Building Attention

"Attention is, in fact a highly directed process. Shift the focus of attention, the area of interest and totally new sensory data flow in. This shift depends on such things as alertness, degree of concentration and areas of interest."

Before you can expand your intellectual horizons in the areas of information processing, comprehension and perspective, it is imperative that you increase your attention span and expand the perceptions of your senses. Think of the brain as a switching center, like that of a giant railroad, sending  different trains down different tracks all at the same time. You always want to be awake at the switch. 

When  one thinks "short attention span," one almost always identifies it with very young children and that is as it ought to be. When building your own intelligence, building your attention span first is a critical factor.

Intelligence tests require you to correctly repeat a sentence you have just heard, the gist of a longer passage and a series of numbers. Sentence memory, passage memory and digit memory are based on the span of your attention and are tests of that span and how well you are able to focus it.

To test your own attention span, try to picture the words as you read, written out on a blackboard. With the longer passage, concentrate on memorizing the key words. The others will fall into place by themselves. The scoring on a test like this tends to be absolute. You receive credit on the sentence memory and the digit sequence only of you repeat every word of the sentence exactly. Muff a word or a number and you receive no score. 

In a passage memory exercise, the scoring is again black and white, except you are not expected to remember every exact word. You are however, given credit only if you can recall every salient point in the passage. You are either get these right or you get them wrong. But, on an intelligence test, as the sentences, passages and number series become increasingly more complex and difficult, the test maker will usually begin to stumble more often. At that point, the test is stopped and the testee is given credit for the levels at which there no errors. It works sometime like an eye chart, except that you do not come away with new glasses.

If you have any trouble remembering the seven-digit series. Make up about dozen of them each day for the next week, practicing them until you are comfortable seeing or hearing a seven digit series once, then repeating it once or twice. When you can do that with ease, you should be able to hear a telephone number once and have no problem holding it in your short term memory until you actually dial it.

Although the word "attention" is singular, attention itself is not. There are several kings of attention, each useful in different way and all necessary. There is the long range kind of tenacity required to plow through and digest a boring, but necessary, corporate report and the creative kind of perseverance required to stay with an original project of your own. Too many half knitted sweaters or unfinished letters are languishing in desks or clothes because of insufficient perseverance.

Still other kinds of work require shorter, but more intense bursts of attention to make an extraordinary exertion of mental muscles or break through to new area of thinking, supplying you with final push that can make the difference between your reach and your grasp.

Building Vocabulary

Vocabulary is the foundation of your English skills. Without a large vocabulary, even the best understanding of English grammar will not allow you to speak English. Memorizing vocabulary may not be your favorite activity, but there are plenty of creative ways to make it more fun. We've prepared some study tips to make learning English vocabulary more fun and you can learn new words.

1. Read the dictionary.

Dictionaries contain most words that you find in daily life. Looking up words in the dictionary that you see or hear will definitely improve vocabulary, all be it slowly. The important thing to remember is to use your new word as soon as you have learned it. If you practice saying, and writing the new words throughout the day, you’ll start to remember it’s meaning and the new vocabulary word becomes a part of your common knowledge. Make yourself comfortable with the new word and keep repeating it in different areas of your life when talking to people. Using the new word in emails, blog posts, or other forms of writing will also cement the new word into the memory bank. Expanding your vocabulary will always be improved by regularly diving into the dictionary and reading entries for words you aren't yet familiar with.

2. Read more.

Read quality Newspapers, well written magazines, essays, and Online materials everyday. If you come across a word whose meaning is unknown to you, underline it and look up the word in the dictionary. Try using the new words you have learned in your daily conversation. Make it a habit. Start with a page a day, and in a while, your vocabulary will be expanded.

Also try to read at least one book and several magazines every week. Not just this week and the next week, but every week for a long time. As well as improving your vocabulary, you'll also keep updated and backdated, your general knowledge will increase, and you'll be a well-rounded person who knows a lot more than many other people do.

3. Write more.

The more you write, the more your vocabulary increases as you're forced into a position of expanding your word usage to convey precisely what it is that you wish to get across to the reader. When writing, aim to replace commonly used words with less used and more descriptive and interesting words; get out the thesaurus and use more challenging words. Doing this can improve your fiction, biographical, and some forms of work writing a great deal. Most material written for public dissemination aims to avoid the use of words that the average reader would not know. Keep this in mind when flexing your new vocabulary; you'll still need to keep your plain English in good usage for everyday writing, especially in most work environments.

4. Open your mind to new ideas.

Every word you see is the translation of new idea. Think about the areas of human knowledge that may possibly be unknown to you - psychology, semantics, anthropology, science, art, music, management, etc. Then, attack one of these areas methodically, by reading books on that particular subject. In every field, from the simplest to the most abstruse, there are several books for the average, untrained lay reader, right through to those for experts in the field. Push yourself with the reading as far as you can, to expose yourself to new ways of using the vocabulary and forming ideas; doing this will give you both a good grasp of the subject and, at the same time, add new vocabularies to your existing knowledge.

