Reviews by Hubie Goode: Let’s Talk About Mental Leverage, Pt. 3

You know what isometric exercises are, right? If you try these for physical fitness, you’ll find that pushing against an immovable object will actually make your muscles stronger. It helps to know this, because your brain is actually kind of like this. It, too, is a muscle. Kids in school often feel they will never use the things they learn in school, but they miss the important step of exercise which makes the capacity for thought “bigger” and therefore improves their chances for success in life.

The secret of isometrics is that you are using your own muscles to increase their strength. You are exerting those muscles past their limit and trying to move the immovable. This has a better rate of return than weight lifting for the same amount of time. With weights, they can be heavy but not immovable. Your muscles get more of a workout when they push against something that will not move with lots of practice.

The amazing thing is that with less time spent every day you can develop a musculature that would take more time from each day you use it. So it is with your mind. If you give a brief amount of time to isometric exercises with the mind, then over an accumulated amount of time, it is possible to develop way beyond where you are now. But another nice thing is that you can practice mental exercise while involved with other things. In the same way you use muscle to make muscles bigger, you use your mind to make your mind “bigger”.

So, let’s talk about memory. You probably believe that you were born with the world’s worst memory sometimes, I know it happens to me also. I have a problem with names, I see faces forever, but I can and often do, put the wrong names to the faces. I’ll correct the mistake, and then later on the mistake will come back to memory and I can’t remember the correction. Ack!

Or how about when you are searching for the right word to use, or the name of some movie, or, even where you put the car keys... and then it pops up in your mind a half hour later. Frustrating, I know. But don’t worry, your memory is a lot better than you think. It’s just a matter of learning how to use it efficiently.

For instance, how many of you have a roster of passwords and user names for internet sites and can’t keep them all straight? It can get pretty nuts. But if you use some memory techniques for this, you can do just fine. I’ll give you two right now before I go on.

Name two things you are familiar with. Your dog’s name, your favorite color. Okay, you like a website for growing tomatoes. Say, tomatoes.com. You are a member and have to input a password each time. So the dog’s name is Spot. You’re favorite color is blue. So your password is always in front of you at Tomatoes.com. Your password is spottomatoesblue. Or, you could use numbers in there. For instance even numbers twice, like 22. spottomatoes22.

If you were into race cars at racecars.com, it would be spotraceblue or spotrace22. And that system will work for you with all of the sites you visit, because you are attaching something old, planted in your memory with something new and the two link up to form one thought. Got it?

Or you can use the keyboard in front of you if you would like something a little harder to keep track of and even more effective. Look at your key board. See the letters QWAS? POLK? They are on each side of the board and they follow a key sequence, if you can remember the individual sequences of the keys as you see them, for instance, Q is 1, W is 2, A is 3, S is 4 and then P is 1, O is 2, L is 3. K is 4, then you’ll be able to mix and match combinations that are almost impossible to de-encrypt.

I’m trying to keep these as short as possible, so we’ll continue next time with more memory ideas.


More to come in part 4.