This is a digestible breakdown of nearly 20 different articles in regards to critical thinking, deductive reasoning, and mental exercises you can perform in your daily life to become much more dynamic in thought. Much to the likes of the great fictional detective Sherlock Holmes.
A healthy body means a healthy brain. be sure you are leading a healthy physical life. Eating right and getting regular exercise. A number of studies have shown links between regular activity and intellectual capacity, productivity, and creativity. Sitting all day will not only kill you and hinder your brain from being at its absolute best.
Allow yourself to be open to impossibility. When ruling out all possible results, whatever is left no matter how impossible, must be truth.
Apply the scientific method to daily life. Thinking critically and using scientific deduction can easily weed out common mistakes we make in our daily life.
Be aware of logical fallacies, appeals to your emotion, and other shortcuts. By knowing what fallacies are, you will also be able to avoid using those same fallacies yourself.
Be engaged. Those who are motivated by their personal engagement in a situation are more likely to make the effort to counteract their initial judgments.
Be inclusive. When examining a note, not only read it and look at it. Give yourself additional input through all available senses.
Believe you can be smarter. Belief and positive thinking can make it true. This will lead you to keep an open mind and ask questions.
Continue education. Choose your habits mindfully, make each facilitate thought. Take on tasks that are challenging in order to keep learning.
Contribute to discourse and admit your own ignorance or ask questions and attempt learn something in the process.
Doing things the hard way is an active approach to learning more. Doing things the hard way can help keep your brain sharp allowing new skills to develop.
Examine everything with healthy skepticism. Stop and question our own thoughts. By filtering our thoughts, they can not influence our behavior outside of our awareness.
Learn second or third language. Research shows that it can actually make you smarter. If you know a second language, you're able to adapt to and switch between certain mental tasks better than those that only know one.
Observe all first impressions closely. Something superfluous often influences our judgments.
Play puzzle games and other such brain teasers to keep your mind sharp and allows you to think outside the box.
Practice active reading. Active reading allows you read faster and retain more. Give your mouth something to do, like chewing or humming. Take some time to absorb and reflect on what you read to keep it in your memory. Wikipedia's Random Article is a good option for reading practice.
Take a step back. Imaginative thinking is enhanced when we walk away from a problem. Distance gives perspective.
Take time to learn your own mental hiccups allows you to apply the time you spend on actually learning.Keep a journal. Write everything down and then look for patterns, without jumping to conclusions. Again gaining perspective.
Talk to yourself often, recent studies have shown that talking out loud to yourself can help give you a temporary cognitive boost when trying to find something. When you give yourself verbal labels to a tasks are performing, you focus better on the task at hand.
Use expressive speech making sure you speak with an engaging tone. Use your pitch and volume as necessary and try to minimize the number of pauses as you speak.
Work to overcome biases. With practice, we can overcome the wiring of our brains to become more objective.