change is a given. Even by virtue of seeing a problem you’ve never encountered before, your intelligence undergoes change.
How could it not?
So, when we’re asking questions like, is IQ genetic or learned?
In other words, the structures of our brain change the brain as they grow.
Since “malleable” means “changeable,” then the meaning of malleable intelligence is changing intelligence.
Because we know that the brain physically changes, so too must the content of the brain transform. And it’s only because the brain is malleable (changeable) that we’re able to learn anything at all.
“IQ scores can change significantly in a short period of time but, more importantly… targeted interventions can improve performance on the cognitive processes assessed in intelligence measures, contradicting the belief that our intelligence is fixed.”
Echoing Flynn, the authors of this handbook talk a lot about the importance of mindset. If you want to change your attitude you can.
The Attitude Of Parents Is Critical
Researchers have shown that how parents think about the malleability of intelligence deeply influences their children. Parents who express to their children that their intelligence can be shaped help actualize positive transformation.
Similar studies have shown that teachers and professors have the same effect on their students. If the instructor believes that your intelligence is fixed, then they might influence you into behaving as if it is.
However, if they know that intelligence is malleable, they are much more likely to help you improve your level of intelligence.
A Sad Personal Example Of A Negative Professor
It was my third year as a teaching assistant during my PhD. I was teaching under the main professor of a course called The Networked Imagination. It was all about the history of the Internet.
On the first day, the professor I was assisting stood in front of over 500 students in the lecture hall. She said that 90% of them
would fail. 50% of them wouldn’t even pass the first exam.
Crazy, right?
It is, but it happens in schools all the time.
And it needs to stop.
Is There Hope?
The scientific finding that we influence each other’s ability to improve our intelligence means one thing:
Parents and teachers in particular must be educated about intelligence and also think critically about the role it plays in the daily lives of their families.
“There will never be a time when everyone wants to think critically.”
This is especially sad given the free availability of some of the best critical thinking strategies for everyone.
How to Increase Your IQ (Starting Today)
I agree with Flynn that critical thinking is the key to improving your intelligence. Even if your IQ does change with age, you’ll still benefit from being able to question the role of intelligence in your life.
How do you develop solid critical thinking skills? You can start by educating yourself about:
If you do that, isn’t the question of whether or not intelligence is fixed easy and obvious to answer?
Before you know the planets or the presidents in order, you always had the potential to do so. After you’ve learned just one new planet or name, you have changed your intelligence.
And if you’d like to get started with a slightly more ambitious memory improvement program, give this free course a try:
If The Real Problem Is Mental Attitude…
Now that we know fixed intelligence is a myth, what about attitudes? After all, a lot of people certainly seem to be stubborn and beyond change.
Fortunately, there are a few things we can do.
One thing we can do is simply work on expanding the mind. Changing the terminology from “changing” to “expanding” could be just the trick a stubborn person needs.
You can also work on improving your concentration. As I discussed in The Victorious Mind, one reason so many people can’t learn memory techniques is that they can’t focus long enough to complete a memory goal.
It’s not their fault. The Internet is literally using the fact that our brains are malleable to ruin our attention spans. The problem has been well-studied and is called digital amnesia.
Ultimately, attitude change brings us back to the role of influence from parents and teachers.
However, they also note “success breeds complacency.” This finding lends some credibility to some of the criticisms that we’re now living in an age of decadence.
Originally, Flynn’s research didn’t jive with the idea that society is decaying. IQ scores just kept going up and up.
Recently, however, they’ve started going down again. And this could well be as a result of bad attitudes and the kind of bickering we’ve seen on social media platforms constantly eroding the critical thinking we talked about above.
My suggestion?
Recognize that intelligence never was fixed and never will be. We lived through an incredible information revolution since the birth of the Internet, and it does not have to sour.
Have the courage to stand up for the malleability of intelligence and let everyone know that improvement is possible.
But so is decay, and therein lies the risk.
Since it’s proven that intelligence can change for both the better and the worse, which side of the battle are you going to serve?
Scott Gosnell on Bruno and The Shadows of Ideas
Sep 30, 2021
Show notes
Scott Gosnell’s translations of the memory improvement books of Giordano Bruno are legendary.
They have enabled English readers around the world to access some of the richest ideas for using the Memory Palace technique around.
Now, Scott is launching a revised and updated edition of his first translation:
On the Shadows of Ideas.
