Tag Archives: autism

A Tool of Control: How Health Officials Weaponize Language to Manage Public Perception of COVID Vaccines

Posted on by
1

The deployment of clever linguistic tricks has created a hostile upside-down universe, where even the vaccine-injured are tarnished as “anti-vaxxers” or liars rather than acknowledged as ex-vaxxers who took risks that turned out to be life-changing.

By Children’s Health Defense Team

Source: The Defender

Psychological and linguistic manipulation are, for those in power, proven tools for building, consolidating and maintaining dominance — a reality keenly depicted in George Orwell’s never-more-relevant novel, “1984.”

As phrased by master propagandist Edward Bernays, an approximate contemporary of Orwell’s, the mind of the people “is made up for it by the group leaders in whom it believes and by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion.”

Recent events surrounding COVID vaccines have shown that medicine and public health — with the help of a complicit media — are particularly skilled at “pull[ing] the wires which control the public mind.”

The clever bag of linguistic tricks deployed by the medical cartel includes seeding evocative terms such as “vaccine hesitancy” and “lockdowns” (which is prison terminology) into popular and scientific discourse, forging slippery new definitions of words with formerly fixed meanings (such as “pandemic,” “herd immunity” and “vaccine”), and circling failed products back around by giving them the positive spin of “boosters.”

Ominously, medicine’s and public health’s verbal assaults encourage shaming of, or violence against, those who ask questions, while upholding the disingenuous pretense that vaccine mandates are compatible with freedom.

In this hostile upside-down universe, even the vaccine-injured are tarnished as “anti-vaxxers” or liars rather than acknowledged as ex-vaxxers who took risks that turned out to be life-changing.

‘Much like other stressors’

One of the more insulting recent examples of linguistic weaponization involves a dubious psychiatric cover term, “functional neurological disorder” (FND), that is suddenly being trumpeted as an explanation for the tsunami of adverse events — especially severe neurological reactions — being reported all over the world in the aftermath of COVID vaccination.

Psychiatrists conveniently define FND — which they also refer to as a “psychogenic” (originating in the mind) or “conversion” disorder — as “real” nervous system symptoms that “cause significant distress or problems functioning” but are “incompatible with” or “can’t be explained by” recognized neurological diseases or other medical conditions.

Lest members of the public derive a “simplistic impression of potential links between the [COVID] vaccine and major neurological symptoms,” neurologists pushing the FND story have hastened to reassure people that the “close development of functional motor symptoms after the vaccine does not implicate the vaccine as the cause of those symptoms.”

One of these individuals is National Institutes of Health-funded neurologist Alberto Espay, who implausibly adds that COVID vaccination (which entails injection with high-risk substances and technologies) is just “a stressor or precipitant, much like any other stressor … such as a motor vehicle accident or sleep deprivation.”

Officials and the media are audaciously trotting out the FND narrative on both sides of the pond, as evidenced by a recent Daily Mail headline that read, “Videos of people ‘struggling to walk’ after getting their COVID vaccine are NOT result of jab itself but a condition triggered by stress or trauma.”

Helping with the spin, a member of the UK’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization straight-facedly attributed this “stress” to coercion, stating: “If people begin to feel they are being kind of forced against their will to do something, then in a sense that’s quite a damaging thing to do because it gives people the impression vaccination is something being imposed on them.”

Hammering home the point that “there is nothing to see here,” Kings College London physician Matthew Butler solemnly (and without evidence) agrees that FND — though “serious and debilitating” — “does not implicate any vaccine constituents and should not hamper ongoing vaccination efforts.”

Butler is the lead author of a May 2020 paper proposing FND patients’ “abnormal body-focussed attention” be treated with psychedelics such as LSD and psilocybin — never mind that psychedelics themselves, admit Butler and co-authors, “sometimes produce abnormal physical and motor effects,” including seizures.

An all-too-familiar game

To past victims of vaccine injury, the “it’s all in your mind” sleight-of-hand being summoned to dismiss COVID vaccine injuries is all too familiar.

Consider autism, which psychiatrists blamed, in its earliest days, on emotionally distant “refrigerator moms.”

In more recent decades, families affected by autism have experienced the double whammy of regulatory indifference to likely culprits (including not just neurotoxic vaccines but other probable environmental triggers) alongside brazen denial of autism’s escalating prevalence.

