Hey,<\/p>\n
The key to making yourself smarter–mental training.<\/p>\n
That is, if you actively engage your mind on difficult mental
\nproblems, you’ll get better at thinking across a wide range of
\nissues.<\/p>\n
Companies like Nintento capitalized on this fact when they released
\ntheir game Brain Training, a game directed at adults who wanted to
\nkeep their minds sharp.<\/p>\n
However, I disagree with the form that most “mental training”
\nprograms are taught in. They tend to be repetitive logic or math
\nproblems, which may test your brain, but only in a narrow
\ncalculating way.<\/p>\n
In fact, most academic problems suffer from the same flaw. Instead
\nof asking difficult, creative problems–they ask you to solve
\nformulas and perform tedious calculations.<\/p>\n
The problem isn’t that mental training doesn’t work–it’s that most
\nactivities suggested for mental training are boring.<\/p>\n
—<\/p>\n
There is another way you can train yourself to become smarter
\nwithout relying on mental math drills–problem invention.<\/p>\n
With problem invention, you don’t follow drills, instead you look
\naround the real world and pose yourself questions that:<\/p>\n
1. You don’t know the immediate answer to
\n2. Feel solvable on a gut level (that is, you feel someone,
\nsomewhere probably has the answer)<\/p>\n
Once you find this problem, you spend 15 minutes or so working on
\na possible solution. The key isn’t to find a solution, but to
\nstart chewing away at it. Some questions you pose will turn out
\nto be too difficult, that’s okay. What matters is that you turn
\nyour expectations around.<\/p>\n
Here are a few example problems I can pull from the top of my head:<\/p>\n
1. Trees look like fractals. What would be the simplest shape I
\ncould draw that would look like a tree if applied recursively?<\/p>\n
2. How far away is the horizon?<\/p>\n
3. How could I get a computer program to check if a maze was
\nsolvable?<\/p>\n
Those are just examples from math\/logic\/computers, you could easily
\nchange the situation to set yourself a particular challenge to
\npractice a different mental skill such as:<\/p>\n
1. Translating a theme song into another language<\/p>\n
2. Figuring out which motions I could no longer make if I were
\nmissing a particular muscle<\/p>\n
The point is to create an interesting mental problem that you can
\ndo without research or tools that you can think about when you’re
\nbored, waiting in lines or otherwise unoccupied.<\/p>\n
If you set yourself these kinds of mental tasks, you’ll find when
\nyou’re faced with them in real situations (or tests) you’ll do much
\nbetter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Hey, The key to making yourself smarter–mental training.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/members\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/members\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/members\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/members\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/members\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=505"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/members\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":506,"href":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/members\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505\/revisions\/506"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/members\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/members\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/members\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}