How to speed up your brain's thinking. Accelerated thinking (Thinking disorders V.M.
Some people are unhappy with their brain activity, complaining about a genetic predisposition. Quick thinking directly reflects a person's lifestyle. Poor nutrition and lack of physical activity, smoking cigarettes, alcohol abuse, etc. – there are many reasons for decreased memory and speed of thought. In the 21st century, a technique for increasing the potential of consciousness is widely in demand.
Gymnastics for the mind is a set of exercises and daily activities that can be done on the way to work, during meals or before bed. Such activities do not require a specific place and time, because they are carried out in the human mind. The exact formula for “Success” has not been found, but the ways to achieve the cherished goal are known.
Changing genetic predisposition, developing speed of thinking and increasing brain activity is quite simple. The main thing is to follow a number of simple recommendations:
Regular exercise increases brain activity by increasing the number of gray cells.
Curiosity is a useful quality in the race for quick thinking. Find answers to emerging questions while gaining new information.
Enjoy life, smile and laugh, because in a state of joy endorphins are produced in the body.
Include nuts that contain omega-3 acids in your diet - such products will help improve memory by speeding up the process of assimilation of new information.
Scientists have proven that classical music increases a person's ability to count, developing a mathematical mindset.
Regularly nourish your mind by adding new and interesting activities to your complex of habitual exercises to develop quick thinking.
Do not neglect rest, because healthy and sound sleep improves the biological processes of life.
Analyze the information that happened to you during the day. By straining your memory, you train it, developing your thinking.
Learn to concentrate on a specific type of activity, abstracting from distractions.
Stop being lazy and start achieving your previously set goals.
Aromatic oils help fight stress, calm the nervous system, have a beneficial effect on consciousness and increase brain activity.
To increase the speed of thinking, it is recommended to make non-standard decisions, which previously you would have considered absolutely absurd actions. By looking at a situation from an unfamiliar and complex perspective, you develop the areas of the brain responsible for learning new information and memory.
Effective exercises to develop quick thinking
You can develop your thinking speed with the help of special exercises that stimulate the functioning of certain areas of the brain. It is recommended to choose classes on logic and counting. A set of effective ways to increase the speed of thought include:
After making a purchase in a store, cover the total amount on the receipt with your finger. Add up the cost of products in your mind to “stretch” your thinking in an everyday situation.
Using perfume again, try to identify the components of the perfume by the aroma. Identify components using solely your sense of smell. After completing such a procedure, check your conclusions.
After leaving your own apartment, remember 3 license plate numbers of the cars you met along the way. When returning to the house, try to reproduce the signs in your memory.
Blindfold your eyes with an impenetrable cloth and identify objects by touch in familiar territory. Before performing such an exercise, it is recommended to make sure that the room is safe so as not to get injured by tripping over a chair or other components of the interior.
If you are used to performing daily procedures with your right hand, then change it to your left hand (brushing your teeth, eating, working at the computer, combing your hair).
Get a notebook at home in which you write down your favorite phrases and aphorisms. Having heard an interesting quote in a dialogue with your interlocutor or read a captivating slogan on an advertising banner, remember them in order to replenish your collection later.
Enjoy the dish as you eat, exploring the aromas and flavors of the food.
Crosswords, puzzles and mosaics help develop the speed of thought.
The set of exercises should be exciting so that you associate them with positive emotions. If classes become routine training, then it will be impossible to achieve your goal. Have fun solving logic riddles.
There is no clear answer to the question of how to develop speed of thinking. The main thing is that you have a strong desire to increase brain activity. Be sure to choose methods and techniques, exercises and logic classes taking into account individual preferences.
January 18, 2014, 11:47Disorders of the associative process include a number of disturbances in the way of thinking, expressed in changes in tempo, mobility, harmony, and focus. The following clinical phenomena are distinguished.
Acceleration of thinking characterized not only by the abundance and speed of occurrence of associations, but also by their superficiality. This leads to the fact that patients are easily distracted from the main topic of conversation, and speech acquires an inconsistent, “jumping” character. Any remark from the interlocutor gives rise to a new stream of superficial associations. Speech pressure is noted, the patient strives to speak out as quickly as possible, and does not listen to answers to the questions asked.