Young people injured by human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines tell similar stories of “denial and dismissal of reported harms and deaths.” Researchers who in 2017 reviewed the serious adverse events reported during two of the largest HPV vaccine clinical trials noted that “Practically, none of the serious adverse events occurring in any arm of both studies were judged [by the manufacturers] to have been vaccine-related.”

In the face of severe symptoms such as heart-attack-like chest pain, numbness and swelling of extremities, hair loss, whole-body aches and extreme fatigue, boys and girls injured by HPV vaccines have been repeatedly subjected to medical gaslighting — told they are “crazy” and just need to “slow down.”

In one incident in Australia, after “26 girls presented to the school’s sick bay with symptoms including dizziness, syncope [fainting] and neurological complaints” within two hours of receiving HPV vaccines at school, pharma-funded researchers had the chutzpah to dismiss the safety signal and characterize the episode as a “mass psychogenic event” — which they defined as “the collective occurrence of a constellation of symptoms suggestive of organic illness but without an identified cause in a group of people with shared beliefs about the cause.”

Recognize, question and reclaim

The medical-public health-pharma cartel, the “small cabal of wealthy countries, corporations and individuals” that support it, and their media mouthpieces are supremely confident in their ability to manage public perceptions through words and narratives, whether for the purpose of “mystifying” the public about key events, securing buy-in for oppressive policies or sowing discord to divide and conquer. (As journalists Caitlin Johnstone and Glenn Greenwald also remind us, many media personalities are intelligence agency veterans or assets, and the “sole owner of the Washington Post is a CIA contractor.”)

Thus, it pays to be attentive to how health authorities use language, for “the more you know about language, the more immune you become to its effects.”

Beyond noticing the manipulation, we must also stop ceding the linguistic terrain to our would-be manipulators — for example, by eschewing weaponized vocabulary such as the pejorative term “vaccine hesitancy.”

Catholic journalist Jane Stannus points out that the term “vaccine hesitant” portrays those who decline COVID (or other) vaccines as “‘trapped by irrational fears’ in a state of inaction or ignorantly opposed to science,” with the strong suggestion “that such backward and weak-minded persons are worthy of contempt, especially compared with the enlightened, confident people who signed up for the vaccine immediately.”

The unfortunate corollary of such language is the “witch hunt on the unvaccinated” that we are already witnessing, “an act of violence against the fabric of society,” says Stannus, that is “a greater evil … than the shared suffering of disease.”

We can and urgently need to see through these shenanigans and reclaim our humanity.

Fast-moving current events are proving those who have declined COVID injections are the wise ones, with science proving them correct in just about every way.

Whether we consider the many suspected dangers of products unleashed on the public less than a year ago, or the injuries and deaths occurring on a never-before-seen scale (including in teens who had their lives ahead of them), or the clear superiority of natural immunity, or the fact that the injections don’t even do the one thing the clinical trials alleged they could do (i.e., keep more severe illness at bay), it is clear that citizens who would rather think for themselves than swallow prefabricated lies are the ones who are going to come out ahead.

Extinction is Stalking Humanity: The Threats to Human Survival Accumulate

Posted on by
16

By Robert J. Burrowes

I have previously written a summary of the interrelated psychological, sociological, political-economic, military, nuclear, ecological and climate threats to human survival on Earth which threaten human extinction by 2026. See ‘Human Extinction by 2026? A Last Ditch Strategy to Fight for Human Survival’.

Rather than reiterate the evidence in the above article, I would like to add to it by focusing attention on three additional threats – geoengineering, medical vaccinations and electromagnetic radiation – that are less well-known (largely because the evidence is officially suppressed and only made available by conscientious investigative activists) and which, either separately or in combination with other threats, significantly increase the prospect of extinction for humans and most (and possibly all) life on Earth by the above date, particularly given the failure to respond strategically to these interrelated threats.

Before doing this, however, let me emphasize, yet again, that it is (unconscious) fear that is driving all of these crises in the first place and fear that underpins our collective failure to strategically address each of these interrelated threats in turn. And, as I have explained elsewhere and reiterate now, if we do not address this fear as a central feature of any overall strategy for survival, then extinction in the near term is certain. See, for example, ‘The Limited Mind: Why Fear is Driving Humanity to Extinction’.

So, beyond the usual issues that are considered imminent threats to human survival – particularly nuclear war, ecological collapse and climate catastrophe based on dysfunctional political, economic, legal and social institutions – let me briefly outline some of these other threats and, once again, invite a strategic response to each and all of these threats so that we give ourselves some chance of surviving.

