By Dan Hurley
Terrible. It bored the hell out of me. I thought I had bought a book about breakthrough science on intelligence, but ended up with the experiences of some author that does not resemble science at all; in journal format and comedic (and insufferable) writing style.
This is the reason why I am wary on books written by journalists, because their aim (most of the time) is not to present to the reader something useful as much as it is to entertain, ego-boosting and nothing more.
Amazon Page for details
My Rating: 4/10
Click Here to Read My Notes
Terrible. It bored the hell out of me. I thought I had bought a book about breakthrough science on intelligence, but ended up with the experiences of some author that does not resemble science at all; in journal format and comedic (and insufferable) writing style.
This is the reason why I am wary on books written by journalists, because their aim (most of the time) is not to present to the reader something useful as much as it is to entertain, ego-boosting and nothing more.
Amazon Page for details
My Rating: 4/10
Click Here to Read My Notes
Fluid intelligence, on the other hand, is the underlying ability to learn, the capacity to solve novel problems, see underlying patterns, and figure out things that were never explicitly taught.
If the same areas of the brain are involved in all working-memory tasks, he reasoned, then perhaps training on one such task should result in improvement on another, because both require strengthening of the same brain region. Just as doing push-ups makes a person better at lifting weights.
Working memory, on the other hand, is your ability to manipulate the stuff you’re being asked to remember: flipping the numbers around, adding them up, deciding whether they’re odd or even.
With language, working memory enables you not simply to remember this sentence, but to understand its meaning and consider its implications.
Working memory is what permits a poet to play with words to discover the best expression of a given thought; it’s how we remember the second and third steps of a set of directions after completing the first.
From Merzenich’s groundbreaking research, Klingberg took two principles.
First, to be successful, training should be offered in relatively short bursts of twenty to thirty minutes a day, but repeated four to six times a week for at least four weeks.
Second, the training schedule should be continuously adapted to the capacity limit of the individual being trained.
Together, these two principles developed by Merzenich made for a standardized regimen: four weeks of short daily bursts of intense training that is continuously adapted to remain always at a person’s capacity limit. That regimen would prove crucial not only to Klingberg’s progress, but to the entire field’s.
Why matrices should be considered the gold standard of fluid-intelligence tests may not be obvious at first.
Love is not eye contact over dinner. It’s not holding hands. Those are just manifestations of love. And intelligence is the same.”
Mensa does not permit applicants to take its IQ test twice, because the organization ascribes to the view that intelligence doesn’t change much, so there’s really no point in retaking it.
“When we’re talking about cognitive control,” he said, “it means being able to inhibit distractions, to maintain information in working memory, to switch between tasks and selectively attend in the face of interference. But we are talking about goal setting as well.”
Control of one’s thoughts, control of one’s emotions, control of one’s goals and behaviors:
In March 2012, the firm released its first public analysis of that database, showing that users who reported getting seven hours of sleep or having one or two alcoholic drinks per day performed better on cognitive tasks than those who had either more or less sleep or alcohol. That’s right: moderate drinkers performed better than teetotalers, and sleeping too much proved just as harmful to mental performance as sleeping too little.
The greatest effect, however, was from exercise. Those who worked out at least once a week performed 9.8 percent faster, solved 5.8 percent more math problems, and had 2.7 percent better spatial memory than those who never exercise.
A number of studies have reached a similar conclusion: learning a second language well enough to be considered “bilingual” does seem to delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.
So which ancient methods of maximizing brain power do stand up to scientific scrutiny? I found three.
A classic study in 1975, for instance, found that older people who played tennis or racquetball performed significantly better than their nonexercising peers on a variety of simple cognitive tests.
can’t be a coincidence: the two psychologists whose studies became milestones in the science of music as a means of enhancing cognition both began their careers as musicians.
Recalling how he learned to play the saxophone during high school, Clinton said in a speech that day: “I might not have been President if it hadn’t been for school music.”
These days, Schellenberg told me, he sees the relationship between music lessons and intelligence as a two-way street. “Nature and nurture are almost impossible to separate in the case of music lessons,” he said.
