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I’m always on the lookout for new ways to make the most of myself, and doing so found me looking at the book Mind Performance Hacks by Ron Hale-Evans. I’d seen his work elsewhere, at the mentat wiki, an excellent resource for finding new tips and techniques for revving up the speed, range, and depth of your thinking. While the wiki is an excellent free resource, I actually like the book a little better.
The Good.
This book is overflowing with tips and tricks you can use to try to almost anything you can think of for day-to-day functions. The book is well organized and laid out into separate sections: Memory, Information Processing, Creativity, Math, Decision Making, Communication, Clarity, and Mental Fitness. Each section has several hacks to use.
The hacks are listed sequentially, with a thermometer showing the difficulty of using each one. The system requirements on some of them can be pretty steep, but it’s good to know that before hand.
A few of my favorite hacks are:
- #13: Catch your ideas, wherein methods are suggested to hang on to the good ideas as opposed to letting them slip away.
- #39: Turn your hands into an abacus, wherein you learn an ancient Korean method for doing almost exactly that.
- #51: Learn an artificial language. I’m all in favor of people learning at least two languages total, because it expands their perspective. The words of language influence how one thinks and vice-versa. By learning a new language, you open up your field-of-view and thus gain more mental flexibility.
- The entire section on clarity
- The common sense advice in the section on mental fitness
All in all, the hacks are well laid out with as much instruction as is fitting. Obviously you won’t find tomes on new languages in the book, but you do find resources to where such info can be found.
The Bad
As I mentioned before, the system requirements for some of them can be rather steep. When I first got the book, I didn’t have quite enough discipline to complete a list of 100 combinations of letters. Some combinations are just hard to produce, so I kept it close by in case anything struck me and over a year later, I still haven’t gotten around to finishing it, because by now it’s such a low-priority item. (In case you were curious, it was to construct a mental “filing cabinet” of 10,000 “locations” to store information. My partially completed list has helped me in a minor way, so it’s a matter of time before the completion of the list ranks higher in my To Do column).
Another thing that I found was that while many of the hacks listed are downright useful, quite a few of them amount to mental parlor tricks. The hack for being able to count to a million on your fingers, for example. Interesting, but I can’t say that it would ever be used. Contrasted with the “abacus” hack listed above, it feels like it and some others were added as filler material.
The bottom line.
Despite the book’s minor flaws, it remains nonetheless one of my favorites on it’s topics. Reading the book alone gets my mind moving in new directions whenever I open it. Whether you’re an old hand or just getting started, there’s something for you in this book.
If you have any thoughts or experiences with this book to share, please leave a comment.
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