In the ‘‘Human Extinction by 2026?’ article I cited above, I referred to the use of geoengineering to wage war on Earth’s climate, environment and ultimately ourselves. See, for example, ‘Engineered Climate Cataclysm: Hurricane Harvey’ and ‘The Ultimate Weapon of Mass Destruction: “Owning the Weather” for Military Use’.

But if you are unfamiliar with the evidence of how Earth is being geoengineered for catastrophe, by inflicting enormous damage on the biosphere, try watching this recent interview by Dane Wigington of Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt on the subject. Dr. Klinghardt carefully explains why geoengineering (simply: the high altitude aerial introduction of particulates – especially a synthesized compound of nanonized aluminium and the poison glyphosate in this case – into Earth’s atmosphere to manipulate the climate) creates a ‘supertoxin’ that is generating ‘a crisis of neurological diseases’ and, for example, crosses the blood-brain barrier causing diseases on the Autism spectrum (a spectrum of diseases virtually unknown prior to 1975 and now at epidemic proportions in countries, like the USA, where geoengineering is conducted extensively). See ‘World-Renowned Doctor Addresses Climate Engineering Dangers’.

While careful to distinguish the offending toxic compounds of aluminium and making the point that these adversely impact all lifeforms on the planet, Dr. Klinghardt nevertheless maintains that ‘Aluminium could be isolated as the single factor that is right now creating the mass extinction on the planet including our own’.

Because Dr. Klinghardt cites the corroborating research on glyophosate and aluminium by Dr Stephenie Seneff, Senior Research Scientist at MIT, who investigates ‘the impact of nutritional deficiencies and environmental toxins on human health’, you might like to consult relevant documentation from her research too – see Dr Stephenie Seneff – or watch one of her lectures on the subject. See ‘Autism Explained: Synergistic Poisoning from Aluminum and Glyphosate’.

Given the role of vaccination in precipitating autism, among a great many other disorders, by introducing into the body contaminants such as aluminium and glyphosate as well, you might also like to check out Sayer Ji’s 326 page bibliography with a vast number of references to the literature explaining the exceptional range of shocking dangers from vaccination. See ‘Vaccination’.

Or, if you wish to just read straightforward accounts of the history of vaccine damage and the ongoing dangers, see these articles by Gary G. Kohls MD: ‘A Comprehensive List of Vaccine-Associated Toxic Reactions’ and ‘Identifying the Vaccinology-Illiterate among Us’.

Before proceeding, it is worth mentioning that given his commitment to understanding the causes of, and healing, disorders on the autism spectrum but many others besides, Dr Klinghardt offers treatment protocols for many (now) chronic illnesses, including those on the autism spectrum, on his website: Klinghardt Academy or Institut für Neurobiologie.

But worse than these already horrible impacts, Dr Klinghardt also explains how the nanonized aluminium becomes embedded in our body, including the mitochondria (thus ‘jamming’ the body’s energy production ‘machinery’). More importantly, the metal reacts extremely negatively to electromagnetic radiation (such as wifi, which will get enormously worse as 5G is progressively introduced) and this destroys the mitochondria in the DNA very rapidly thus spelling ‘the end of higher evolution in the next six to eight years’. Why so soon? Dr Klinghardt carefully explains the exponential nature, a poorly understood concept, of what is taking place. See ‘World-Renowned Doctor Addresses Climate Engineering Dangers’.

Moreover, he explains, because geoengineering is not confined to what is sprayed over land masses but includes what is sprayed over the ocean as well, the world’s oceans effectively have a layer of microplastic and metal covering their surfaces creating the effect of confining the Earth’s oceans in a gigantic sealed plastic bag. As Dr Klinghardt explains: This has reduced the water content of the atmosphere by 40% in the past two decades, causing droughts and desertification throughout Europe and the Middle East, for example, and substantially reduced the capacity of algae in the ocean to produce oxygen.

Having mentioned 5G above, if you are not aware of the monumental hazards of this technology, which is already being introduced without informed public consultation, the following articles and videos will give you a solid understanding of key issues from the viewpoint of human and planetary well-being. See ‘5G Technology is Coming – Linked to Cancer, Heart Disease, Diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and Death’, ‘20,000 Satellites for 5G to be Launched Sending Focused Beams of Intense Microwave Radiation Over Entire Earth’, ‘Will 5G Cell Phone Technology Lead To Dramatic Population Reduction As Large Numbers Of Men Become Sterile?’, ‘The 5G Revolution: Millions of “Human Guinea Pigs” in Big Telecom’s Global Experiment’ and ‘5G Apocalypse – The Extinction Event’.