Frankly, this is the most important Kickstarter campaign I’ve ever seen.
Why support it?
A few reasons.
First, this incredible book will help you understand the classic method of loci in a deeper way.
If you want to explore the Renaissance approach and learn more about using a memory wheel, On the Shadows of Ideas is essential reading.
Even better:
You’ll discover an incredible way to apply it to reflecting on life’s many challenges.
It’s an epic book, and the best part is that supporters of the current Kickstarter campaign can also sign up to get all of Scott’s Bruno translations.
You can also get access to a course that Scott is putting together – a learning experience I’m tremendously excited about!
In this interview, Scott and I dive deeper into the ideas in this book and the implications for your practice with mnemonics.
We also discuss the production of this kind of educational material from Bruno’s era to our own, its challenges and the wide open potentialities.
Enjoy this episode and I look forward to seeing you with your copy of this new edition!
The Memory Palace Of Hannibal Lecter – Legit or Pure Fantasy?
Sep 22, 2021
Show notes
Normally when we think about the Memory Palace technique, it’s for virtuous outcomes.
For example, medical students use it to learn the skills that help them save lives.
Hannibal Lecter?
Not so much.
In fact, this fictional doctor has such a horrible memory problem, the ways he uses the technique almost puts it to shame.
Good thing then that it truly is the stuff of fiction.
The question is…
How exactly is memory and the Memory Palace technique presented in the vast number of stories that have sprung from the original Thomas Harris novels?
Let’s have a look and think through some ways you could turn a bad relationship with your memory into a force for good.
An Overview of Hannibal’s Memory Palace
The first interesting thing about Hannibal Lecter is not so much memory, but language learning. For example, Lecter is said throughout the stories to be have studied:
Lithuanian
English
Italian
Latin
Japanese
I raise the point partly because it lets me make a scientifically valid pun: bilingualism is proven to be good for your brain, especially if you become a polyglot.
I also point it out because it’s part of Hannibal’s character as a well-studied individual, particularly one who murders many of his victims to teach lessons.
“Lecter” connects to words like “lecture” and “lector” which means reader in Latin.
But the name is also close to lēctūrus, which has meanings related to choosing, gathering and even stealing – the exact behaviors of serial killers.
The Memorable Buildings In Lecter’s Life
The next thing we should focus on are the buildings Lecter might have used for his Memory Palaces. Theoretically, these might include:
As far as I can tell, few of these buildings would be like the Norman Chapel, which is a very different way of approaching the Memory Palace technique.
By his own definition, Lecter’s Memory Palaces aren’t about storing information related to learning faster.
Instead, he primarily uses his “Memory Palaces” to mentally revisit the places being imprisoned prevents him from seeing.
Since he seems to know a lot about architecture, it’s little surprise he uses old churches. In fact, the most famous Hannibal Lecter Memory quote is:
“My palace is vast, even by medieval standards.”
This quote proves that he’s not really using memory techniques.
Few, if any memory masters would have only one Memory Palace. My friend Nelson Dellis, for example, has over 300!
The best part? Memory Palace examples are in abundance for anyone to take inspiration from.
The Major Memory Themes Associated With Lecter
I feel that the series of books, movies and serial episodes aren’t so much about what Hannibal Lecter likes to remember, but what he has repressed.
Instead, the dramatic focus is always on the negative aspects of his relationship to memory.
For example, there’s a symmetry between him being an astute language learner only to spend quite a long time without speaking to anyone.
He’s also said to have repressed memories of his sister.
Lecter’s self-induced forgetting later has a symmetrical relationship in the novel Hannibal. We see this when Lecter hypnotically induces Clarice Starling into serving as a proxy for his murdered sister.
It is ultimately repressing memories that turned Lecter into a killer, and there’s nothing I’ve seen in the series about using the techniques to remember information.
Rather, as Jessica Balanzategui has pointed out, memory serves throughout the stories as a symbol for repression and desire.
To be clear, the series does talk about him using this technique as a “mental system.” But it never shows him using it – certainly not for any positive outcomes like language learning or passing med school exams.
It is primarily depicted as a tool used to escape the punishment he deserves.
Resources For Creating Your Own Memory Palace
When we focus on the positive, Thomas Harris talks about what is usually called the Roman Room technique.
Harris attributes it to Cicero, who is often mistakenly credited as the author of a book from 90 BCE that contains Memory Palace instructions called Rhetorica ad Herennium.
