It doesn't take long to figure out if something is worth reading. Skilled writing and high-quality ideas stick out.As a result, most people should probably start more books than they do. This doesn't mean you need to read each book page by page. You can skim the table of contents, chapter titles, and subheadings. Pick an exciting section and dive in for a few pages. Maybe flip through the book and glance at any bolded points or tables. You'll have a reasonable idea of how good it is in ten minutes.Then comes the crucial step: Quit books quickly and without guilt or shame.

1. Quit More Books

One way to improve reading comprehension is to choose books you can immediately apply. Putting the ideas you read into action is one of the best ways to secure them in your mind. Practice is a very effective form of learning.Choosing a book that you can use also provides a strong incentive to pay attention and remember the material. That’s particularly true when something important hangs in the balance. If you’re starting a business, for example, then you have a lot of motivation to get everything you can out of the sales book you’re reading.

2. Choose Books You Can Use Instantly

Keep notes on what you read. You can do this however you like. It doesn't need to be a big production or a complicated system. Just do something to emphasize the important points and passages.You can do this in different ways depending on the format that you're consuming. You can highlight passages when reading on Kindle. You can dog-ear pages and transcribe notes when reading a print book.But here's the real key: store your notes in a searchable format. There is no need to leave the task of reading comprehension solely up to your memory.

3. Create Searchable Notes

One way to imagine a book is like a knowledge tree with a few fundamental concepts forming the trunk and the details forming the branches. You can learn more and improve reading comprehension by “linking branches” and integrating your current book with other knowledge trees.

4. Combine Knowledge Trees

As soon as you finish a book, you can challenge yourself to summarize the entire text in just three sentences. This constraint is just a game, of course, but it forces me to consider what was really important about the book.Some questions you can consider when summarizing a book include:<ul><li>What are the main ideas?</li><li>If I implemented one idea from this book right now, which one would it be?</li><li>How would I describe the book to a friend?</li></ul>

5. Write a Short Summary

If you only read one book on a topic and use that as the basis for your beliefs for an entire category of life, well, how sound are those beliefs? How accurate and complete is your knowledge?Reading a book takes effort, but too often, people use one book or one article as the basis for an entire belief system. This is even more true (and more difficult to overcome) when it comes to using our one, individual experience as the basis for our beliefs.

6. Surround the Topic

I'd like to finish by returning to an idea I mentioned near the beginning of this article: read great books twice. The philosopher Karl Popper explained the benefits nicely, “Anything worth reading is not only worth reading twice but worth reading again and again. If a book is worthwhile, then you will always be able to make new discoveries in it and find things in it that you didn’t notice before, even though you have read it many times.”Additionally, revisiting great books is helpful because the problems you deal with change over time.

7. Read It Twice

One book will rarely change your life, even if it does deliver a lightbulb moment of insight. The key is to get a little wiser each day.

It's important to read books, but it's just as important to remember what you read. Read this article to learn three reading comprehension strategies.

writing

Reading & Writing

strategy

Strategy

education

Learning & Education

problemsolving

Problem Solving

scienceandnature

Science & Nature

7 Ways to Retain More of Every Book You Read

In the average adult human, the brain represents about 2% of the body weight. Remarkably, despite its relatively small size, the brain accounts for about 20% of the oxygen and, hence, calories consumed by the body. This high rate of metabolism is remarkably constant despite the widely varying mental and motoric activity.

Brain's Oxygen Usage

Your brain uses 20% of the total oxygen and blood in your body.

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

health

Health

Brain Oxygen Consumption

We are living in an age of immense connectivity & digital entertainment – multiple streaming shows, countless social media platforms, 24/7 newsfeeds, all instantly available at your fingertips.
The technological advancement that enabled social connectivity & ease of access to information came with a huge prize: mental distress. How does access to information and social connectivity cause mental derangement in the human psyche?
Distractibility , or a fleeting attention span! The seventeenth-century Catholic philosopher Blaise Pascal once said, “All of man’s problems arise from an inability to sit quietly in a room.”
Sent By Sabith Mohammed