In essence then, there is enormous evidence that geoengineering, vaccinations and 5G technology pose a monumental (and, in key ways, interrelated) threat to human and planetary health and threaten near term extinction for humans and a vast number of other species. Of course, as mentioned above, these are not the only paths to extinction that we face.

How have these threats come about? Essentially because the insane global elite, over the past thousand years, has progressively secured control over world affairs in order to maximize its privilege, profit and power, at any cost to the Earth and its populations (and now, ultimately, even its own members), successfully co-opting all major political, economic, corporate, legal and social institutions and those who work in these institutions – see ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’ – while the bulk of the human population has been terrorized and disempowered to such as extent that our resistance has been tokenistic and misdirected (almost invariably at governments). See, for example, ‘Why Activists Fail’.

And this is why, even now, as humanity stands at the brink of extinction, most people’s unconscious fear will prevent them from seeking out or considering the type of evidence offered in this article or, if they do read it, to dismiss it from their mind. That is how unconscious fear works: it eliminates unpalatable truths from awareness.

Fear and Extinction

So here we stand. We are on the brink of human extinction (with 200 species of life on Earth being driven to extinction daily) and most humans utterly oblivious to (or in denial of) the desperate nature and timeframe of our plight.

Why? Because the first three capacities that fear shuts down are awareness (of what is happening around us), faculties such as conscience and feelings (particularly the anger that gives us the courage to act) and intelligence (to analyze and strategize our response). Which is why I go to some pains to emphasize that our unconscious fear is the primary driver of our accelerating rush to extinction and I encourage you to seriously consider incorporating strategies to address this fear into any effort you make to defend ourselves from extinction.

‘But I am not afraid’ you (or someone else) might say. Aren’t you? Your unconscious mind has had years to learn the tricks it needed when you were a child to survive the onslaught of the violent parenting and schooling you suffered – see ‘Why Violence?’, ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’ and ‘Do We Want School or Education?’ – among the many other possibilities of violence, including those of a structural nature, that you will have also suffered.

But your mind only learned these ‘tricks’ – such as the trick of hiding your fear behind chronic overconsumption: see ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’ – at great cost to your functionality and it now diverts the attention from reality of most people so effectively that they cannot even pay attention to the obvious and imminent threats to human survival, such as the threats of nuclear war, ecological collapse and climate catastrophe, let alone the many other issues including the more ‘obscure’ ones (if your attention has been successfully diverted) I touched on above.

The reality is that fear induces most people to live in delusion and to believe such garbage as ‘The Earth is bountiful’ (and can sustain endless economic growth) or that the ‘end of century’ is our timeframe for survival. But the fear works in a great many ways, only a few of which I have touched on in ‘The Limited Mind: Why Fear is Driving Humanity to Extinction’, for example.

Defending Ourselves from Extinction

So how do we defend ourselves from extinction, particularly when there is an insane global elite endlessly impeding our efforts to do so?

For most people, this will include starting with yourself. See ‘Putting Feelings First’.

For virtually all adults, it will include reviewing your relationship with children and, ideally, making ‘My Promise to Children’. Critically, this will include learning the skill of nisteling. See ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.

For those who feel courageous enough, consider campaigning strategically to achieve the outcomes we need, whether it is to end violence against children or end war (and the threat of nuclear war), halt geoengineering, stop the destruction of Earth’s climate, stop the deployment of 5G or end the destruction of Earth’s rainforests. See Nonviolent Campaign Strategy or Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy. A lot of people doing a bit here and there, or lobbying governments, is not going to get us out of this mess.

The global elite is deeply entrenched – fighting its wars, upgrading its nuclear arsenal, exploiting people, geoengineering the destruction of the biosphere, destroying the climate, invading/occupying resource-rich countries – and not about to give way without a concerted effort by many of us campaigning strategically on several key fronts. So strategy is imperative if we are to successfully deal with all of the issues that confront us in the time we have left.

If you recognize the pervasiveness of the fear-driven violence in our world, consider joining the global network of people resisting it by signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

But if you do nothing else while understanding the simple point that Earth’s biosphere cannot sustain a human population of this magnitude of whom more than half endlessly over-consume, then consider accelerated participation in the strategy outlined in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’.

