Beyond IQ: Scientific Tools for Training Problem Solving, Intuition, Emotional Intelligence, Creativity, and More - Softcover

Sundem, Garth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0770435963 ISBN 13: 9780770435967

Verlag: Crown, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

Forget the IQ tests and tweak those parts of intelligence that matter most to real world success.
 
Sure, having a high IQ is great. But surprisingly, science shows that mental abilities not captured in IQ tests can have the most impact in the real world—attributes like creativity, willpower, emotional intelligence, and intuition.
 
And yes—you can train those skills. In these pages, journalist Garth Sundem draws on interviews with psychology’s top experts and the latest research to show you how.
 
Beyond IQ is a new kind of braintraining guide, one packed with useful, engaging exercises scientifically shown to help you make the most of the brain you've got in the arena that matters most—life!"
 
BEYOND IQ is filled with simple pen-and-paper exercises that will help you:
--teach your mind to hear that "eureka" moment of insight
--improve your problem-solving skills
--use divergent thinking to boost your creativity
--retrain your intuition to become more trustworthy
--avoid the cognitive "blinkering" that too often comes with expertise
--expand your working memory
--practice your performance under pressure
--improve your pattern-recognition skills
--sharpen your emotional intelligence
--strengthen your willpower
 
And more!

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

GARTH SUNDEM is the author of numerous books, including Geek Logik and the pop-science guides Brain Candy and Brain Trust. His writing has appeared in such publications as the New York Times, Esquire, Wired, and Men's Health. He lives in Colorado.

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Chapter One

Insight

I was at a thing the other night with a handful of other Boulder, Colorado, authors, ostensibly to talk about writerly stuff but actually to drink beer and swap stories. After a couple of Left Hand Brewing Wake Up Dead Stouts, a defense lawyer turned biographer turned crime writer named Mark told a story about his book in progress, the fifth in a series of crime novels. Set in south Florida, it features hit men with guns, a corpse filled with bullets, and more than a pinch of courtroom drama. Mark talked about how he’d peppered the first two-­thirds of the book with clues leading to his meticulously pre-­planned conclusion that, in hindsight and in the great tradition of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Perry Mason, and Angela Lansbury as amateur detective Jessica Fletcher, could’ve gone no other way.

Only, it did.

For a couple of weeks, in the back of Mark’s mind had been the disappointment that this fifth book was going in the same direction as his first four—­not the details, per se, but the mechanism of clue-­sprinkling that eventually leads the only place it could lead: to the true killer. You know, the crime-­novel thing. One morning he sat down to type as he always does, imagining that in a couple of hours, he’d be two thousand words closer to his scripted finish.

But then—­bang!—­something happened.

The clues came together in his head like the melding of the two panels of a 3D stereogram, only instead of bringing the killer’s face into focus (spoiler alert!), the sum of these clues was no killer at all. The hit men found an already-­dead body and claimed the crime in order to get paid. Mark described his absolute confidence that the left turn he took meshed with the interconnected web of clues woven into his novel’s previous two hundred pages.

He just knew it was right. And in this state of knowing, the words in his head outpaced his typing skills. He found himself attacking the keyboard in a frenzy to crystalize his insight. One day and fifteen thousand words later, Mark had his newest crime novel.

Crime writer Mark’s insight is the stuff we all hope for when presented with a tricky problem: a simple, brilliant solution that strikes us seemingly out of the blue. But it seems serendipitous, impossible to re-­create.

In fact, while Mark’s crime-­novel insight was serendipitous in that he didn’t necessarily mean to discover clues clicking into new configurations when he sat down at his computer that morning, the insight itself was anything but luck. Without knowing it, he’d entered a state of brain-­ and knowledge-­readiness that made insight nearly inevitable. You can learn to put your brain in the same state.

First, here’s why insight can be difficult: It requires a paradoxical mix of experience with openness. Usually, experience leads to set-­in-­stone ways of doing things. Typically, openness is only present when you’re forced by inexperience to remain available in your search for solutions. Experience mixed with openness is a rare cocktail.

Let’s unpack this a bit. Insight is the novel connection of far-­flung bits of information floating around in your head. And so in order to make connections, you have to have the needed information in your brain already. This is what we think of as experience, or expertise; researchers call it problem-­specific knowledge. These chunks of information and know-­how form the building blocks of insight. If you’re a physicist, your insights come from combining your problem-­specific knowledge of physics facts in novel ways; if you’re a chef, an insightful dish comes from knowing ingredients and techniques and then melding them together to make something new.

The more problem-­specific knowledge you accumulate, the more building blocks you have to use when constructing insight. There’s no pill you can take that will instantly implant you with problem-­specific knowledge—­although chapter 7 on expertise can help you develop it sooner rather than later.

For now, though, we’ll focus on the second half of insight: openness. Again, this second step is why insight is dear: it’s a rare person who can know the old solutions but keep an open mind to new ones. And it turns out you can make your brain ready and able to link together whatever problem-­specific knowledge you have in new, insightful ways. Researchers John Kounios of Drexel University and Mark Jung-­Beeman of Northwestern University know how. They pinpointed the brain state of “readiness for insight” by watching subjects’ gray matter as they solved remote-­association problems—­for example: What one word melds with each of the words tank, hill, and secret to make a compound word or common phrase? This kind of remote-­association problem gives itself up to insight or analysis, and use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) shows that depending on which strategy you use, distinct areas of the brain are at work.

Ready for another paradox? Rather than opening your mind to insight, Kounios and Jung-­Beeman show that if you want insight, the best thing you can do is to close it.

A closed mind shows up on an fMRI as activation of the anterior cingulate cortex, your brain’s home of inhibiting distraction. It’s as if your ACC is a pair of noise-­cancelling headphones, and with these headphones in place you’re more able to hear your brain’s quiet, insightful whispers. But what’s even cooler is that fMRI shows that “these brain states are likely linked to distinct types of mental preparation,” say Kounios and Jung-­Beeman. In other words, by readying your brain, you can increase the chance of insight. The researchers describe this state as the brain shutting its eyes. Here’s how to do it:

First, turn off as much outside stimulus as possible so your brain doesn’t have to work to inhibit it. Once you’ve turned off the outside world, turn off the inside world too—­release distracting thoughts and the tempting golden apples of the tried-­and-­true solutions you know from experience. Then, the researchers say, get ready to close your mind even further—­prepare to inhibit not only the distracting things that already exist inside and outside your skull but also any new false whispers your brain offers. For example, remember the words tank, hill, and secret? As you look at the word “secret,” the whisper of “service” might pop into your mind. Sure, it makes “secret service” but after you discover “hill service” and “service hill” are nonsense, be ready to inhibit the false insight of “service” as surely as you’ve inhibited background noise and irrelevant thoughts. Shove it quickly and securely into your brain’s locked waste vault so that it doesn’t compete with other, possibly correct, whispers.

Close your mind.

Assuming you have the problem-­specific knowledge, the correct insight is tumbling around in there somewhere. Your job is to silence everything else so that you can hear it. This process of focusing inward, inhibiting irrelevant thoughts, and getting ready to switch to new thinking styles makes you measurably more likely to experience sudden insight, which, in the case of tank, hill, and secret is the word “top,” as in tank top, hilltop, and top secret.

Of course, this is unintentionally your mental state when you’re sleepy and is why insight tends to strike in bed, in the shower, or while groping for predawn coffee. This generally held opinion of...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Crown
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0770435963
• ISBN 13: 9780770435967
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 240
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar