Reddit reviews How to Be Twice as Smart: Boosting Your Brainpower and Unleashing the Miracles of Your Mind

Yes, I did speedreading. But it's not very suitable for highly technical material like engineering, scientific, or mathematical texts. And way too much work for recreational reading (it takes all the fun out of it). I liked testing my speed and comprehension after runs (because the results looked impressive). But I was in engineering college at the time, and so it wasn't applicable to things like chemistry and physics. I ended up only really getting a tangible benefit out of it just once, when I had to try memorizing a 100+ page instruction manual in an hour (and then pass a test), or possibly go to jail sometime later (long story).


Note that the more you read in general (the more practice you get) the faster you'll get naturally, up to a certain point. And the more you expand your vocabulary will help as well (since you'll understand more without the need to guess definitions from context, or look them up). But of course the speed reading techniques WILL greatly accelerate you-- at least for certain types of material (I'd read at least 2000 books by college, because I was a bespectacled teenage geek with virtually no social life; so I'd had plenty of practice, even before learning speed reading).


In college I actually got more use out of rapid note-taking, using a technique from a book called How to be twice as smart. That book has several items you might like in it (including mnemonic techniques I believe):

http://www.amazon.com/How-Twice-Smart-Brainpower-Unleashing/dp/0134023390

Mnemonics would probably be more useful to many people than speed reading-- but they are similar to speed reading in that it can take considerable work to utilize them. I read a book once about a guy with the best tested memory in the world, and it turned out he used his own geographical mnemonic technique in his head. He kept a whole virtual town in his noggin, and whenever he wanted to remember something, he'd find somewhere to put it in that imaginary town, and after that he could always return to retrieve it again (sorry for the very brief synopsis, but I read that 30+ years ago, and never tried to memorize it in detail at the time: I was reading it for fun and to avoid studying, more than anything else).


Yes, I believe there's mnemonic techniques you can use for general purposes-- but as I've rarely had need for such since college, I no longer have them readily at hand in memory (stuff you don't regularly use gets tougher to recall over decades). The Twice as smart book may list some of those.


I mainly used meditation and yoga to relax. I learned and used self-hypnosis to get myself through some particularly difficult engineering classes. Created a trigger I could use to put myself immediately into a highly receptive state during lectures, and actually visualize almost like a hallucination what the professor was describing in real time (the most vivid image in my recollection now has to do with the inner workings of an electric motor). The first time I took the class, I failed it. I think at least half the class failed with me. I was totally lost. My school used certain classes as filters to weed out big bunches of students, and encourage them to change their majors to something easier. The second time though, using the self-hypnosis, I got a B.

Yeah, it'd be a much better story if I'd gotten an A. But I was personally wildly pleased with the B! Plus the fact that I may have been one of the few students during the finals who wasn't scared out of my mind (some of the teachers did a great job at terrorizing us).

I also invested some time in something called Silva Mind Control, to try beefing up my powers of visualization. Basically it was very similar to self-hypnosis, only with some intriguing tales by the authors about the technique possibly helping you acquire certain superhuman capabilities as well (ha, ha). The superhuman promises stuff really helped me and a friend pursue it for a while. I remember spending a whole xmas vacation (4 weeks) doing visualization exercises from the book (it was mentally very strenuous). Also around that same time I read a sci fi book (maybe by Silverberg? unsure) where the hero himself used techniques like self-hypnosis to gain superhuman abilities. So I was really gung ho on it at the time! Ha, ha.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silva_Method

Adam Smith Powers of Mind was another intriguing book I read around this time-- and seemed to list some major results relating to things like hypnosis and other forms of mental training that science at that time could not explain.

http://www.amazon.com/Powers-Mind-Adam-Smith/dp/0671447971

I've done/tried a LOT of stuff. Many of which might be embaressing to admit now. Like hung out with this hippy dude for a while who was really into Scientology (this was way back like 35 years ago, when Scientology was much less well known-- and more of a tantalyzing mystery-- than today). I actually read Dianetics by Hubbard.

I read all the earliest Carlos Castaneda books. Did acid, mushrooms, speed, pot, etc., etc. Drank to excess quite a few times. Bought a book called How to increase your intelligence (I think the link below is to the same work):


http://www.amazon.com/How-Increase-Your-Intelligence-Wenger/dp/0880471522

This book had some pretty weird exercises to do in it. But I know I did at least some of them (decades back).

There's quite a lot of mind expansion possibilities to be found in various editions of the old Whole Earth Catalog too. The WEC was basically the internet in a book, before the internet existed. Only the WEC pointed almost exclusively just to excellent books on almost every significant topic under the sun.

The WEC was where I found the main two books on self-hypnosis I ended up using (among maybe 100 other tomes).


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Earth_Catalog




This is just a sampling of my own plodding course. But maybe you'll find something useful (or at least entertaining) among it all.

Thanks a lot! That's exactly the kind of answer I was hoping for.

Any chance this is the book? http://www.amazon.com/How-Twice-Smart-Brainpower-Unleashing/dp/0134023390