9 Ways To Become Smarter

Flickr/kimdokhac

I recently had the opportunity to talk with the technology journalist Clive Thompson, author of "Smarter Than You Think." You can read the full conversation here. From that chat, I distilled nine lessons from Clive on how we can improve our thinking, with and without technology.

1. Spend Significant Chunks of Time Offline

“I think it’s good to spend significant chunks offline. For example, I don’t check my email on weekends. This means I’m usually off social media…I’ll text a bunch because that’s social for me and how I organize social behavior. But I tend to get more reading done and my brain gets pulled in a cooler direction. And a lot of people tell me they can’t do that because their boss demands they check email all weekend. And this shows that a lot of the problems of distraction we have are not really latent in the technologies themselves, they’re latent in the power relations that emerge from those technologies.