5. Add the new words you meet in your reading

When you see an unfamiliar word in a book, magazine, manual, etc., do not skip over it impatiently. Instead, pause for a moment and say it to yourself. Get used to its sound and its appearance. At first, try to puzzle out its possible meaning in the context of the sentence. Whether you come to the right conclusion or not, whether indeed you're even able to come to any intelligent conclusion at all is of no importance. What is important is that, by that process, you're becoming super conscious of the new word. As a result, you will suddenly notice that this very word pops up unexpectedly again and again in all sorts of places. For now your mind has been alerted to notice it. Once you've tried this exercise, look it up in the dictionary and confirm its meaning.

6. Become actively receptive to new words.

Every time you read, there are opportunities to increase your vocabulary. Don't ignore these opportunities. Many of us tend to skip unknown words and gain general understandings of phrases or paragraphs from their overall context. If you're used to doing this, it may require additional effort to remember to note down the unknown words. Train yourself to be invariably aware when reading and listening to others, and remember the words that are not known to you. Look them up later in a dictionary. Consider keeping a small notebook with you and quickly jot down unknown words as you come across them for checking later. If you hear or see a word you don't know, be sure to look it up.

Let new words percolate in your mind. Learn the meanings and then add them into everyday speech as regularly as possible.

7. Do word puzzles and play word games.

Word puzzles are an excellent source of increasing your word knowledge because the puzzle creators will often need to resort to an array of unusual words to ensure that the words fit into their puzzles and that they are interesting for the puzzle doer. There are many varieties of vocabulary puzzles, including crosswords, find-a-word and hidden word puzzles. As well as strengthening your word knowledge, puzzles are also good for improving your critical thinking skills. For word games, try such games as Scrabble, Boggle, and Cranium to extend your vocabulary.

8. Set a goal.

Set your self a goal of finding and remembering several new words every day. While this may sound ambitious, you will discover as soon as you start actively looking for new words in your reading, and actively doing reading of a more challenging type, that new words are all around you and that this is an exciting goal to fulfill. And understand this – vocabulary building snowballs. The results of each new day search will be greater and greater.

Make looking up 10 words in the dictionary a day a habit. Once that gets real simple start looking up 20,30, 40, etc.

9. Use the new words that you met into a sentences.

If you learn some new words,do not hesitate. Talk to whoever you can and implement those words in sentences. Decide among your circle of friends that you will only talk in English with each other. This way you can get rid of hesitation and also have your friends correct you when you are wrong.

Building Information

If we accept the computer as a metaphor for the brain itself, then the intellect is the hardware and information the software. A computer accepts all information impartially, sorts it without judging it, store it, and regurgitates it on command. But a computer chip is built to last practically forever while human brings are comparatively short lived. All information is not of equal value, if we had eternity to sift through the information of previous centuries- all the books, music, art, ideas generated by the human race, all the wonders of the universe known and unknown-we could take our time selecting the best and leaving the rest.

In the last 400 years, we have mad a quantum leap in information technology. By the 1980s, if a Russian leader sneeze in Moscow, his ka-choo is transmitted instantly by satellite, the Soviet delegation to the United Nations can say "Gesundheit" in New York, and a few seconds later, they can hear "Thank you" back from the Kremlin.

Every day we are bombarded b an onslaught of information from the airwaves, from our newspapers and magazines, by video clip and radio-cast, and even by headlines spelled out in lights blinking around public buildings. At least, most of this bombardment is unnecessary overload. Much of the time, it is simply junk. at worst, however, it is dangerously misleading. 

Always remember that there is more information than truth. Information is only the first step to Data, and Data only the next step to Fact. Fact is on the road to Truth, but is has a long way to go. And do not ever confuse Information with Truth, or you will wind up with a painful of dirt, or at best, fool's gold.

Know exactly who and what it is feeding you information before you swallow or digest it. Chew the information thoroughly first. We have talked before about how people unconsciously select slanted or biased newspapers, magazines and other sources of information and "opinion" to buttress their own beliefs. By now you should be out of that habit. 

Learn to install facts from commentary. Probably the greatest difficulty in distilling facts from commentary is telling the difference. The words you hear spoken on the news have often been so homogenized that the milk of commentary and the cream of fact are blended so completely you can not tell where one leaves off and the other begins.

Understand that a lot of the time this is not even done consciously. There is no conspiracy to matter of each person in power having his or her own political beliefs. This fact causes each speech or program to be slanted in that particular direction. Overt instructions to slant the news are quite unnecessary. Every employee knows that the fastest route to advancement is to please the boss and fix into the organisation.

Many television news programs actually employ "commentators", media stars who are paid to deliver a one-sided opinion of national and world events. They tell you up front that this is their commentary and doesn't reflect anything but that. Presumably, the viewer is meant to believe that the rest of the news is therefore free of slant or bias. But to believe that is an naive as believing that newspapers run unbiased stories off the editorial pages and put of the purview of its columnists.