Or, if this feels too complicated, consider committing to:

The Earth Pledge

Out of love for the Earth and all of its creatures, and my respect for their needs, from this day onwards I pledge that:

  1. I will listen deeply to children (see explanation above)
  2. I will not travel by plane
  3. I will not travel by car
  4. I will not eat meat and fish
  5. I will only eat organically/biodynamically grown food
  6. I will minimize the amount of fresh water I use, including by minimizing my ownership and use of electronic devices
  7. I will not buy rainforest timber
  8. I will not buy or use single-use plastic, such as bags, bottles, containers, cups and straws
  9. I will not use banks, superannuation (pension) funds or insurance companies that provide any service to corporations involved in fossil fuels, nuclear power and/or weapons
  10. I will not accept employment from, or invest in, any organization that supports or participates in the exploitation of fellow human beings or profits from killing and/or destruction of the biosphere
  11. I will not get news from the corporate media (mainstream newspapers, television, radio, Google, Facebook, Twitter…)
  12. I will make the effort to learn a skill, such as food gardening or sewing, that makes me more self-reliant
  13. I will gently encourage my family and friends to consider signing this pledge.

Sometime in the next few years, the overwhelming evidence is that homo sapiens will join other species that only exist as part of the fossil record.

Therefore, you have two vital choices to make: Will you fight for survival? And will you do it strategically?

If you do not make both choices consciously, your unconscious fear will make them for you.

 

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.

Roundup of Disturbing Roundup Statistics

Posted on by
4

74481_1667968857660_1190475812_1810124_6476601_n

Source: Washington’s Blog

Roundup is found in 75% of air and water samples.  Indeed, some farmers drench crops with Roundup right before harvest.

Roundup is linked to a number of diseases.

A study from the Journal of Organic Systems includes the following 12 charts which show the correlation between Roundup (technically known as “glyphosate”) and disease:

Thyroid cancer and GMOs
Renal disease deaths and GMOs

Urinary and bladder cancer and GMO
Hypertension and GMOs

Saturday Matinee: Ben X

Posted on by
Reply

index

“Ben X” is a Dutch-Belgian drama directed by Nic Balthazar based on his novel “Nothing Was All He Said”. To escape the constant bullying at his school, Ben, a teenager with Asperger syndrome, immerses himself in the world of multiplayer rpg video games where he meets Scarlite, who gives him the inspiration and courage to stand up to the bullies. The film stands out for it’s realistic portrayal of autism, great acting all around, and a resolution much different from other films with a bullied protagonist (and unlike similar actual events that have made the headlines).

Podcast Roundup

Posted on by
Reply

6/8: Hosts Mickey Huff and Peter Phillips discuss the ongoing situation in the Ukraine with Dr. Michael Parenti, Prof. Michel Chossudovsky, and former Congresswomen and Green Party Presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney on “the Project Censored Show”. All of them are contributors to a new book by Clarity Press edited by Stephen Lendman, “Flashpoint Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WWIII.”

https://s3.amazonaws.com/Pcradiodos/Project+Censored+060614.mp3

6/9: On “the Progressive Commentary Hour”, host Gary Null interviews Dr. Andrew Wakefield, a gastroenterologist and academician specializing in inflammatory bowel disease and the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine or MMR. They discuss how the US government uses corporations and universities to support policies, silence top scientists, jeopardize public health and protect corporate profits.

http://s36.podbean.com/pb/3f11f4e516587793b6f2d38475623afc/5398ccbc/data1/blogs18/371244/uploads/ProgressiveCommentaryHour_060914.mp3

6/10: On “the Higherside Chats”, Adam Gorightly and Vyzygoth joins host Greg Carlwood for a freewheeling but illuminating conversation about the suppressed history of the United States hidden beneath lies and disinformation most have been led to believe.

http://thehighersidechats.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/112-Vyzygoth.mp3

6/12: KMO talks with Vincent Horn of Buddhist Geeks on the lastest C-Realm podcast. They discuss the use of mindfulness techniques in technological society and its connection to DIY, Quanitifed Self and Maker movements. KMO wraps up with commentary on the nature of individualism and community.

http://www.c-realm.com/wp-content/uploads/418_Adaptive_Comtemplation.mp3

 

 

Five Ways to Boost Intelligence

Posted on by
Reply

original

I’ve never subscribed to the notion that intelligence is fixed and unchanging. Intelligence (and its opposite) can be taught and reinforced though there may be varying ranges determined by factors such as diet, habits, genetics, personality, environment, time, resources and relationships. There’s also different categories of intelligences that aren’t equally valued by society, but the type of intelligence involved in critical thinking and creative problem solving is what our society seems to need most. On the latest episode of The Bulletproof Executive podcast, host Dave Asprey and researcher/science writer Andrea Kuszewski discuss methods to improve this type of intelligence among other topics including the relationship between extreme altruism and sociopathy.

