Customer Reviews

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Improving Your IQ

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1 star:		(2)

 

 

I expected to find, at least, nutritional suggestions, examples of "mental exercises" one can perform, etc. The authors get your attention with the title, and then [ruin] your expectations because the content is, quite simply, useless. It's fluff and "feel good" material ("you're only as intelligent as you are effective! that's all that matters!") and should be avoided by a person who's serious about improving their brain.

"Idiots Guide to Improving your IQ" from Alpha Books is misleading, deceptive, and useless at best in improving your IQ. For example, the author begins by manipulating throughout the whole book the definition of IQ into EQ ("Effective Intelligence"), making the title very misleading. By doing this, the content is nothing about improving your intellectuality, but rather your effectiveness. Also, the author's twisted view of IQ thus leads his motives of improving your intelligence into improving your efficiency. Moreover, this book is very deceptive. Instead of explaining intelligence, it goes into the anatomy of the brain and the body. This is incredibly boring, and has nothing to do with improving your intellectuality. Furthermore, this book is useless in improving your IQ. Since it focuses RARELY about intellectuality, and only efficiency, strategies, and anatomy, the reader never improves his or hers IQ. This book would be better titled, "Efficiency in the Workplace," or, "300 Pages of 'Nothing That Will Improve Your IQ'." In summary, this book is misleading, deceptive, and useless at improving your IQ. There are a few (VERY, VERY FEW), good points. It talks a little about how to sit for a positive "aura," and negative/positive communication. Nothing about intelligence, but that's still interesting. Those were the only chapters though that's a little entertaining, but even those chapters were written in simple sentences, and explained as though one was in the first grade. I would recommend this book for people looking for a book titled "Idiots Guide to Effective Work." Don't buy this if you're looking to improve your IQ, try a puzzle book, but PLEASE don't make the same mistake I did.

It's hard to choose where to begin my praise of this wonderful book... I suppose I'll address the other reviewers compaints first. The book openly states in the first couple of chapters that IQ really is an absurd statistic... the tests were originally designed to determine if a person was mentally handicapped, not to determine how intelligent they were. Besides, if a person walks into a flaming building to take an IQ test, they will obviously score higher than the person who doesn't. However, who would you consider more intelligent?

This book is not about raising an outdated and flawed statistic about how intelligent you are. It's about making you a more intelligent person.

The book addresses the facets of intelligence that many books on the subject utterly neglect. For instance, mood - how well can one intelligently act when they're depressed, sad, and otherwise run-down? Not very well at all, obviously. But I have never seen this simple yet extremely important factor mentioned in any other book.

Now, some other people have been complaining about the book being confusing, or about the brain, which they don't care about. Well,you will NEVER find a book as simply, eloquently, and effectivly written on the subject of neuroscience, neuropsychology, and abstract mental concepts such as intelligence. I was amazed at the simplicity with which the author could convey concepts that other books rambled on and on about for several pages; often these horrendously complex concepts were simply explained in a single paragraph. Not only does this allow virtually everyone to access this book, but it allows this author to fill it with more information than half a dozen other books have on intelligence. Also, this is one of the very few books that clearly explains the connection between intelligence and the brain, which everyone needs to understand to truly improve their intelligence to any significant degree.

Is this a book that gives you abstract little word puzzles and mind twisters to allow you to get a higher number on the next IQ test you take? No. This is a book to fundamentally change the way you live, to give you the information you need to be happy, active, wonderfully productive, intelligent, and an awesome example of human potential. In my honest opinion, everybody should have been taught this information in school.

The author also doesn't just tell you about these amazing concepts, he has managed to find simple, easy to do exercises that allow you to actually apply every important concept that is presented - and these exercises aren't dry, boring, nor tedious; they're fun, and most of them can be done simply by changing one of the things you do in your daily life. These are the most effective intelligence increasing exercises I've ever seen.

Would you rather have a three digit number to tell you how intelligent you are, or a life filled with wonderful achievements to trumpet your intelligence?

As said in prior reviews, this is not a book filled with puzzles and logic problems. It is not truly a book on how to improve your IQ, as the title implies. It is instead a book on how to be effective with the intelligence that you possess, and how to put it to use.

It had a very large section on how the brain reacts and interprets data from the different senses. Very technical. This I was uninterested in. Just give me the bottom line on that, please. I made myself read these chapters just in case the info was needed in the following chapters, but really, a brief skimming would have been sufficient.

To sum up the book, to be effective in gaining practical intelligence, you must set goals and work for them without getting sidetracked. It basically encourages you map out what your goals are and what you need to do to accomplish them, then to use all your senses to reach these goals. It tells you how having an emotional link to what you are trying to accomplish is critical.

The most interesting part of the book was how your mind fills in information based on past experiences and how you can reprogram your mind to associate positive feelings to things you may have had an aversion to from those past experiences. The discussion around how the mind tries to make things flow smoothly and fill in gaps was also interesting.

All in all, it was OK. Like I said, not what I expected, but I did take some useful things away from it.

Richard G. Pellegrino is an expert in the field of human intelligence and he has produced a well written, scholarly work which undoubtedly achieves its aim of improving IQ. I sold my copy to Russell Crowe for $45 more than I paid for it, and the 'actor' read it in two hours. The title, that is. A year later, after he'd finished the actual book, Crowe called me and said excitedly, "Schwarz, it works! At first I thought this was a great book but by the final page I was smart enough to see that it's the worstest thing what has ever been wrote."
I sat back in my chair, lit a cigar with the $50 note Crowe had paid me for my unread copy, and said, "Russ, you're a genius."
"A what? How do you spell that?"
As I hung up, I could hear him flipping through the 'j' section of the dictionary.

I liked this book. It was pretty helpful, butalot of it was just fluff instead of useful material. Also, some of the material seemed too self-help ish for my tastes. Other than that, it was reasonably helpful, but it was not excellent.

I perused this book in my local Borders Store. I didn't buy it because it didn't offer me any information I didn't already know. I disagree with many of the posters who recommend mind teaser puzzles etc, because they are a big waste of mental energy and they don't really improve your IQ either, they may help you develop a different way of looking at things but so does this book and furthermore isn't being effective intellectually like a precursor to improving your IQ? I would say that being able to use fewer words to communicate an idea effectively is a sign of effective intelligence. What I've learned in my efforts to improve my IQ was one major thing and that it takes a good bit of effort and the willingness to LEARN to improve it. Unless you've worked mind teaser puzzles for a good many years you are not going to pick up one of the books and suddenly start solving them. No you are going to spend a good deal of time learning how to solve them. Improving your IQ requires a healthy brain and attitude!