You don’t have to be Einstein to get an instant boost with five simple brain hacks

  1. Question authority
  2. Don’t let the context shark bite you
  3. Super-calm wins
  4. Occam’s razor cuts the crap
  5. Gorge yourself

FREE HACK 1: Question Authority

Trusting authority is a bad idea. Just because an authority says something is true, does not make it true. It is okay to weigh authority, but don’t be fooled by authority! Ask questions.

  1. Origin: Crackpot website. Find out where the information itself is coming from.
  2. Info-Spam! One story re-tweeted over and over again is not verification of the information. Are there many root sources that all agree the information is valid?
  3. Does the authority have a reason to manipulate you? A political or social agenda?

As President Ronald Reagan put it — Trust but verify

FREE HACK 2: Don’t let the context shark bite you

A Viral video shows you thirteen times normal background radiation reported from a walk on the beach!!

Recently a man reported using a Geiger Counter at a beach in Half Moon Bay, California and seeing radioactive readings of 412 Counts Per Minute (CPM).. which is over 13 TIMES NORMAL BACKGROUND of 30 CPM.

Often facts do not stand alone. You can make bad assumptions from simple facts if the facts are out of context. In the case above, the “facts” sound scary.

Half of the story is missing. Radioactivity is not just about how often (the counts per minute measure) but what kind and for how long. You can be exposed to very high CPM for a short time from Beta type radiation without danger. In contrast, a low CPM of Alpha radiation over a long period of time might be concerning.

When you hear a measurement or number or “fact” do not assume it is true and do not assume you have enough context. Do your homework.

FREE HACK 3: Super-calm wins

Pause. A very simple word and idea, and profoundly powerful. You rush through your days and accept a lot of messages from a lot of places. You accept them at face value because you are busy.. You are now given full permission to pause. Stop. Take a breath.

Choose one thing. Perhaps a commercial, perhaps an email, perhaps a talk show radio host’s latest rants. Just one thing. One idea. And rather than taking the idea as truth, take a step back. Think it through. Even just identifying the assumptions contained in the idea will help. You identify the assumed facts. Apply all of the hacks in this post to the idea. Doing so will open adventure in discovery that can only help you be better informed.

Applying this habit once a day will rapidly transform your relationship with information. Your mind will have the power to break through the noise and become a much better lie detector. You will have a powerful new quick free tool that helps you kick information overload to the curb.

FREE HACK 4: Occam’s razor cuts the crap

Occam’s razor is a statement and a tool. The statement is summarized as “the simplest explanation is usually true” or “An extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence”

For example, the other day I saw an odd disk shaped object in the sky and it moved in a way that I have never seen. Using Occam we would start to ask if the most likely and most mundane possibility is the disk in the sky came from another planet and is piloted by beings unknown. Occum does not state that aliens do not exist, nor does it say that what we saw was not a flying saucer. Occum helps evaluate the hypothesis:

Given two possibilities..

(1) what you saw was an alien filled craft from another planet OR

(2) what you saw can be explained by simple earth bound factors

Occum says it is more likely that the explanation for the object rests in earth bound factors rather than aliens flying an unknown type of craft. The explanation that does not involve a lot of new or special ideas is usually the correct one.

Do you trust your eyes? Are you an accurate judge of distance? Are you an accurate judge of speed and motion in the air?

Who else saw this object? Did they experience the same “odd motion” of the object”? Did anyone get photos or video? Do we have independent and well documented evidence that objects like this one are spacecraft with aliens inside? What lines of evidence exist to back up our hypothesis that this must be an AFO (Alien Filled Object)?

FREE HACK 5: Gorge yourself — on evidence

As you probably have noticed, these hacks all have a similar theme and spiral in and out of each other. Going back to the example of the radiation scare. All you know is a person named “Dave” submitted a video to rense.com. We also know that a massive number of “experts” on the internet have highly charged opinions about the risks.

But what about other lines of evidence? How many people have taken how many readings in the same area and received the same results? Does time of the year or time of the day matter? Where else is this phenomena seen? Always at the beach? Just in California?

The hypothesis that the fear monger manipulators make is that the radiation detected is from Fukushima Japan. What evidence is presented to back up that claim? The lines of evidence required to build a case for the risk and the origin are immense:

Is CPM the only method of measuring radiation toxicity?

Did the equipment function correctly?

Does 13x higher than background mean danger?

What evidence is presented to show the origin of this radiation is Fukushima?

You can start today and quickly see the results

Choose one of the hacks above and use it today for 10 minutes. Pick up this 10 minute habit and apply it daily. Do that for a month.

When you have one hack easily and quickly integrated into your thought pattern, pick up another.

Over time, you will notice that your brain starts to kick these habits into gear automatically and your patterns of thought advance. Congratulations, you have picked up habits that will serve you a lifetime and help you avoid scams make better decisions, and become a more informed person

These hacks will also help you in the workplace when you are confronted with information that seems to beg for a decision. Your brain hack tools will give you a leg up, more insight and ultimately better decisions.

Originally published at www.criticalarmy.com on January 24, 2014.