71–80 of 85 posts
Why do you want to improve your abstract thinking skills? I would be surprised if there is anyway to improve these skills, g(aka IQ) is notoriously hard to improve. But I imagine you want better abstract thinking skills for a specific reason, and it'll probably be much more effective to skip directly to the reason you want to improve these skills.
It is not, and by thinking so you are limiting yourself.
This is not quite related, but I learned something yesterday. My wife tells me that she wants to be smarter so while we were walking I was trying to teach her mental chess so we can play chess while we walk. And she didn't want to because she was mentally exhausted (perhaps from all my talking, which is totally okay). Some of the smartest people I know don't actively seek out to improve their thinking skills. Its sim…
A great way to understand how to get mentally fit is to look at physical fitness. For most unfit people, exercising muscles that they don't use is unpleasant. What they need is simple exercises that are short, easy to understand, repeatable, cover a range of muscles, and have variations that provide increasing difficulty for advancement. You don't want to start someone off doing power lifts.
If you've been to any gym classes, you'll realize that there's no such thing as an objective scale for exercise difficulty. Squats may be trivial to someone but impossible for someone else. Finding a person's level of fitness and figuring out a good set of exercises that are appropriate for their progression is the key to a good long term fitness plan that actually works.
How about starting her off with something simple like sudoku? I know some may balk at the idea of sudoku being a mental challenge, but it's the mental exercise equivalent of yoga. The reality is that some people who haven't used their brain in a long time may be at a very, very low level. Not a knock on them, just not everyone has the opportunity to use their mental faculties 8hrs a day at their day job.
This is not quite related, but I learned something yesterday. My wife tells me that she wants to be smarter so while we were walking I was trying to teach her mental chess so we can play chess while we walk. And she didn't want to because she was mentally exhausted (perhaps from all my talking, which is totally okay). Some of the smartest people I know don't actively seek out to improve their thinking skills. Its sim…
You memorize the order of an entire deck of cards every day?
Write, read challenging works of literature, learn an instrument and play music, listen to art music, learn to paint or draw, or take an acting class. Or any other art, such as woodworking or pottery.
The question was posed on a site dedicated to discussion of programming and related subjects. It therefore should be assumed that the author was requesting advice for developing abstract reasoning skills such as are employed in mathematics or software engineering. Your suggestions require explanation as to why they would help this sort of abstract reasoning. As a matter of fact, many people who are proficient in the…
Music and the arts have long been documented as wonderful ways to enhance abstract thinking. And you might become a well rounded person as an added bonus!
Suspension of judgment was the very first step I discovered, I clearly remember, from when I was quite little. Perhaps I started out especially daft, but I kept making discoveries ever since. Something which served me well a long time was a mental game of following logic to extreme conclusions and then asking myself "what if this is true, and my premise was wrong?" One of the most powerful methods I use now when appr…
This is not quite related, but I learned something yesterday. My wife tells me that she wants to be smarter so while we were walking I was trying to teach her mental chess so we can play chess while we walk. And she didn't want to because she was mentally exhausted (perhaps from all my talking, which is totally okay). Some of the smartest people I know don't actively seek out to improve their thinking skills. Its sim…
This is not quite related, but I learned something yesterday. My wife tells me that she wants to be smarter so while we were walking I was trying to teach her mental chess so we can play chess while we walk. And she didn't want to because she was mentally exhausted (perhaps from all my talking, which is totally okay). Some of the smartest people I know don't actively seek out to improve their thinking skills. Its sim…
"Time spent thinking" is actually a great metric for getting smarter. However playing mental chess is probably way too difficult for her and the majority of the population. A great way to understand how to get mentally fit is to look at physical fitness. For most unfit people, exercising muscles that they don't use is unpleasant. What they need is simple exercises that are short, easy to understand, repeatable, cover…
While I agree with most of your comment, this caught my eye, because that's exactly what "Starting Strength" by Mark Rippetoe (an HN recommendation, I might add) does. Granted, Rippetoe points out, multiple times, to start with the empty bar. It's also probably not a bad idea to have your form checked, although I lifted for a year before doing so, and the only time I've injured myself was a bodyweight exercise (situps, which aren't part of "Starting Strength").
Study higher level math! Category theory is a brainfuck that exercises that skill well. This book https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/category-theory-sciences doesn't have any real mathy prereqs but is fun. Added benefit from studying math is that its a foundation for a whole bunch of other cool stuff.
I was going to recommend “How to Prove It”, if someone doesn’t know proofs already.