You can increase your intelligence

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=you-can-increase-your-intelligence-2011-03-07

by bootload • 15 years ago

519 131 15 years ago

scientificamerican.com

aresant• 15 years ago

The bullet point version extracted from the 4,474 words:

1. Seek Novelty

2. Challenge Yourself

3. Think Creatively

4. Do Things The Hard Way

5. Network

jacques_chester3• 15 years ago

Perhaps in meeting point 4, we should skip your summary?

thaumaturgy11• 15 years ago

Yeah, the TL;DR thing really grates on my nerves. Are we so miswired now that we can't take the time out to read 4,500 well-written words on a subject, and instead need it condensed to a list appropriate for Twitter? Is there really no other value in the entire essay other than the list items themselves?

FrojoS2• 15 years ago

I like the humor but I disagree.

Its called an abstract and I'm glad that you can't publish any peer reviewed science paper without it. You can only read a mind blogging tiny fraction of all the information out there. Even in a narrow field of specialization its hard to read everything relevant.

Whats better? Reading 10 articles in depth or reading 9 articles in depth and 10 abstracts? I'm pretty sure, the latter is better for point 4.

I really wish, abstracts where standard for longer online posts. Maybe, there should be a field for abstracts in the HN submission form.

thaumaturgy11• 15 years ago

Hmm. So, according to #2, I should be able to help increase my own intelligence by playing Sudoku?

dcreemer2• 15 years ago

In fact that exact strategy is specifically addressed in the article. The answer is yes, but only until you get good at it. Then you need to move on to something else.

bendmorris2• 15 years ago

You can increase your measurable intelligence. This is only true to the degree that intelligence tests measure what they're supposed to.

hackinthebochs2• 15 years ago

I don't agree with the downvotes here. I tend to think people downvote short comments without really attempting to understand the value they're bringing to the conversation. Conversely, people assume a long comment is insightful.

It is a reasonable explanation that any increase in intelligence is just the subject getting better at the tests that are measuring intelligence. If you take the same IQ test over again, you're likely going to score a bit higher. But this certainly doesn't mean the act of taking the test made you smarter. You're simply getting better at using the tool used to measure intelligence.

This made sense at least before the most recent study cited with the Dual-N-Back training. You're going to be hard pressed to explain that away.

arethuza2• 15 years ago

I've suspected this for a long long time - when I was a young kid (around 5 years old) my oldest sister was at university studying psychology with an emphasis on child development - so for years I got bombarded with "intelligence" tests to the point where I could do them very easily and I used to get extremely high results in IQ tests in my teens. However, I've never thought I was particularly brighter than anyone else, just that I had done a lot of these silly tests and had acquired the skill of doing them.

rimantas• 15 years ago

But by doing that you also acquired a skill to spot patterns and connections: I'd argue, that this ability is important part of intelligence.

ambertch• 15 years ago

'#4 Do Things The Hard Way'

I think this is so important for our young generation b/c everybody is trying to "hack" or "game" the system. The problem is that you don't actually internalize things by hacking your way through

So it depends on your goals. Let's take a computer science degree for example: if your goal is to do investment banking and having a CS/engineering degree from a top university really puts you apart from all those econ/business majors in the finance interviews (which it does), sure hack your way through CS/EE: you're not planning to go into that field anyways so copy-change homework and study past tests to hack the system and get a good GPA. But if you're doing CS to be a software engineer, you DON'T want to hack your way through, you'd want to "do things the hard way" and really learn the material.

ankrgyl2• 15 years ago

I think your definition of "hack" is confusing with respect to this forum. Hackers are people who understand the system so well that they can manipulate it to their advantage. Good hackers have done things the hard way and use those experiences to make things easy in the future.

Retric• 15 years ago

You can hack collage just like any other complex system. The #1 secret to a inflated GPA in collage is knowing which teachers take and which ones to avoid.

I knew one teacher who basically gave every student an A in his advanced math classes. "Ok so everyone has an A, but we have 2 weeks left and I have more material I would like to cover so please show up." Not only that but he actually knew how to teach so you where ready to use the material in the future.