A patient diagnosed with “manic-depressive psychosis,” meeting a doctor in the morning, rushes to him, starting the conversation with compliments: “You look great, doctor, and the shirt is just right!” I'll give you, doctor, a nice tie and a mink hat. My sister works at a department store. Have you been to the department store in Presnya, on the fourth floor? Do you know how high the floors are? As soon as I walk, my heart is pounding. Can I get an electrocardiogram? No! Why bother you in vain? It's time for me to check out. I'm so healthy. In the army I trained in barbells. And at school I danced in an ensemble. Do you, doctor, like ballet? I'll give you tickets to the ballet! I have connections everywhere...”
Extremely pronounced acceleration is designated as " leap of ideas"(fuga idearum). In this case, speech breaks down into separate cries, the connection between which is very difficult to understand (“verbal okroshka”). However, later, when the painful state passes, patients can sometimes restore a logical chain of thoughts that they did not have time to express during psychosis.
Acceleration of thinking- a characteristic manifestation of manic syndrome (see section 8.3.2), can also be observed when taking psychostimulants.
Slowing down your thinking is expressed not only in the slow pace of speech, but also in the poverty of emerging associations. Because of this, speech becomes monosyllabic and lacks detailed definitions and explanations. The process of forming conclusions is difficult, so patients are unable to comprehend complex questions, cannot cope with counting, and give the impression of being intellectually impaired. However, slowing down of thinking in the vast majority of cases acts as a temporary reversible symptom, and with the resolution of psychosis, mental functions are completely restored. Slowing down of thinking is observed in patients in a state of depression, as well as in mild disorders of consciousness (stunning).
Pathological thoroughness (viscosity)- manifestation of rigidity of thinking. The patient speaks with thoroughness not only slowly, drawing out words, but also verbosely. He is prone to excessive detail. The abundance in his speech of unimportant clarifications, repetitions, random facts, and introductory words prevents listeners from understanding the main idea. Although he constantly returns to the topic of conversation, he gets stuck on detailed descriptions and gets to the final thought in a complex, confusing way (“labyrinthine thinking”). Most often, pathological circumstance is observed in organic diseases of the brain, especially in epilepsy, and indicates a long course of the disease, as well as the presence of an irreversible personality defect. In many ways, this symptom is associated with intellectual disorders: for example, the reason for detail lies in the lost ability to distinguish the main from the secondary.
A patient with epilepsy answers a doctor’s question about what he remembers about his last seizure: “Well, there was one seizure somehow. Well, I’m at my dacha, they dug up a good garden. As they say, maybe from fatigue. Well, it was there... Well, I actually don’t know anything about the attack. Relatives and friends said. Well, they say that there was an attack... Well, as they say, my brother was still alive, he also died of a heart attack... He told me while he was still alive. He says: “Well, I dragged you.” This nephew is there... The men dragged me to the bed. And without that, I was unconscious.”
The pathological thoroughness of the associative process should be distinguished thoroughness of patients with delirium. In this case, the detailing does not serve as a manifestation of irreversible changes in the patient’s way of thinking, but only reflects the degree of relevance of the delusional idea for the patient. A patient with delirium is so carried away by the story that he cannot switch to any other topic, constantly returns to the thoughts that worry him, but when discussing everyday events that are of little significance to him, he is able to answer briefly, clearly and specifically. Prescribing medications can reduce the relevance of painful delusional ideas and, accordingly, leads to the disappearance of delusional circumstance.
Reasoning also manifests itself in verbosity, but thinking loses focus. Speech is replete with complex logical constructions, fanciful abstract concepts, and terms that are often used without understanding their true meaning. If a patient with thoroughness strives to answer the doctor’s question as fully as possible, then for patients with reasoning it does not matter whether their interlocutor understood. They are interested in the process of thinking itself, and not the final thought. Thinking becomes amorphous, devoid of clear content. When discussing the simplest everyday issues, patients find it difficult to accurately formulate the subject of the conversation, express themselves in florid ways, and consider problems from the point of view of the most abstract sciences (philosophy, ethics, cosmology, biophysics). Such a penchant for lengthy, fruitless philosophical reasoning is often combined with absurd abstract hobbies. (metaphysical or philosophical intoxication). Reasoning is formed in patients with schizophrenia with a long-term process and reflects irreversible changes in the way of thinking of patients.
