How to learn to think faster. How to think faster is an effective technique. How to expand the set of mental models

Yes, in children's educational games. Designed for the development of children, they are great for adults. The range of educational games is very wide. There are electronic construction kits like SnapCircuits, and board card games (Swish, Set), and games for smartphones and tablets, for example, Gravity Maze. By playing games, you will not only develop the skill of thinking outside the box, but also have a great time with friends or children.

2. Connect with people

Despite the abundance of various sources of information, other people are still able to give us new ideas. By meeting with the unique experience of another person, we significantly enrich our understanding of the world (or of a particular problem). And it is not at all necessary to communicate with the luminaries of science or financial gurus.

Career consultant Gia Ganesh cites a conversation she had with a granite builder as an example. It turned out that the guy was from Cuba. He told how he came to the USA and how he got this job. The conversation prompted Gia to interesting thoughts about migration and choosing a profession, suggested ideas for new research.

3. Get a new experience

To think differently, you need to live differently. Give up habitual patterns of behavior, destroy the established way of life, break stereotypes. Prepare new dishes, change the route from home to work and look around more. Try wearing clothes that are uncharacteristic for your image, change your hairstyle.

A great way to learn something new - . Other countries, other cultures, unusual surroundings - all this gives a good stimulus for the work of thinking. Especially if you don’t miss the opportunity to make new acquaintances while traveling.

4. Explore unusual ideas

There is no lack of information in our age. On the contrary, there is even too much of it around. But not all of it deserves attention. Really worthwhile ideas have to be found, but doing this is much easier than 100 or even 50 years ago. Read more! , articles on the Internet and magazines. Look everywhere for fresh ideas, new views and non-standard approaches.

Thinking differently is good, but not enough. You must be able to formulate and defend your original ideas.

It is not always easy to have your own opinion, different from the generally accepted one. The social pressure of the majority is great, and very often society is able to impose a collective point of view on individuals. The following are a few ways to help develop and defend your own opinion.

5. Be Factual

This seemingly elementary principle is violated too often. Emotions, speculation, expectations, assumptions, rumors… All this is not good. Start with simple questions: “How do I know this is true?” “What facts support my opinion?” If there are not enough facts, then you have to look for them.

6. State your opinion in writing

Imagine that you need to convince someone and write a letter for this. A written presentation will help to formulate your thoughts more clearly, to trace a logical chain of conclusions and conclusions. Diagrams and drawings will make your ideas more clear and visual. Such a blank will be very helpful if you really need to or defend your point of view in the discussion.

7. Discuss

Group discussion is both a test of your ideas and a means to find new solutions to old problems. The most useful are specially organized discussions. Almost any topic can be chosen: from politics to football. Divide the group into two teams and have them defend opposite points of view. It is better to limit the time allotted to each participant - this helps to formulate your arguments clearly and concisely.

8. Be objective

Advice from the category of those that are easy to give, but difficult to carry out. Each of us is inclined to consider his opinion, if not the only true, then certainly not erroneous. But even the ancients said that it is human nature to err. We look at the world through the prism of our experience and very often see only what we want to see.

When developing your own opinion, it is important to get rid of bias in the selection and evaluation of available information. Have we really considered all the available facts? Have we exaggerated the significance of some facts to suit our expectations? Are there alternative points of view? These and other similar questions will help you be more objective and independent of anyone else's biases. Even from your own.

This is not an exhaustive list of ways to help think differently and shape. What methods do you use?

Have you ever had moments when you thought very quickly and easily? When did a solution or an answer almost come to mind without any effort? I think yes, everyone knows this feeling. There are other situations when the head is overloaded, and you don’t want to think about anything, and thoughts drag on very slowly, as if bogged down in a web.

These two different states are familiar to everyone. The first is when your brain is alert, and your mind is full of energy, trained to think correctly, and clear of the extra noise of unnecessary thoughts. At this point, you acquire the ability to think quickly. The second state is when the brain is tired and the mind is cluttered and lazy.

In the first state, you can solve any questions at all, come up with a solution to any problem in one fell swoop, write a book or a picture, create a new miracle of technology, instantly come up with the right answers in an important conversation, but you can do anything. But the second state is completely unproductive and you need to get rid of it.

And how often do you experience this very first state? Do you want it to be with you always? Do you want to learn how to think quickly, not only in moments of insight, but every time you need it? Let's figure out how to think faster.

How to learn to think fast

Training

First you need to understand how everything works. The speed of our thinking and decision-making depends on the brain and the state of the nervous system. From this we conclude that in order to think very quickly, we must first put our body and mind in order.