Unfortunately I knew a history teacher who like to base essay questions off of obscure references in the ~3,000 pages of text you where apparently supposed to memorize for the test. In his words two A's in the same class was a sign he was going soft.

hackinthebochs2• 15 years ago

I'm no authority but I'm gonna have to disagree. Hackers as understood on this forum are people who find the shortest path to an intended outcome. This usually takes a novel way of looking at the system. But it by no means requires a complete understanding of it. Hacking requires a clever insight that allows you to quickly accomplish your goal. Total understanding is usually too time consuming for the hacker.

tokenadult3• 15 years ago

The author raises a number of interesting questions after citing several path-breaking research studies. Why, indeed, aren't school systems adopting some of these techniques known to improve children's learning and problem-solving ability? Quite a few mathematicians have written critiques of United States practice in teaching primary and secondary school mathematics, informed by practice in other countries, for example Hung-hsi Wu,

http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/Lisbon2010_2.pdf

http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/Lisbon2010_3.pdf

http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/Lisbon2010_4.pdf

http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/NoticesAMS2011.pdf

Richard Askey,

http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/fall1999/amed1.pdf

http://www.math.wisc.edu/~askey/ask-gian.pdf

Roger E. Howe,

http://www.ams.org/notices/199908/rev-howe.pdf

Patricia Kenschaft,

http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf

and

James Milgram.

ftp://math.stanford.edu/pub/papers/milgram/milgram-msri.pdf

ftp://math.stanford.edu/pub/papers/milgram/report-on-cmp.html

All those mathematicians think that the United States could do much better than it does in teaching elementary mathematics in the public school system. I think so too after living in Taiwan twice in my adult life (January 1982 through February 1985, and December 1998 through July 2001). Taiwan is not the only place where elementary mathematics instruction is better than it is in the United States. Chapter 1: "International Student Achievement in Mathematics" from the TIMSS 2007 study of mathematics achievement in many different countries includes, in Exhibit 1.1 (pages 34 and 35)

http://pirls.bc.edu/timss2007/PDF/T07_M_IR_Chapter1.pdf

a chart of mathematics achievement levels in various countries. Although the United States is above the international average score among the countries surveyed, as we would expect from the level of economic development in the United States, the United States is well below the top country listed, which is Singapore. An average United States student is at the bottom quartile level for Singapore, or from another point of view, a top quartile student in the United States is only at the level of an average student in Singapore. I've been curious about mathematics education in Singapore ever since I heard of these results from an earlier TIMSS sample in the 1990s.

The article "The Singaporean Mathematics Curriculum: Connections to TIMSS"

http://www.merga.net.au/documents/RP182006.pdf

by a Singaporean author explains some of the background to the Singapore math materials and how they approach topics that are foundational for later mathematics study. I am amazed that persons from Singapore in my generation (born in the late 1950s) grew up in a country that was extremely poor (it's hard to remember that about Singapore, but until the 1970s Singapore was definitely part of the Third World) and were educated in a foreign language (the language of schooling in Singapore has long been English, but the home languages of most Singaporeans are south Chinese languages like my wife's native Hokkien or Malay or Indian languages like Tamil) and yet received very thorough instruction in mathematics. I hope that all of us here in the United States can do at least that well in the current generation.

P.S. Another reply mentions the Flynn effect (secular increase in raw scores on IQ tests from generation to generation in most countries worldwide), and links to the Wikipedia article. Thanks for bringing that up. Being aware that the Wikipedia article on that subject has been subject to edit wars that have gone to the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/...

I think it may be helpful to link to another source about the Flynn effect

http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/flynn-beyond/

that has had the influence of better informed and more impartial editors. There are several good discussions of the Flynn effect in recent books on IQ testing, and citations to those can be found in Wikipedia user space.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Intellige...

aik5• 15 years ago

Interesting. Mind if I e-mail you with some questions about schools adopting some of these techniques, and about gifted programs, and homeschooling? I'm hugely interested in all this and you seem to be very informed here.

ShabbyDoo• 15 years ago

I am thankful for these links as well given that I am attending my local school district's "Parents Math Night" tonight. It's a presentation about the K-12 math curriculum. Sadly, I suspect that any points of contention will be between alternatives which I will consider to all be lacking in some fundamental way. After seeing what's happening in my ostensibly excellent public school system, I want to compare it with the Montessori school up the street.

aik5• 15 years ago

What I find interesting here is that you focus a lot on mathematics instruction in your comment. In my opinion there's much more that influences learning outcomes and outcomes on test results than math instruction techniques, namely student self-theories and various systems having to do with the existing educational paradigm. I believe those factors are involved and a culprit for sub-average results equally much if not more.

thaumaturgy11• 15 years ago

He focused on mathematics because that's his current field of expertise.

