How To Improve Your Mind: 20 Keys to Unlock the Modern World

Each day our minds experience a deluge of conversation, lectures, newspapers, TV, the Internet, and more. But what should we really be paying attention to? James R. Flynn, world–renowned intelligence researcher and discoverer of the Flynn Effect (the phenomenon of rising global IQs over time), poses the most challenging question of all: Who is to be the master of all this information you or the modern world? It is you, he claims, who must be the gatekeeper that filters out what is worth remembering. Otherwise you may find yourself at the mercy of a life that you can only manage day by day.

In How to Improve Your Mind, Flynn presents 20 key concepts to aid critical thinking: practical guidelines that will empower you to critically analyze what you read, what you hear, and what you see. You will gain a greater understanding of a wide range of topics that include contemporary race and IQ debates, what makes good science and history, why America and Israel behave as they do, and the origins of the current economic crisis. Flynn′s "20 keys" translate into an invaluable toolkit enabling readers to make up their own minds about ethics, religion, history, economics, international politics, and even what they should eat. How to Improve Your Mind offers great insights into how to become an information master in the age of information overload. 

List of Figures and Boxes ix

Acknowledgments x

1 Introduction: The Knowledge Trap 1

Part 1 Arguing about Right and Wrong 15

2 Logic and Moral Debate Attacks on Blacks 17

3 Getting Rid of Tautologies No Private Clubs 24

4 The Naturalistic Fallacy and Its Consequences be Judgmental 32

5 But that is Unnatural Words Best Never Said 41

Part 2 The Truth about People 49

6 Random Sample Quality Not Size 51

7 Intelligence Quotient Hanging the Intellectually Disabled 56

8 Intelligence Quotient and the Black/White IQ Gap 62

9 Control Group How Studying People Changes Them 69

10 The Sociologist s Fallacy Ignoring the Real World 75

Part 3 The Market and Its Church 85

11 Creating a Market Not a Frankenstein 87

12 Market Forces How they Take their Revenge 96

13 Market Worship No Ritual Sacrifices 108

14 The Economic Collapse of 2008 117

15 What is to be Done? 130

Part 4 Enemies of Science 139

16 Reality What Scientists Really Say About Science 141

17 History, Science, and Evolution Only One Kind of Each 152

Part 5 Nations and their Goals 163

18 Understanding Nations Understanding Anyone 165

19 Four Cases Making Sense Out of Nonsense 173

20 Conclusion: Gene Debs University 183

Index 189

James R. Flynn is Professor Emeritus at the University of Otago, New Zealand, where he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate and its Gold Medal for Distinguished Career Research. He has been profiled in Scientific American and named "Distinguished Contributor" by the International Society for Intelligence Research. He is the author of What is Intelligence? (2007). 

"Professor James Flynn sets a clever trap in his latest book, How to Improve Your Mind. Promising that all readers will "be far more able to defend their position after reading it than before", Flynn instead provides the critical tools necessary instead for reassessing the irrational beliefs each of us hold and, in so confronting, end them. For your own good, you should let yourself be trapped." Weekend Press, Christchurch