What does it mean?

1. We should feel cheerful and full of energy. After all, the brain consumes 1/3 of all the energy of our body for its work. And where can I get it? Here will help you healthy sleep at least 8 hours per day. Moreover, it is desirable to create the correct daily routine, go to bed and wake up at the same time. If at all in a good way, then you need to go to bed before 24 hours (from about 22 to 24 hours the brain rests best).

1. Next, you need to pay attention to proper nutrition. Your diet should consist of foods that actively nourish the brain with useful substances, and the body with energy (calories). Useful food for the brain and exercises for its development can be found in this.

1. Now regarding psyche. If you are anxious, tense, irritable, you can not think about any speed of thinking. Imagine a water surface. When it is calm, the signals in your brain are transmitted as quickly and clearly as possible, without loss of information. When a storm begins on the water, a storm, the passage of signals is very difficult. Therefore, you must be calm. In our time, of course, this is not an easy task, but it is a prerequisite.

Useful Skills to Learn to Think Fast

No extra noise

Now let's talk about the skills that you need to develop in yourself if you want to learn how to think quickly. And the first is turning off the internal dialogue and, in general, the mental noise in the head. I think it is not necessary to give many examples. Everyone already knows the state when there are a lot of thoughts in the head. They jump from branch to branch like monkeys.

All unnecessary noise must be learned to turn off. To do this, you can practice meditation. Or simply by an effort of will to pay attention to your thoughts and calm your mind. Turn it into a quiet sea surface. Every time you do this, you are exercising. And every time it will turn out faster and faster.

Complete focus

The next skill is the ability to focus. When you have completed the first stage and got rid of unnecessary noise, you should learn to instantly direct all your attention to the desired object, to the problem being solved. It is easy to learn this, the techniques are described in this.

Planning / modeling the situation

Another useful skill is planning or modeling the situation. For example, if you know that you have a business conversation ahead, then try to put yourself in the place of your interlocutor and think about what he could say to you. After that, figure out what you will answer to each of his phrases. And what will you answer if he says something that you are not ready for and you need time to think about how you will behave in this situation.

This approach is very similar to preparing for any kind of work, you simply lay out all the necessary tools in advance and you do not need to spend a lot of time looking for them, you can instantly orient yourself in any situation.

Need more knowledge

Even grandfather Lenin said - study, study and study again! These are evil words. A smart person is first and foremost a knowledgeable person. The baggage of knowledge will never burden, but on the contrary, it will allow you to understand any business or give you a wonderful skill - the ability to learn quickly, because you have done this more than once. Therefore, read a lot, about everything that interests you, you never know what knowledge will be useful tomorrow.

brain training

As you know, we think with the brain, which means that the better our brain is trained, the faster it thinks. Therefore, set aside at least 5-10 minutes a day for training, and do the exercises described in this.

So we figured out how to think fast. All of these methods and exercises should be repeated daily and become a way of life. Then you will notice that the speed and clarity of your thinking has improved significantly, and this is a very pleasant and extremely useful quality. Good luck!

I first learned what a mental model was when I was reading a story about the famous physicist Richard Feynman. Feynman received his bachelor's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. from Princeton. During this time, he managed to earn a good reputation among students and teachers - he could solve problems that brilliant graduate students could not solve.

Feynman believed that his secret weapon was not intelligence, but strategy, which he learned in school. One day, a physics teacher told him to stay after school.

“Feynman,” he said, “you talk too much and make too much noise. I know why. Are you bored. So I will give you a book. You will sit on the back desk, in the corner, and you will study this book. When you know everything that is written in it, you can talk again.

So, in every physics class, Feynman paid no attention to what the class was actually doing. He sat at the back of the desk with Woods' Calculus of Differentials and Integrals. It was while reading that he began to develop his own set of mental models.

When kids at MIT or at Princeton struggled with an integral, it was because they couldn't take it with the standard methods they learned in school. And Feynman solved the integral thanks to a new prism and a set of tools he learned from books.

What distinguished Feynman was not his intellect, but his vision of the problem. He had a wider set of mental models.

What is a mental model?

Mental models are ideas, strategies, ways of understanding based on previous experience that exist in the mind of a person and guide his actions. They are used to explain cause and effect and to give meaning to life experiences. Mental models explain how the world works.

For example, supply and demand is a mental model that helps you understand how the economy works. Game theory is a mental model that explains how relationships and trust work.

Mental models determine your behavior and perception of the world. These are the tools you use to understand life, make decisions, and solve problems. Each new model that you learn will change your vision of the world. This happened to Richard Feynman when he learned a new mathematical technique.