I'm not sure what you mean by "student self-theories and various systems having to do with the existing educational paradigm", but axiomatic mathematics instruction leads directly into analysis, problem solving, and general logic; while that doesn't justify an educational curriculum consisting solely of mathematics, it does make it very important.

jessriedel• 15 years ago

I have no doubt that math teaching methods in the US are terrible, in general. And I am very open to the possibility that Singapore does it much better. But however poor Singapore was in the past, it is now 3rd in the world in per-capita PPP GDP while the US is 7th (according to the IMF; $56,522 vs. $47,284).

Furthermore we should always expect the top countries to be small ones; if each state in the US (pop. ~300m) was considered individually, it seems very likely that several would be more highly ranked than Singapore (pop. ~5m). Seeing as that those states are much more alike to the rest of the US--in terms of culture, government, etc.--than is Singapore, shouldn't we be looking to them for guidance on how to improve the rest of the US?

snippyhollow• 15 years ago

Actually, if you read http://pirls.bc.edu/timss2007/PDF/T07_M_IR_Chapter1.pdf , Massachusetts and Minnesota are also benchmarked independently, Massachusetts is #4 globally (page 4 of the pdf, 34 of the document). Also, the level is slowly increasing in the US and slowly decreasing in Singapore. Finally, a lot of countries are missing in these rankings, so these are not true global results.

ellyagg• 15 years ago

Personally, I don't think the situation is nearly as gloomy in the US as a lot of my fellows seem to. It's a characteristic of nation citizens to be over hard on certain aspects of their community.

As a matter of fact, if the US school system is partly or significantly responsible for the productivity and creativity of adult residents, I'm pretty satisfied with it on the whole. I'm not sure studying to tests produces the best outcomes. I'm more interested in novel problem solving, invention, and innovation, and typical international standardized tests don't suss that out especially well, do they?

Moreover, it's hard to know what to infer when comparing a giant, multicultural country with a small, much more homogeneous one such as Singapore. It makes sense that some small countries might outperform the US at testing in the same way that you expect some small countries to have a higher per capita gdp. Unless I miss my guess, we could cherry pick some communities in the US that do better on either than Singapore.

This article about US test scores, after adjusting for demographics, was discussed on HN before, although I can't find the link just now:

http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou...

It's extremely interesting, and I haven't seen anything that impeaches it.

That's not to say that I think the US school system does not have huge room for improvement. That's clear, and I'm hopeful that continued technological development and research will provide amazing breakthroughs. Moreover, we're not even using some of the best methods that are already available; research suggests the Montessorri method is advantageous, and indeed my own son was trained at one, and we were much happier with the result in comparison to his time at a public elementary school.

But it's not necessary to down talk where we're at to motivate improvement. What I don't want to see is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. US schools get some things right. Students come out believing they can do anything. They're not afraid to try new approaches. I'd rather not end up with test taking automatons who are mainly expert at memorization and thoughtless skills drills.

thaumaturgy11• 15 years ago

Just a couple of quibbles:

> But it's not necessary to down talk where we're at to motivate improvement.

It is necessary if the general perception of where we're at is much better than where we're actually at. I think the U.S. still has a very strong cultural air of superiority which perhaps is no longer justified (if it ever was). The first step to solving a problem is to realize that it exists, and the U.S. educational system is only recently coming under scrutiny because of repeated criticisms of it.

> Students come out believing they can do anything.

I'm uncertain about this -- both whether it's true, and whether it's beneficial if true.

> They're not afraid to try new approaches.

Actually, there's a growing murmur of dissent that, at least in the special case of "gifted" children, the constant praise of their intelligence leads to a fear of failure which, in turn, leads to a fear of trying things which others might try without hesitation.

zwieback• 15 years ago

Agree, I have two kids in public elementary school and have no complaints about what and how they learn math. I think the problem in the US is the huge difference between schools. I happen to live close to a very good school but not everyone is as privileged. From what I've heard the difference in school quality goes up in the higher grades, which I can easily believe.

pixcavator• 15 years ago

>it's hard to know what to infer when comparing a giant, multicultural country with a small, much more homogeneous one such as Singapore.