Cerebrate Weekly: Your Attention shapes your reality

But from what are we absolutely distracted? “Verily in the remembrance of God do hearts find rest! “  Chapter 13:28.  It is indeed this state of distractibility from God, that is the root cause of most of the mental health issues that we are facing. God Himself revealed in His Book that the peace of mind that we are longing for lies in our remembrance of Him. He also says in another verse: “And whoever turns away from My remembrance – indeed, he will have a depressed [i.e., difficult] life, and We will gather [i.e., raise] him on the Day of Resurrection blind.”  Chapter 20:124

We usually tend to blame our distractibility on social media & streaming channels  — but these are all just proximate causes of distraction. We blame them, while the root causes stay hidden as explained by Nir Eyal in his book Indistractable. For the past ten to fifteen years, there has been a huge increase in the degree to which that human vulnerability has been exploited for profit. Huge enterprises, and entire economic sectors, are dedicated to preying on our attention and focus. They have merged the sciences of Psychology, algorithms & information technologies to create habit-forming products that hook us onto their infinite pool of content.

They don’t call it “surfing the web for nothing”. In reality, this is what’s happening. Nothingness! Just think about the idea of a Web! What do you do with a web? A spider knows what it does with a web. He captures flies, liquidates their innards, then suck the life out of them, and then there’s just a shell lying there on the web. This is exactly what surfing the web does to you. Also, the interesting thing about the sport of surfing is that you’re just trying to stay on the wave. The wave has you. You’re not controlling the wave, the wave is controlling you. You’re just trying to stay afloat. The first step in combating this is to be conscious of the fact that our desire for comfort may easily bleed into general apathy and the potential to be manipulated leading to our attention being bought and sold in destructive ways.

The first step in combating this is to be conscious of the fact that our desire for comfort may easily bleed into general apathy and the potential to be manipulated leading to our attention being bought and sold in destructive ways. Hence it is important to be mindful of our attention.

Mindfulness

Let’s get into the Etymology of some of these words. Advertisement:  The word “advert ” means to turn towards, so an advertisement means to divert your attention to something the ad campaign (a military term) wants you to be mindful of.Distraction : What exactly do you mean by “distraction”? One of the definitions we find in the dictionary is “mental distress or derangement”. Isn’t it interesting that we also live in one of the most mentally deranged periods in human history, with people unsure of what the ultimate purpose of life is?

The best way to be mindful is to delve deep into Etymology

Another meaning in the dictionary for distraction is “that which divides attention ”. The word “ Decide ” in English comes from a word “decidere ” which means to cutoff. Why would “decide” mean “to cut off”? because what you decide cuts off everything else. Once you’ve made your decision you’re actually cutting off other things. So make conscious decisions on where you spend your time. The Arabic word for distraction is ‘ilha ‘, which means to pull someone into entertainment. Therefore, whatever receives our attention influences the reality we experience.

Entertainment , according to the dictionary, means “agreeable occupation of the mind, diversion, amusement.” Who or what is occupying your mind? Our Prophet ﷺ occupied his own mind with the remembrance of God. He said, “Whoever makes his concerns (what he or she is mindful of) one concern (God), God will take care of all his other concerns.”

Who or what is occupying your mind? Our Prophet ﷺ occupied his own mind with the remembrance of God. He said, “Whoever makes his concerns (what he or she is mindful of) one concern (God), God will take care of all his other concerns.” One of the Arabic words for mindfulness  is “muhtamm “, which means “what one is concerned with.” The Arabic word for attention is ‘tiba ‘, which means to be awake and aware. It also means to devote. So We should try to be mindful and present in order to direct our attention & devotion to God. Source:  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZHj5O-eKaU">The Mindful Messenger </a> ﷺ, Hamza Yusuf, Zaytuna College

Podcast Episode: <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/221-how-to-train-your-thoughts-tame-the-hidden/id1208024744?i=1000512138284">How to Train Your Thoughts & Tame the Hidden Dragons</a> With Dr. Daniel Amen & Kwik Brain with Jim Kwik.
Blog: <a href="https://www.akramnadwi.com/shaytans-tricks/">Devil’s Tricks.</a> An excellent take on “Distraction” from a Psycho Spiritual perspective on how human’s are lured to distraction by the devil.

