Intellectual Hacks

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Mind hacks: 4 techniques to hack your brain

Ever wanted to hack your mind to be smarter? Today you are going to learn some IQ hacks that will boost your intellectual skills off the roof. By applying them, you will be able to memorize thousands of concepts and words in minutes or learn languages in days.

We are not exaggerating. Did you know that there are people who are able of such things?

For instance, there are memory tournaments, in which people memorize thousands of pieces of information in amazingly short periods of time.

Today we are going to see 4 of the most important mind hacks they use or have used in the past.

Note that, for now, most of the techniques and hacks that science knows have to do with memory. The following hacks we are going to see are aimed at memory, but the truth is that they can help and boost your performance in more intellectual domains than just memory.

Let’s dive in!

Making songs (music mnemonics):

Songs are an easy and popular way to remember things. We can remember rhythms very easily, and that’s what in turn will indirectly make us remember the target words.

Especially when it comes to languages, there are many Youtube videos of songs aimed to help people memorize certain things and vocabulary lists.

For instance, here you have two songs about the weeks of the day in Spanish, choose the one that sounds better to you.

Acronyms (name mnemonics):

Making acronyms consists in simplifying large amounts of information by basically converting them into smaller and manageable pieces of information.

Say we want to memorize the days of the week in Spanish.

We take the first letter of each day of the week and form a new word, which we try to memorize. In this case, the resulting word would be LMMJVSD.

However, it does not sound too pronounceable, right? We can just grab the beginning of each word.

LuMaMiJuViSaDo.

(Lunes, Martes, Miércoles, Jueves, Viernes, Sábado, Domingo)

Now we can focus on memorizing “LUMAMIJUVISADO” instead.

Image and visualization mnemonics

This one is probably one of the strongest memory techniques ever.

We can take the words and use images and visualizations to remember them. Say we want to memorize the days of the week in Spanish, we could visualize a special image for each day of the week (the image should be related to the day somehow).

For instance, for Saturday, (Sábado) we could imagine a satellite since both words (satellite and Saturday) start with SA.

Let’s see an example:

-Lunes (Monday): Imagine a “looer” (since lunes starts by LU).

-Martes (Tuesday): Imagine a “martian” (since martes starts by MAR)

-Miércoles (Wednesday): Imagine a “miracle” (since miércoles starts by MI)

-Jueves (Thursday): Imagine the “Juventus” football team (since both start by JU, plus they also sound very similar)

-Viernes (Friday): Imagine a “Visa” (since viernes starts by VI)

-Sábado (Saturday): Imagine a satellite (since sábado starts by SA)

-Domingo (Sunday): Imagine a “Domestic animal” (since domestic and domingo both start by DOM).

Ideally, you should relate the images not only to the phonetics but also to the semantics of the words you are trying to memorize. For instance, for the example of “Saturday/sábado – satellite”, you could visualize an astronaut crossing all saturdays of his calendar from the international space station.

Implausible Visualization techniques

A technique by Ramon Campayo, it consists in visualizing a sequence of events that are related to the thing we want to memorize but that are unreal and unlikely to occur in real life. Indeed, if it is so unlikely that it even has a humoristic touch, even better.

The visualizations should be as unrealistic and unlikely as possible. Striking and unlikely events are more likely to be remembered, thus increasing recall.

There are several variants of this technique, each adapted to the different contexts in which it can be used.

For example, in language learning, it is common to use this technique by visualizing something that has to do with the phonetics or the written form of the target word to be memorized. Through visualizing, we should connect that concept (the one we are extracting from the phonetics or from the written form of the word), with the concept of the meaning of the word. Remember these visualizations should make no sense.

For instance, imagine you want to remember the word “gapic sie”, which is a Polish word that means “to stare”.

You could imagine a big GAP (a concept taken from the written form of the word, “GAPic sie”) in the ground opening each time a person stares at another one. Let’s just imagine there is a person that has the superpower of opening gaps in the ground every time he stares at someone.

We hope this article helped you improve your study efficiency or your cognitive capabilities. Unfortunately, these 4 techniques will not increase your intellectual abilities, just your performance, same as if you had taken a very powerful supplement.

However, the good news is that you can still take a free IQ test on free-iqtest.org to practice and see where you currently stand against all the other test-takers.