Mentalrobics®
Stay mentally fit with these daily brain exercises. You will learn how to flex your mind, improve your creativity and boost your memory. Pick your favorite exercises from our daily suggestions and repeat them as desired to enhance your mental capacity. Try to do some Mentalrobics every single day!
Mentalrobics Articles
Daily exercises and tips for improving memory, creativity, vocabulary and stress management.
Flash Cards
When you are trying to memorize something, flash cards can be a very effective way to improve your memory.
Vocab Builder
This vocabulary test is loaded with over 3000 of the most common words found on the SAT and GRE standardized tests.
Mentalrobics Articles
Word of the Day : Truculence
truc-u-lence ::
A disposition or apparent disposition to fight, especially fiercely.
"The continued truculence of the street gangs made everyone afraid of going out alone."
Lateral vs Vertical Thinking
When trying to solve a problem, it is very important to consider alternate solutions instead of forging forward with the first decent idea. Picking one idea and proceeding until a solution is reached is called vertical thinking and this is the type of thinking that is most often taught in our schools. When thinking laterally, you continue to generate ideas even after a promising idea has been produced. A vertical thinker must always be moving usefully in some direction and must be correct at every step. A lateral thinker can wander in different directions to find creative solutions and often must be wrong in order to be right in the end. Lateral thinkers welcome and explore seemingly irrelevant facts or ideas, whereas vertical thinkers shut out all irrelevant data.
There are merits to both types of thinking. If you used only lateral thinking, you would be constantly experimenting and broadening and you would seldom finish anything. If you only used vertical thinking, you could go very far down the wrong path because you failed to find the correct path before starting out. A good compromise would be to use lateral thinking until you have decided on a solution and then switch to vertical thinking to implement that solution.
Break it Up
When you are studying something, you must decide if you want to study the whole subject or break it up into chunks. If you break it up into chunks, you should study the first part until you have learned it fully before moving on to the second chunk and so on. With the whole method, you study the whole thing from start to finish over and over until you have learned it. The most effective method depends on the study topic.
An advantage of the whole method is that the entire subject will be in context and you will know how each section relates to the others. If the subject is difficult to divide, the whole method may work better. Material with distinct parts will make using the part method easier. When using the part method, you will need to spend extra time putting each piece back together into the whole picture. The more material there is, the more beneficial the part method becomes.
An advantage of the part method is that you will get quicker feedback about your progress because you will be testing yourself more often. With the whole method, you will not have any feedback until you have studied the whole thing for a longer period of time. People who need feedback might prefer the part method. People who have used the whole method before understand that they are making progress even if it might take longer to realize it.
Additionally, you could combine the two methods. You could review the entire subject a few times and then break it up into parts. Then combine it all at the end and review the whole thing. Or, you could use a progressive part system. With this, you start with a part and each time you add a chunk, you study everything learned so far. For example, you would start by studying part 1. Then you would study parts 1 and 2 together and finally parts 1, 2, and 3 as one piece.
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