Entertaining Your Brain?

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?"

Comments

Memorizing Pi

[sahrss]

Well, here's one someone posted here on /. a while back:
http://theory.cs.iitm.ernet.in/~arvindn/pi/

I've tried it, and it probably would increase memorization ability, but I'm actually too lazy and busy to keep it up.

Wikipedia

[Przepla]

Wikipedia is always in need of good contributors. Give it a try.

Meditation.

[eyeball]

Like the subject says -- Meditation.

There are plenty of resources online, but I wouldn't be a /. poster if I didn't be a know-it-all and give my advice: You goal should be an hour a day, but It's really difficult to just sit down the first tim and do one hour straight. So start at 5 minutes, and when you can sit still for the whole time, increase by 5 minutes the next day.

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.

Re:Meditation.

[Clay_Culver]

Well, meditation is a good idea, though the previous poster didn't explain why. Meditation can help focus the mind, and allow you to concentrate fully on what you are doing. I used to have this problem all the time in high school. Every time I sat down to do something, distractions came by the dozens to take me away from the task at hand. Early in my senior year I started studying Zen (which is a sect of Buddhism), and after meditating and being mindful of what I was doing for quite some time, I noticed significant improvements in my ability to concentrate on what I'm doing.

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.

Re:Meditation.

[StiLTs]

You can develop concentration and focus with meditation, or with anything else that requires them. If you're not concentrating on what you're doing, make it more difficult: if you can play a piece on the piano without hitting any wrong notes, try playing it with perfect posture and rhythm; if you're fluent with a programming language, write your next source file with cat; if visualization-meditation on a labyrinth is getting easy, imagine moving through the same labyrinth with walls made of boulders, a blue sky overhead, and shrubs at your feet. The better your concentration and focus, the better your performance in anything you do.

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.

If you're so smart...

[fm6]

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?

I don't follow. Do feel stupid or ignorant? These are two different things. I guess, like most people, you confuse intelligence with rote knowledge of facts.

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.

Relative Intelligence

[Nutcase]

I am often in the same situation. People tell me that I think totally differently from most people and am really smart and all that stuff. It's very hard to understand what they mean, because I just think the way I always have. I came to the conclusion that there are different types of intelligence, and people in various types view the other types as the intelligent ones.

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.

Hey, some tips

[cookiepus]

I often ask myself the same question (and not because people tell me I am brilliant).

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.

Somewhat related...

[nacturation]

This article talks about Rajan Mahadevan who memorized some 31,000+ digits of pi for the (then) world record. Another interesting article on Mahadevan if you're into that.

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.)