How to think clearly and become smarter

According to the latest neuroscience, the human brain uses neurons in the left visual cortex to process written words as whole word units. The brain combines these words and their stored meanings to remember and understand information.

Analytical thinking is the process of remembering words and putting their meanings into context. This process is not simply accessing a mental dictionary. Every time you use words, you re-create their meaning.

The words you habitually use when you’re thinking (and then expressing those thoughts) mold how you see the world. For example, people who habitually think (and speak and write) the word “hate” tend to find an ever-increasing number of things to hate.

This relationship between word usage and perception is hugely important in business. When you train yourself to speak and write using clearly defined words arranged into concise sentences, you’re training your brain to think more clearly.

More important, when you write and speak more clearly, you increase your positive influence on your team. Due to their mirror neurons, they’ll begin to imitate your clarity in their own thought processes. Clarity is contagious.

Conversely, if you habitually use fuzzy, ill-defined words crammed into long and convoluted sentences, you’re training your brain–and the brains of your team members–to think less clearly. Confusion is also contagious.

With that in mind, here are three easy ways to hone your word skills:

1. Mentally edit out fuzzy buzzwords.

While most business buzzwords are simply annoying (like saying “utilize” rather than “use”), some are so fuzzy and vague that they automatically lead to confused thinking.

The worst offenders are: alignment, best of breed, client-centric, core competency, crystallize, customer-centric, diversity, empowerment, holistic, leading, leverage, generation, paradigm, robust, seamless, stakeholder, sustainability, and synergy.

Take the term synergy. In physics, synergy describes the creation of a whole that’s greater than the arithmetic sum of its parts. Classic example: combining flour, water, yeast and heat to create a loaf of bread.

In business, though, synergy generally pops up when disparate organizations are combined, as in a merger, acquisition, or corporate restructuring. In business, however, synergy is rare to the point of nonexistence.

“Even when you have a deal that looks lovely on paper,” says Wharton’s Emilie Feldman, “getting cultures to fit together, people to stay on board, merging I.T. systems and back offices: all these things are really hard.”

Rather than ask difficult questions and think things thoroughly through, decision makers unconsciously use the word synergy to make problematic deals seem more palatable, like slathering ketchup over rancid meatloaf.

Mentally editing out the fuzzy, vague buzzwords when you are talking, speaking, listening, or reading gradually clears your mind of the confusion they create, thereby making you smarter.

2. Simplify your business writing.

If you find yourself writing or reading long, complex sentences at work, edit and reedit them so that they express the gist in fewer words. Do this repeatedly and over time you’ll automatically accustom your brain to shorter, clearer wordings.

Here’s how this works. A subscriber to my free weekly newsletter recently sent me this fairly typical example of biz-blab:

Leveraging XYZ technology and compliance expertise can give your business an important competitive advantage. XYZ can help you manage the ‘people side’ of your businesses more effectively, avoiding compliance pitfalls and creating key benefits for the businesses and your employees, while simultaneously freeing up time for owners and executives to concentrate on growing their businesses by focusing on operations, strategy, and innovation.

While that paragraph is grammatically correct, it’s using a lot of words to waltz around a fairly simple concept. I’m sure that if you read it carefully, you know what they’re getting at, but it can be worded with much more economy, like so:

XYZ handles your personnel busywork so that you can spend more time growing your business.

Simplifying biz-blab to the fewest number of words doesn’t just make your writing crisper, it also habituates your mind to seek the simple essence of needlessly complex concepts. The more often you practice this clarification process, the smarter you get.

3. Play the “one syllable” game.

This exercise trains your brain to use smaller, easier-to-understand words rather than complex ones. The concept is simple: Try to communicate business ideas using words of only one syllable.

For example, if I were trying to communicate the rules of the game using those rules, I’d write: “The point of the game is to talk and write with words that are so short that they can not be split.”

While this kind of writing and speaking doesn’t result in anything you’d actually use in a business discussion, the mental effort of oversimplifying accustoms your brain to reach for the small words rather than the overly complex ones.

Since complex words tend to “complexify” your thoughts (and your expression of them), habitually using common words leads toward clearer thinking.