In the final stages of the disease, impairment of the purposeful thinking of patients with schizophrenia can reach a degree fragmentation, reflected in the breakdown of speech (schizophasia) when it completely loses any meaning. The associations used by the patient are chaotic and random. It is interesting that in this case the correct grammatical structure is often preserved, expressed in speech by the exact agreement of words in gender and case. The patient speaks measuredly, emphasizing the most significant words. The patient’s consciousness is not upset: he hears the doctor’s question, correctly follows his instructions, constructs answers taking into account the associations made in the speech of the interlocutors, but cannot fully formulate a single thought.
A patient with schizophrenia talks about himself: “I have worked in all sorts of ways! I can do it as an orderly, and the stitching turns out straight. As a boy, he used to make a chair and make rounds together with Professor Banshchikov. Everyone sits like this, and I speak, and everything works out congruently. And then in the mausoleum everyone was carrying bales, so heavy. I’m lying in a coffin, holding my hands like this, and they’re dragging and folding everything. Everyone says: they say, abroad will help us, but I can work as an obstetrician here too. For so many years I have been delivering babies in Gorky Park... well, there are boys and girls... We take out the fetuses and put them away. And what the chefs do is also necessary, because science is the greatest path to progress...”
Incoherence (incoherence)- a manifestation of the gross disintegration of the entire thinking process. With incoherence, the grammatical structure of speech is destroyed, there are no complete phrases, you can only hear isolated fragments of phrases, phrases and meaningless sounds. Incoherent speech usually occurs against the background of a severe disorder of consciousness - amentia (see section 10.2.2). At the same time, the patient is inaccessible to contact, does not hear or understand speech addressed to him.
Manifestations of thought disorder can be speech stereotypies, characterized by the repetition of thoughts, phrases or individual words. Speech stereotypies include perseverations, verbigerations and standing turns.
Perseverations are most often found in dementia caused by vascular damage to the brain and with age-related atrophic processes in the brain. At the same time, due to intellectual impairment, patients cannot comprehend the next question and, instead of answering, repeat what was said earlier.
A patient diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, at the doctor's request, names the months of the year with some delay, but in the correct order. Fulfilling the doctor’s request to name her fingers, she shows her hand and lists: “January... February... March... April...”.
Verbigerations can only conditionally be classified as thinking disorders, since they are in many ways reminiscent of violent motor acts.
Patients stereotypically, rhythmically, sometimes in rhyme, repeat individual words, sometimes meaningless combinations of sounds. Often this symptom is accompanied by rhythmic movements: patients sway, shake their heads, wave their fingers and at the same time repeat: “Lying-lying... between-between... buzz-buzz... push-press... look-look...”. Verbigerations are most often a component of catatonic or hebephrenic syndromes (see section 9.1) characteristic of schizophrenia.
Standing speed - these are stereotypical expressions, similar thoughts, to which the patient returns many times during the conversation. The appearance of standing speed is a sign of decreased intelligence, empty thinking. Standing movements are quite common in epileptic dementia. They can also be observed in atrophic diseases of the brain, for example, in Pick's disease.
A 68-year-old patient, suffering from epilepsy since adolescence, constantly uses the expression “mental-brain system” in his speech: “These pills help with the mental-brain system,” “The doctor advised me to lie down more for the mental-brain system,” “Now I hum all the time , because the mental-brain system is recovering.”
A 58-year-old patient diagnosed with Pick's disease answers the doctor's questions:
- What is your name? - No way.
- How old are you? - Not at all.
- Who do you work for? - No one.
- Do you have a wife? - Eat.
- What is her name? - No way.
- How old is she? - Not at all.
- Who do they work for? - Nobody...
In some cases, patients have the feeling that some processes in thinking occur against their will and they are unable to control their thinking. Examples of such symptoms are an influx of thoughts and interruptions in thinking. influx thoughts (mentism) is expressed by a painful state for the patient of a chaotic stream of thoughts rushing through the head, usually occurring in the form of an attack. At this moment, the patient is unable to continue normal work,
distracted from the conversation. Painful thoughts do not represent any logical series, so a person cannot express them coherently; he complains that “thoughts go in parallel rows,” “jump,” “intersect,” “cling to one another,” “get confused.”
