How to Improve Your Mind

He opens up with some really good jokes. Then he starts talking about education.

This is the specific topic he's going to talk about. He says the human mind has the greatest possibility for perfection of all things in creation. He talks about grace enabling humans to become a child of God.

Thomas Aquinas says humans have three great urges: to eat, sex and for knowing. The three urges can become abnormal (such as gluttony and adultry.) Knowing can become crime or pride. Hence, he says, the need for temperance.

Too little studiousness and we become 'low brow.' He says in the universe there is a law of evolution but there is also a law of devolution. We can go up and we can go down in something (like using ones muscles.)

He says Darwin talked of colorful pigeons being released on an island and ten years later they had all become the same shade of gray. He says 61% of adults in the United States in 1965 did not read a single book. (An article online says that now around 24% of adults had not read a single book in a year. This is an interesting and rather major difference. It'd be interesting to know just why things changed so much.)

He says the average adult spends three hours and twenty minutes a week watching television. The source I say online says adults now spend 35.5 hours per week watching television. Of course there are lots more televisions and lots more channels now than in 1956 when the episode was broadcast.

He says that something is wrong with education in that it does not inculcate a desire for continued learning.

Going to the other extreme you have 'high-brows.' He says that such a person's knowledge tends toward over-specialization. Then he brings up Darwin again who said he spent his whole life specializing on one area but lost his appreciation for good art and literature.

He says one problem with high-brows is that they have no use for the common people.

Then he talks about how to improve the mind throw temperance. He says there are three things involved, the first being taste. Some things are just trash. Some things you might like a little but realize you don't want to keep reading that kind of thing. He says that person's emotions can be pulled to the extreme one way or another and if this is done too much the person can become effectively emotionally cold.

Chew is the next topic. He says there is no such thing as an easy path to knowledge. He says sometimes we have to get away from the book and meditate, really think about what we have read. He says he will read a book relatively quickly and underline what he feels to be the most important points and then reads it again. I'm assuming he is talking about reading the underlined portions, not the entire book.

I actually found this approach very effective when I was talking a difficult course in child psychology in college. The professor started off the year saying the book was great. By the end of the year he realized it wasn't.

What I did was to read each paragraph and condense that into one sentence which I wrote down separately. Then to prepare for a test I only read the sentences I had written down, trying to get the basic knowledge down and also try to figure out the author's way of thinking. When it came test time I aced the tests and that was in a class where I was one of the very few who were not actually studying psychology as a life goal.

A friend of mine was in the same boat. He got poor grades until I taught him my approach. He started doing that and his grades in the course went up.

The third way to improve your mind is to digest what you have read. We read the book and then close it and try to rethink what we have read (which is again similar to what I did in the psychology course.) He says for the understanding of some things we have to appeal to the light outside of us and that is the light of God.

He says there's a world of difference between knowledge and wisdom. In order to have wisdom you have to be a good person.