Intelligence Books - Page 4

Lateral thinking: creativity step by step

Edward De Bono

By: Harper & Row Amazon Marketplace: 7 new & used starting at $19.99

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 17 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Be Smarter than Socrates 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 3 people found this review helpful.

Isn't it amazing that for hundreds of years no one thought about creative thinking till de bono and lateral thinking came along.

Sort of interesting - great primer for an IQ or SAT test! 3 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Well, I have to admit I was a bit disappointed, but maybe that's just from erroneous expectations. I'm an artist & designer, and a graphic designer I admire had this on his list of the most important books he'd read, and that was my motivation to pick it up.

My conclusion is that this is a great book for non-'Creative' types (not to mean that they're not creative, just that they're not in a 'Creative' field such as the arts) such as scientists and engineers, who are looking to round out their thought process, or young adults in jr. high or high school who are exploring the nature of creativity.

It is intriguing to hear someone dissect the creative process in a cold, calculating, scientific sort of way, and de Bono does this job quite well without coming off as too fatuous (a common fate in that endeavor it seems).

Ultimately though, the creative thinking de Bono discusses is a very specific and fairly limited type, namely problem-solving. It's telling that almost all of the examples & figures he gives are geometric puzzle-solving. This would be a great book to read right before you take a IQ or SAT test.

Editorial Review:

The first practical explanation of how creativity works, this results-oriented bestseller trains listeners to move beyond a "vertical" mode of thought to tap the potential of lateral thinking.

Smart Choices: A Practical Guide to Making Better Decisions

John S. Hammond, Ralph L. Keeney, Howard Raiffa

Amazon Price: $25.55 List Price: $35.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Harvard Business School Press Amazon Marketplace: 67 new & used starting at $0.47

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 44 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Making smart choices is a fundamental life skill, relevant to anyone: managers, doctors, lawyers, teachers, students, parents, young, old. Your decisions will shape and influence the course of your professional career and the quality of your personal life--the ability to make good decisions is a key factor in determining whether you achieve your goals. To help you increase your chances of finding satisfying solutions, Smart Choices blends the art and science of decision making into a straightforward, proven approach for making tough choices. Smart Choices doesn't tell you what to decide; it tells you how. Authors Hammond, Keeney, and Raiffa, among the world's best-known experts on resolving complex decision problems, blend the art and the science of decision making into accessible steps that lead you to consider your choices both intuitively and analytically. Here, for the first time, is a flexible system that can be applied to business decisions, to personal decisions, to family decisions--to any decision you make.

The Thinker's Toolkit: 14 Powerful Techniques for Problem Solving

Morgan D. Jones

Amazon Price: $10.88 List Price: $16.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Three Rivers Press Amazon Marketplace: 61 new & used starting at $5.73

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 25 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Great Textbook on Problem Solving 4 out of 5 stars.
9 of 9 people found this review helpful.

This is a great book for anyone who needs to make important decisions. I'm with a professional services (consulting) firm, and we're about to make this book mandatory text for all our consultants. It's that good!

Morgan Jones starts off describing that human beings are bad decision makers, but kid themselves about their ability to make good decisions. Then, the book describes 14 tools that can be used to make decision making more structured and error-free. Each tool is described through a story, and has plenty of exercises to try out the tool. It even has the "solutions" at the back to verify your approach.

The book has a few shortcomings. For starters, it does not describe which situations each tool is most useful for. The sample exercises present the facts together - something that is unlikely to be replicated in real life. It also does not classify decisions as being big or small - some decisions are too small to apply structured tools presented here, while some decisions are too big to depend solely on these tools.

This book is written like a textbook. To get full value from The Thinker's Toolkit, you'd have to really participate in the exercises actively. If you're planning to skim through the book, then I'd recommend you drop this book and instead read "Making Great Decisions in Business and Life" by Henderson & Hooper.

To sum up, it's a great textbook if you're a consultant or would like to teach structured problem solving. Bring out your pen and paper!

Editorial Review:

A book that does for problem solving and decision making what Roger Von Oech's "A Whack on the Side of the Head" did for creative thinking, "The Thinker's Toolkit" shows how anyone in business can start making better decisions--with immediate benefits to the bottom line.