Weekly Compass

Book Summary: <a href="https://www.thinkabled.com/dopamine-detox/">Dopamine Detox</a> by Thibaut Mueriss. This book explains the role of the Neurotransmitter “Dopamine” in our behavior & how its functioning has been hijacked in modern world.
 Article: <a href="https://www.thinkabled.com/pavlovs-experiment-the-reason-why-you-are-distracted/">Pavlov’s Experiment: The Reason Why You Are Distracted</a> . In this article Omer Mohammed revisits the Pavlov’s Experiment & explains how environments trigger our behaviors.
Video : <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDIkyP9WOdQ">I Left Social Media For 14 Days</a> : Afterbreaking his phone accidentally, Omer was forced to undergo a social detox. In this video he shares his experience on dopamine detox after quitting social media.

Read & Rise

Or were they created without there being anything, or are they themselves the creators? ―<a href="https://quran.com/52/35">Quran 52:35</a>

Food for Thought

<a href="https://www.khaleejtimes.com/books/book-lady-of-dubai-celebrates-third-anniversary-of-booktopia">Book Lady of Dubai:</a> This article tells the story of a voracious reader and book enthusiast who went on to become a successful entrepreneur in Dubai.

Weekly dose of Inspiration

<a href="https://readwise.io/">Readwise </a>: Do you want to remember everything you read ? Then check out this app named Readwise   to grow wiser and retain books better. Readwise  helps you get the most out of what you read by making it fun & easy to revisit your highlights from all your favorite reading platforms in one place Get more wisdoms and actionable ideas in our weekly newsletter: Cerebrate . Sign up here to join our growing community of readers.

Tools for Thought

Cerebrate Weekly: Your Attention shapes your reality We are living in an age of immense connectivity & digital entertainment - multiple streaming shows, countless social media platforms, 24/7 newsfeeds, all instantly available at your fingertips. The technological advancement that enabled social connectivity & ease of access to information came with a huge prize: mental distress. How does access to information

meditation

Meditation

Your Attention Shapes Your Reality

Solipsism revolves around the idea that there is nothing you can confirm except your own existence. If you think about the brain’s capacity for hallucination, and just good ol’ dreaming, it’s not that hard to imagine outside manipulation being possible as well. For all we know, we COULD be stuck in the Matrix, or maybe you’re the only person that exists and the entire world and your experience of it is just an illusion.

Solipsism

The philosophy of idealism has nothing to do with being idealistic. It has nothing to do with ideals, but rather ideas. It revolves around the thought that reality is fundamentally something that exists on a mental level. Kant once defined idealism as “the assertion that we can never be certain whether all of our putative outer experience is not mere imagining.”

Idealism 

Is the idea that nothing can be said to exist beyond the observation of the thing itself. So, for example, you could not argue that the stone exists, only that your sense of it exists. You could say: “I saw a stone.” but not: “The stone was there.” The only thing that one is able to confirm is the sensory data of the stone, but not the stone’s existence independent of your own.

Phenomenalism

The idea that only the present exists, and that both the past and future do not. A Buddhist scholar named Fyodor Shcherbatskoy said the following: “Everything past is unreal, everything future is unreal, everything imagined, absent, mental . . . is unreal. . .. Ultimately real is only the present moment of physical efficiency.” The belief that our way of experiencing time is it’s true and only nature. So, for a presentist the idea of time travel is ridiculous, as there exists no destination to travel to, where other philosophies and theories might suggest otherwise.

Presentism

Contrary to presentism, eternalism is the belief that all moments in time, past, present and future are equally real. Some eternalists believe that because of the nature of time, in this case that time exists as a whole, not in separate parts, the existing future already exists in a set and final manner, and therefore we are only capable of experiencing the future, not able to change it in any way, which one could interpret as the existence of fate. Modern scientific theories seemingly support the eternalism over presentism, but with our ever-developing understanding of the universe.

Eternalism

The most well-known form of nihilism, existential nihilism is focused on the assertion that life has no inherent purpose, goal, or intrinsic value. (Intrinsic value is the idea of something having value in and of itself.) Simplified, it’s the belief that life is utterly pointless. The difference between nihilism and hedonism is that pleasure, or joy, is seen as worthless as well, and therefore is often characterized as leading to a feeling of despair. Some modern interpretations of existential nihilism conclude that precisely because your life has no intrinsic value, goals or purpose.

Nihilism

Hedonism is centered around the belief that pleasure is the only thing that has intrinsic value. Basically, a hedonist makes pleasure the ultimate goal of any and all of his actions and choices in life. Hedonism is perhaps the philosophy that is closest to our original instincts, in that it embraces the response of pleasure to things like eating and fornicating wholeheartedly. Instead of bringing morals into the picture, it focuses on feasting on pleasure, a sensory response that probably played a vital part in our survival as a species.

