Welcome to /mentat/
Welcome to /mentat/, a board for those who seek to enhance the capability of their mind to its limit. A mentat is a human computer capable of great feats of memory, analytics, mathematics and logic. You can find a good overview of what a mentat is here-
>http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=1643
This board was created for the purpose of creating a place on ∞chan for those who wish to train themselves to be a mentat and enhance their cognitive capacity. This started as my own personal goal with >>>/improve/4113 , but I've decided that anyone training to be a mentat could benefit from a learning community to be part of.
My goals for this board is to create a place for the exchange of information and resources relating to mentat training, as well as a learning community of mentats that studies together and intellectually challenges other members of the community by means of discussion and debate.
I also believe a mentat should be more than analytics, logic, math and memory. A mentat, being a human computer, a hybrid of the two (so to say), should not neglect history, arts and humanities and culture for purely scientific/mathematic studies. To this end, a community of mentats should also be a place for the discussion and exchange significant cultural works- movies, art, music, literature.
So let this board be a place for not just the discussion of enhancing our cognitive abilities to their limits, but also a place for the discussion and expansion upon our worldly and cultural knowledge.
Resources *copied from my /improve/ thread for now, will create a more comprehensive list later
>Mentat Wiki
>http://www.ludism.org/mentat/HomePage
Stage one: Healthy body, healthy mind
Exercise: http://ss.fitness (thanks /fit/)
Couch-to-5k, https://archive.is/D0Qxr
Workout Routine: https://archive.is/fqa8M
Diet: http://www.nerdfitness.com/blog/2011/11/10/healthy-eating/
Sleep: http://www.apk4market.com/apps/health-fitness/sleep-cycle-alarm-clock-v1-3-696-apk/
Meditation: http://www.artofmanliness.com/2011/09/07/a-primer-on-meditation/
Stage two: Brain Training
Language Learning
>Memrise http://www.memrise.com/home/
>Duolingo https://en.duolingo.com
Math
>www.khanacademy.org
>http://tutorial.math.lamar.edu
>http://mathforum.org/k12/mathtips/beatcalc.html
Speed Reading
Studying/Knowledge expansion
>www.edx.org
Spaced Repetition Software (memory training)
Stage three: Cognitive training+enhancement
Nootropics
>https://www.reddit.com/r/nootropics/wiki/beginners
>http://www.ludism.org/mentat/NootropicsPrimer
Dual N-back
Progress tracking
My mentat training
It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.
I'd like to go into length and detail about my current mentat training. I'm looking specifically for feedback, commentary, constructive criticism and to spark conversation. I'd also like to declare my mentat intentions, goals and aspirations to hopefully inspire my fellow mentats, and I'm hoping to be equally inspired by you.
I'm most interested in what works. What is effective? I like to live as frugally as possible, so I will often measure the efficacy of a technique by its cost/benefit ratio.
I do not differentiate between my body and my mind, they are one and the same. If I drink, I get drunk. My physiology affects my psychology. But the converse is also true: if I tell myself that healthy living doesn't matter I get fat and out of shape. I know this from experience. Nothing mystical here, my psychology also affects my physiology. This shapes how I see my mentat training: train the body to train the mind. Train the mind to train the body. A well trained body-mind will be at the peak of its mental performance capabilities. I also like to use language in unconventional ways to break myself of typical nuero-patterns of thought (if I speak like average people, I think like average people).
A short aside: I do not look down at average people, normies, mundanes, etc. I think to do so is counter-productive to mentat training but I'll go into that in depth later. We want to avoid becoming twisted mentats.
I have zero interest in trivia or useless talents. Memorizing a deck of cards is as equally impressive as it is useless. Same with memorizing pi to the Nth decimal place. No thank you. I am only interested in these tasks if it can be shown that they have some benefit and cannot be done with other more useful data sets (memorizing the military phonetic alphabet is more useful than coming up with your own, simply because of the benefit of a shared reference. To make a programming analogy: If we use the same pointers, we should be at the same memory address more frequently than if used different pointers. I have no interest in re-inventing the wheel).