Technique for Producing Ideas

James Webb Young

List Price: $5.95 By: NTC/Contemporary Publishing Company Amazon Marketplace: 9 new & used starting at $9.85

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 23 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

straight to the point, somewhat perceivable 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I really enjoyed reading this book. Although a bit too short, James Webb Young succeeds in clarifying the creative process with common wisdom. It will be helpful for almost anyone, but especially to those in the creative field.

Personally I have been using the same thought process for a couple of years now, but without paying the appropriate attention to detail in every single step of it.

Overall an easy to digest recommended reading.

Savvas S.

Short and to the Point 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

If you want to cut to the chase about how to be more creative, this is the book for you. Young breaks the creative act into its basic points in as straighforward a fashion as possible. It is a very short book, which can be digested in probably 20 minutes or less, but leaves you with all you need to know to get started. The book has no creativity activities or exercises like other books of its kind, but focuses instead on the main principles and basic methods for producing creative ideas. This is the book to begin with if you aspire to more creative production in your life.

Editorial Review:

A McGraw-Hill Advertising Classic

A Technique for Producing Ideas reveals a simple, sensible idea-generation methodology that has stood the test of time.

First presented to students in 1939, published in 1965, and now reissued for a new generation of advertising professionals and others looking to jump-start their creative juices, this powerful guide details a five-step process for gathering information, stimulating imagination, and recombining old elements into dramatic new ideas.

Dragons of Eden

Carl Sagan

List Price: $10.95 By: Random House Amazon Marketplace: 205 new & used starting at $0.01

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 65 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

The Dragons of Sagan 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 7 people found this review helpful.

This is an instructive and entertaining book, but there is an underlying philosophical message that the reader needs to be aware of.

"The Dragons of Eden" is based on a theory that divides the human brain into three concentric layers that have evolved over millions of years, with each successive layer corresponding to a level in our evolutionary history. This may be a useful model, but it also lends itself to being misused as the basis for a narrow view that looks down upon the role of the older parts of the brain and exaggerates the status of the neocortex. Such a misuse is exactly what Sagan is guilty of. Instead of emphasizing the interplay between the three areas of the brain, which allows us to balance reason with emotion and instinct, he takes the model and twists it to suit his overly rational view of human nature.

His is a negative, Freudian view of the unconscious. But whereas Freud stressed the misunderstood importance of these functions, Sagan merely stresses their primitive aspect. For example, he feels that dreams and sleep are a holdover from our evolutionary past. They are a period when the reptilian brain comes alive, takes over, and turns what is by day a well-ordered and rationally supervised operation into a nighttime playground of bizarre symbolism, illogical foolishness, and disguised sexuality. It bothers him that he has such weak linguistic skills in his dreams and that he can't even perform simple arithmetical calculations. He openly confesses his admiration for those unusual individuals who seem to need only two or three hours of sleep a night. In fact, one suspects that Sagan would ideally have humans living totally in the waking world of the neocortex, although it is very unappealing to contemplate a machine-like mind that never turns off and lets the unpredictable and creative unconscious take over, giving it free rein to roam, do the impossible, and experience exhilarating or frightening things.

Sagan idealizes the cerebral cortex as a logical, computer-like operation, and he seems to have an aversion toward the primitive depths of the mind. Who knows what beasts may lurk there? And yet his book itself is proof of how we use rational arguments to justify underlying attitudes and impulses. The impression one gets is that a conflict between cool intellect and emotional passion or obsession is present in Sagan's own complex personality. This was sublimated into a drive to become a proselytizer for science, to the point where popularizing almost turns into evangelicizing, or something even worse. Not content with merely spreading the news of the good works of science, Sagan seems overly preoccupied with stamping out the heresy of "pseudo-science"-- a category that naturally includes such things as astrology.

This self-righteous posture might have been appropriate a century or two ago, as a reaction to the repression that the young field of science had to endure and overcome, but that is well behind us now. The fact is that our romance with science has ended and the marriage has begun. The crusade is long over and the infidels have been converted, but Sagan on his Quixotic quest seems oblivious to this, and so what is left for a knight to do but fight imaginary enemies or dragons. But before we add the name of Sagan to Sigurd and Siegfried, perhaps we should remember than no matter how many times the dragon was slain in the past, it always seemed to emerge somewhere else in another form, as various legends contributed to the gradual evolution of its features and character.