Hedonism

Unlike what seems to be popular belief, stoicism is not about faking not having an emotional response or becoming completely emotionless. It is a philosophy that focuses on training yourself to improve through training and conditioning. From everything to your outlook on life, to knowledge and perhaps especially minimizing your negative emotional responses. Stoics believe that emotions like anger, sadness and frustration are based in your own, fixable faults rather than justified responses to outside influences.

Stoicism

One could perhaps argue that skepticism is the basis for all other philosophies. Because if we didn’t question, if we didn’t ask, then where would the answers be? But philosophical skepticism, unlike methodical skepticism, does not focus on questioning individual statements to validate or invalidate; rather, it questions if there is a possibility for a certainty in any knowledge. And given the constant changes in our understanding of the universe and even what’s directly in front of us, it might not be as “overly skeptical” as you might think.

Skepticism

philosophy

Philosophy

religionandspirituality

Religion & Spirituality

mindfulness

9 Philosophies That Will Change The Way You Look At Life

We can all probably agree that procrastination isn’t wise. While most of us procrastinate from time to time, we often chalk it up to poor planning. When you understand what’s going on in your brain, though, a failure to plan isn’t the root cause.“Procrastination is an emotion-focused coping strategy,” says Tim Pychyl, associate professor of psychology at Carleton University in Ottawa, and author of Solving the Procrastination Puzzle: a concise guide to strategies for change. “It’s not a time management problem.”

Procrastination Is A Brain Thing, Not A Mind Thing

Pychyl says researchers in Germany compared the brains of procrastinators to non-procrastinators using functional MRI. It found that the brains of procrastinators have a larger amygdala, which is part of the limbic system known for fight or flight.“What’s happening is what we call the ‘amygdala hijack,'” says Pychyl. “The procrastinators are reacting emotionally, and the emotion-focused coping response is to escape. It’s saying, ‘I don’t want these negative emotions I’ll experience during the task,’ and so it avoids the task.”

The Brain Of A Procrastinator: “I Don’t Want To Do That!”

Another important brain reaction is how it perceives the future. Research done by UCLA social psychologist Hal Hershfield found that the brain views our future self in the same way it views another person.“[Hershfield] used a functional MRI to look at the brains of people when they were thinking of their present self, their future self, or the other,” says Pychyl. “When we think of future self, the same parts of the brain light up as when we think about the other.”

The Brain Of A Procrastinator: “Let That Stranger Do It!”

It’s also human nature to seek pleasure. “We want to feel good now,” says Pychyl. “It’s hedonistic over eudaimonic, which is the happiness we feel when we achieve meaningful goals.”

The Brain Of All Of Us: “I Want My Pleasure NOW!”

Putting it all together, when we face a task that presents boredom, frustration, or fear, the limbic system lights up, and the amygdala hijack overrides the prefrontal cortex, which is the home of executive function that includes things like impulse control, planning, and organization.“All of a sudden, we’ve got all this input from the amygdala and we’re not able to recruit those higher order processes,” says Pychyl. “Even when we do, we think about our future self as a stranger. All those things come together to drive procrastination.”

The Amygdala Hijack

Some of us are more prone to procrastination than others. Pychyl says this group often has high traits of neuroticism, such as worry, and depression, and self-consciousness. They have over-active, dominating amygdala.People who are better at planning use another area of their brain. “This group is high in executive functioning,” says Pychyl. “Instead of so much limbic system activity, they’re getting more prefrontal cortex activity, which reflects with planning and impulse control. Any down regulation of the prefrontal cortex, leads to problems with following through on things.”

Limbic System VS Prefrontal Cortex

Fortunately, there are things we can do. The key to getting control over procrastination is emotion regulation, and one method is practicing mindfulness.Research out of the University of Pittsburghfound that people can learn to control their emotions through mindfulness. Participants practiced using nonjudgmental awareness over the course of eight weeks. The study found that their amygdala shrunk and the connections to the prefrontal cortex changed.

Fighting “Flighting”: Nonjudgmental Awareness

“When you’re freaking out over a task you need to do, your body and your mind are responding to your physiological arousal,” says Pychyl. “So, first and foremost, you have to stop that pattern of down regulation that it feeds off of.”Pychyl suggests using breathing and muscle relaxation exercises.

