Louis J Sheehan 80219

On Dec 11, 2007, at 10:53 PM, hdenenberg@aol.com wrote:

HERB DENENBERG COLUMN FOR DECEMBER 13, 2007 NF(16)(61) A BRILLIANT MIND PROVEN WAYS TO INCREASE YOUR BRAINPOWER

A PROVEN WAY TO INCREASE YOUR BRAINPOWER: HERE’S THE ROAD TO THE BRILLIANT MIND YOU’VE ALWAYS WANTED SET FORTH IN A BOOK OF ONLY 186-PAGES

Are you looking for ways to get a brilliant mind? Do you want to know about some proven ways to increase your brainpower? If you answer “yes,” I have what you’re looking for. I came across a book by Frank Minirth, M.D., entitled A Brilliant Mind: Proven Ways to Increase Your Brainpower. Much to my surprise, I found the book convincing, so I thought I’d pass along the essence of what Dr. Minirth has to say. The book would be valuable for anyone, but would have special power for students trying to learn and master a course of study.

Here’s the idea in the author’s own words: “Increasing your brain power does not depend upon age, station in life, or intelligence; what matters is desire. No matter your age – seven, seventeen, fifty-seven, seventy-seven – you can exercise your mind. A desire to empower one’s mental capacity, coupled with effective techniques of vocabulary recall, will lead almost anyone to excel.” And almost anyone includes you, and everyone else.

For the faint of heart and mind, the author has some compelling examples of a few “dumb” people who became some of the great geniuses of our time. He writes, “Thomas Edison, thought by many to have the highest IQ in the last millennium, was dismissed from school because his teacher though


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he did not have the intelligence to succeed academically. Albert Einstein could not read until he was seven and still was considered a slow learner in high school. Winston Churchill was last in his class in school but developed a remarkable vocabulary that led him to become one of the greatest orators of all time. If Edison, why not you? If Einstein, why not you? If Churchill, why not you? Your mental muscles can be developed as surely as your physical muscles?”

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I’m sure many readers will be surprised to know they have the making of Edison, Einstein, and Churchill all rolled into one!

This line of reasoning about developing muscles – physical and mental – was one I quickly accepted long ago. That’s because when I was a freshman at the University of Nebraska, I took a course in weight lifting. The instructor had us do exercises all semester and we recorded the size of various muscles, such as the circumference of our biceps. In a short period of time, those biceps and other muscles – due to regular weight lifting – started increasing in size. So when I read of mental exercises, I have the same kind of vision of increasing brainpower with regular exercises over time. That’s one of the central ideas of Dr. Minirth’s interesting book. And it’s easy to appreciate. As I took various courses in school, I often almost felt the increasing mastery of a subject brought with it increasing brainpower.

The sky’s the limit. Minirth notes most of us naturally use only five percent of our overall brain potential. He says, “The development of the other 95 percent lies in your own hands…By tuning your brain, you create innumerable new opportunities for growth, communication, and experience, and you save countless hours formerly spent retrieving information – hours that can be spent in fruitful enterprise and relationships.”

Minirth makes another crucial point. Don’t underestimate yourself, your brainpower, and your ability to increase your brainpower. He writes, “I believe you’ll surprise yourself with your brain’s ability to stretch your memory beyond anything you thought possible.” I might add the least you can do is give it a shot.

One of the explanations of Minirth’s approach is called neuroplasticity, defined by Minirth as follows: “Neuroplasticity simply means that the brain is capable of being molded; it can change and develop more connections between its many nerve cells so that, to a degree, it can even develop more connections between its many nerve cells so that, to a degree, it can even develop nerve cells. Neurogenisis is a similar term; it means that the brain is capable of growth and development.”

I can believe that again on



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analogy to exercise and the development of muscles. I was once struck by studies that said many if not most people end up in nursing homes because they allow they


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muscle to wither away. The technical term is sarcopenia, a subject previously discussed in this column. At the time, I noticed I was having trouble doing certain kinds of work, such as opening cans. So I immediately launched an exercise program, involving resistance training (weights), stretching, and aerobic exercise. It works; I can still open cans. Fortunately, I’ve always been on a program to keep learning and writing (thanks to an incurable disease called workaholism). Dr. Minirth recommends such a continuous program of learning and study. Dr. Minirth wants you to exercise your mind, by learning vocabulary, by memorizing scriptures, or by some other technique.

However, what he focuses on is increasing your vocabulary. He writes, “The word lists contained in this book will start you on the road to increasing your brain capacity and even possibly forming new brain cells. Dr. Minirth focused on vocabulary and memorization of word meaning as a good approach based on the findings of studies, which he cites:
· In the 1930s, Johnson O’Connor’s famous research at the Human Engineering Laboratory of Boston found that the success of young men studying to be executives could be predicted by the size of their vocabulary. The more words they knew, the more likely they were to be executives in five years. None of those testing in the lower 25 percent made that jump.
· Other tests have confirmed the vocabulary’s role in success. For example, chief executive officers are consistently found to have higher vocabulary knowledge than any other group, even doctors and lawyers.

In a way, this is not surprising. We form concepts with words. We think with words. We communicate with words. Our greatest leaders have been masters of words; Lincoln and Churchill come to mind. And Dr. Minirth argues we can increase IQ through words. He notes many standardized tests (GRE, MAT, SAT) involve vocabulary and language. He argues as we learn words, the number of connections in the brain and the number of cells in the brain increases, which means our brainpower increases.

Marilyn von Savant, reputed to have the highest IQ of recent testing, has said, “A well-developed vocabulary is the outward sign of a well-developed mind. Words are the working tools of your brain, just as surely as your hands or your eyes.”

This 186-page book gives you many lists of words to master. But it also tells you how to do that and makes doing it easy, interesting and entertaining by organizing words around various concepts such relationship words, foreign words, and various nuances of sundry words. For example, he lists sixteen words related to the word “small” such as elfin (small and fairylike); trifling (of little importance); infinitesimal (to small to measure); picayune (petty); lilliputian (small); minimize (to reduce) and minutiae (the small details).

He has an especially valuable chapter on prefixes, suffixes, and roots. The value of this approach was clear to me again because of a class I took at the University of Nebraska taught by a noted classical scholar on Greek and Latin for pre-med students. The professor taught all the Greek and Latin roots that so generously populate the medical vocabulary. But I found it fascinating, and a valuable tool in understanding language and vocabulary that has served me well ever since. You can almost understand much medical vocabulary without even resorting to a dictionary if you are well grounded in these Latin and Greek roots. (Incidentally, I found words more interesting than blood and gore so I did not seriously pursue a pre-med course). Dr. Minirth has many lists of prefixes and word roots such as magni (meaning great as in magnitude); mal (meaning bad as in malign); and mem (meaning remember as in memorandum).

Dr. Minirth also has important advice for those of us concerned with our disappearing brain cells, which means most of us. He writes,
“We normally lose thousands of brain cells daily beginning in our early thirties. We lose 1 to 2 percent of our neural cells each year, and the loss increases significantly after age forty-five as measured by neuropsychological testing; this is known as age-related cognitive decline. Today’s consumers eagerly seek products to halt this decline. Yet I believe the best tool we have for mitigating this decline in healthy individuals is not natural products, not nutrition, not ‘smart drugs,’ not medication, but mental exercises.
“My hope is that you will try these exercises yourself to increase your own mental capacity, and also that you will share this tool with those you know to help them improve not only their mental states – through neurogenesis –but also their everyday lives.”


ddd take courses at a local college
Louis J Sheehan