Okay, we probably shouldn’t bad-mouth mentats. If pressed, we would admit that we actually think mentats are pretty cool.
The Mentat Wiki adopts the mentat as an ideal towards which to strive; it is a catalog of many different approaches to mental self-improvement, and deserves lengthy and repeated delving. The site is maintained by Ron Hale-Evans, author of the superb Mind Performance Hacks.
Mind Performance Hacks (published by O’Reilly) deserves special mention. Dollar for dollar and ounce for ounce this was one of my best book purchases of last year. While I was certainly familiar with a large number of the topics covered, the presentation is excellent and there is quite a lot of value in having such a high-density collection of intelligent and useful ideas in easily portable form. There’s something of interest on nearly every page. It’s a great book, and I plan to give a more detailed review in a future post.