For the best possible success with this ancient memory technique, pleasure consider giving my free course a try:
Don’t Wind Up Like Hannibal Lecter!
Listen, I’m a fan of crime fiction.
I’m not trying to rain on anyone’s parade.
I’m grateful for anything that draws attention to any mnemonic devices.
But mental health issues are real. People who do not deal with bad memories in appropriate ways can wind up leading criminal lives.
That’s why a lot of my recent work has involved teaching people how to use the Memory Palace technique to deal with harms created by issues like PTSD and depression.
If that’s you, consider going through this guided meditation:
The Memory Palace is a powerful technique, so what do you say?
Are you ready to use it as a force for good?
How to Increase IQ: 7 Actionable Activities
Sep 08, 2021
Show notes
If you want to know how to increase IQ, the answer is simple. Create and complete goals. Sounds like a sweeping statement, doesn’t it? I’ll explain why it’s true on this page. And rest assured, the main reason why intelligence goes stagnant in the first place is also simple to explain. It comes from the absence of goals, or the bad habit of not completing the ones you set for yourself. Think of it this way: Failing to continually fuel yourself with goals leads to feelings of worthlessness and shame on a downward spiral to rock bottom. But once you understand that intelligence requires goals in order to grow, there are endless self-directed missions you can create that are scientifically proven to make you smarter. And to help you even more, I’ll give you a list of suggested activities that improve cognitive function quickly. Ready to boost your IQ in ways that are easy and fun? Let’s get started. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXl_s6wnmak How To Increase Intelligence: 7 IQ Boosting Activities Now that you know how to separate your wants from your needs, let’s look at additional activities you can start practicing today. One: Boost Your Cardio I try to get to the gym at least once a week. The benefits to intelligence are too large to miss. As published in the journal Neuroscience, regular cardio exercise is incredibly important from cognition. One study in particular found that exercise improves “synaptic plasticity and neuronal excitability.” In other words, your brain is like a garden and exercise makes your brain wake up like flowers opening to the sun. Two: Meditate Daily There are a lot of reasons to meditate, and reducing mind wandering is one of them. As reported in Psychological Science, people prone to distraction are especially helped by even just a simple meditation practice. One reason meditation works so well is because meditation increases memory capacity. Because meditation trains you to continually bring your awareness back to a basic level of consciousness, your procedural memory improves. In other words, coming back to a state of focus becomes an autopilot procedure. That way you can learn a lot more, faster. Your intelligence will increase naturally as a result. For more on both simple and robust meditation techniques, I suggest reading The Victorious Mind: How to Master Memory, Meditation and Mental Well-Being. Three: Read In 90-Day Knowledge Missions People get interested in topics, but then give up too easily. But the trick to increasing your knowledge and ability to learn intelligently is persistence. Rather than getting interested in reading just one book on a topic, you want to read several. That way you develop what is called “pattern recognition.” So why 90-days of reading on a particular topic? Well, a lot of numbers around positive habit formation get tossed around: 21 days, 66 days, etc. But as Richard Wiseman reports based on research in his book 59 Seconds, 90 days is the closest number. And if you commit yourself to 90-day reading missions, you’ll not only learn enough about a topic to legitimately know a decent amount about it. You’ll instill the habit of reading for depth. As a result, you’ll develop more pattern recognition, spot more patterns and connect the dots in the future with much greater ease. Four: Learn a Musical Instrument Musicians enjoy many benefits. For one thing, it’s been proven that they can pull details out of conversations better in noisy crowds. This finding probably relates to the pattern recognition benefits you’ll get from mission-oriented reading. Music also helps with language acquisition because musicians become expert at handling a variety of sonic input sources. It’s like they can juggle sounds with their minds. The best part? Musicians are able to speak a language of their own with other instrumentalists. That’s why I have always kept up my own musical abilities, and often take on 90-day music memorization challenges. Five: Create New Things I’ll never forget when my fellow memory expert Mark Channon told me about how his son created a game. He went through everything from initial planning to product design. Not only did this set the stage for learning about game design, but also enabled him to learn better during the second iteration. Likewise when I write new books. Because the new goals I set are based on the existing competence I already have, I’m able to quickly discover industry practices, learn them and put them to use. As reported by Science Daily, the brain literally changes itself as we create. The existing neural networks become stronger and new ones form. Note: creating new things should not become a game of perfectionism. After all, perfectionists aren’t even perfect at being perfect. Instead, like Mark’s son, understand that just about everything related to your memory and intelligence is