Interruptions in thinking (sperrung, stopping, or blockage, of thoughts) cause the feeling that “thoughts have flown out of my head,” “my head is empty,” “I was thinking and thinking and suddenly it was as if I ran into a wall.” The violent nature of these symptoms can instill in the patient the suspicion that someone is deliberately controlling his thinking and preventing him from thinking. Mentism and sperrung are a manifestation of ideational automatism (see section 5.3), most often observed in schizophrenia. Difficulties in thinking that arise during fatigue (for example, with asthenic syndrome), in which patients cannot concentrate, concentrate on work, and involuntarily begin to think about something unimportant, should be distinguished from attacks of mentism. This state is never accompanied by a feeling of alienation or violence.
The most diverse disorders of the associative process are typical of schizophrenia, in which the entire figurative mindset can be radically modified, acquiring an autistic, symbolic and paralogical character.
Autistic thinking is expressed in extreme isolation, immersion in the world of one’s own fantasies, and separation from reality. Patients are not interested in the practical significance of their ideas, they can think about a thought that obviously contradicts reality, and draw conclusions from it that are as meaningless as the original premise. Patients do not care about the opinions of others, they are quiet and secretive, but they are happy to express their thoughts on paper, sometimes filling up thick notebooks. Observing such patients, reading their notes, one can be surprised that patients who behave passively, speak colorlessly, indifferently, are actually overwhelmed by such fantastic, abstract, philosophical experiences.
Symbolic thinking characterized by the fact that patients use their own symbols, incomprehensible to others, to express thoughts. These may be well-known words that are used in an unusual meaning, making the meaning of what was said unclear. Often patients make up their own words (neologisms).
A 29-year-old patient diagnosed with schizophrenia divides his hallucinations into “objective” and “subjective”. When asked to explain what he means, he states: “Subjection is color, movement, and objects are books, words, letters... Solid letters... I can imagine them well, because I had a surge of energy...”.
Paralogical thinking manifests itself in the fact that patients, through complex logical reasoning, come to conclusions that clearly contradict reality. This becomes possible because in the speech of patients, which at first glance seems coherent and logical, there is a displacement of concepts (slipping), substitution of the direct and figurative meaning of words, and violations of cause-and-effect relationships. Often paralogical thinking is the basis of a delusional system. At the same time, paralogical constructions seem to prove the validity of the patient’s thoughts.
A 25-year-old patient, talking about her family, emphasizes that she loves her mother very much, who is now 50 years old and looks quite healthy. However, the patient is very concerned that her mother might get sick and die before her eyes, so she intends to kill her as soon as she turns 70 years old.
Autistic, symbolic and paralogical thinking are not specific manifestations of schizophrenia. It has been noticed that among relatives of patients with schizophrenia, more often than in the general population, there are people without a current mental illness, but endowed with an unusual character (sometimes reaching the level of psychopathy) and a subjective way of thinking, with unexpected logical constructs, a tendency to isolate themselves from the outside world and symbolism.
Take your emotions into account. Our consciousness is only a small part of what happens in our head. At any moment, the brain processes a gigantic amount of information at enormous speed - we cannot comprehend everything so quickly. Based on its findings, the brain generates emotions. Don't ignore this subtle hint - your personal supercomputer is trying to tell you something.
Don't think under the pressure of circumstances. At moments when all you are required to do is action, there is no point in analyzing your methods. “The plane took off - it’s too late to check fuel reserves.” Once, having spent time learning a skill (this always takes time), we must subsequently trust our automaticity and perform actions quickly and efficiently.
Consider an alternative. This method is often used by poker players when they suspect that their partner is bluffing. Let us assume for ourselves the thought that “the partner is not bluffing”, after which the brain will sensitively filter all signs (speech, facial expressions) that conflict with this fact, which we have taken for granted.
Question your habits. If you love good wine, there is no connection between its price and how much you personally like it. Same with perfumes, movies, books... Find out what you personally want and get more pleasure from life.
Take long showers. Research shows that often the solution to a problem comes during a long walk or while standing in the shower. These ideas are received at the peak of activity of the right hemisphere of the brain, and the mind works most effectively with this hemisphere when it is stress-free.