Of course, mental models are far from perfect, but they are very useful. In physics or mathematics, for example, there is not a single model that would perfectly and accurately explain the universe, but thanks to the best mental models from these sciences, we have learned how to build bridges and roads, develop new technologies, and even fly into space.

“All scientists agree that there is no one hundred percent correct theory. Therefore, the quality of knowledge is determined not by how true it is, but by how useful it is.” – Yuval Noah Harari

The best mental models are the most useful ideas. Understanding these concepts will help you make smart decisions. Therefore, for anyone who wants to think rationally and effectively, it is important to expand the set of these tools.

How to learn to think rationally?

We all have favorite mental models—often those that help us understand why or why something happened. We mature and gain experience in a certain area, and over time we begin to use only those concepts that are most familiar to us.

Here's the problem: when a particular worldview dominates your mind, you try to explain every problem you encounter in terms of that worldview. This trap is especially easy for smart or talented people to fall into.

The more you master one mental model, the more likely it is to become your biggest flaw, because you will start applying it to try to solve every problem. What appears to be an experience is actually a limitation.

Let's consider one example. Biologist Robert Sapolsky asks the question, "Why did the chicken cross the road?" He then assumes that different experts will answer.

• An evolutionary biologist would likely answer, “The chicken crossed the road because it saw a potential mating partner on the other side.”
• A kinesiologist would likely answer, "The chicken crossed the road because the muscles in its legs were contracting, which made it move forward."
• A neuroscientist would most likely answer, “The chicken crossed the road because neurons in its brain fired, prompting it to move.”

In fact, they are all right. However, none of them sees the whole picture. The problems we face cannot be fully explained using only one model of thinking.

Relying on just one mental tool is like wearing a mental straitjacket. When your set of thought patterns is limited, so are your decisions. To unlock its full potential, you must learn a wide range of mental models. Only in this way will you learn to think rationally.

How to expand the set of mental models?

Mental models explain to us how the world works. We must regularly, learn the basics of areas unfamiliar to us, communicate with people whose experience is completely different from ours. Otherwise, we will see only part of the whole picture.

Why is it important to identify relationships between mental models?

At school, we divide our knowledge into different categories - biology, economics, history, physics, philosophy. In the real world, everything should be the other way around.

The greatest minds of mankind rarely think in categories. They do not look at life through the prism of one object.

It is very important not only to learn new mental models, but also to understand how they are interconnected. Creativity and creativity often arise at the intersection of ideas. By identifying connections between different mental models, you can find solutions that many have not missed or noticed.

Tools to help you think better

Good news:

You don't have to ideally master every subject to be the greatest thinker. You only need to learn a few mental models to understand how the world works.

The key disciplines are biology, chemistry, physics, economics, mathematics, psychology and philosophy. Every field has fundamental ideas to be aware of. For example, in economics, these are stimulus, scarcity, and economies of scale.

If you understand the basics of each discipline, you will be able to form an accurate and useful picture of the world.

This article explained the amazing difference between how we think our brain works and how it actually works. As you read further, this article clarified various ideas about how the human brain handles tasks, and how we can optimize brain function by knowing these facts.

All of these points can be used in many different areas of any aspect of your life. We decided to adapt Cooper's "10 Things" to and see how they will help us here. So sit down, grab yourself a plate of blueberries and get ready to optimize your brain for poker.

1. Your brain is better at creative tasks when you're tired.

In the course of her research, Cooper sifted through a ton of information that relates to the human biological clock and exactly how our brains work at specific times of the day. She found that while our brains are better at complex analytical work when we're awake, we're better at creative tasks when we're tired.

According to Cooper: If you're tired, your brain isn't as good at filtering out distractions to focus on one task at a time. He also has a harder time remembering connections between ideas and concepts. But both of these points are great for creative work, since this type of work requires us to create new connections, be open to new ideas and think outside the box. So a tired, slightly clouded mind is much more efficient when it comes to working on creative projects.».

And while rescheduling more for creative evening sessions may be the perfect solution for an artist or writer, a poker player will only get in the way of such a state of mind. Poker still belongs to the category of analytical games, where the constant assessment of opponents, the search for the optimal bet size and leaks in the behavior patterns of your opponents are simply vital. A strong one forces us to create connections between the different lines of behavior of our rivals, and a tired brain that is not capable of this can clearly negatively affect our income in the long run.

To maximize the efficiency of the brain, it is preferable for a winning poker player to start the session in the morning. In this way, the player can increase his chances of playing at the moments when his brain is most efficient, which will allow him to maintain the accuracy and speed of the analytical processes in his head.