permanently in beta. That means you can always improve on the second iteration. Basic intelligence involves allowing yourself to make mistakes or miss critical details so that you can improve later. Six: Explore Historical IQ-Boosting Practices A lot of people think IQ began with Alfred Binet in the early 1900s. Although he might have designed the first IQ test, he was hardly the first person to think about how intelligence could be boosted. For example, many people practiced Pythagoreanism and actively promoted intelligence-boosting activities. Although many of their practices were based around math, they debated, meditated and trained their memories. Simonides of Ceos, another Greek, is considered one of the first teachers of memory techniques. But it was Ramon Llull with his ars combinatoria that many people attribute to the early origins of formal logic. Llull’s influence on Leibniz, for example, is well known. Later, in the 1600s, Giordano Bruno would revise ars combinatoria in a big way, and you can use a memory wheel in a simple way to think better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cYDmaBXvJg There are many more thinking tools like this that will increase your intelligence if you explore them. What makes them stand out in my mind is that these tools help you think categorically and see the world as organized by genres of information. By doing so, you rapidly help yourself reduce complexity and see the connections between things. You’re also able to mentally organize them in much more structured ways. Seven: Get Proper Brain Exercise By proper brain exercise, I mean activities that you conduct in your brain, not with an app. Or if you’re going to use an app, follow Dr. Christine Till’s research. As she found, people get barely any results from playing brain games unless they follow-up with a personal trainer. What counts as proper brain exercise when it comes to increasing your memory power? It must incorporate new learning It must be reasonably complex with increasing challenges It must be varied and interesting It must be engaged in frequently Here’s one such brain exercise you can try: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJbRKxDEHJE Can You Increase Your IQ? In a word, yes. The only catch is that there are multiple kinds of intelligence. Now, I’m not asking you to understand the difference between crystal and fluid intelligence. But if you want to increase your understanding of psychology and memory, you should learn about such matters. You should also look into the science of IQ testing, which remains divided. That division is a good thing because testing and retesting our assumptions is what science is all about. Richard Haeir is one of the more progressive scientists working on intelligence, and in this interview suggests that treatments to help people improve their IQ scores may be coming in the near future. For now, I see every reason to believe you can increase your intelligence and it comes down to how you definite it. I also see no reason to limit the understanding of your “intelligence quotient” to a test that may not reflect the kinds of problems you tackle in your everyday life. So how should the lifelong learner craft a personal definition of intelligence that can be worked on scientifically as an individual? Here’s an attempt: Intelligence is the ability to learn new information. And since there are many kinds of information, it’s important that you are specific. That’s where proper goal-setting comes in. As you’ll discover today, you can pick individual kinds of information to focus on and get incredible boosts as a result. Think of choosing specific goals like riding in a single lane. Instead of weaving around, you stick within the chosen framework. This fixity itself creates more focus, leading to boosts in intelligence. How To Increase Intelligence:An Important Nuance You Need To Know Of course, some readers might be thinking: “That’s my problem! I can’t learn new things!” If that’s the case, don’t worry. Learning how to learn is the first goal you’ll want to set. You can do that quite readily by learning related skills that will increase your meta-learning intelligence. For example, you can focus on how to: Read faster Use objective reasoning Practice reflective thinking Think more logically Improve your memory using a Memory Palace The point is to be goal-oriented. Pick one goal at a time. Master it thoroughly. This nuance really matters because when people fail to complete a learning project, their intelligence about how to learn is lacking. People who do not learn how to learn always remain frustrated with their inability to increase their intelligence. But when you bolster up on how to learn, your intelligence can grow predictably. What Increases IQ? The big picture for some quick wins boils down to common sense, something you can see in the lives of many people with some of the highest IQs ever recorded. For example: Regular exercise has been shown to boost your intelligence Meditation increases your attention span so you can learn more Sleep the appropriate number of hours Proper nutrition removes inflammation that creates brain fog Well-formed brain exercises increase cognitive reserve Learning a language boosts memory and multiple levels of intelligence Long term learning projects that don’t involve skimming or scanning Reading books that actually make you smarter Pursuing proven paths to memory improvement But the big kicker when it comes to how to improve your IQ is this: Base your learning projects and goals on existing competence. This is an idea I picked up from Jordan Peterson’s Maps of Meaning which has an excellent section on how Freud’s “existing competence” enabled him to spot psychological trends in literature like Shakespeare’s Hamlet. When you base your goals on what you are already capable of achieving, you can more readily move to the next level of difficulty. Let’s explore this point in greater detail. Why Goals Based On Existing Competence Boost Intelligence A lot of people want to shoot straight to the top. They want the Mensa membership without having to play the games and complete the puzzles. Or they want the millions in sales commissions without learning how to make a dollar. I’m sorry, but that’s not intelligence. That’s human vanity interfering with the smarts you need to succeed. When you visualize clearly, however, you’ll look at the current situation and what your intelligence is like now. Next, you’ll set a goal based on what your current intelligence can actually achieve. Rest assured, everyone is smart enough right now to do this. Here’s a simple exercise that will help. The Want Vs. Need Exercise As we’ve already seen, it’s possible to increase your IQ because intelligence is simply defined as the ability to learn new things. But that means we all need to continually improve how we learn. In other words, we “want” better intelligence, but we need to improve how we learn. Do this: On a sheet of paper, create two columns: The Want Column and the Need Column. Next, write out all the things you want in life. For example, if you want to become a doctor, write that down under “want.” Then, list what you need to do in order to achieve that goal. For example, you might list: Research medical schools Book an information interview with my doctor to ask about this career Watch videos about the learning journey Take qualifying example tests online This exercise is a very simple way to calibrate your attention on exactly how to increase your intelligence in a specific field. How to Improve Cognitive Function Over the Long Haul The most important thing to realize is that keeping mentally sharp is a marathon, not a race. It’s one you must be intimately involved in. No one can improve your intelligence for you. And as I hope to have demonstrated, all you have to do is start by improving your ability to learn new things. Everyone can work on this. In fact, doing so is the hallmark of intelligence. This is the reason why people flock to know what intelligent people are reading. Reading is one of the major ways to develop and maintain your ability to learn. As is persistence and taking steps to develop the mental strength we all need to be consistent. By focusing on both creating and completing goals, you will rapidly become smarter. As I often like to say, S.M.A.R.T.E.R. = Serious, mature and ready to embrace reality. And the reality is, the world needs as many reality-embracing people as possible. If you’d like help with the memory improvement portion of doing that, feel free to grab my free course: So what do you say? Are you ready to increase your intelligence and join the ranks of those working to improve the world?
How to Remember Conversations (4 Secret Tricks)
Sep 01, 2021
Show notes
Do you wish you knew how to remember everything you hear?
If so, you might feel like you’re a poor listener because you forget so many details.
Worse, you wind up losing out on so many opportunities to participate in the present and take action in the future.
For example, let’s say someone mentions a book.
You know you just have to read it because it’s going to help you conquer an important goal.
But after you leave your meeting, you not only forget what the book is called. You even forget that anyone mentioned the perfect path existed for you in the first place.
Good news:
There’s a way to eliminate this problem from your life forever.
On this page, I’ll show you how to remember all the important details in any conversation from now on.
You’re about to become a “Warrior of the Mind” who never forgets important details again.
Let’s get started.
How to Remember Conversations Better In 4 Steps
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Iuqfmpo8CI
The steps you’re about to learn begin with a meta-step. You need to do this first in order to see any improvement in your memory for remembering everything you hear.
Commit.
I know, I know.
Some people are already clicking the “back” button because some crazy teacher on the Internet is trying to hold you accountable to your goals.
But we all know it’s true.
Those who succeed at anything are committed to learning skills and practicing.
And that’s all that I ask in the conversation we’re having now:
Remember the need to commit so that you can improve in life.
With that in mind, here’s what I want you to commit to first:
One: The Spatial Memory Hack That Makes Every Bad Listener Good
The first thing you need to do is start becoming more aware of the details as they fly past your ears.Then you need to grab ho
ld of them and pin them into place.
To do this, you’ll want to learn a special technique called the Memory Palace.
There are a few ways to use this technique for conversations and we’ll get into them.
The first thing to understand is that you can use rooms to “place” ideas that you want to memorize.
For example, let’s say the friends Janet and Tina are hanging out in a cafe.
Janet tells Tina about a book that will help her improve her memory. The book is called The Victorious Mind, by Anthony Metivier.
To use a Memory Palace, Tina takes the difficult new title and connects it with information she already knows. She then mentally places this familiar association in the corner of the cafe.
By focusing on a location in a room and placing an association, you have a reference point you can return to later.
