Mind Challenges

These challenges are copied from a book Learn More, Study Less written by Scott Young. Four challenges(2,6,7,10) are shown details because of their difficulties in practicing by myself. I will cover the rest challenges first.

1. Increase reading speed and comprehension.

• Buy or find one book for practice reading.
• Commit for at least 3 weeks to practice for 15 minutes a day.
• User finger as a pointer on all written material on paper.
• Practice active reading once a week.

2. Practice flow-based notetaking for two weeks.

3. Improve the ability with using metaphors to understand and remember abstract ideas.

• Commit for at least 2 weeks to go over a subject you are studying once each day. Write out at least 3-5 major ideas.
• With each idea, write out a possible metaphor that could be used to explain it.
• If the metaphor isn’t complete, try looking for one or two more metaphors that could also associate to the same idea.
• Use the 10-Year Old Rule. Make your metaphor is simple and easy to understand.
• Repeat this process with the other 2-4 ideas until you are satisfied that you understand them.

4. Get better flexibility and skill to form mental pictures and link in different sensations.

• Get a few blank sheets of paper and a pencil for drawing.
• Pick a few key cocepts or ideas (easy ones at the start).
• Form a mental image, add sensations and emotions to your idea.
• Quickly sketch a picture of the idea based on your mental image. (30-60 seconds max.)
• Repeat this with several other ideas each day for two weeks.

5 Enhance skill at making diagrams and increase your diagraming speed.

• A sheet of paper. An idea or set of concepts that could be made into a diagram.
• Start a timer no more than 2-5 minutes and begin creating a diagram using one or a combination of the different diagram types.
• When the timer beeps, stop what you are doing and make a note of the amount of information you are managed to store, the clarity of that information and how many different relationships or connections you were able to make.
• Repeat this exercise once a day for two weeks until you are comfortable making quick diagrams of several different ideas.

6. Learn the link method to handle the arbitrary(try committing for an entire month)

7. Peg method to store pegged lists of information and series of numeric information such as dates. (This method is built off of the link method.)

8. Use information compression.

• Once per day, go through your textbook or notes and pick out a group of facts you would like to compress. Then create either a mnemonic or picture linking to group the ideas under one theme.
• After doing this for two weeks, create a notes compression for the last two weeks of material, incorporating the various picture linking or mnemonics you used earlier.
• Test yourself to see if you can remember the entire group of ideas after using one of these methods to compress several ideas together. Keep doing this process for four weeks(2 note compressions) or until you feel comfortable with using these methods quickly and easily.

9. Practical usage.

• Once a week for the next two months, pick one of your major courses.
• Spend at least 5-10 minutes creating a list of ways you can use this information in your daily life.
• Make sure the list has at least 20 ideas and don’t censor yourself in letting them flow.
• After you’re done this weekly exercise, pick one of those ideas and implement it.

10. Do regular practice sessions.

11. Design a project that your expect to take one month to accomplish.

• The project should be simple, but have a sharp learning curve.
• Set deadline and schedule a bit of time each day to work on the project.
• After you’ve finished the project, do a review of the project-based learning method and decide what other projects you might like to tackle.

Among all the methods, learning with metaphor, visceralization or diagrams is the recommended way.