Exercises for the development of thinking: types, effective methods, advice from psychologists

2024 Author: Miguel Ramacey | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 06:11

Thanks to thinking, each person has the opportunity to study and learn about the world around him, interact with people, understand phenomena and truths. This intellectual process is formed as the personality develops. However, it can be accelerated through mental training. There are various exercises for the development of thinking. This will be discussed in our article.

Types of thinking

The quality of other human cognitive processes depends on the development of mental abilities. In psychology, thinking is divided into several types. We propose to consider them separately.

Visual Thinking

With the help of this kind of thinking, we are able to imagine various images in our head. For example, every girl is familiar with the situation (associated with an important meeting) when you need to carefully choose clothes for going out. Of course, in her mind, pictures of how she will look in this or thatdress code. We often use this method without noticing it ourselves. In children, this ability begins to manifest itself at about four years of age. You can help them with this with the help of exercises for the development of visual-figurative thinking, which, by the way, are also suitable for adults.

Exercise

Let's move on to the practical side of the issue. Such exercise for the mind contributes to the development of one's own imagination. Try to follow these steps in sequence:

1. Replay in memory the image of yesterday: what did you do? What were they wearing? Who did you talk to and about what? Try to remember as many details as possible, down to the smallest detail.

2. Look at the following pictures. Come up with as many original and interesting associations as possible.

This exercise for the development of thinking helps to master the ability to analyze and synthesize the ratio of figures to each other in size, shape and color.

3. Look at the individual geometric images that are shown in the figure, and think about what will happen in the end if they are superimposed on each other? Choose an answer from the shapes on the right.

4. Next, we offer an exercise for the development of thinking and attention, aimed at the formation of geometric representations and images. The bottom line is this: finish the second half of the drawings, but so that it is completely identical.

5. Describe in threeadjectives each of the following items:

• apricot;
• window;
• star;
• floating snowflake;
• wheel.

The above exercises for the development of intelligence and thinking can be changed at your discretion. Do them the way you want. The main thing is that this type of thinking should be directly involved, the speed and quality of which will depend on how often you practice.

Verbal-logical thinking

This way of thinking has another name - abstract, and the right hemisphere of the brain is responsible for its development. It is carried out with the help of logical manipulations and has three forms:

• A concept is a system of thoughts that singles out and generalizes objects of various classes according to their characteristics.
• Judgment is a thought in which denial or affirmation occurs.
• Inference - when, based on certain judgments, we obtain a specific conclusion.

Experts recommend starting to develop this train of thought in children as early as possible. Thanks to abstract thinking, kids train memory, attention and fantasy.

The following exercises are suitable for both children and their parents.

1. Set a timer for three minutes and write down as many words as you can that start with the letters 'g', 'c', 'sh', and 'z'.

2. Take any word or phrase as a basis and read it backwards. For example: hadron collider, 11th grader, excellency and so on.

3. Below is an exercise to develop thinking in younger children.schoolchildren. The bottom line is to remove the extra word. For example, a chicken, a cow and a pig are domestic animals, but an elephant has nothing to do with them. For older children or adults, you can come up with a more complex group of words.

4. Find the maximum number of differences between a train and a helicopter, a horse from a sheep, an oak from a pine, and so on.

5. From a group of words, select one or two, without which the main concept cannot exist:

• war - battle, planes, guns, soldiers;
• game - cards, players, pen alty, dominoes;
• road - asph alt, car, traffic lights, pedestrians.

Any proposed tasks can be modified at your discretion, complicate or simplify - it's up to you. Such exercises for the development of memory and thinking will also help strengthen the intellect.

Visual Action Thinking

The process of this thinking comes down to the actual actions of a person. It is the basis of mental activity, starting from primitive time, which is responsible for solving practical problems, for example, the need to build a house or find food.

Visual-effective thinking develops rapidly in children up to seven years old, when they begin to analyze and operate with all kinds of objects as a whole.

To train and develop this ability, you can play chess, collect puzzles, solve various puzzles, sculpt all kinds of figures from plasticine. In addition, there are effective exercises for the development of thinking:

1. Draw the following shapes on the landscape sheet: a trapezoid, a triangle and a rhombus. Then turn all these elements into a square, cutting once in a straight line.