That's nothing. I remember a few years ago at this forum someone put forward a report that compared the US with a list of contries with the Vatican at the top.

tokenadult3• 15 years ago

I wrote: (the language of schooling in Singapore has long been English, but the home languages of most Singaporeans are south Chinese languages like my wife's native Hokkien or Malay or Indian languages like Tamil)

And then you replied: it's hard to know what to infer when comparing a giant, multicultural country with a small, much more homogeneous one such as Singapore.

I especially noted the language diversity of Singapore to respond to something I have read over and over and over throughout the years when Singapore is mentioned in discussions of educational comparisons, namely the false idea that Singapore is "homogeneous" in any meaningful sense for the provision of primary education. It is not. Singapore is, as far as I know, the only country in the world with four different official languages (Modern Standard Chinese, Bahasa Malay, Tamil, and English) from different language families (Sino-Tibetan, Austronesian, Dravidian, and Indo-European) and surely one of the very few countries during my lifetime in which the typical person grew up in a home in which NONE of the official languages were spoken at home. Since before independence, the primary language of school instruction in Singapore has been the official language, English, that was at the beginning LEAST likely to be spoken by any school pupil at home. School officials in the United States whine about a minority of pupils who speak Spanish at home, even though they surely also speak English in the broader community (as my neighbors from Spanish-speaking households do). Try to imagine the United States and its level of educational achievement if most school pupils had first of all, when entering school, to learn a new language that they don't speak at home to their parents and rarely speak to classmates when outside of school. That is the amazing achievement of Singapore. (Something similar and only a bit less amazing happened in Taiwan over a just slightly longer time span, when a majority population that spoke Taiwanese or Hakka watched a younger generation grow up as Mandarin-speakers.)

We largely agree on these statements of yours. On my part, I think "research" (on educational methods that already work in other places) are like to have more impact on primary education than "technological development," but I'll take improvements however they come.

I see I omitted to mention in my first post here, an omission I will now correct, a link to a study of PISA results

http://www.hks.harvard.edu/pepg/PDF/Papers/PEPG10-19_Hanushe...

showing that advantaged pupils with highly educated parents in the United States fare particularly poorly in comparison with pupils enjoying similar advantages in other countries. What's really shocking about international educational comparisons is how badly the top-end students in the United States do, as was also shown in the data graphs linked to in my first post,

http://pirls.bc.edu/timss2007/PDF/T07_M_IR_Chapter1.pdf

which provide an excellent example of correct use of what are sometimes called "box and whisker" plots.

thefool• 15 years ago

Just because the average quartile in the US falls in the bottom quartile in Singapore doesn't mean that the top quartile falls into the average quartile in Singapore.

While on average here the system is pretty bad, the US also tends to produce the people that end up making some of the largest contributions to science and math.

There is very good education available here, it simply isn't available to everyone. The outliers are still performing on a very high level.

tritogeneia2• 15 years ago

To summarize a few of the articles you linked: Students do better at math in East Asia than in the US because East Asian math teachers know math and American math teachers don't.

My own experience bears this out. I once taught in a program to help public school teachers get certified to teach mathematics. I simply couldn't believe these teachers had college degrees. I was teaching geometry, and none of them could go to the board, draw a circle with a compass and label the center point A. It took them two weeks to learn that the center of a circle is in the middle, not on the circumference -- and, believe me, I tried to explain it. Of course, none of the teachers could add fractions either. These teachers were impressive people -- it's not easy to play parent, social worker, and cop to fifty teenagers at a time -- but they were absolutely uneducated. It seems that education majors aren't taught the rudiments of the subjects they're meant to teach. Teachers wish they knew math and they're grateful to anyone who will teach them -- they were so grateful to me that I was terribly embarrassed. I don't know what's going on in education departments, but it's a real disservice to teachers and students.

nunb• 15 years ago

I would be interested to know where in the US this was. I was once in a Statistics program in Ohio with a bunch of students who were working towards their Masters in Education, and they were solidly in the middle-lower end of the class but the upper end was taken up by dept. students anyway.

notsosmart• 15 years ago

I really enjoyed this article. I wish she had given specific tips on how to think more creatively. She mentioned what happens "when" you think creatively, but did not really go into the "how."

vishaldpatel• 15 years ago

If you come up with a few on your own, then you're thinking creatively!! =)

jfoutz• 15 years ago

Try to fit math ideas.