Let’s say Tina’s a fan of the show Victor Frankenstein. The book is by Anthony Metivier, so she imagines Victor handing his mind to an ant after a battle. He’s feeling victorious when he does it.
Now, this association is not a one-to-one correspondence. But later when Tina searches for the book on Google, she’s going to think back to the corner of that cafe and remember the key words: Victorious, mind and Anthony based on the associative-imagery.
These are the basics of the Memory Palace technique.
Instead of just having Victor Frankenstein hand his mind to an ant, imagine his mind exploding like a bomb.
Make sure to make your associations multi sensory. That way, they’ll be even easier to remember later.
Hearing the sound of the explosion and feeling its force in your imagination will make the memory much stickier when you think back to that corner in the cafe.
This kind of elaborative encoding can feel difficult when you’re new to using these techniques.
The trick is to have a system for adding the exaggerations. I use the KAVE COGS formula:
Kinesthetic
Auditory
Visual
Emotional
Conceptual
Olfactory
Gustatory
Spatial
One way to practice running through each of these is to run through them all while developing your first pegword method.
Three: Practice Scaling
By this point, you’re probably thinking…
“Great.
I know how to memorize just one detail.
What about the thousands of details I encounter in conversations every week?”
Well, we all start somewhere. If you can’t memorize one detail, there’s no point in worrying about how to memorize thousands of them, right?
Scaling up to multiple details is easy, but you need the basics mastered first.
Then, to scale is easy, provided you follow this simple recommendation:
Know how to turn any room into a Memory Palace with at least 8 Magnetic Stations in it.
Using a simple number system, you can turn any room into a Memory Palace that will help you recall every important detail in any conversation.
This is what we call a “Magnetic Square” in the MMM Masterclass. It’s one of several different ways to use the Memory Palace technique.
I like this for cafe meetings because it makes it easy to turn any room into a powerful memory tool.
You can also learn how to expand it into a “Magnetic Cube,” and if you’d like all the details on more variations, this free course should do the trick:
The point is to build your skills gradually. Learn to memorize a few details from conversations first. Then scale.
And remember:
You don’t actually have to be in the room you’re using to remember the details of any given conversation. You can think about any building or location around the world. You just need to prepare the Memory Palaces you want to use first.
When listening to remember, using the news and podcasts makes for great practice. One is visual and audio where the other is purely auditory.
When watching news, you can use the screen as a Memory Palace to encode details as they emerge.
Practice memorizing conversations in real time by turning your TV into a small Memory Palace.
This small space might allow you to memorize only four details, but it keeps you focused on the practice. If you get really good, you can also learn ways to reuse Memory Palaces.
You can also use the body of the reporter to capture and pin details:
Practice turning the body into a Memory Palace by using news anchors. Then use the bodies of your friends or people at meetings to remember what they say during conversations.
Then, when you’re used to doing this with people on TV, you can transfer linking details to the bodies of people with whom you hold conversations.
When it comes to podcasts, you can use your smartphone, or even try using objects, like I talk about in this video about my memory practice habits:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyUsLTPHbTk
How To Retain Information When Listening
So far, you’ve learned how to use rooms, objects like TVs and human bodies to encode information you hear during conversations.
When it comes to retention, you’ll want to do a small amount of repetition that fires off the KAVE COGS we talked about previously.
For example, I recently met with a private coaching client named Michael.
Within the first few minutes of speaking, Michael told me about a friend named Kerry, a math teacher named Igor and talked about Naples, Harvard, studying chemistry for a Regents exam and Upstate New York.
Using the association technique you learned above, I placed all of these details around the screen of my computer as we Skyped. But I also quickly revisited each and went through the KAVE COGS.
To take just one example, when he mentioned he had a friend named Kerry, I used KAVE COGS to associate that name with Kerry King, the guitarist in Slayer.
I felt Kerry’s guitar as if I was holding it myself, heard a Slayer song, felt emotions associated with it, and so on.
Hearing music, feeling the sensation of a guitar and feeling emotions help memories stick very quickly.
You might think it’s a lot of heavy lifting to go through 8 “Magnetic Modes” so quickly, but with a small amount of practice, it’s more than easy. It’s incredibly fun.
Remembering For The Long Term
If you want to hang onto the information from conversations for the long haul, please make sure to use the Recall Rehearsal patterns taught in the MMM Masterclass.