“I think that smarter kids are more likely to take music lessons, and to stick with them longer, which in turn expands their cognitive functioning even further.”
It’s safe to say, then, that while listening to a recording of Mozart is not going to make anyone smarter, learning to play an instrument might.
multitude of studies suggest that the ancient practice of mindfulness meditation actually holds promise as a way to improve cognitive abilities, to increase attention, expand working memory, and raise fluid intelligence.
I added mindfulness meditation to my regimen, my list of interventions now nicely balanced between the age-old methods of physical exercise, music training, and meditation and the modern, computerized approaches of Lumosity and the dual N-back.
“Tasks that are difficult to learn are the most effective,” Shors said. “If they simply exercised, they didn’t retain the neurons. Learning must occur, and it must require some effort. So if you exercise, you will produce more neurons. If you do mental training you’ll keep alive more cells that you produced. And if you do both, now you have the best of both worlds: you’re making more cells and keeping more alive. The effort part is key. We need to learn things that are new, and we need to keep it challenging.”
Back home in New Jersey, I read through dozens of human and animal studies published over the past five years showing that nicotine—freed of its noxious host, tobacco, and delivered instead by chewing gum or transdermal patch—may prove to be a weirdly, improbably effective cognitive enhancer and treatment for relieving or preventing a variety of neurological disorders, including Parkinson’s, mild cognitive impairment, ADHD, Tourette’s, and schizophrenia. Plus it has long been associated with weight loss. With few known safety risks. Nicotine? Yes, nicotine.
In the past six years, researchers from Spain, Germany, Switzerland, and Denmark—not to mention Paul Newhouse in Vermont—have published over a dozen studies showing that in animals and humans alike, nicotine administration temporarily improves visual attention and working memory.
Yet studies published in leading scientific journals since 2005 have shown that tDCS can improve outcomes for a variety of purposes that include (deep breath) depression, stroke, traumatic brain injury, long-term memory, math calculations, reading ability, complex verbal thought, planning, visual memory, the ability to categorize, the capacity for insight, and the solving of an inherently difficult problem.
And that was the last of the seven activities and treatments for which I found credible scientific evidence that they could increase fluid intelligence, along with N-back, Lumosity, physical exercise, mindfulness meditation, learning a musical instrument, and wearing a nicotine patch. But now I had something else to figure out: how to actually put these into practice in my daily life.
Improving one’s cognitive abilities, I discovered, remains very much a do-it-yourself job.
So it’s not that “smarter” people have “better” long-term memories; it’s that they simply generate more categories and search through them more diligently when trying to remember. They are better at exploiting the clumps of sugar on the tabletop of the mind.
If the same areas of the brain are involved in all working-memory tasks, he reasoned, then perhaps training on one such task should result in improvement on another, because both require strengthening of the same brain region. Just as doing push-ups makes a person better at lifting weights.
Working memory, on the other hand, is your ability to manipulate the stuff you’re being asked to remember: flipping the numbers around, adding them up, deciding whether they’re odd or even.
With language, working memory enables you not simply to remember this sentence, but to understand its meaning and consider its implications.
Working memory is what permits a poet to play with words to discover the best expression of a given thought; it’s how we remember the second and third steps of a set of directions after completing the first.
From Merzenich’s groundbreaking research, Klingberg took two principles.
First, to be successful, training should be offered in relatively short bursts of twenty to thirty minutes a day, but repeated four to six times a week for at least four weeks.
Second, the training schedule should be continuously adapted to the capacity limit of the individual being trained.
Together, these two principles developed by Merzenich made for a standardized regimen: four weeks of short daily bursts of intense training that is continuously adapted to remain always at a person’s capacity limit. That regimen would prove crucial not only to Klingberg’s progress, but to the entire field’s.
Why matrices should be considered the gold standard of fluid-intelligence tests may not be obvious at first.
Love is not eye contact over dinner. It’s not holding hands. Those are just manifestations of love. And intelligence is the same.”
Mensa does not permit applicants to take its IQ test twice, because the organization ascribes to the view that intelligence doesn’t change much, so there’s really no point in retaking it.