2. Stress can affect the size of your brain (and shrink it)

Stress is present in our day to day life. It can occur for many different reasons. However, during her research, Cooper came to the conclusion that stress can have an adverse effect on our brains over the long term. The study cited by Cooper says that rats that were chronically stressed ended up with a reduction in the size of the hypocampus.

For those who, like me, are poorly versed in brain regions, I clarify: the hypocampus is a region of the brain that is vital for the formation of memories. It is also responsible for spatial memory (think of being able to quickly navigate in a city you know) and for orientation in general.

Clearly, high levels of stress have never been a pleasant experience. And although daily stress is a fairly common occurrence in our time, none of us could have imagined that prolonged stress could affect your results so much. This is especially true if you are constantly stressed while playing. As you sit at the table, try to eliminate as much of the stress of the outside world as possible from your thoughts, and instead focus solely on this hand.

This can be tricky, as the size or difficulty of the game can be one of the causes of stress, but it's obvious that stress can cloud your judgment, which will eventually lead to negative results. It's important for poker players to be aware of when there is too much stress in your life and that this can have a big impact on your performance at the table. It is often better not to play at all if you experience too much stress in your daily life, as playing under such conditions will only negatively affect your results.

3. Our brain is not capable of multi-tasking at the same time.

Have you ever heard of a player playing open face Chinese poker on their iPad while listening to music, engaging in a conversation with the player to their right, eating meatball soup while trying to grind a winning session in and so on? no longer an easy game? Okay, this, of course, I went too far, but you get my point. As Cooper explains in his article, multitasking is something people have been trying to master for centuries.

The ability to work energetically on multiple projects at the same time and still get decent results on all of them is something that is valued in any job, and I have seen guys who write on their resumes that they are excellent at multi-tasking at the same time. However, while you may think that you are doing well on all fronts by multitasking, science tells you that this is actually impossible.

At its core, multitasking is a concept that can be called "context switching", meaning that instead of doing several things at the same time, you actually quickly switch between different tasks. This approach leads to a 50 percent chance of error, and it will obviously take you more time than if you sat on each task separately.

By doing this, instead of focusing entirely on one task, you spend less time on a series of tasks, which means you are less efficient overall. So the next time you're sitting at a table and suddenly notice that you're doing 5 different things (besides clicking buttons), try to review your position and assess exactly how focused you are on the game. You may notice that your ability to find good places to gain an advantage over your opponent and, accordingly, your ability to earn money has seriously decreased because of this.

4. Daytime sleep improves the performance of your brain.

This is just great news, because I suspect most of you, like me, love to sleep. Research has shown that short naps improve both memory and our learning skills. Let's first take a look at what happens to memory: Initially, memories are stored in the hypocampus of the brain. And while the memories are there, they are still quite fragile and easy to forget, especially if your brain is busy remembering some more information during this period.

When you lie down to rest, these memories are transferred to the cerebral cortex, which acts as a long-term storehouse of memories. Over a long session, you may well notice some specific tells, or patterns of behavior of your opponents. If the session continues to draw you in, then you may begin to be distracted from the game, and these memories will easily be lost somewhere in the subcortex of your hypocampus. A short nap can help you cement those memories into long-term ones, resulting in improved performance against the same set of opponents.

As far as learning skills are concerned, sleep simply clears space for new information in your working memory. In the studies cited by Cooper, a group of subjects who took a short nap in the middle of the day to then resume the task performed better than those who did this task all day without a break. By opening up extra memory space for your brain, you improve your ability to remember additional information and thus make better decisions against your opponents.

After all, the fact that you'll be working at a higher level of productivity after your short nap before a session is at least a nice excuse to take some extra rest.

5. Vision surpasses all your other senses.

In terms of recognition, vision is the highest among all five senses. To explain what I mean, let's take some piece of information that you heard. Three days later, you will only remember 10 percent of what you heard. Add to that the picture you were watching at that moment, and the playback rate goes up to 65%. In the poker world, this idea makes me think of players who always wear very dark sunglasses at the table. In terms of how your brain processes information, these players are simply depriving themselves of their most important feeling.

And although it is obvious that you can still see through these glasses, but the darkened picture that your brain perceives will be reflected in how much you remember. This process also works in reverse when it comes to optimal poker strategy, which means that you can give yourself the opportunity to remember as much information as possible by focusing on visual images in order to make informed decisions later.

