Exercising the Trader's Brain

READING AND THINKING OUT LOUD


As stated in the article by Litemind, "Solve Your Problems Simply by Saying Them Out Loud", communicating out loud has several advantages over thinking silently:

1. You are forced to clarify your thoughts and state them in objective terms. Language is a tool of thought.

2. By explaining your thoughts to someone else or pretending to explain to someone else, you are forced to make "your knowledge and assumptions explicit, which often accesses different or overlooked data, and thus access entirely new avenues of thought".

3. "Saying the problem out loud engages many more areas of the brain than merely thinking about it."

This last point is also stessed in the article "Brain Tips for Busy People" from BrainReady:

"Reading out loud exercises your brain in a way that reading silently does not. It essentially requires that you process the information you're reading TWICE - the first pass is the basic comprehension, the second pass is remembering how to make the right sounds.
Actually, there are multiple brain-taxing activities happening simultaneously: there's advance scanning (reading ahead) involved so that your brain is also forced to read ahead in order to prepare the translation to your speech faculties, including all intended inflections that are contextually relevant to the sentences in-progress. And then when you count that you are also listening to yourself as you read, modulating your timbre and volume in real-time as you hear how you sounded (all while scanning ahead and speaking and thinking about the contents of what you're reading), it becomes clear just what an engaging, taxing exercise reading out loud really is."


More importantly, the details that you say out loud, especially said out loud many times, will be the information that you will remember in greatest detail later in the day.


In conclusion, if you put in your trading journal information that you believe should be remembered in great detail to improve your trading performance, you should read this information out loud many times to engage many parts of your brain, and allow this information to become remembered in great detail during the trading day and during the heat of trading battle.


MUSIC FOR YOUR BRAIN HEALTH?

In this article by BrainReady, it mentioned the results of a study by Dr. Charles Emery of Ohio State University, that showed how listening to music while exercising can double the performance of verbal fluency tests. The music used in the test was Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons".

It continues to mention that "Several other research studies have illustrated how listening to music is a more complex endeavor than it seems on the surface: the human brain has to sort out tones, timing, and sequencing of various sounds, in order to comprehend music. It is believed that the frontal lobe of the brain is stimulated and activated by listening to music, as it is the part of the brain that is associated with higher mental functions such as thinking abstract thoughts, or planning for the future."


What an easy way to brain exercise - listen to music.


Perhaps a good way to prepare your brain for some difficult tasks, such as trading, is listening to music before and during trading.


Charles