Fighting “Flighting”: Physiological Recovery

“Then practice nonjudgmental awareness of the emotion,” Pychyl says. “Become aware. Acknowledge your feelings. For example, you could say, ‘I’m really anxious about this report.’ And then look for the reasons for those emotions. Maybe you don’t want to disappoint. That makes sense. Your emotions are trying to teach you something. But you don’t need to freak out. My favorite saying is, ‘I can have anxiety. I don’t need to be my anxiety.'”

Fighting “Flighting”: Emotion Acknowledgement

Once we find a way to get control over our emotions, it’s time to move forward. Procrastination, whether it stems from fear, frustration or boredom, is resolved with action. It’s getting ourselves to do something we don’t feel like doing. Pychyl suggests propelling ourselves forward by breaking down a large goal or task into individual steps.

The Only Way To Eat An Elephant Is One Bite At A Time

“What’s the next action you would take if you were going to start?” Pychyl asks. “Keep it as small as possible. Then you realize, ‘Well, I could do that action.’ Research has shown us that when you make progress, even a little bit on a goal, it fuels your wellbeing. Even if you just take the tiniest of steps, you’ll help yourself get started and then you’re on your way.”Mindfulness + action: the one-two punch that can cure procrastination.

Mindfulness + Action: The One-Two Punch

Procrastination is an emotion-focused coping strategy. It’s not a time management problem.

When you understand what’s going on in your brain, you can break the cycle and start to get things done.


productivity

Productivity

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

This Is What’s Going On In Our Brain When We Procrastinate

Many people believe willpower is fixed and finite. Yet powerful strategies exist that can help us increase it. Our reserves of self-control and mental focus appear to be shaped by mindsets. And new studies suggest powerful strategies for anyone to build greater willpower – with huge benefits for your health, productivity and happiness.

The Mindset That Brings Unlimited Willpower

We all face demanding days that seem designed to test our self-control. Perhaps you are finishing an important project and you have to remain in quiet concentration, without letting your attention slip to other distractions. If you are on a diet, you might have spent the past few hours resisting the cookie jar while the sweet treats silently whisper “eat me”. In each case, you would have relied on your willpower, which psychologists define as the ability to avoid short-term temptations and override unwanted thoughts, feelings or impulses where some seem to have much greater reserves of it.

Defining Willpower

Until recently, the prevailing psychological theory proposed that willpower resembled a kind of battery. You might start the day with full strength, but each time you have to control your thoughts, feelings or behaviour, you zap that battery’s energy. Without the chance to rest and recharge, those resources run dangerously low, making it far harder to maintain your patience and concentration, and to resist temptation. Drawing on the Freudian term for the part of the mind that is responsible for reining in our impulses, the process was known as “ego depletion”.

The Depleted Ego

People with the non-limited view on willpower did not show any signs of ego depletion: they showed no decline in their mental focus after performing a mentally taxing activity

In recent years, some scientists have debated the reliability of the laboratory tests of ego depletion, but Job has also shown that people’s willpower mindsets are linked to many real-life outcomes. She asked university students to complete twice-daily questionnaires about their activities over two non-consecutive weekly periods. As you might expect, some days had much higher demands than others, leading to feelings of exhaustion.

Most of the participants recovered to some degree overnight, but those with the non-limited mindsets actually experienced an increase in their productivity the following day, as if they had been energized by the extra pressure. Once again, it seemed that their belief that “mental stamina fuels itself” had become their reality.

If you already have the non-limited mindset about willpower, these findings might be a cause for self-satisfaction. But what can we do if we have been living under the assumption that our reserves of self-control are easily depleted? Studies suggest that simply learning about this cutting-edge science – through short, accessible texts – can help shift people’s beliefs, at least in the short term. Knowledge, it seems, is power; if so, simply reading this article might have already started to galvanize your mental stamina. You might even enhance this by telling others about what you have learnt.

Galvanizing your willpower

Researchers at Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania recently designed a storybook to teach pre-schoolers the idea that exercising willpower can be energizing, rather than exhausting, and that self-control can grow the more we practice it. Children who had heard this story showed greater self-control in a test of “delayed gratification”, in which they were given the chance to forgo a small treat to receive a bigger treat later on, compared to their classmates who had heard another tale.