This idea is also related to the third point, about multitasking. at the table can be very visually dependent, and you should constantly keep an eye on your opponents, hoping that you can gather as much information about them as possible. You may think that you can always throw your hand away while looking at your iPad and listening to what is happening at the table, but by doing so you are depriving yourself of your most valuable sense: sight.

(to be continued)

Hi friends! With you Yuri Okunev.

Do you know the situation: you need to quickly make a decision or answer a question, but you just can’t gather your thoughts? And it happens the other way around - you answer quickly, but after a couple of seconds you realize that you said something completely wrong and chose not the best option. How to be in this situation? Let's talk about how to learn to think quickly and make the right decisions.

First of all, let's think about what components the speed of thinking depends on? Does it depend, for example, on the general level of intelligence development?

Highly developed intelligence means

• the ability to solve mathematical problems in the mind;
• non-standard thinking;
• wide erudition;
• well developed memory.

It is possible to have all these properties and yet think slowly.

Let's take a situation. A young man, a high-level programmer and a great chess player, who beat opponents not only from his city, but also many big players from the Internet, got up on the wrong foot in the morning. Well, let's say he watched an interesting action movie, a novelty of this year, for half the night and went to bed only in the morning. Can he win another game of blitz? Or quickly react to some non-standard situation at work?

It is possible that he can. Only it will be much more difficult for him to give.

The speed of thinking is largely determined by the state of your brain. When he is able or not able to give everything 100%.

It is easy to guess that in order to think quickly, it is necessary to observe the daily routine, rest in time and get enough sleep. What else can be done?

How to develop the speed of thinking? Here are some recipe tips.

• Do a warm-up of facial muscles

It has been scientifically established that when our face is constrained and practically does not change its expression, and our eyes are fixed on one point, this is not reflected in our thoughts in the best way. They also become tense and constrained. To avoid this, massage your face, move your eyes to the right and left, stretch your lips with a tube and smile “from ear to ear”;

• Develop fine motor skills

The speed and amplitude of the movement of the fingers are interrelated with the work of the brain. Playing musical instruments, typing with ten fingers, knitting sea knots - all these activities make us think faster and better.

• Acceleration of personal internal pace

It turns out that we are able to consciously control our physiological processes, including the speed of the brain. Psychologists have a concept - "internal motor". Give yourself the command to do everything faster - and your brain will immediately react to this.

• Teamwork

Train yourself to work in a team, participate in disputes and debates. During a conversation with several interlocutors at once, the brain begins to switch quickly, due to this it works more reactively. Very soon you will feel that you have begun to think faster.

• Development of attention

Practice mindfulness outdoors and in your free time. Notice all the details: how many cars are passing by, how the people passing by are dressed, what expressions are on their faces. Make sure that your gaze is quick and lively, and your memory is all-consuming.

• Service for developing the speed of thinking

Finally, you can develop the ability to think quickly using the service Brinapps. Here you will be offered to take an initial test and further improve your reactive thinking, adhering to an individual program.

fateful decision

Often in our life there are moments when we need to make an important decision, make a life choice, but there is absolutely no time. For example, the boss at work gave me a choice: agree to work after hours or quit and gave me only a few hours to think. How to be?
There are two approaches to address current and urgent issues:

1. First- based on logic and existing experience, knowledge. It is used when there is a sufficient number of facts on hand to analyze the situation. This approach is appropriate when the decision concerns business or business issues.
2. Second- based on intuition. In personal life and in dealing with people, when we are faced with an unfamiliar situation, and our experience cannot tell us anything, we have to listen to the choice of our heart.

• Always set yourself time limits. This makes the brain work quickly and clearly, in this case the most correct decisions are made;
• No need to wait until it "dissolves itself" - this is the path to failure. You need to develop the habit of taking responsibility on your own shoulders and personally making important decisions.
• If emotions interfere with your thinking quickly - fear of failure, excitement, severe stress, anger, rage, in this case it is almost impossible to resolve the situation in an adequate way. Try to give yourself some time to calm down and collect your thoughts.
• The more facts you have, the better. Collect all useful information. Consult with experienced people, leaving the last word for yourself. Analyzing, estimate which of the facts at the moment are more significant and influential, and which are less.
• Having made a decision, act without wasting time.

Conclusion

We have considered the main ways to develop the speed of thinking. Is it possible to say that there are people who are naturally slow and cannot increase their speed, but there are people - "jet planes" do everything quickly and decide quickly?

I think no. The brain of any person is plastic and is disposed to development, regardless of age. Everything is controlled by our desires.

That's all.

I wish you success in making quick decisions. If you liked the article, leave your feedback in the comments, write what difficulties you encounter and how you can further increase the speed. Subscribe to blog news.