If a person spends half an hour a day either meditating (TM) or brainstorming on higher control levels
If I understand the links RichardKennaway gave, a "control level" has to become active in order for you to become aware of it -- which also matches my experience with other mindhacking techniques. It's unlikely that brainstorming will do this unless the thing that prompted your brainstorming was, say, a story of someone who does something that reminds you of you.
Meditation might be useful, if it's awareness-based. That is, if it's directed towards observing the thoughts that occur as you focus on the specific meditation task.
However, it would probably be most useful for you to meditate, not on a mantra or koan, but on a single, specific situation of interest (not a general category of situations, but one real or imagined incident, happening in present-tense terms), because then you will have the greatest specific activation of relevant control systems.
(In effect, in the analytic stages of mind-hacking, I'm directing clients to repeatedly "meditate" for brief intervals and observe their response to imagined stimuli, and the MOL documents RichardKennaway linked describe an almost-identical process, including a focus on observing thoughts as they occur, and any feelings happening in the body. These are certainly key distinctions in mind hacking, and appear to be in MOL as well.)
If I understand the links RichardKennaway gave, a "control level" has to become active in order for you to become aware of it
It's active whether you're aware of it or not. The purpose of MOL is to become aware of things within yourself relevant to the problem but currently outside your awareness. Once you become aware of the conflicting goals (and the higher-level goals for which they are subgoals, and so on, as far as it's necessary to take it), then you are free to make different choices that eliminate the conflict. According to MOL practiti...
Transhumanists have high hopes for enhancing human cognitive abilities in the future. But what realistic steps can we take to enhance them now? On the one hand Flynn effect suggests IQ (which is a major factor in human cognition) can be increased a lot with current technology, on the other hand review of existing drugs seems rather pessimistic - they seem to have minor positive effect on low performers, and very little effect on high performers, what means they're mostly of therapeutic not enhancing use.
So, fellow rationalists, how can we enhance our cognition now? Solid research especially welcome, but consistent anecdotal evidence is also welcome.