Be skeptical about your memories. Scientists have proven that human memory is surprisingly dishonest. The very fact of remembering an event changes the information about this event in our brain - the details and descriptions change. The more you think, the less reliable these events become as a basis for making a decision. It’s unlikely that you should organize your child’s birthday based on memories of what you yourself liked when you were 7 years old.
Don't expect an ideal figure and super thinking at the same time. It turned out that the areas of the brain responsible for will and thinking are quickly depleted. A simple experiment showed that a person who was asked to remember a seven-digit number and then offered to eat chose cake between salad and chocolate cake. And the one who was asked to remember only one number chose the salad without hesitation. In the first group, the “brain tension” was exhausted. Remember, you can do everything, just not everything at once!
Work on your mistakes. One common characteristic of successful people is their desire to focus on their failures. Even when they do well, they insist that they could do better. This, of course, is not a recipe for happiness, but it is a vitally important learning process, because... brain cells figure out how to get it right by analyzing where they went wrong.
Go and dream. Forget efficiency. Scientists have discovered that dreams are a critical component of creativity: they cause a spike in activity in the network of the brain that connects parts of the brain and forms new connections. The dreamer actually does a lot of work.
Think about thinking. It has been proven that the main guarantee of the right decision is not intelligence or experience, but the determination to find this solution. The brain is like a Swiss army knife, full of all kinds of tools. Think about which of these tools is most suitable for solving the problem now.
The material, of course, is from the Internet. But I just can’t remember where I got him, cholera gored him?!
Thinking disorders V.M. Bleicher
Acceleration of thinking is characteristic of manic and hypomanic states of various origins and is observed in manic-depressive psychosis, as well as in manioform states of exogenous origin, sometimes in schizophrenia, mainly in the onset and in its circular form. When thinking is accelerated, disturbances in its dynamics come to the fore, manifested in the lability of judgments.
Characterized by rapid, facilitated emergence and change of thoughts. The judgments of patients with accelerated thinking are superficial. This, as well as attention disorders inherent in states with accelerated thinking, explains the low mental productivity of patients in a manic state. Mental productivity is even lower in symptomatic manias of intoxication or infectious origin, since in these cases the phenomena of increased exhaustion of mental processes become of great importance (such conditions are classified as astheno-manic). The performance of patients with mild hypomanic states and cyclothymia may be relatively good. The more pronounced the acceleration of thinking, the less effective the patient’s activity.
Attention disturbances in manic states are primarily characterized by its instability. The combination of unstable attention, facilitated formation of associations, and accelerated flow of thoughts leads to peculiar changes in the patient’s speech - individual statements are not connected by any common idea, random associations are characteristic, often in consonance. The object of thinking becomes any object to which the patient pays attention. With a significant acceleration of thinking, they talk about a leap of ideas - thoughts replace each other so quickly that from the outside it is perceived as a continuous stream of words. At the same time, with a leap of ideas, in contrast to schizophrenic fragmentation, it is still not difficult to grasp the sequence of thoughts and their, albeit very superficial, interconnection. Only in cases of extremely sharp acceleration of thinking does the observer lose the ability to perceive transitions between individual thoughts. In these cases they speak of manic (vortex) confusion. Accelerated thinking, due to its instability, is characterized by an easy loss of the object of reasoning.
Speech during a jump in ideas reflects the chaotic nature and increased variability of the purposefulness of thought processes, and the patient’s high distractibility. With accelerated thinking, patients do not dwell on individual ideas; their judgments are hasty, ill-conceived, one-sided, and superficial. Accelerated thinking is generally superficial and inconsistent.
In psychological research, such ill-considered, hasty judgments of patients are easily corrected by pointing out to the examinee the mistake made. The exception is cases of angry mania, when the patient sharply negatively perceives any attempt to interfere with his reasoning.
The impression of acceleration of the course of mental processes during an objective examination of patients in a manic state turns out to be external. Thus, the speed of sensorimotor reactions and the latent period between the pronunciation of the stimulus word and the response in a verbal experiment are often not accelerated. On the contrary, an increase in these indicators is occasionally observed and is associated with instability of attention. The acceleration of thinking is determined by the ease of associations and lability of judgments, rapid changes of thoughts.