Listen to the full interview here:

Kuszewski previously expanded on 5 ways to maximize cognitive potential as a guest blogger for Scientific American. Even if one has no need or desire to boost intelligence, they can also be used for sustaining intelligence and preventing cognitive decline associated with aging. Here are the five recommendations and her conclusion:

1. Seek Novelty

It is no coincidence that geniuses like Einstein were skilled in multiple areas, or polymaths, as we like to refer to them. Geniuses are constantly seeking out novel activities, learning a new domain. It’s their personality.

There is only one trait out of the “Big Five” from the Five Factor Model of personality (Acronym: OCEAN, or Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism) that correlates with IQ, and it is the trait of Openness to new experience. People who rate high on Openness are constantly seeking new information, new activities to engage in, new things to learn—new experiences in general [2].

When you seek novelty, several things are going on. First of all, you are creating new synaptic connections with every new activity you engage in. These connections build on each other, increasing your neural activity, creating more connections to build on other connections—learning is taking place.

An area of interest in recent research [pdf] is neural plasticity as a factor in individual differences in intelligence. Plasticity is referring to the number of connections made between neurons, how that affects subsequent connections, and how long-lasting those connections are. Basically, it means how much new information you are able to take in, and if you are able to retain it, making lasting changes to your brain. Constantly exposing yourself to new things helps puts your brain in a primed state for learning.

Novelty also triggers dopamine (I have mentioned this before in other posts), which not only kicks motivation into high gear, but it stimulates neurogenesis—the creation of new neurons—and prepares your brain for learning. All you need to do is feed the hunger.

Excellent learning condition = Novel Activity—>triggers dopamine—>creates a higher motivational state—>which fuels engagement and primes neurons—>neurogenesis can take place + increase in synaptic plasticity (increase in new neural connections, or learning).

As a follow-up of the Jaeggi study, researchers in Sweden [pdf] found that after 14 hours of training working memory over 5 weeks’ time, there was an increase of dopamine D1 binding potential in the prefrontal and parietal areas of the brain. This particular dopamine receptor, the D1 type, is associated with neural growth and development, among other things. This increase in plasticity, allowing greater binding of this receptor, is a very good thing for maximizing cognitive functioning.

Take home point: Be an “Einstein”. Always look to new activities to engage your mind—expand your cognitive horizons. Learn an instrument. Take an art class. Go to a museum. Read about a new area of science. Be a knowledge junkie.

2. Challenge Yourself

There are absolutely oodles of terrible things written and promoted on how to “train your brain” to “get smarter”. When I speak of “brain training games”, I’m referring to the memorization and fluency-type games, intended to increase your speed of processing, etc, such as Sudoku, that they tell you to do in your “idle time” (complete oxymoron, regarding increasing cognition). I’m going to shatter some of that stuff you’ve previously heard about brain training games. Here goes: They don’t work. Individual brain training games don’t make you smarter—they make you more proficient at the brain training games.

Now, they do serve a purpose, but it is short-lived. The key to getting something out of those types of cognitive activities sort of relates to the first principle of seeking novelty. Once you master one of those cognitive activities in the brain-training game, you need to move on to the next challenging activity. Figure out how to play Sudoku? Great! Now move along to the next type of challenging game. There is research that supports this logic.

A few years ago, scientist Richard Haier wanted to see if you could increase your cognitive ability by intensely training on novel mental activities for a period of several weeks. They used the video game Tetris as the novel activity, and used people who had never played the game before as subjects (I know—can you believe they exist?!). What they found, was that after training for several weeks on the game Tetris, the subjects experienced an increase in cortical thickness, as well as an increase in cortical activity, as evidenced by the increase in how much glucose was used in that area of the brain. Basically, the brain used more energy during those training times, and bulked up in thickness—which means more neural connections, or new learned expertise—after this intense training. And they became experts at Tetris. Cool, right?