What does zero mean? what does one mean? does addition make sense? can you take the limit of something? What if something blows up to infinity?

So... try cars. zero being no car. one being a "standard" car. say a honda civic. how much honda can you take a way and still be a car? like taking the limit at zero. There are crazy efficient cars with tiny little internal combustion engines and bicycle wheels that get 100+ mpg but piss poor acceleration. hmm. what would a car be at the other end? a ferrari? Do cars associate? do cars commute? :)

Creativity isn't painting. It's looking at the same crap you look at all the time and playing with it. Math has a lot of tricks for labeling things, then seeing what shows up when you try do stuff with the labels. New dimensions will pop out.

latch• 15 years ago

Anyone interested in this might also be interested in the broader Flynn effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

I've always believed that additional/new stimulations is largely responsible for our increased intelligence.

absconditus• 15 years ago

Flynn recently found the opposite effect among British teens:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/4548943/B...

MetallicCloud• 15 years ago

Excellent post. It's made me realise how much I have been taking the easy road lately.

I used to always be looking into new areas to learn about new things and really pushing myself, but I realise now that lately to solve a problem I reach for a familiar way to solve it, because it's easier and faster. This could be the reason why I am getting less satisfaction with solving problems lately.

Time to get back on that horse...

mberning• 15 years ago

I take exception to the 'Think Creatively' item. It's kind of like making a to-do list with 'lose 20 lbs' as a line item. Much easier said than done.

That being said, I think one of the best ways to improve your creative thinking is to work directly with other people that YOU consider to be creative thinkers. At my previous job I always enjoyed working with the CEO, sales, and marketing folks because they almost always approached problems from a completely different angle than I would. Experiencing how others ideate is very mind opening and often times humbling.

abeppu2• 15 years ago

The author juxtaposes his recommendations against his unnamed professor's claim that intelligence is genetic and fixed at birth, pointing out that there are broad classes of behaviors that can improve our intelligence -- but he neglects half of the response to his professor's genetic predestination view, namely the whole host of physical/chemical/biological factors impacting both brain development and cognition later in life.

As just an example, I was recently impressed by a study (http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/270/1529/2147...) demonstrating improvements on both a memory task and an intelligence task through creatine supplements. The explanation suggested by the authors (and it looks like some other literature as well, though I haven't really dug into it yet) is basically that creatine is part of a mechanism for rapid ATP synthesis, that the ion pumps in your neurons run on ATP, and that if you're sometimes "fuel-limited" (their word) creatine levels matter, in the same way that oxygen and glucose do. This make sense, but I was quite surprised to read this, I think in part because I'm used to seeing my brain as being a relatively static thing. Stepping down a level of abstraction, and thinking about the instant to instant chemical resource needs of individual cells and gates is kind of eye-opening. And for all I know there's hundreds or thousands of other documented effects, where increasing or decreasing the presence of some reagent associated with running ion pumps, or growing axons or synthesizing neurotransmitters has some measurable effect on intelligence.

dcreemer2• 15 years ago

minor nit: the author is female.

wging2• 15 years ago

You can probably induce similar effects (in the reverse direction) by entering states of dehydration or low blood sugar. I've observed that dehydration can be a big cause of poor performance on my part.

gwern2• 15 years ago

> As just an example, I was recently impressed by a study (http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/270/1529/2147...) demonstrating improvements on both a memory task and an intelligence task through creatine supplements.