Not only is exercise smart for your heart and weight, but it can make you smarter and better at what you do.

Anyone with a brain exercises these days, but did you know exercise can return the favor and train your brain? Not only is exercise smart for your heart and weight, but it can make you smarter and better at what you do.

“I like to say that exercise is like taking a little Prozac or a little Ritalin at just the right moment,” says John J. Ratey, MD, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and author of A User’s Guide to the Brain. “Exercise is really for the brain, not the body. It affects mood, vitality, alertness, and feelings of well-being.”

Stephen C. Putnam, MEd, took up canoeing in a serious way to combat the symptoms of adult ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). Then he wrote a book, titled Nature’s Ritalin for the Marathon Mind, about the benefits of exercise on troublesome brain disorders such as ADHD, a neurological/behavioral condition resulting in hyperactivity and the inability to focus on tasks.

Putnam cites studies of children who ran around for 15 to 45 minutes before class and cut their ants-in-the-pants behavior by half when they got to class. As with most exercise, the effects were relatively lasting — smoothing out behavior two to four hours after the exercise.

Putnam also points to some preliminary animal research that suggests that exercise can cause new stem cells to grow, refreshing the brain and other body parts. According to Ratey, exercise also stimulates nerve growth factors. “I call it Miracle-Gro for the brain,” he says.

How Exercise Trains the Brain

Christin Anderson, MS, wellness and fitness coordinator of the University of San Francisco, explains that exercise affects many sites within the nervous system and sets off pleasure chemicals such as serotonin and dopamine that make us feel calm, happy, and euphoric.

In other words, if you don’t want to wait for those good feelings to come by accident (if they do), you can bring them on by exercising.

“When one exercises,” Anderson says, “you can think more clearly, perform better, and your morale is better. This is pure science — stimulate your nervous system and function at a higher level.”

Continued

Effects of Exercise on Depression

Almost everyone has heard of the “fog of war,” but the “fog of living” is depression. “Depression affects memory and effectiveness (not to mention the ability to get up, get dressed, and function),” Anderson says. “If you can control your physiology, you can relax, focus, and remember.”

In a study reported in the Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness in 2001, 80 young male and female volunteers were tested for mood and then did aerobics for an hour. Of the 80, 52 were depressed before the exercise. That group was the most likely to benefit, reporting a reduction in anger, fatigue, and tension. They also felt more vigorous after the workout.

A well-known study was done at Duke University involving 150 people 50 or older who had been diagnosed with depression. They were divided into three groups and given either exercise as a treatment for four months, the antidepressant drug Zoloft, or a combination of the two.

At the end of the four months, all three groups felt better. But the researchers didn’t leave it there. They checked again in six months, and the exercise group had relapsed at significantly lower rates than the Zoloft or combination groups. In fact, the scientists felt that giving the Zoloft along with the exercise undermined the effects of the exercise, saying the combination group might have preferred to feel they had worked for their improvement rather than having to take a pill.

This doesn’t mean, the researcher said, that exercise is a cureall for every case of depression. Seeking out the study showed motivation, and motivation can be hard to come by when you’re depressed.

Bipolar disorder also does not seem to respond as well to exercise. On the other hand, anxiety disorders sometimes respond even more quickly.

If You Want to Try Exercise as a Brain Trainer

Single bouts of exercise can reduce anxiety for several hours afterward, although there may be a lag time before the good feeling sets in if exercise is too intense (good news for those who find fanatical, prolonged, “check your pulse” exercise unappealing).

Continued

Therefore, low to moderate forms of exercise are recommended for brain training. Ratey recommends 8 to 12 minutes a day of sweating and breathing-hard exercise (60% of maximum heart rate) for brain training.

Anderson says a minimum would be 30 minutes of moderate exercise, walking, hiking, or swimming, three times a week. Half an hour to an hour, four to five times a week would be even better. For those who want to be REALLY on the ball, 90 minutes five to six times a week would not be out of line, she says.