Here’s the thing: After that initial explosion of cognitive growth, they noticed a decline in both cortical thickness, as well as the amount of glucose used during that task. However, they remained just as good at Tetris; their skill did not decrease. The brain scans showed less brain activity during the game-playing, instead of more, as in the previous days. Why the drop? Their brains got more efficient. Once their brain figured out how to play Tetris, and got really good at it, it got lazy. It didn’t need to work as hard in order to play the game well, so the cognitive energy and the glucose went somewhere else instead.

Efficiency is not your friend when it comes to cognitive growth. In order to keep your brain making new connections and keeping them active, you need to keep moving on to another challenging activity as soon as you reach the point of mastery in the one you are engaging in. You want to be in a constant state of slight discomfort, struggling to barely achieve whatever it is you are trying to do, as Einstein alluded to in his quote. This keeps your brain on its toes, so to speak. We’ll come back to this point later on.

3. Think Creatively

When I say thinking creatively will help you achieve neural growth, I am not talking about painting a picture, or doing something artsy, like we discussed in the first principle, Seeking Novelty. When I speak of creative thinking, I am talking about creative cognition itself, and what that means as far as the process going on in your brain.

Contrary to popular belief, creative thinking does not equal “thinking with the right side of your brain”. It involves recruitment from both halves of your brain, not just the right. Creative cognition involves divergent thinking (a wide range of topics/subjects), making remote associations between ideas, switching back and forth between conventional and unconventional thinking (cognitive flexibility), and generating original, novel ideas that are also appropriate to the activity you are doing. In order to do this well, you need both right and left hemispheres working in conjunction with each other.

Several years ago, Dr Robert Sternberg, former Dean at Tufts University, opened the PACE (Psychology of Abilities, Competencies, and Expertise) Center, in Boston. Sternberg has been on a quest to not only understand the fundamental concept of intelligence, but also to find ways in which any one person can maximize his or her intelligence through training, and especially, through teaching in schools.

Here Sternberg describes the goals of the PACE Center, which was started at Yale:

“The basic idea of the center is that abilities are not fixed but rather flexible, that they’re modifiable, and that anyone can transform their abilities into competencies, and their competencies into expertise,” Sternberg explains. “We’re especially interested in how we can help people essentially modify their abilities so that they can be better able to face the tasks and situations they’re going to confront in life.”

As part of a research study, The Rainbow Project [pdf], he created not only innovative methods of creative teaching in the classroom, but generated assessment procedures that tested the students in ways that got them to think about the problems in creative and practical ways, as well as analytical, instead of just memorizing facts.

Sternberg explains,

“In the Rainbow Project we created assessments of creative and practical as well as analytical abilities. A creative test might be: ‘Here’s a cartoon. Caption it.’ A practical problem might be a movie of a student going into a party, looking around, not knowing anyone, and obviously feeling uncomfortable. What should the student do?”

He wanted to find out if by teaching students to think creatively (and practically) about a problem, as well as for memory, he could get them to (i) Learn more about the topic, (ii) Have more fun learning, and (iii) Transfer that knowledge gained to other areas of academic performance. He wanted to see if by varying the teaching and assessment methods, he could prevent “teaching to the test” and get the students to actually learn more in general. He collected data on this, and boy, did he get great results.

In a nutshell? On average, the students in the test group (the ones taught using creative methods) received higher final grades in the college course than the control group (taught with traditional methods and assessments). But—just to make things fair— he also gave the test group the very same analytical-type exam that the regular students got (a multiple choice test), and they scored higher on that test as well. That means they were able to transfer the knowledge they gained using creative, multimodal teaching methods, and score higher on a completely different cognitive test of achievement on that same material. Sound familiar?

4. Do Things the Hard Way

I mentioned earlier that efficiency is not your friend if you are trying to increase your intelligence. Unfortunately, many things in life are centered on trying to make everything more efficient. This is so we can do more things, in a shorter amount of time, expending the least amount of physical and mental energy possible. However, this isn’t doing your brain any favors.

Take one object of modern convenience, GPS. GPS is an amazing invention. I am one of those people GPS was invented for. My sense of direction is terrible. I get lost all the time. So when GPS came along, I was thanking my lucky stars. But you know what? After using GPS for a short time, I found that my sense of direction was worse. If I failed to have it with me, I was even more lost than before. So when I moved to Boston—the city that horror movies and nightmares about getting lost are modeled after—I stopped using GPS.