Exercising Willpower

One useful strategy to change your mindset may be to remember a time when you worked on a mentally demanding task for the pure enjoyment of the activity. There might be a job at work, for example, that others appear to find difficult but you find satisfying. Or maybe it’s a hobby – such as learning a new piece on the piano – that demands intense concentration, yet feels effortless for you. A recent study found that engaging in this kind of recollection naturally shifts people’s beliefs to the non-limited mindset, as they see proof of their own mental stamina.

You mustn’t expect miracles immediately. But with perseverance, you should see your mindset changing, and with it a greater capacity to master your thoughts, feelings and behaviors so that your actions propel you towards your goals. Once you have proved to yourself that your willpower can grow, you may find it easier to then resist other kinds of temptation or distraction.

Read this article to find out that willpower is continuously exercising and improvable mind muscle

Many people believe willpower is fixed and finite. Yet powerful strategies exist that can help us increase it.

The mindset that brings unlimited willpower

Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories. In short: your brain is not a computer. <a href="https://aeon.co/users/robert-epstein">Robert Epstein</a> is a senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology in California. He is the author of 15 books, and the former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today.

Brain is not a Computer

No matter how hard they try, brain scientists and cognitive psychologists will never find a copy of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in the brain – or copies of words, pictures, grammatical rules or any other kinds of environmental stimuli.The human brain isn’t really empty, of course. But it does not contain most of the things people think it does – not even simple things such as ‘memories’.

No Memories

Our shoddy thinking about the brain has deep historical roots, but the invention of computers in the 1940s got us especially confused.For more than half a century now, psychologists, linguists, neuroscientists and other experts on human behaviour have been asserting that the human brain works like a computer.To see how vacuous this idea is, consider the brains of babies. Thanks to evolution, human neonates, like the newborns of all other mammalian species, enter the world prepared to interact with it effectively.

Historical Roots

A baby’s vision is blurry, but it pays special attention to faces, and is quickly able to identify its mother’s. It prefers the sound of voices to non-speech sounds, and can distinguish one basic speech sound from another. We are, without doubt, built to make social connections. A healthy newborn is also equipped with more than a dozen reflexes – ready-made reactions to certain stimuli that are important for its survival.It turns its head in the direction of something that brushes its cheek and then sucks whatever enters its mouth.

 Social Connections

It holds its breath when submerged in water. It grasps things placed in its hands so strongly it can nearly support its own weight.Perhaps most important, newborns come equipped with powerful learning mechanisms that allow them to change rapidly so they can interact increasingly effectively with their world, even if that world is unlike the one their distant ancestors faced.Senses, reflexes and learning mechanisms – this is what we start with, and it is quite a lot, when you think about it. If we lacked any of these capabilities at birth, we would probably have trouble surviving.

Learning Mechanisms

But here is what we are not born with: information, data, rules, software, knowledge, lexicons, representations, algorithms, programs, models, memories, images, processors, subroutines, encoders, decoders, symbols, or buffers – design elements that allow digital computers to behave somewhat intelligently. Not only are we not born with such things, we also don’t develop them – ever. We don’t store words or the rules that tell us how to manipulate them.

Not Born With ...

We don’t create representations of visual stimuli, store them in a short-term memory buffer, and then transfer the representation into a long-term memory device. We don’t retrieve information or images or words from memory registers. Computers do all of these things, but organisms do not.Computers, quite literally, process information – numbers, letters, words, formulas, images. The information first has to be encoded into a format computers can use, which means patterns of ones and zeroes (‘bits’) organised into small chunks (‘bytes’).

Bits & Bytes

On my computer, each byte contains 8 bits, and a certain pattern of those bits stands for the letter d, another for the letter o, and another for the letter g. Side by side, those three bytes form the word dog. One single image – say, the photograph of my cat Henry on my desktop – is represented by a very specific pattern of a million of these bytes (‘one megabyte’), surrounded by some special characters that tell the computer to expect an image, not a word.Computers, quite literally, move these patterns from place to place in different physical storage areas etched into electronic components.

Three Bytes Form the Word Dog

Sometimes they also copy the patterns, and sometimes they transform them in various ways – say, when we are correcting errors in a manuscript or when we are touching up a photograph. The rules computers follow for moving, copying and operating on these arrays of data are also stored inside the computer. Together, a set of rules is called a ‘program’ or an ‘algorithm’. A group of algorithms that work together to help us do something (like buy stocks or find a date online) is called an ‘application’ – what most people now call an ‘app’.

