Product Description

You're smart. This book can make you smarter. Mind Performance Hacks provides real-life tips and tools for overclocking your brain and becoming a better thinker. In the increasingly frenetic pace of today's information economy, managing your life requires hacking your brain. With this book, you'll cut through the clutter and tune up your brain intentionally, safely, and productively. Grounded in current research and theory, but offering practical solutions you can apply immediately, Mind Performance Hacks is filled with life hacks that teach you to:

• Use mnemonic tricks to remember numbers, names, dates, and other flotsam you need to recall
• Put down your calculator and perform complex math in your head, with your fingers, or on the back of a napkin
• Spark your creativity with innovative brainstorming methods
• Use effective systems to capture new ideas before they get away
• Communicate in creative new ways-even using artificial languages
• Make better decisions by foreseeing problems and finding surprising solutions
• Improve your mental fitness with cool tricks and games

While the hugely successful Mind Hacks showed you how your brain works, Mind Performance Hacks shows you how to make it work better.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12698 in Books
• Published on: 2006-02-06
• Format: Illustrated
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 330 pages

About the Author
Ron Hale-Evans is a writer and game designer who earns his daily sandwich with frequent gigs as a technical writer. He has a bachelor's degree in psychology from Yale, with a minor in philosophy. Thinking a lot about thinking led him to create the Mentat Wiki at http://www.ludism.org/mentat, which led to this book. His multifarious and nefarious other projects can be accessed from his home page, http://ron.ludism.org, including his award-winning board games, a list of his Short-Duration Personal Saviours, and his blog.

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Customer Reviews

Ideas -- Some Good, Some Wrong
This book is a summary of techniques taken from the mentat wiki. While skimming a sample of hacks from each section, I discovered some less-than-scientific ideas. So, I went to the URL and tracked some of the links. I discovered that some of the links were legitimate links to peer-reviewed wikis, like Wikipedia. However, the contents of mentat do not appear to be peer-reviewed. For example, one link was to an interpretation of a research project which contained the researcher's comment that the site did not correctly interpret his research. Also, some links were to commercial web sites. So, the mentat content is simply a collection of individual opinions about different subjects. Therefore, as always, the hacks in this book should be evaluated with a critical mind. Some of the ideas are legitimate; some are simply extensions of long-held myths; some could be self-motivated trivia.

Brain hacks
Great book! You can learn many hacks to save time, sharpen your mind, remember things, Etc. Etc. Buy it! You will surely find something that will interest you, or help better develop your mind!

Lots of ideas, very few of practical use
Many of the 'hacks' are actually more difficult than the problem they are intended to solve.