I won’t lie—it was painful as hell. I had a new job which involved traveling all over the burbs of Boston, and I got lost every single day for at least 4 weeks. I got lost so much, I thought I was going to lose my job due to chronic lateness (I even got written up for it). But—in time, I started learning my way around, due to the sheer amount of practice I was getting at navigation using only my brain and a map. I began to actually get a sense of where things in Boston were, using logic and memory, not GPS. I can still remember how proud I was the day a friend was in town visiting, and I was able to effectively find his hotel downtown with only a name and a location description to go on—not even an address. It was like I had graduated from navigational awareness school.

Technology does a lot to make things in life easier, faster, more efficient, but sometimes our cognitive skills can suffer as a result of these shortcuts, and hurt us in the long run. Now, before everyone starts screaming and emailing my transhumanist friends to say that I’ve sinned by trashing tech—that’s not what I’m doing.

Look at it this way: Driving to work takes less physical energy, saves time, and it’s probably more convenient and pleasant than walking. Not a big deal. But if you drove everywhere you went, or spent your life on a Segway, even to go very short distances, you aren’t going to be expending any physical energy. Over time, your muscles will atrophy, your physical state will weaken, and you’ll probably gain weight. Your overall health will probably decline as a result.

Your brain needs exercise as well. If you stop using your problem-solving skills, your spatial skills, your logical skills, your cognitive skills—how do you expect your brain to stay in top shape—never mind improve? Think about modern conveniences that are helpful, but when relied on too much, can hurt your skill in that domain. Translation software: amazing, but my multilingual skills have declined since I started using it more. I’ve now forced myself to struggle through translations before I look up the correct format. Same goes for spell-check and autocorrect. In fact, I think autocorrect was one of the worst things ever invented for the advancement of cognition. You know the computer will catch your mistakes, so you plug along, not even thinking about how to spell any more. As a result of years of relying on autocorrect and spell-check, as a nation, are we worse spellers? (I would love someone to do a study on this.)

There are times when using technology is warranted and necessary. But there are times when it’s better to say no to shortcuts and use your brain, as long as you can afford the luxury of time and energy. Walking to work every so often or taking the stairs instead of the elevator a few times a week is recommended to stay in good physical shape. Don’t you want your brain to be fit as well? Lay off the GPS once in a while, and do your spatial and problem-solving skills a favor. Keep it handy, but try navigating naked first. Your brain will thank you.

5. Network

And that brings us to the last element to maximize your cognitive potential: Networking. What’s great about this last objective is that if you are doing the other four things, you are probably already doing this as well. If not, start. Immediately.

By networking with other people—either through social media such as Facebook or Twitter, or in face-to-face interactions—you are exposing yourself to the kinds of situations that are going to make objectives 1-4 much easier to achieve. By exposing yourself to new people, ideas, and environments, you are opening yourself up to new opportunities for cognitive growth. Being in the presence of other people who may be outside of your immediate field gives you opportunities to see problems from a new perspective, or offer insight in ways that you had never thought of before. Learning is all about exposing yourself to new things and taking in that information in ways that are meaningful and unique—networking with other people is a great way to make that happen. I’m not even going to get into the social benefits and emotional well-being that is derived from networking as a factor here, but that is just an added perk.

Steven Johnson, author who wrote the book “Where Good Ideas Come From”, discusses the importance of groups and networks for the advancement of ideas. If you are looking for ways to seek out novel situations, ideas, environments, and perspectives, then networking is the answer. It would be pretty tough to implement this “Get Smarter” regiment without making networking a primary component. Greatest thing about networking: Everyone involved benefits. Collective intelligence for the win!

…And I have a departing question for you to ponder as well: If we have all of this supporting data, showing that these teaching methods and ways of approaching learning can have such a profound positive effect on cognitive growth, why aren’t more therapy programs or school systems adopting some of these techniques? I’d love to see this as the standard in teaching, not the exception. Let’s try something novel and shake up the education system a little bit, shall we? We’d raise the collective IQ something fierce.

Intelligence isn’t just about how many levels of math courses you’ve taken, how fast you can solve an algorithm, or how many vocabulary words you know that are over 6 characters. It’s about being able to approach a new problem, recognize its important components, and solve it—then take that knowledge gained and put it towards solving the next, more complex problem. It’s about innovation and imagination, and about being able to put that to use to make the world a better place. This is the kind of intelligence that is valuable, and this is the type of intelligence we should be striving for and encouraging.