2. Pick up any thing and try to determine its weight. Then weigh your clothes in the same way and check yourself with a special device.

3. Walk around the apartment and visually try to determine the area of the kitchen, bathroom, living room and other rooms in your apartment.

4. Build a house out of six matches, and then move two sticks so that you get a flag.

5. Lay out a figure of four squares in front of you with matches, then shift three of them so that you get the same number of identical similar elements.

As an effective addition to training, you can add games to the constructor. To develop visual-effective thinking, experts recommend assembling different shapes and using as many details as possible.

Exercise for kids

For schoolchildren and preschool children, the following games and exercises for the development of thinking are suitable:

1. "Edible – inedible." The essence of the game is as follows: the child needs to throw or roll a ball on the floor, while naming any word. If it means something edible, then the baby should catch the ball, and if it is inedible, discard it.

This exercise for the development of memory and thinking of children can be complicated in many ways. For example, throwingball, you can name the color, and the child must remember and name the object of this color.

2. "Twisted Fairy Tale". To carry out this exercise, pre-print illustrations for the child’s favorite fairy tale on separate sheets of paper. If you take an unknown work, then in this way complicate the task for the baby. Pictures with images must be mixed in a chaotic manner and laid out in front of the child. The task of the child is to arrange the illustrations in the correct order, so that a fairy tale is obtained.

The development of visual-effective thinking does not require much effort and time, it is enough to conduct such classes as often as possible.

It is worth paying attention to the mental activity of a baby up to a year.

• It's common for kids this age to throw away toys and see how they react. Try tying objects to the side of the crib so your baby can pull on the rope to get it out. They should sometimes be changed so that the crumbs remain interested.
• When the child already knows how to sit, play the following game: put an interesting and unusual object in front of him, tie a ribbon to it and put one end in the baby's hands.

Logical thinking

Logical thinking is necessary for every person in order to be able to analyze in time and correctly apply the information received. It helps to reason and think consistently and rationally. Thanks to this skill, people are able to reasonably evaluate the world around them, distinguish between the main and the secondary, as well as find relationships and analyze various situations. Competent speech and judgments of a person are directly related to the ability of an individual to build step-by-step logical chains in his mind. Therefore, it is very important to train such abilities in both children and adults. There are a huge number of different tests, tasks and exercises for the development of logical thinking. With their help, you can assess the level of your intellectual skills. To do this, watch a special video.

The following are exercises to develop the thinking of schoolchildren and their parents, which will help to think in an orderly manner, increase the level of memory and attention:

1. From a small group of words, for example: “sofa, chair, stool, table”, “circumference, circle, ball, oval”, “knife, spoon, fork, towel”, etc. you need to choose a word that does not fit the meaning. This exercise is quite easy to use, but very effective.

2. The following workouts can be done with family or friends, they significantly speed up the work of brain functions, and are also suitable as entertainment. For this, it is necessary that one person or a group of people invite the rest to solve a semantic riddle, where you need to convey the content of a text. For example: “The lawbreakers committed illegal acts and took property that did not belong to them to their home, but, nevertheless, it was for the good. All these actions were taken in connection with the holiday, on which this thing is the main attribute. The children were delighted." Thinking logically, one can recall a children's song called "The little Christmas tree is cold in winter."

3. Cross out the excess. Performing the following exercise, you need to prepare cards with groups of words and arrange them in rows. When reading in turn, the child must determine what unites most of the semantic meanings, and which name is superfluous. It is important that the baby talks out loud and voices his choice.

Example of words combined by meaning:

• Cup, frying pan, pan, button accordion.
• Eraser, notebook, pencil, ball.
• Sweater, trousers, shirt, boots.
• Wardrobe, armchair, sofa, chair.
• Happy, brave, cheerful, joyful.
• Yellow, orange, light, red.
• Skates, skis, jump rope, snowboard.

4. The following groups of words are combined according to formal features. That is, they may begin with the same letter or have the same prefix or number of syllables. When compiling such a group of words, it is important that only one feature matches. This exercise requires a high level of attention. So let's look at some examples:

• Ice cream, music, violin, walrus, monastery. (A common feature is that all words begin with the letter "m".
• February, rain, performance, thunder, five. (Four words end in "b".)
• Candle, paste, performance, legs, thunder. (Four words are stressed on the first syllable.)
• Drawing, notebook, life, minute. (In three words, the second letter is "and".)