“When we’re talking about cognitive control,” he said, “it means being able to inhibit distractions, to maintain information in working memory, to switch between tasks and selectively attend in the face of interference. But we are talking about goal setting as well.”
Control of one’s thoughts, control of one’s emotions, control of one’s goals and behaviors:
In March 2012, the firm released its first public analysis of that database, showing that users who reported getting seven hours of sleep or having one or two alcoholic drinks per day performed better on cognitive tasks than those who had either more or less sleep or alcohol. That’s right: moderate drinkers performed better than teetotalers, and sleeping too much proved just as harmful to mental performance as sleeping too little.
The greatest effect, however, was from exercise. Those who worked out at least once a week performed 9.8 percent faster, solved 5.8 percent more math problems, and had 2.7 percent better spatial memory than those who never exercise.
A number of studies have reached a similar conclusion: learning a second language well enough to be considered “bilingual” does seem to delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.
So which ancient methods of maximizing brain power do stand up to scientific scrutiny? I found three.
A classic study in 1975, for instance, found that older people who played tennis or racquetball performed significantly better than their nonexercising peers on a variety of simple cognitive tests.
can’t be a coincidence: the two psychologists whose studies became milestones in the science of music as a means of enhancing cognition both began their careers as musicians.
Recalling how he learned to play the saxophone during high school, Clinton said in a speech that day: “I might not have been President if it hadn’t been for school music.”
These days, Schellenberg told me, he sees the relationship between music lessons and intelligence as a two-way street. “Nature and nurture are almost impossible to separate in the case of music lessons,” he said.
“I think that smarter kids are more likely to take music lessons, and to stick with them longer, which in turn expands their cognitive functioning even further.”
It’s safe to say, then, that while listening to a recording of Mozart is not going to make anyone smarter, learning to play an instrument might.
multitude of studies suggest that the ancient practice of mindfulness meditation actually holds promise as a way to improve cognitive abilities, to increase attention, expand working memory, and raise fluid intelligence.
I added mindfulness meditation to my regimen, my list of interventions now nicely balanced between the age-old methods of physical exercise, music training, and meditation and the modern, computerized approaches of Lumosity and the dual N-back.
“Tasks that are difficult to learn are the most effective,” Shors said. “If they simply exercised, they didn’t retain the neurons. Learning must occur, and it must require some effort. So if you exercise, you will produce more neurons. If you do mental training you’ll keep alive more cells that you produced. And if you do both, now you have the best of both worlds: you’re making more cells and keeping more alive. The effort part is key. We need to learn things that are new, and we need to keep it challenging.”
Back home in New Jersey, I read through dozens of human and animal studies published over the past five years showing that nicotine—freed of its noxious host, tobacco, and delivered instead by chewing gum or transdermal patch—may prove to be a weirdly, improbably effective cognitive enhancer and treatment for relieving or preventing a variety of neurological disorders, including Parkinson’s, mild cognitive impairment, ADHD, Tourette’s, and schizophrenia. Plus it has long been associated with weight loss. With few known safety risks. Nicotine? Yes, nicotine.
In the past six years, researchers from Spain, Germany, Switzerland, and Denmark—not to mention Paul Newhouse in Vermont—have published over a dozen studies showing that in animals and humans alike, nicotine administration temporarily improves visual attention and working memory.
Yet studies published in leading scientific journals since 2005 have shown that tDCS can improve outcomes for a variety of purposes that include (deep breath) depression, stroke, traumatic brain injury, long-term memory, math calculations, reading ability, complex verbal thought, planning, visual memory, the ability to categorize, the capacity for insight, and the solving of an inherently difficult problem.
And that was the last of the seven activities and treatments for which I found credible scientific evidence that they could increase fluid intelligence, along with N-back, Lumosity, physical exercise, mindfulness meditation, learning a musical instrument, and wearing a nicotine patch. But now I had something else to figure out: how to actually put these into practice in my daily life.
Improving one’s cognitive abilities, I discovered, remains very much a do-it-yourself job.
So it’s not that “smarter” people have “better” long-term memories; it’s that they simply generate more categories and search through them more diligently when trying to remember. They are better at exploiting the clumps of sugar on the tabletop of the mind.