How Do You Improve Your Thinking Power

To improve your thinking power it helps to know a little about cognitive science. With recent discoveries in this field scientists are now re-naming what was always referred to as “short-term-memory” to “working memory”?

The working memory is a kind of blackboard where computations and results are calculated for later use, anything deemed not relevant to the task at hand is swept away.

Working memory capacity is quite limited with people usually being able to hold (memorize) no more than five number or words.

To improve thinking power there are a number of cognitive structures and tools that can assist. One is a simple hierarchy where each entity can contain no more than five points – working memory deals with each level one at a time. So you would start with your abstract thought or idea and break it down into successive components in the form of a hierarchy.

Another method is mnemonics which are sometimes used by magicians or memory performers. This is where you assign meaning to the data that you are trying to remember. A similar method to mnemonics is sometimes used to remember foreign words. For example, French for the poster is l’affiche (which sounds like la fish) so you could picture in your mind’s eye a large poster with a fish on it.

A further method to assist with thinking power is the mind mapping concept developed by Tony Buzan. This is where you start with one concept or field and place it in the center of a page. You then branch out with related thoughts and images from that central concept. This structure is supposedly meant to mimic how our mind organizes data.

Hope this gives you some ideas for further study/research.

A good free, open-source software product is available to assist with mind mapping called freemind.