Bend Your Brain (BYB)

Bend Your Brain

10 tips to Bend Your Brain into submission :



These tips are a starting point of how to learn things while reading any book. Listen to your brain and figure out what works for you and what doesn’t. Try new things.

1. Slow down. The more you understand, the less you have to memorize.

Don’t just read. Stop and think. When the book asks you a question, don’t just skip to the answer. Imagine that someone really is asking the question. The more deeply you force your brain to think, the better chance you have of learning and remembering.


2. Do the exercises. Write your own notes.

Workout the exercises while reading any book. Use pencil. There’s a plenty of evidence that physical activity while learning can increase the learning.

3. Don’t do all your reading in one place.

Stand-up, stretch, move around, change chairs, change rooms. It’ll help your brain feel some difference, and keeps your learning from being too connected to a particular place.

4. Atleast rest for sometime after you read. Or recall what you read before you go to sleep.

Part of the learning (especially the transfer to long-term memory) happens after you put the book down. Your brain needs time on its own, to do more processing. If you put in something new during that processing-time, some of what you just learned will be lost.

5. Drink water. Lots of it.

Our brain works best in a nice bath of fluid. Dehydration (which can happen before you feel thirsty) decreases cognitive function.

6. Talk about it. Out loud.

Speaking activates a different part of the brain. If you’re trying to understand something, or increase your chance of remembering it later, say it out loud to someone else. You’ll learn more quickly, and you might uncover ideas you hadn’t known were there when you were reading about it.


7. Listen to your brain.

Pay attention to whether your brain is getting overloaded. If you find yourself starting to skim the surface or forget what you just read, it’s time for a break. Once you go past a certain point, you won’t learn faster by trying to shove more in, and you might even hurt the process.

8. Feel something !!

Your brain needs to know that this matters. Get involved with the stories. Make up your own captions for the photos. Groaning over a bad joke is better than feeling nothing at all. Uttering the magical “F!!!” word at something interesting (or boring) is still better than just blindly reading it.

9. Linking system.

The traditional linking system plays a major role in the remembering of things. Link whatever you learn to the things in your room, to the daily activities, to the incidents you remember the most (good or bad) and to the persons you remember the most (good or bad). Remembering is flexing your brain into recursion of remembering things. Remember new things by linking it to things you already remember. This goes on and on to an endless limit. Do u know the memory storage of your brain?? 1 GB or 80 GB or... You are wrong. Its infinity. You believe it or not !!

10. This is for the Computer Geeks out there. Type and run code.

Type and run the code you want to know about. Then you can experiment with changing and improving the (or breaking it, which is sometimes the best way to figure out what’s really happening) code. For lengthy code, you can download the source files from internet and run. ( no need to be lazy about downloading the readily available code :-) ).