Anderson recommends two sessions a day for this purpose, rather than one big heaving workout. “Swim for 20 minutes in the morning, then walk at night,” she advises. “Right after hard, intense exercise, you may not be as acute. Overtraining can set off enzymes that can lead to fatigue, which is the enemy of alertness.”

Anderson also says the type of exercise you select depends on your personality. It may be the opposite of what you’d expect. “If you’re a 32-year-old male, work 70 hours a week, play ball twice on the weekend and jog daily,” she says, “you may need to do some yoga to improve your mental acuity.” Some coaches, she points, out actually have to get people to relax to find their “edge.” Meditation can also be a great complement to exercise, she adds. Then: “Do what you enjoy. That’s important.”

“You want to ready your brain for learning,” Ratey says. For that to happen, all the chemicals must “jog” into place.

Star Lawrence is a medical journalist based in the Phoenix area.

Sources

SOURCES: John J. Ratey, MD, associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, author, A User’s Guide to the Brain. Stephen C. Putnam, MEd, author, Nature’s Ritalin for the Marathon Mind. Christin Anderson, MS, wellness and fitness coordinator, University of San Francisco. University of Cincinnati web site.

This article was written by Valerie Pierce and originally published on September 14, 2015 on

Valerie Pierce, Associate Faculty at Ashridge Executive Education, provides some solutions to challenge this outward blame culture and provides advice for developing clear focus.

Here are five steps to developing much needed focus by building up essential clear thinking skills:

Check Your Attitude
It is incredible how our focus follows our desires. To illustrate this, notice how easy it is to think of lots of ways and new ideas to achieve a goal when you really want it. Conversely, if you do not want to achieve a goal, notice how you focus on all of the reasons why it is not a good idea to forge ahead. To attain clear Focus – try to be honest about your desire to achieve a particular goal – Do you really want it? This may save you a lot of time at the very beginning or your pursuits.

Have a Clear Purpose
To achieve our goals we must be specific. The reason for this is that it is impossible to think towards a moving target. If we keep changing our goal, then we are also demanding of our brain to continually change its focus and so can lose our direction. To keep your focus, sit down for five minutes and write down, as clearly as you can, what you want to achieve.

Use Your Passion to control your Emotions
There is a simple reason why this is so: As you strive for your goal, Your Passion overcomes problems as it focuses on the pleasure of achieving the perfect goal. Your Emotions, however, can be overwhelmed by problems as they feel the pain to the Ego of a potential loss of the goal.

To keep your focus, clearly look ahead to achieve what you want: use your Passion to control your emotions.

Use your Negative Thinking to produce Positive Action
One of the most valuable assets we have is our Negative Thinking – for far from negative thinking leading to negativity, negative thinking is the stimulus that can free our imagination to achieve exactly what we want.

Using the phrase ‘Why not = How to’ you can stimulate your imagination to focus your negative thinking into positive action.For example, Anna, a member of a large corporation in the UK told me how she was able to progress her career on a global level, by using this technique.

She looked at the reasons why she could not progress in her career – the ‘Why nots’. They were:

• • She lacked experience and contacts for her new career path· She did not have a visa to work in the USA where she needed to be to progress her career
  • She was lonely to leave her family and friends

And by using these negatives as a signpost, instead of a blocker to her career progression, she was able to turn these ‘why-nots’ into a ‘how to’ plan to achieve her goal:

• • Anna sought out colleagues and mentors who could help her to gain the experience and knowledge that allowed her to progress.
  • Amongst these contacts Anna found a sponsor who helped her to gain a short term contract in a similar corporation in New York. This short term contract became the springboard to finding a permanent position.
  • This was the easiest to overcome, as Anna kept in constant contact with family and friends through electronic and social media – and she made some fantastic new friends Stateside.

So remember, your negative thinking is the intelligence that allows you to focus on achieving your goals if you can use it in a positive way.

Use Cool Logic in Hot Situations to reach your Goal
This last skill is most important to retaining focus, for so many of us can begin with clear focus on our goals, but then be diverted by ourselves or others to lose that clear direction.

The golden mantra to retain clear direction to achieve what you want is to ‘focus on the issue, not the ego’ – and learn to see the difference in all conversations you have.