You’ll also do very well to:
Write down what you heard later
Speak about the key details to verbalize the info in your own words
Do any follow up reading
Listen to any podcasts or videos that will deepen the information
Also, understand that there’s nothing wrong with taking notes during conversations.
Although I can memorize in real time, I still sometimes jot things down. In fact, it’s hard to test if you were correct about certain details if you don’t write the info down.
For example, a friend of mine suggested that I visit Mt. Nebo.
Memorizing the name of this location was easy.
But I wanted to make sure what I memorized was accurate later, and we were in a noisy cafe and I wasn’t sure if I’d heard the correct pronunciation.
That’s why I wrote it down.
It’s perfectly okay to take notes during conversations. Sometimes you need to in order to make sure you have pronunciations correct.
Remembering Things You Want Or Need To Do In The Future
Sometimes people tell you things that involve the future, like something you want to look up or visit.
To remember future things, you have at least two options:
Mnemonic Calendar
Spatial labelling
Using a Mnemonic Calendar involves learning the Major System. This lets you create images for every number.
For example, when I wanted to remember that my friend Nick’s birthday is October 25th, I imagined a nail going through a pumpkin. Nail is the image for 25 and pumpkin is the image for October.
When it comes to spatial labelling, I’ll give you an example.
As I discussed in this TEDx Talk, my friend Ben told me the title of a book I absolutely needed to read.
I usually don’t carry the Internet with me (to protect my memory). I remembered to order it when I got back home by placing an associative image of Happiness Beyond Thought at my desk.
Then, when I got home, I literally walked into a Memory Palace and was reminded to look the book up and order it.
You can do this with all kinds of things you need to remember, from groceries for a recipe, making a dentist appointment or memorizing your credit card so you don’t have to pull it out every time you shop online.
Remember Everything You Hear?
Frankly, I’m not sure anyone needs to remember everything.
The trick is being able to remember the information that matters.
Knowing exactly what that information might be is its own skill, and it involves developing pattern recognition and discernment.
Being able to memorize will naturally guide you to developing these meta-skills.
And that means that the best time to get started was yesterday.
The second best time is now.
So what do you say?
Are you ready to remember more from the conversations you hold?
Get some Memory Palaces created, learn to associate and please keep me posted on your progress updates along the way!
How to Memorize 70 Decks of Playing Cards For Charity: A Memory Training Convo with Braden Adams
Aug 12, 2021
Show notes
Imagine memorizing 70 decks of playing cards to raise money for Alzheimer’s.
Not just to fund research into curing the disease, but also to support front line workers who help care for the victims of this cruel disease.
Well, that’s the goal memory athlete Braden Adams set for himself.
Think about this for a second: That’s 70 times 52…
3640 cards, all shuffled up.
That’s a lot of Memory Palace prep and Braden and I dig into that topic, including the “Shadow” technique used for encoding the cards – a powerful way of applying mnemonic tacts you’re not going to miss.
But it’s the meaning of Braden’s mission I want to focus on above all.
It is incredible.
Why?
Because memorizing cards is a perfectly aligned symbol for the battle against conditions like Alzheimer’s.
After all, the disease mixes up your thoughts and memories, but when you have the kind of memory skills Braden has developed for yourself, no matter how shuffled those cards get, you can still lay everything out in perfect order.
I wanted to learn more about this training journey and help spread the word about his mission.
His tips on creating a proper Memory Palace are golden.
And as we speak, people have already been donating to the cause!
If you’d like to toss in a few Magnetic clams, as I’ve done myself, you’ll find the donation link in the description or can simply type this handy link I’ve created for the cause.
But you can also consider donating to any Alzheimer’s charity near you during this drive.
You can also watch Braden memorize and recall the decks live on August 28th on his stream by visiting his Twitch page.
Until the event takes place, if you like digging deep into the nitty gritty about how memory techniques work and how you can use them to complete MASSIVE memory projects like memorizing 70 decks of cards, I think you’re going to love this discussion.
Our TOPPODCAST Picks 
Stay Connected
Ever heard of a note taking technique that involves vibrant colors and keywords and asked yourself…
Is intelligence fixed? Of course not. 
Scott Gosnell’s translations of the memory improvement books of Giordano Bruno are legendary.
Normally when we think about the Memory Palace technique, it’s for virtuous outcomes. 
Do you wish you knew how to remember everything you hear?
Imagine memorizing 70 decks of playing cards to raise money for Alzheimer’s. 
