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.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Help With Clear Thinking Is Essential Now
Comment: Help with clear thinking is essential now that the information flow has reached fever pitch and the demands on our brains have escalated so dramatically. When you consider that people base votes for politicians on 'who they'd rather have a beer with,' it becomes obvious that people need help. The paradox is that the people who most need the help are the least likely to benefit from this book, because some degree of clear thinking is necessary before you can gain the advantage of it.

That said, it's a commendable read, it lays out in simplest terms that there are things you can do to clean up your messy brain and actively participate in modern life. Compliance professionals have hijacked the thinking ability of our society, and hacking your brain may be your only hope of escaping from their clutches. Each of these tips serves that purpose, but only if you act on it. I'd put a good night's sleep at the top of the list, because once I got a good night's sleep, i was able to read, recognize and integrate all the rest pretty effortlessly.

Wonder what I mean about compliance professionals? We now understand what people respond to when it comes to persuasion. Insider's Guide To The Art Of Persuasion That can be a good thing when good (and thoughtful) people use it for good purpose. But our only protection from less than desirable persuasive efforts is using our ability to think for ourself. And the more you learn about how to do this, the safer and smarter you'll be. I cannot recommend this book highly enough!

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Ideas -- Some Good, Some Wrong
Comment: 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.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Brain hacks
Comment: 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!

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

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Valuable and entertaining
Comment: This is a valuable book that is also very entertaining.

The book is a compilation of seventy-five "hacks" designed to help us "overclock" our brains. Catchy! What it means is that the book is a collection of tips and techniques that speed and enhance our mental abilities. And they do.

The tips deal with memory enhancement, perception, decision making, math applications, and general mental fitness. Most of them aren't really new, but all of them are very clearly explained and illustrated with real-world examples. Every tip has citations for further research, a feature that led me to several hours of surprising and useful reading.

This is not a mental fitness system; that is, the author does not expect the reader to adopt and use every one of the tips. It's a loose collection of tools, and like all tools, the trick is to select the appropriate one for the task. I'm using several of the tools on a regular basis, and that more than justifies the cost of the book for me.

Finally, the book is a very entertaining and very quick read. The author's style is just right. The information is presented in easy-to-digest blocks, and the explanations are very clear. The author clearly has expertise, but he's never condescending. The tone is light and slightly self-deprecating without being cutesy.

I really liked this book. It's rare to find such a finely balanced combination of entertainment and utility. I'm very happy I bought it, and I recommend it highly.

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