I would point out that Rae 2003 was conducted using vegetarian subjects. When you run tests on normal subjects, no benefit is found. To quote what I've said the last few times creatine came up http://www.gwern.net/Nootropics#creatine :

> I’m not a bodybuilder, but my interest was sparked by several studies showing IQ boosts (such as Rae 2003; however, Rae 2003 was only in vegetarians, who are known to be creatine deficient (much like B vitamins, creatine is usually gotten in one’s diet from meat), and the other studies are likewise of subpopulations. Rawson 2008 studied young omnivores who are not stupid or sleep-deprived, and found no mental benefit. The summary of the DNB ML discussion was that Rawson 2008 is a broad null result for healthy young omnivores who aren’t idiots. Vegetarians, idiots, the sleep-deprived, and old people may benefit from creatine supplementation.

abeppu2• 15 years ago

Thanks for pointing that out, and linking to those notes. As it happens, I'm vegetarian and often sleep deprived, so I still might try the creatine thing.

bluekeybox• 15 years ago

My addition (6): observe others, be inquisitive about other people. This will not only help you appear smarter to others (believe it or not, there is such thing as behaving/appearing smart), but will also help you with networking because (a) people respond positively when someone displays genuine interest in them (well as long as you are being nonthreatening) and (b) smart people tend to seek out others like them.

bumbledraven• 15 years ago

http://sourceforge.net/projects/brainworkshop/ is an open-source implementation of the dual n-back test for Windows, Linux, and OS-X.

"Following training of working memory using the dual n-back test, the subjects were indeed able to transfer those gains to a significant improvement in their score on a completely unrelated cognitive task. This was a super-big deal."

Splines• 15 years ago

FYI, this game crashed on me at launch (W2K8 R2). Setting the exe to run under WinXP compat mode made it work.

It's also devilishly hard. Dual 1-back is easy, but Dual 2-back is surprisingly difficult. I think it'd be fun to get good at this :).

Kutta• 15 years ago

I usually play it at d9b with 2,5 sec intervals. I intend to advance higher though.

kmt• 15 years ago

I always slack when it comes to number 5 (networking). I'm always busy with something "more important" and kinda have to force myself to get out and meet people.

ashbrahma• 15 years ago

Dual N-Back test: http://www.soakyourhead.com/

keyle• 15 years ago

You can play dual n-back here: http://cognitivefun.net/test/5

joelthelion• 15 years ago

There is also a very good app for android, called n-back if I recall correctly. Very handy to kill time during the daily commute!

phucnguyen• 15 years ago

Hey Joel, try out mine too ;) https://market.android.com/details?id=phuc.entertainment.dua...

eande• 15 years ago

Excellent article and here is a link to an open source Dual N-Back game, have fun. http://brainworkshop.sourceforge.net/

pella2• 15 years ago

"Join the Dual N-Back, Brain Training & Intelligence forum & mailing list at Google Groups for some interesting discussions on dual n-back, memory, intelligence and the brain"

http://groups.google.com/group/brain-training

anthuswilliams• 15 years ago

#4) Do things the hard way. It's hard for me to agree with this. In principle, I want to bemoan the decline of my ability to spell as a result of auto-correct. But I think that casts an unfair negative light on the idea of doing things "the easy way".

Think about math. There is no question that the Arabic numbering system makes doing math easier. Why should I to go back to scratching out base-60 cuneiform? I can challenge myself just as easily by pushing on to more powerful and abstract mathematical concepts made possible by timesavers like the Arabic numbering system.

I'm sure that having access to high-level languages limits my understanding of the bits and bytes. But I can use these new tools of abstraction to do things that I would have found impossible if I were writing machine code. I'm not sure I see the value in doing things the hard way, when my brain will be challenged enough probing the depths of what these new innovations have made possible. I think the author misses one crucial part of intelligence - intelligence, insofar as it is about abstract thought, is positively correlated with the sorts of things I can do without thinking about them.

melvinmt• 15 years ago

"Any fool can make things bigger and more complex. But it takes a genius to move in the opposite direction." - Einstein

Solving things in the easiest way, is often the hardest challenge there is.

sophacles• 15 years ago

Simple and easy are not the same thing. Please stop being lazy and bother to learn the words you are using. It is simple to do, just read the dictionary. This really isn't easy tho, you have to cross reference other words, take time to do so, bother to remember, and so on - lots of effort.

bluedanieru• 15 years ago

Doing math in base-60 would have a number of benefits over base-10. 60 is highly factor-able, after all (this is probably why it was chosen as base for some numbering systems, e.g. time).

Had you compared Roman numerals with Arabic numerals, I'd agree with you.

qjz• 15 years ago

The author of the article is actually promoting the concept of "use it or lose it" with this point. Labor-saving can become excessive if it robs you of any opportunity to exercise your body or mind. She's really suggesting that you don't always reach for the calculator for simple math problems or hop in the car for short trips.