What this means is that in every conversation, either within yourself or with others, make sure that you are concentrating on the issue you are trying to achieve, only. Do not let the conversation focus on the egos involved. For example, if you find your focus is more on your ability or the ability of others to achieve your project or goal, you may find yourselves becoming defensive and egos becoming more important than the issue at hand.

Using ‘Cool Logic in Hot Situations’ means that you direct all conversations to progress the goal you want to reach in an objective and purposeful way.

Being aware of these five simple steps will switch your personal psychology to achieving what you want.

If you would like to find out more about Hult’s global business programs, download a brochure here.

Valerie is the Author of the book ‘FOCUS: The Art of Clear Thinking’ (2014) and has been named as one of Ireland’s Top 50 Most Influential Women in Irish Business (Sunday Tribune). With her background in analytical philosophy, she developed the first ‘Clear and Critical Thinking’ business training module in 1990. CCT training focuses on developing competent thinking skills in all aspects of leadership, communication, problem solving and decision making.

Step up your game with executive education at Ashridge agile business school. To find out more, take a look at our blog My journey – From medical doctor to Executive MBA, or firm up your exec career footing with a Masters in International Business from Hult. Download a brochure or get in touch today to find out how Hult can help you learn everything about the business world, the future, and yourself.

If you Google “books that make you smarter,” you’ll come up with over 91.000.000 search results. This isn’t a fluke: reading has always been believed to enrich the mind, and in the past several decades, multiple studies have backed up this belief. But there isn’t only one way to become “smarter.” On the contrary, there are three acknowledged types of intelligence: fluid, crystallized, and emotional. In this article you will find a list of books to help you stimulate and exercise all three.

Firstly, however, let’s do a quick recap of the theories behind books that make you smarter. Fluid intelligence is the ability to think abstractly, to establish relationships between separate concepts, to reason and learn new things. Crystallized intelligence involves the compilation of knowledge acquired throughout your life, and the ability to solve problems based on such knowledge. Finally, emotional intelligence is the ability to understand and manage one’s own emotions.

On to the list of books that make you smarter.

1. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

This 2011 bestseller by Nobel Laureate Kahneman is an intriguing account of the way the human brain works, with its two main manners of thinking and coming to decisions: namely, fast and slow. How do they differ? Is one of them better? Kahneman seeks to explore this, and more.

2. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari.

A deeply compelling exploration of human history, Harari’s work delves into the evolution of the human species, from the time that Homo Sapiens shared the earth with others, to the contemporary human, and beyond. It tracks the three great revolutions that altered the course of humankind, and the way our brains and cultures developed and expanded.

3. Train Your Brain: 60 Days to a Better Brain by Dr. Ryuta Kawashima

This short book undertakes to stimulate your brain in order to prevent its aging and loss of capabilities. It consists in a series of spreadsheets with daily exercises to boost your brainpower. A bestseller in Japan, it’s a practical and engaging way to stimulate your mind.

4. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

This wildly popular book can boast of divulging complex scientific topics in an intelligible, accessible manner. Bryson wrote it in order to make science interesting for himself as well as the everyday reader. With a rating of 4.2 stars on Goodreads, it’s fair to say that he succeeded.

5. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass

It is a heart-wrenching yet inspiring account of the power of learning and reading, as well as an exploration of the ways in which slavery was denigrating for slaves and slaveowners alike (this doesn’t negate the responsibility or evil of the latter).

6. The Holy Bible

It contains the most important document(s) of both Judaism and Christianity, and has been wielded as a weapon throughout most of its history. Depending on whose hands it has fallen in, it has been both a blessing and curse. Whether you’re a believer or not, it’s an interesting account of two of the most prominent religions in the world.

7. The Quran

If reading the Bible is important, the Quran is equally so. Islam has been subjected to incredibly gross attacks for years, and its cornerstone text provides a deeper understanding of another of the most followed – and persecuted – religions of our time.

