Book Review - Unleashing Genius by Dilip Mukerjea

Blogadda sent me Unleashing Genius book for review around 5 days ago. It reached me full well and healthy. The parcel felt heavy. Not usual personal development books, I wondered. And it definitely wasn’t.

Unleashing Genius by Dilip Mukerjea is about training our brains. He has done a fabulous job of collecting the information, ideas and techniques that improve our brain power and get the our brain to work more creatively in rationalizing, decision taking, calculating and understanding stuff that surrounds our life. Dilip Mukerjea calls it “a book on learning miracles for children of all ages”. I think, it is!

The feel of the book is heavy, as I said earlier. It is a full colour illustrated book, with lots cartoons around all the pages trying to make the words more understandable. Illustrations don't looks like they are much worked upon and the typography is not lovable to the eyes. Illustrations look rather ugly and old class and so does typography.

But illustrations and typography are not the real essence of the book. The real thing is the knowledge. The real secret is in the form of techniques, exercises and methods. The book is deep into how brain works and how we can make it work even better and faster.

The book is a brain development learning environment using colours, mind maps, illustrations, imagination. It is filled with jokes that tickle the brain.

Deep in the Chapters

Chapter 1 talks about brain. It’s a full on medical class and worth skipping. The first chapter tells us what the brain is, what it is made up of, how neural cells work and how brain works. It contains comparisons and statistics.

Chapter 2 is about improving our memory. Many of us think that memory has to be exercised. Well, I think we are constantly exercising the memory. It has a few good methods like linking method and the peg system. The book has in-depth exercise and technical knowhow to help you understand the methods.

The next chapter teaches about reading. Reading should be methodical. It should surpass how we read and mug up things in school and college. Reading should be spontaneous, fast, comprehensive and easy. That’s what reading dynamics is all about. To me, it reading dymanics is the most important part of the book because that’s when you get to apply other techniques of mind mapping, memory building and others in sync. You got to read to remember, understand and make brain create reasons.

Reading dynamics also teaches you power browsing the book. It is important because sometimes we simply need a quick way to take a good overview of the content we will be dealing with. It further relates to photoreading books which is quite common these days.

With mindmaps, Dilip claims that a student group could complete a year’s syllabus in a week. A learning miracle in itself, isn’t it?

One of the many good tips to readers is to ask questions while reading. Questions like, what is being said, why it is being said and how?

Then there is some psychology and personal development that teaches you how to think, act and work. It feels like a have-done thing but in fact, it is a totally non-cliché book I’ve read in a time that thrives on originality and yet feels too unfamiliar to adopt.

The book is splendid to the end. It has lots of jokes, brain building exercises and fun routines that feel like a lot of work to be done. Enjoyed the book but well, a simple question I ask myself – is the book worth a 1200 rupees price tag? Definitely, not! But that doesn’t mean it is not good enough. It is good and worth learning from, improving upon and unleashing the genius within. { Thanks to Blogadda for sending me the book under the fab Book Reviews Program. }