Typically, accelerated thinking occurs against a background of heightened mood and euphoria. At the same time, a paradoxical phenomenon that seems at first glance is noted - with obvious superficiality of judgment and low productivity of mental activity, patients in a manic state sometimes amaze their interlocutor with apt remarks and their powers of observation. The fact is that their intellectual level is not reduced, and their ability to sharply judge, wit, often evil, and observation do not suffer. A. A. Perelman (1957) considered this feature of such patients as a sign of the preservation of the potential capabilities of their intellectual activity, the determining goals in thinking. At the same time, they exhibit some lack of control of judgment and weakness of inhibitory systems, which is manifested in a certain decrease in the sense of tact and insufficient ability to be embarrassed. This explains the fact that a patient in a manic state can tell another person to his face what a healthy person would prefer to hide.
W. Jahrreiss (1928) distinguished the following variants of the jump of ideas.
1. Mental race of ideas - rich and poor in images. The picture of a race of ideas rich in images corresponds to its descriptions in typical circular mania. Poor in images of the leap of ideas, it is distinguished by the small number of ideas that arise in the patient’s thinking during its vortex acceleration. Clinically, the lack of images of the jump of ideas manifests itself mainly in the acceleration of speech and verbosity with a narrow range of ideas and images. Transitions from one thought to another occur not so much due to the lability of thinking, the ease of the emergence of semantic associations, but rather due to consonance or under the influence of external impressions. The role of internal incentive mechanisms can be traced significantly less in the mental production of patients with a lack of images and a jump of ideas. The onslaught of speech does not correspond to the volume of ideas and images that arise in the content, which is striking in its poverty. In this case, thinking has little content, despite its external acceleration. In such cases, they speak of unproductive mania, which should always alert the psychiatrist in terms of a possible diagnosis of the schizophrenic process.
2. Speech jumping of ideas is also mainly based on associations of consonance and is often observed in manioform states in patients with schizophrenia.
It is often observed during catatonic excitement.
3. “Mute”, speech-poor leap of ideas is also called a whirlwind influx of thoughts - mentism (P. H. Shaslin, 1914). Mentism is understood as an influx of thoughts, memories, and images. This symptom is distinguished by its involuntary occurrence and insubordination to the will of the patient. Subjectively, the patient experiences an influx of thoughts extremely painfully; their direction does not depend at all on his consciousness; no volitional effort can either stop the influx of thoughts or direct them into the usual direction of reasoning. Often these thoughts do not even acquire a clear verbal form and appear in the mind in the form of images, ideas, and concepts devoid of specific content. Many psychiatrists consider mentism as a type of associative automatism (minor automatism). Mentism is observed in schizophrenia (especially in the onset and in the sluggish course of the process, when there is no pronounced mental defect), sometimes in exogenous-organic psychoses, in their initial stage, in cases of mild disorders of consciousness with manic stupor. In mentism, K. A. Skvortsov (1938) saw the initial stage of automatism, the beginning of the oncoming alienation of thoughts. A characteristic feature of mentism in schizophrenia is its protracted course, the influx of thoughts leaves the patient only for a short time.
4. Vortex confusion is considered as the highest degree of expression of the race of ideas. Vortex (manic) confusion is difficult to distinguish from confusion in exogenous-organic psychoses, from an amental state. Their differentiation is possible only by analyzing the movement of psychopathological symptoms and taking into account the somatic state of the patient. V.P. Osipov (1923) believed that the basis of vortex confusion is the weakness of the associative process in connection with somatogenic asthenia.
From a clinical point of view, the acceleration of thinking is not a diagnostically unambiguous symptom complex. The variety of its manifestations reflects both the specific essence of the pathological process and the peculiarities of pathogenesis inherent in a particular stage of the disease and often the severity of the disease and the intensity of its severity.
It should be noted that the presence of accelerated thinking significantly complicates the pathopsychological examination of the patient. This primarily applies to manioform states in patients with schizophrenia. Acceleration of thinking in such cases often masks thinking disorders typical of schizophrenia. Only when manic-like manifestations subside do thought disorders of a schizophrenic nature clearly appear. We must remember this and not rush to a diagnostic judgment in cases where the clinical picture simultaneously shows signs of accelerated thinking and schizophrenic symptoms.