App is an Application

Forgive me for this introduction to computing, but I need to be clear: computers really do operate on symbolic representations of the world. They really store and retrieve. They really process. They really have physical memories. They really are guided in everything they do, without exception, by algorithms.Humans, on the other hand, do not – never did, never will. Given this reality, why do so many scientists talk about our mental life as if we were computers?

Our Mental Life

In his book In Our Own Image (2015), the artificial intelligence expert George Zarkadakis describes six different metaphors people have employed over the past 2,000 years to try to explain human intelligence.In the earliest one, eventually preserved in the Bible, humans were formed from clay or dirt, which an intelligent god then infused with its spirit. That spirit ‘explained’ our intelligence – grammatically, at least.

Six Different Metaphors

The invention of hydraulic engineering in the 3rd century BCE led to the popularity of a hydraulic model of human intelligence, the idea that the flow of different fluids in the body – the ‘humours’ – accounted for both our physical and mental functioning. The hydraulic metaphor persisted for more than 1,600 years, handicapping medical practice all the while.By the 1500s, automata powered by springs and gears had been devised, eventually inspiring leading thinkers such as René Descartes to assert that humans are complex machines.

Humans Are Complex Machines

In the 1600s, the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes suggested that thinking arose from small mechanical motions in the brain. By the 1700s, discoveries about electricity and chemistry led to new theories of human intelligence – again, largely metaphorical in nature. In the mid-1800s, inspired by recent advances in communications, the German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz compared the brain to a telegraph.

The Brain Like a Telegraph

The mathematician John von Neumann stated flatly that the function of the human nervous system is ‘prima facie digital’, drawing parallel after parallel between the components of the computing machines of the day and the components of the human brain.Each metaphor reflected the most advanced thinking of the era that spawned it. Predictably, just a few years after the dawn of computer technology in the 1940s, the brain was said to operate like a computer, with the role of physical hardware played by the brain itself and our thoughts serving as software.

Prima Facie Digital

The landmark event that launched what is now broadly called ‘cognitive science’ was the publication of Language and Communication (1951) by the psychologist George Miller. Miller proposed that the mental world could be studied rigorously using concepts from information theory, computation and linguistics.This kind of thinking was taken to its ultimate expression in the short book The Computer and the Brain (1958), in which the mathematician John von Neumann stated flatly that the function of the human nervous system is ‘prima facie digital’.

Cognitive Science

Although he acknowledged that little was actually known about the role the brain played in human reasoning and memory, he drew parallel after parallel between the components of the computing machines of the day and the components of the human brain.

The Role of the Brain

Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories. In short: your brain is not a computer

sciencefiction

Science Fiction

creativity

Creativity

artificialintelligence

Artificial Intelligence

Your brain does not process information and it is not a computer | Aeon Essays

For some years now, <a href="https://www.gq.co.za/wealth/5-books-that-bill-gates-wants-you-to-read-to-expand-your-mind-and-knowledge-b23053ae-351d-4e98-9d26-58c1413abfff">Bill Gates </a>has managed to maintain a place near the top of the list of the richest people in the world, but, more importantly, he has also managed to have a successful and remarkable career. Even now that he is no longer the CEO of his company, he is one of those people who seem to have the ability to turn everything they touch into gold.

Bill Gates’s habits to increase your brain power: 

And how has he achieved all that he has? Gates knows very well that, to be successful, to age well, and to maintain your good memory over time, you first need to have a sharp and powerful brain.The brain is a muscle and that means you have to look after it and exercise it. You have to make sure your cognitive abilities are kept in good shape and that you protect your memory and your ability to react and think.You need those<a href="https://www.gq.co.za/wealth/the-soft-skills-you-need-to-get-a-good-job-e47dd09f-d278-4ffe-97a4-78652e3a7b74">skills </a>to do all sorts of things, like making better decisions or finding the right solution to a business challenge.

And it’s not just about excelling at Sudoku or Wordle, you need to have good habits that help protect, strengthen, and empower your brain, and Bill Gates has some of the most important ones.