And just as every Eden or idyllic kingdom requires its dragon, so does the rational mind need its irrational unconscious. The more safe, sane, and sterile we make our world, the more we create the need for that which is dangerous, disruptive, and beyond our control. The dragon may be fictitious,but what it symbolizes is something real, something that is a part of human nature. Better to be accepted as such, then denied and made into something external that is fiercely suppressed until the day when, grown immense and unrecognizable, it suddenly rears its head, like the huge mushroom cloud rising above a leveled city.

Entropy and Alchemy: The Problem of Individuality in an Age of Society

Editorial Review:

Dr. Carl Sagan takes us on a great reading adventure, offering his vivid and startling insight into the brain of man and beast, the origin of human intelligence, the function of our most haunting legends--and their amazing links to recent discoveries.
"A history of the human brain from the big bang, fifteen billion years ago, to the day before yesterday...It's a delight."
THE NEW YORK TIMES

The Mind Map Book: 9How to Use Radiant Thinking to Maximize Your Brain's Untapped Potential

Tony Buzan, Barry Buzan

List Price: $29.95 By: Dutton Adult Amazon Marketplace: 13 new & used starting at $6.38

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 86 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Must have 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Instant improvement on the way you can retain and process informaiton. Get his book on speed reading as well. The return on your investment is incalculable.

Great book So glad I purchased it 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 2 people found this review helpful.

All of the books I have read by Tony Buzan
are great. I have never been dissapointed
by any of his books. So glad he has shared
his wonderful knowledge in book form for us
to learn.
Great practical info. So glad I purchased it.

Everything you need to get started with Mind Maps 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

If you were going to buy one book on mind maps, this is the book. It presents the basics of creating a mind map and then goes on to show different ways and situations in which you can use them. There are also some really nice examples of mind maps to get your mind going. You don't need to be an artist. I went through the Radiant Learning workshop that the Buzan Organization teaches to certify mind map instructors back in 2000. I've used mind maps with coaching clients, in workshops and in corporate consulting. You can get what you need from this book to get the benefits of mind maps right now for a really low price. The key is to just follow the basics described in the book and go from there. If you want, you can learn more about mind maps and other visual thinking/creating tools. But this is the one to start with because you'll establish a strong foundation in the basics. Once you read this book, you'll be able to judge if any other book or product has anything new to offer. You can't beat this book for the price and the skills it offers. Mind maps will help you end writer's block, solve problems, create new ideas and more. It's really fun to use with kids too. Enjoy, you'll be doing yourself a big favor!

Editorial Review:

An authority on learning techniques and the brain offers a groundbreaking, fully illustrated program for tapping and freeing the mind's hidden powers, showing ways to improve memory, concentration, and creativity. National ad/promo.

How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life

Thomas Gilovich

List Price: $22.95 By: Free Pr Amazon Marketplace: 12 new & used starting at $6.12

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 36 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Not the Full Monty. 4 out of 5 stars.
5 of 8 people found this review helpful.

My main interest in this subject lies in a search for answers to the question of why perfectly sane and intelligent people put faith in God above reasoning. Why do so many choose to believe so strongly with so little evidence? Unfortunately Thomas Gilovich absolutely refuses to cast light on religious delusions, but mainly states that theists and atheist "both need to develop the habit of thinking more broadly." Not helpful at all and sort of a faux pas to include this lame comment in the book.

Never the less, the book is a good and thorough introduction to the subject of our penchant for faulty reasoning, but also somewhat dry and repetitive. I wasn't exactly rolling on the floor with laughter, which might be too much to ask; but the many examples and anecdotes could be presented with greater vigour without harming the seriousness and validity of the study.

May I recommend: "Don't Believe Everything You Think: The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking" by Thomas E. Kida, which is very similar in content and reference a lot of the same sources, but is also more playful and entertaining.

Editorial Review:

When can we trust what we believe - that "teams and players have winning streaks", that "flattery works", or that "the more people who agree, the more likely they are to be right" - and when are such beliefs suspect? Thomas Gilovich offers a guide to the fallacy of the obvious in everyday life. Illustrating his points with examples, and supporting them with the latest research findings, he documents the cognitive, social and motivational processes that distort our thoughts, beliefs, judgements and decisions. In a rapidly changing world, the biases and stereotypes that help us process an overload of complex information inevitably distort what we would like to believe is reality. Awareness of our propensity to make these systematic errors, Gilovich argues, is the first step to more effective analysis and action.

Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter

Steven Johnson

List Price: $23.95 By: Riverhead Hardcover Amazon Marketplace: 78 new & used starting at $0.27

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Total reviews: 91 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

From the author of the New York Times bestseller Mind Wide Open comes a groundbreaking assessment of popular culture as it's never been considered before: through the lens of intelligence.

The $10 billion video gaming industry is now the second-largest segment of the entertainment industry in the United States, outstripping film and far surpassing books. Reality television shows featuring silicone-stuffed CEO wannabes and bug-eating adrenaline junkies dominate the ratings. But prominent social and cultural critic Steven Johnson argues that our popular culture has never been smarter.

Drawing from fields as diverse as neuroscience, economics, and literary theory, Johnson argues that the junk culture we're so eager to dismiss is in fact making us more intelligent. A video game will never be a book, Johnson acknowledges, nor should it aspire to be-and, in fact, video games, from Tetris to The Sims to Grand Theft Auto, have been shown to raise IQ scores and develop cognitive abilities that can't be learned from books. Likewise, successful television, when examined closely and taken seriously, reveals surprising narrative sophistication and intellectual demands.

Startling, provocative, and endlessly engaging, Everything Bad Is Good for You is a hopeful and spirited account of contemporary culture. Elegantly and convincingly, Johnson demonstrates that our culture is not declining but changing-in exciting and stimulating ways we'd do well to understand. You will never regard the glow of the video game or television screen the same way again.

A User's Guide to the Brain: Perception, Attention, and the Four Theaters of the Brain

John J. Ratey

Amazon Price: $10.85 List Price: $15.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Vintage Amazon Marketplace: 58 new & used starting at $6.50

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Total reviews: 39 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

John Ratey, bestselling author and clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, here lucidly explains the human brain’s workings, and paves the way for a better understanding of how the brain affects who we are. Ratey provides insight into the basic structure and chemistry of the brain, and demonstrates how its systems shape our perceptions, emotions, and behavior. By giving us a greater understanding of how the brain responds to the guidance of its user, he provides us with knowledge that can enable us to improve our lives.

In A User’s Guide to the Brain, Ratey clearly and succinctly surveys what scientists now know about the brain and how we use it. He looks at the brain as a malleable organ capable of improvement and change, like any muscle, and examines the way specific motor functions might be applied to overcome neural disorders ranging from everyday shyness to autism. Drawing on examples from his practice and from everyday life, Ratey illustrates that the most important lesson we can learn about our brains is how to use them to their maximum potential.

Attitude 101: What Every Leader Needs to Know (101 Series)

John C. Maxwell

Amazon Price: $9.99 List Price: $9.99 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Thomas Nelson Amazon Marketplace: 80 new & used starting at $2.90

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 15 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Pretty good read! 4 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

I am glad I read this book - it doesn't tell you things you didn't know (At least not to me) but it puts it in such a light that it really has a more permanent impact. The writing style is easy to read, and almost rhytmic & poetic. It's a quick read, a good read for emerging leaders, or for anyone who wants to better understand true secrets to success......I recommend it if you come across it!

Editorial Review:

John Maxwell firmly points to attitude as the key in making or breaking a leader. Leadership has less to do with position than it does with disposition, because it will influence the way the followers think and feel. Great leaders understand that the right attitude will set the right atmosphere, which enables the right responses from others. Maxwell addresses what shapes a person's attitude and whether or not attitude can be changed. He addresses the common feeling of failure and shows how to overcome obstacles. Understanding success as a journey rather than a destination, he explains, is the key to good leadership. He concludes Attitude 101 with practical ways readers can take their attitude to the next level.