8. 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do by Amy Morin

Morin’s book offers practical, actionable advice to stimulate emotional intelligence. She draws from her experience as a licensed clinical social worker, and her own journey through devastating loss, to sketch a map of qualities that help build emotional resilience.

9. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

Hawking wrote this definitive account of cosmology for the non-scientist who wished to know more about this fascinating science. Updated throughout the years, A Brief History of Time remains unsurpassed as an introduction to the topic.

10. Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture edited by Roxane Gay

In the era of #MeToo, this anthology of essays chronicles the gaslighting permeating our world, that allows rape culture to thrive. Sexual assault and harassment are routinely dismissed as “not that bad”, making it harder for survivors to acknowledge or speak out about the abuse they are victims of.

Of course, this list of books that make you smarter is incredibly limited. Nearly any book will help expand your vocabulary, broaden your horizons, and acquire knowledge of some kind – even if that’s simply “I can’t believe I wasted money and time on this”, in which case you know not to do it again. But this is a good starting point if you want to stimulate your mind and stretch your intellectual boundaries.

“I’ve spent my life trying to undo habits—especially habits of thinking. They narrow your interaction with the world. They’re the phrases that come easily to your mind, like: ‘I know what I think,’ or ‘I know what I like,’ or ‘I know what’s going to happen today.’ If you just replace ‘know’ with ‘don’t know,’ then you start to move into the unknown. And that’s where the interesting stuff happens.” — Humans of New York

No skill is more valuable and harder to come by than the ability to critically think through problems. And schools don’t teach you a method of thinking, you have to do the work yourself. Those who do it well get an advantage and those that do it poorly pay a tax.

Poor initial decisions are one of the reasons we’re so busy. With poor thinking, a large chunk of your time is spent correcting mistakes. Good thinking, on the other hand, produces better initial decisions and frees up time and energy.

I’ve read Solitude and Leadership, an essay by William Deresiewicz before. In fact, I even pointed out some of its leadership lessons. However, after Peter Kaufman prompted a re-visit to the very same essay, I realized that I missed a key part.

How do you learn to think?

Let’s start with how you don’t learn to think. A study by a team of researchers at Stanford came out a couple of months ago. The investigators wanted to figure out how today’s college students were able to multitask so much more effectively than adults. How do they manage to do it, the researchers asked? The answer, they discovered—and this is by no means what they expected—is that they don’t. The enhanced cognitive abilities the investigators expected to find, the mental faculties that enable people to multitask effectively, were simply not there. In other words, people do not multitask effectively. And here’s the really surprising finding: the more people multitask, the worse they are, not just at other mental abilities, but at multitasking itself.

One thing that made the study different from others is that the researchers didn’t test people’s cognitive functions while they were multitasking. They separated the subject group into high multitaskers and low multitaskers and used a different set of tests to measure the kinds of cognitive abilities involved in multitasking. They found that in every case the high multitaskers scored worse. They were worse at distinguishing between relevant and irrelevant information and ignoring the latter. In other words, they were more distractible. They were worse at what you might call “mental filing”: keeping information in the right conceptual boxes and being able to retrieve it quickly. In other words, their minds were more disorganized. And they were even worse at the very thing that defines multitasking itself: switching between tasks.

Multitasking, in short, is not only not thinking, it impairs your ability to think. Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself. You simply cannot do that in bursts of 20 seconds at a time, constantly interrupted by Facebook messages or Twitter tweets, or fiddling with your iPod, or watching something on YouTube.

I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise. And often even that idea doesn’t turn out to be very good. I need time to think about it, too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job done and move on to the next thing.

I used to have students who bragged to me about how fast they wrote their papers. I would tell them that the great German novelist Thomas Mann said that a writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. The best writers write much more slowly than everyone else, and the better they are, the slower they write. James Joyce wrote Ulysses, the greatest novel of the 20th century, at the rate of about a hundred words a day—half the length of the selection I read you earlier from Heart of Darkness—for seven years. T. S. Eliot, one of the greatest poets our country has ever produced, wrote about 150 pages of poetry over the course of his entire 25-year career. That’s half a page a month. So it is with any other form of thought. You do your best thinking by slowing down and concentrating.