5. The meaning of the next task is identical to the previous one: it is necessary to identify a common feature of these numbers. For example:

• 18, 22, 36, 54, 72 (exclude from22 rows are needed, because the rest of the sum of the digits is 9).
• 21, 43, 52, 65, 87 (in this row, the extra number 52, since the rest have the first value more than the second by one).
• 8, 11, 16, 22 (11 is extra, other digits are even).

6. "Invisible Words". The next exercise for the development of children's thinking is so that the child can return the previous correct form to a certain word. To do this, you will need to print incorrectly written names on the sheets, for example, instead of “door”, write “in”. Such mental exercise not only trains logical thinking, but also helps to concentrate and analyze the material. An example of exercises where it is necessary to restore the order of letters in words:

• Shodla, lakeb, kobasa, atuk, nyukid.
• Gsen, Azim, gishurka, Rashumi, Potala.

In addition to exercises for the development of logical thinking, experts recommend solving logical problems as often as possible, passing tests for the IQ, reading detective stories, as well as self-education and training intuition.

Exercise for kids

1. The next task is more difficult, since the child needs to restore the correct order of the names and remove one extra meaning.

In this case, animals are hidden, and the word "window" is superfluous here.

Sali, kwol, rabsuk, noko, gebemot

Color names are veiled here, but the word "pen" is superfluous.

Niop, pantul, zaro, karuch, lashnyd

In the next version, the seasons are hidden, but there are alsothe extra word is cat.

Tole, Zami, Kashko, Ones, Snave

2. The next exercise is to find another in one word by rearranging the letters. For example:

• bank - wild boar;
• moose - s alt;
• power is a fox,
• pine - pump;
• chamomile - midges.

3. In this task, you need to take one long semantic meaning, and find others in it. For example, in the word "electricity" you can find several names: whale, mouth, cake, lion, man, and so on.

Try to find as many invisible words as possible in the following: shop, keyboard, parents, gift. For an interesting and useful pastime, you can play this game with your child and compete to come up with the most names.

Creative thinking

Creative thinking helps a person to solve problems and problems in extraordinary ways, and also helps to increase efficiency in the assimilation of new knowledge. With such skills, people quickly switch from one task to another, and also tend to come up with innovative ideas that have not been seen before.

The main task of developing creative thinking is the ability to activate unused resources. If you believe the experts, then the potential of each person is quite large, but not everyone realizes it even by fifty percent. Therefore, it is very important to apply exercises to develop creative thinking.

To learn how to think creatively, experts advise:

• get out of your comfort zone and look for other wayssolving various problems;
• expand your horizons and engage in self-education;
• travel as much as possible to discover new places and meet new people;
• make it a habit to learn something new every day.

Exercises for developing creative thinking

As science has already proven, our brain is capable of a lot. The potential of intellectual resources is quite large and can be realized at any age. Of course, for this, an already formed person needs to pay more attention to mental training. Exercises for developing thinking in adults can be as follows:

1. Draw nine dots on the sheet, three vertically and the same number horizontally. Try to connect them all with four segments, but without lifting the pencil from the paper. With all this, the line can pass through each of the points only once.

2. Ask yourself questions as often as possible. For example, “if I opened my own business, what would it be connected with?” or “If I wrote a book, what would it be about?” Then explain your choice to yourself. Such an exercise will enable the brain to find unusual ways to solve simple problems, to remember what you may have forgotten. This exercise in the form of a game is suitable for both adults and children.

3. Take an example from the kids - ask yourself as often as possible seemingly simple questions. Here are some examples: “Why do we think that the clouds are floating?”, “Why is the grass green?”, “If a spider wore pants, how would he do this?”. Maybe,these questions may seem trivial, but they help to activate the brain and start thinking in extraordinary ways, thereby showing creativity.

4. The following exercise was developed by MIT instructor Minor White. It is as follows: choose the picture you like and for ten minutes consider everything to the smallest detail. Try not to be distracted by foreign objects, be concentrated only on it. After the specified time has passed, turn away and try to visually restore the image. Try to remember the image of this picture as often as possible and practice on others.