Many studies talk about the importance of getting enough sleep, because the brain needs time to recover, consolidate memories, and store the information it has absorbed during the day. Lack of sleep is a major factor in cognitive decline.Bill Gates once said that, early in his career, he slept very little and thought it was not a priority, but he soon realised that lack of sleep was affecting his <a href="https://www.gq.co.za/culture/4-ways-to-be-more-productive-according-to-experts-22609f53-19f2-4128-87b3-609c94feb6bd">creativity, productivity </a>, and more, so he decided to have a nightly routine (starting with washing dishes to relax his brain) to get adequate rest and sleep each night.

1. Sleep at least 8 hours

A powerful brain needs to be learning and discovering new things, and reading is ideal for this. Bill Gates recommends reading around 50 <a href="https://www.gq.co.za/culture/sport/the-20-best-sport-books-to-read-right-now-281c0745-5a77-4f18-b2ea-9731afb63c66">books </a>every year and his lists of suggestions always consist of books that he has read, and that have taught him important things about success, business, and much more. Reading leads to learning, improves your writing and vocabulary, can inspire you, and keeps your brain from getting rusty and sluggish.

2. Never stop reading

According to some studies, people in the world’s so-called “blue zones” live longer and better for several reasons, one of which is that they don’t stop working.This doesn’t mean that you have to stay at your job until you die, but rather that you have to find activities that make your brain feel useful and like you are constantly challenging it so that you don’t stop using it and the “muscle” is lost.Finding an activity or pastime you like (which can be things like gardening or remodelling your home) helps prevent cognitive decline and can even reduce the symptoms of some mental conditions.

3. Don't stop working

This is not simply about sleeping, but also setting aside time for yourself, to do the things you like, and simply to take a break from thinking when you relax and have fun. Downtime is important for physical and <a href="https://www.gq.co.za/culture/5-questions-you-should-ask-yourself-to-have-good-mental-health-57f2fb92-d055-4de0-9f42-7e54cd48b980">mental health </a>, it restores your energy, can provide motivation to keep going, and helps clear one’s mind and reduce stress, which can be dangerous if it is at very high levels or if it becomes chronic.

4. Find time to rest

Many experts agree: Physical exercise is important to strengthen the brain, but that doesn’t mean hours and hours of weight training every day. Any kind of exercise is good, especially when you do it outdoors and surrounded by nature, which has also been shown to be very good for brain health.

5. Work out, even if it's just light exercise

Bill Gates 5 Habits that'll Help You Think Smarter 

You’re not going to be successful or smart if your brain isn’t up to the challenge. Here’s what you can learn from Bill Gates.

habits

Habits

Bill Gates’s 5 habits that'll help you think smarter

<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2326098.The_How_of_Happiness">The How of Happiness </a>describes a scientific approach to being happier by giving you a short quiz to determine your “happiness set point,” followed by various tools and tactics to help you take control of the large chunk of happiness that’s fully within your grasp.

Book Summary 

"Happiness is not out there for us to find. The reason that it's not out there is that it's inside us."-Sonja Lyubomirsky

Author Quote 

<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2326098.The_How_of_Happiness">The How of Happiness </a>provides an overview of what we know about how to increase happiness through our thoughts, feelings, and behavior. It covers topics such as mindfulness meditation, gratitude exercises, self-compassion practices, and more. If you’ve been looking for advice on how to apply these principles in real life—you’re in the right place.

Book Overview 

The book will teach you how to become more mindful when interacting with others or by adopting positive habits that will lead to lasting changes. Author <a href="https://sonjalyubomirsky.com/">Sonja Lyubomirsky </a>bases her advice in the latest scientific research, showing that while we do have a baseline level of happiness (our “happiness set point”), we control a large chunk of our happiness, up to 40% in fact!

<ol><li>Our thoughts and genes influence our happiness levels in life.  </li><li>Practicing gratitude can indeed make you happier.  </li><li>You can become happier by doing a series of activities that make people happy in general.  </li> </ol>

Top 3 Lessons From The Book 

Read our summary of The How of Happiness to discover science-backed strategies to become happier, including "the 40% rule" and others.

The How of Happiness Summary

Find 100+ Facts about Science - Curated by others from trusted sources like Books, Podcasts & Articles - Genuine Insights from like-minded Users like You!

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Bill Gates’s 5 habits that'll help you think smarter

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It's time to Read like a Pro.

It's time to
Read like a Pro.