The best way to improve your ability to think is to spend time thinking.

Чему вы научитесь

Требования

Описание

• The “How to Think Smarter” course takes you inside the source of your native smarts – your amazing mind! The course is perfect for both beginners and more advanced students of how to:
  *Understand how your thoughts direct your behavior.
  *Select the best questions to ask when facing a decision
  *Solve personal and business problems faster and easier.

The course avoids the use of complicated terminology, although you will encounter the scientific names of a few areas of your brain. BUT no special education is required to fully understand and benefit from “How to Think Smarter.”.

The “How to Think Smarter” course includes information on how to understand and use your native mind power to the maximum. Materials include three short video lectures, several video exercises, PDF versions of the exercises are also included.

This FREE course is structured for ease of use on any computer or portable device.

WHY take this course? Your human mind is an awesome asset. Increase your understanding of its potential, and you will increase your native intelligence. This course even includes 5 simple ways you can increase your mind power – and some of them will totally amaze you.

Для кого этот курс:

• This course has been created for both beginners and advanced students of human behavior
• It has been designed by a neuroscientist to reach directly into your mind and activate new thought patterns.

Материалы курса

How to immediately think faster and smarter 5 лекции • 17 мин

Boost Mind Power Exercises 2 лекции • 3 мин

Audios 8 лекции • 20 мин

Bonus: Your Next Step 1 лекция • 1 мин

Преподаватель

Dr. Jill Ammon-Wexler is a doctor of neuro-psychology, 45-year pioneer brain/mind power expert, and internationally published author and speaker. Her emphasis is on helping people achieve what they most desire in their lives and businesses.

Dr. Jill is a “life adventurer” with a passion for finding, and then pushing beyond, her personal limits. She has pursued higher states of consciousness since her late teen years, first climbed a mountain alone at age 16, and then had to find her way down the mountain in a wild snow storm. Over the years she was chased by a white shark, and went eye-to-eye with a wild mountain lion (on purpose). During her university years she studied with amazing leaders like Fritz Perls, Virginia Satir, Soygal Rinpoche and Alan Watts.

She also walked on fire, did sweat lodges, studied with shamanic elders, and become the holder of a coyote talking stick. After receiving her Masters degree in psychology, she shaved her head and spent 6 months in a monastic Buddhist retreat. She then completed her PhD in psychology, became a clinical hypnotherapist and certified clinical biofeedback provider, and began her professional career as a pioneer mind power trainer and personal transformation coach.

Over the years Dr. Jill has provided mind power training to organizations and individuals from around the world. She served as a consultant to President Jimmie Carter’s Special Commission on Women in Business.

Whether you skim a blog post, peruse files for work, or browse through a book, you most likely do some type of reading every day. But slogging through dense passages of text can be time-consuming, mentally exhausting, and hard on your eyes. If you want to read faster while maintaining reading comprehension, check out these seven tips.

1. PREVIEW THE TEXT.

Viewing a film’s trailer before watching the movie gives you context and lets you know what to expect. Likewise, previewing a text before reading it prepares you to quickly gain an understanding of what you’re about to read. To preview a text, scan it from the beginning to the end, paying special attention to headings, subheadings, anything in bold or large font, and bullet points. To get a big picture understanding, skim the introductory and concluding paragraphs. Try to identify transition sentences, examine any images or graphs, and figure out how the author structured the text.

2. PLAN YOUR ATTACK.

Strategically approaching a text will make a big difference in how efficiently you can digest the material. First, think about your goals. What do you want to learn by reading the material? Jot down some questions you want to be able to answer by the end. Then, determine the author’s goal in writing the material, based on your preview. The author’s goal, for example, might be to describe the entire history of Ancient Rome, while your goal is simply to answer a question about Roman women’s role in politics. If your goal is more limited in scope than the author’s, plan to only find and read the pertinent sections.

Similarly, vary your plan of attack based on the type of material you’re about to read. If you’re going to read a dense legal or scientific text, you should probably plan to read certain passages more slowly and carefully than you’d read a novel or magazine.

3. BE MINDFUL.

Reading quickly with good comprehension requires focus and concentration. Minimize external noise, distractions, and interruptions, and be mindful when your thoughts wander as you read. If you notice that you’re fantasizing about your next meal rather than focusing on the text, gently bring your mind back to the material. Many readers read a few sentences passively, without focus, then spend time going back and re-reading to make sure they understand them. According to author Tim Ferriss, this habit, called regression, will significantly slow you down and make it harder to get a big picture view of the text. If you carefully and attentively approach a text, you’ll quickly realize if you’re not understanding a section, saving you time in the long run.

4. DON’T READ EVERY WORD.

To increase your reading speed, pay attention to your eyes. Most people can scan in 1.5 inch chunks, which, d epending on the font size and type of text, usually comprise three to five words each. Rather than reading each word individually, move your eyes in a scanning motion, jumping from a chunk (of three to five words) to the next chunk of words. Take advantage of your peripheral vision to speed up around the beginning and end of each line, focusing on blocks of words rather than the first and last words.

Pointing your finger or a pen at each chunk of words will help you learn to move your eyes quickly over the text. And it will encourage you not to subvocalize as you read. Subvocalization, or silently pronouncing each word in your head as you read, will slow you down and distract you from the author’s main point.

5. DON’T READ EVERY SECTION.

According to Dartmouth College’s Academic Skills Center, it’s an old-fashioned myth that students must read every section of a textbook or article. Unless you’re reading something extremely important, skip the sections that aren’t relevant to your purpose. Reading selectively will make it possible for you to digest the main points of many texts, rather than only having time to fully read a couple.

6. WRITE A SUMMARY.

Your job shouldn’t end when you read the last word on the page. After you finish reading, write a few sentences to summarize what you read, and answer any questions you had before you started reading. Did you learn what you were hoping to learn? By spending a few minutes after reading to think, synthesize the information, and write what you learned, you’ll solidify the material in your mind and have better recall later. If you’re a more visual or verbal learner, draw a mind map summary or tell someone what you learned.

7. PRACTICE TIMED RUNS.

Approaching a text strategically, reading actively, and summarizing effectively takes practice. If you want to improve your reading speed, use a timer to test how many words (or pages) per minute you can read. As you’re able to read faster and faster, check in with yourself to make sure you’re happy with your level of comprehension.

One thing that helps me think clearly and avoid confirmation bias is to try to falsify my beliefs.

If you think about it, that’s not how we go about our lives everyday. We’re usually trying to confirm if the beliefs we hold are true.

For example, after you read or watch the news you probably don’t really think about the possibility of the news station being subjective, biased or pushing an agenda.

We grow up watching the news and believe that journalists and reporters do their due diligence and report events objectively. Most of the time, they are simply stating the facts of various events that happened around the world.

However, humans have a hard time being objective, given that their experiences are often shaped by their subjective views. Nowadays, one event can be interpreted in two completely different ways to push a narrative or political agenda.

To be fair, most of us don’t have time to sit around and analyze the facts of every story that are reported to us. If we want a breakdown of important events happening around the world, we’ll go skimming through Google or NYTimes for headlines, and we’ll pick up things that interest us. We’ll read the stories with intriguing headlines and run with whatever the writer gives us.

Here is where most of us stop caring about confirming if the stories are actually unbiased and objective or not. Every story we read after will only be confirming the story that we started with. We often only need two or three more news reports confirming our beliefs before we solidify the “reality” of the situation.

This is dangerous because there are many times where writers make mistakes, misinterpret the facts they were given, use exaggerated scenarios, or blatantly lie about what really happened. It almost seems like they don’t really care about making sure that events actually happened as they were reported.

They got all the eyeballs they wanted, or got the general public riled up with an exaggerated or inflammatory headline. They just want attention and sometimes they’re willing to misrepresent the facts for a few more clicks and buys.

All this outrage that keeps dividing the country is partly due to people doubling down on their beliefs.

They accept a narrative and refuse to look for refuting evidence.

They rely on confirmation bias to uphold their beliefs, and will censor opposing views when it threatens to poke holes in their world view.

