2013-03-16

Mind performance hacks (book review)

Mind Performance Hacks: Tips & Tools for Overclocking Your Brain
Ron Hale-Evans
O'Reilly, 2006

Here's my next book review and again, it's not a new book. Nevertheless, I think Mind Performance Hacks by Ron Hale-Evans is interesting. It's more or less a continuation of Mind Hacks by Tom Stafford and Matt Webb. The book contains 75 brain hacks. Just as I wrote earlier, this way of hacking has nothing to do with criminal activities. As the author states:
"Mind performance hacks are a technology as new as the newest smart drugs and as old as language. In the broadest sense, every time you learn something, you're hacking your brain. This book is designed to help you learn to hack your brain intentionally, safely, and productively."
Hale-Evans describes every hack in the same structure. It's possible to read the entire book at once or just the hacks that might interest you. They are grouped by theme.
  • Memory
  • Information processing
  • Creativity
  • Math
  • Decision making
  • Communication
  • Clarity
  • Mental fitness
Among others, the author learns his readers how to overcome the tip-of-the-tongue effect (# 12), to speak your brain's language (# 15) including why that's useful and to hold a question in mind (# 30) when solving a complex problem. Other examples are to put down the calculator (# 35) using some simple tricks and warming up your brain (# 66) before getting busy.

Reading the entire book - I really did - I learned some interesting things. As the author added also additional resources like reports, books and websites, the book contains tons of information. There's also the Mentat Wiki for still more information. However some of the tips and tricks, I'll never use as they seem useless to me or I simply don't like them. An example of these, is playing boardgames (# 67). Being a Christian, I neither like the hacks in chapter 7, Clarity. Therefore my advice is to read Mind Performance Hacks and use the hacks you like and/or are useful to you.

Did you read this book? What's your opinion about it?

Happy reading!