“So you want a brilliant mind,” I said with a twinkle in my eye to an inquiring seven-year-old. “Well, I can tell you how to develop one.” She followed my advice, and she recently completed college with a 4.0 GPA, scored among the erudite on the MCAT, and will soon enter medical school….

And so starts the book ‘‘A Brilliant Mind: Proven Ways to Increase Your Brainpower‘
‘. The opening lines piqued me and I wondered what tips is the author Frank Minirth going to provide to develop A Brilliant Mind.

Frank Minirth claims that increasing brain power is not dependant upon age, position or intelligence. He quotes example of Edison – who was dismissed from school because his teacher thought he did not have the intelligence to succeed academically and Winston Churchill – the greatest orator of all time – who used to be last in his class. Both, increased their brain power using one simple and powerful technique – being voracious readers and increasing their vocabulary.

I actually couldn’t believe that by simply increasing my vocabulary I can have a brilliant mind or increased IQ. But I was sold to the idea of increasing vocabulary after reading the following :

The logic, I reasoned was simple: we think in words; words are the tools of thoughts. With words we express our beliefs. With words we encourage others to act upon our beliefs. Others judge us by how we use words. The right word allows us to connect with others. Words are our showcase to the world. With words we create the perception we want to present.

I did wonder how does memorizing words and increased brain power connect. The connection was in Neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity means that brain can develop new cells. It can change and develop new connections between its nerve cells. It has been proven that memory exercises cause Neuroplasticity. You can increase number of cell connections in the brain by memorizing words. The more words you memorize, the more you can memorize because of the increase in cells and cell connections.

Of course it is possible to develop brain by simply memorizing things other than words. But increased vocabulary has its own benefits of being able to communicate better, score well in tests etc. Hence, the idea of increasing brain power by memorizing words gets a thumbs up from me.

The rest of A Brilliant Mind is made up of memorizing techniques and pages and pages of words to memorize. There are chapters on parts-of-speech words, relationship words, prefixes, suffixes, roots, specialized words and so on. I plan to start with 20 words at a time as suggested by Frank Minirth. What are you going to do?