They trap themselves in echo chambers, instead of communicating with the other side and trying to understand why they think the way they think.

Think about how you approach all your beliefs. When you are looking for ways to prove a hypothesis, do you look for evidence to back it up or to disprove it?

I think people who are actively looking to disprove the beliefs they hold are confident. They don’t hold onto their beliefs stubbornly — they challenge them. If they can’t find any sort of proof refuting their beliefs, assuming they are being honest to themselves and others, more power to them.

The people who only look for evidence to confirm their beliefs are scared of the other side because they might actually make sense.

You know what that means? That means there’s a possibility that other beliefs they hold about the world may be wrong.

That means there’s an enormous amount of time and energy that they might need to invest into restructuring their perspective of the world. That means the world they know crumbles before them and lose stability. The easiest option is to double down and refuse to accept opposing evidence and arguments.

There is actually a lot to lose if you accept the other side’s narrative, so it’s understandable why people cling to their beliefs.

But there is also a lot to gain if you’re willing to accept opposing evidence.

You become more open-minded. You become more confident in your beliefs. You become more interested in different ideas and expand your horizons. You become curious and excited and inquisitive. You become stronger and smarter and you are a force to be reckoned with.

You can see through people’s deception, instead of gobbling them up like you used to. You can question and learn more about the world. You can think clearly and rationally. You can always know that you are examining difficult situations, thinking critically and deconstructing the world without jumping to conclusions.

You can be free from the group, and become an individual. You can be free, and think for yourself.

REM sleep boosts memory, creativity, and more, experts announce.

PUBLISHED August 17, 2010

Here’s more evidence that sleep, including napping, can make you smarter.

Dreaming may improve memory, boost creativity, and help you better plan for the future, new research suggests.

In a recent study, people who took naps featuring REM sleep—in which dreams are most vivid—performed better on creativity-oriented word problems. That is, the REM, or rapid eye movement, sleep helped people combine ideas in new ways, according to psychiatrist Sara Mednick, who led the study.

Part of the experiment’s morning round involved a word-analogy test, similar to some SAT problems. For example, given “chips: salty::candy:_____” the answer would have been “sweet.”

At midday, after the first round, the subjects were given a 90-minute rest period, during which they were monitored.

Some participants took naps with REM sleep, which typically begins more than an hour after a person falls asleep. Others took an REM-less nap. A third group rested quietly but didn’t sleep.

There was a second round of tests in the afternoon. In a typical second-round test, participants were asked to guess what single word is associated with three seemingly unrelated words. For example, given “cookie,” “heart,” and “sixteen,” the answer would have been “sweet.” The correct answers to many of the second-round questions were the same as the solutions to analogy questions from round one.

On the second-round questions whose answers matched first-round answers—for example, “sweet” and “sweet”—the REM nappers improved their performances by 40 percent. Non-REM nappers and the non-nappers showed no improvement on these problems, said Mednick, of the University of California, San Diego, who presented her findings Friday in San Diego at the American Psychological Association’s annual convention.

That means that REM sleep improved participants’ ability to see connections among seemingly unrelated things: the answers from the first-round analogy problems and the three words in each round-two association test, she said.

Mednick noted that all groups remembered the morning’s answers equally well—proving that the second round wasn’t just testing nappers’ memorization abilities. Instead, REM “plays a role in helping people detach their memory of that word from being able to use that word in other contexts,” she said.

Sleep Helps Turn Memories Into Predictions?

Boosted by deep sleep, an improved memory may have yet one more benefit: helping you imagine—and better plan for—the future.

“When you imagine future events, you’re recombining aspects of experiences that have actually occurred,” Harvard psychiatrist Daniel Schacter, whose research was separate from Mednick’s, told National Geographic News.

Schacter, who also presented Friday at the psychology convention, has found that the same areas in the brain that handle memory, such as the hippocampus, show increased activity when subjects are asked to imagine future events (interactive brain map).

Could REM sleep turn you into a crystal ball?

“Nobody really knows,” he said. “But I suspect there might be a connection. After all, dreams are a different way of recombining aspects of past experience.”