In some twelve thousand in-depth interviews for more than a hundred clients in over thirty countries, seven deep metaphors have surfaced with the greatest frequency in every sector- finance, food, transportation, and so forth- and in every country, regardless of the research team.

Two years ago, when Malcolm Gladwell published his best-selling “Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking,” readers throughout the world were introduced to the ideas of Gerd Gigerenzer, a German social psychologist.

According to Raz & Buhle, the studies showing effects of hypnotism on reducing automaticity in the Stroop task are even more compelling than those that use meditation. Several of these studies are written by Raz himself, such as a fascinating article by Raz, Fan & Posner from a 2005 issue of the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

This wiki is a collaborative environment for exploring ways to become a better thinker. Topics that can be explored here include MemoryTechniques, MentalMath, CriticalThinking, BrainStorming, ShorthandSystems, NotebookSystems, and SmartDrugs. Other relevant topics are also welcome. How have you made yourself smarter ?

As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

The Tetris effect is the ability of any activity to which people devote sufficient time and attention to begin to dominate their thoughts, mental images, and dreams. It is named after the video game Tetris. In the game a player rotates and moves different falling shapes made up of blocks. If the player can arrange the shapes so there are complete horizontal lines of blocks without any gaps, those lines are eliminated. The object of the game is to eliminate as many lines as possible before the shapes fill the screen.

The executive system is a theorized cognitive system in psychology that controls and manages other cognitive processes. It is thought to be involved in processes such as planning, cognitive flexibility, abstract thinking, rule acquisition, initiating appropriate actions and inhibiting inappropriate actions, and selecting relevant sensory information.

A new study, which appears in the Nov. 2007 issue of the British Journal of Psychiatry, examined reasoning capabilities in people with schizophrenia. The study compared healthy individuals to people with schizophrenia "under conditions where common sense and logic conflict(ed)." The results suggested that people with schizophrenia reasoned more logically than healthy individuals, but lacked commonsense reasoning skills.