Egregore• 15 years ago

My ability to spell actually improved with auto-spell checkers. In school I was very bad at languages, after writing few years with instant feedback of spell checkers I make less errors now and I think it's because of instant feedback of spell checkers. So while I think that the article is good it has some points I don't agree with.

chalst• 15 years ago

The key study cited by the article is available in full as a PDF.

Jaeggi, Buschkuehl, Jonides, and Perrig (2008), Improving Fluid Intelligence with Training on Working Memory: http://lowellinstitute.com/downloads/BrainLearning/Fluid%20I...

dopkew• 15 years ago

"So to make the most of your intelligence, improving your working memory will help this significantly"

This reminds me of how RAM is underestimated in improving computer performance.

sayemm• 15 years ago

Excellent analogy

IvarTJ• 15 years ago

PDD-NOS – Pervasive Development Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, is not necessarily a mild form of autism. The meaning is in the name. It means that the diagnosed doesn’t fit more specific diagnoses such as Kanner’s autism or Asperger syndrome.

Even though someone who’s autistic fail to show intelligence through a test, I believe they still may be very intelligent and can show this better through training.

I personally still believe reasoning skills can be trained by learning new heuristics at least.

chegra• 15 years ago

I don't think people on HN need more intelligence. After 120 IQ points, it doesn't make much of a difference to winning a Nobel Prize. I think what people need here is an increase in their willpower to see boring stuff through to the end.

adaml_6232• 15 years ago

I disagree totally. I find it annoying to have a limited short term memory. When coding multiple files I wish I had a little more space in my brain.

barry-cotter3• 15 years ago

http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2008/07/annals-of-psychometry-i...

[Review] Anne Roe: The Making of a Scientist

After 120 IQ points, it doesn't make much of a difference to winning a Nobel Prize. Not true

Test (Low / Median / High) Verbal 121 / 166 / 177

Spatial 123 / 137 / 164

Mathematical 128 / 154 / 194

xutopia• 15 years ago

Still though the correlation with making money and intelligence is really low (I think I read it was 0.2%). And what if wether or not you are happier might be inversely proportional to how intelligent you are?

I'm just saying that being happy with your life should not be based on winning a Nobel prize.

ArbitraryLimits• 15 years ago

If you follow that link, you'll find that in the study referenced the researchers made up their own more or less ad hoc tests of "ability" precisely because "most IQ tests are not good indicators of true high level ability (e.g., beyond +3 SD or so)." It seems to me this study supports the idea that IQ is irrelevant to winning a Nobel Prized past a threshold instead of refuting it.

TeMPOraL• 15 years ago

I think people need to use their willpower and intelligence to automate boring stuff out of existence.

lloeki• 15 years ago

In French the fields known as Computer Science and Information Technology are called Informatique, a portmanteau between information and automatique.

I think it captures the goal of the field pretty well: automate the boring stuff to let humans focus on the interesting side of problems.

StuffMaster• 15 years ago

Willpower is a different subject though. No reason not to go for both.

curiousepic• 15 years ago

This is where I am. All of the techniques in the article sounded familiar to me because, thankfully, I do them intrinsically. What I need are ways to stay interested in a given project. Any suggestions?

alexandros• 15 years ago

The subtitle for this piece is '5 ways to maximize your cognitive potential'.

Shouldn't that be -realize- your cognitive potential, or maximize the utilization of your cognitive potential or some such? What good does it do to maximize my potential?

gwern2• 15 years ago

'I know what the statistics say - but gosh darn, I have an anecdote to the contrary!'

OP spends a lot of time & space on Jaeggi 2008... and she quietly omits all of the other results and considerations: http://www.gwern.net/N-back%20FAQ#criticism

pella2• 15 years ago

"Brain fog - poor memory, difficulty thinking clearly etc"

http://www.drmyhill.co.uk/wiki/Brain_fog_-_poor_memory,_diff...

mannicken• 15 years ago

From what I saw, society reserves creativity to artists, writers, composers, and other "creative types". For some reason creativity has become associated with creating useless inventions that no one will ever buy; sometimes people see creative person as a loner who spends days and nights on drugs throwing paint around or mumbling crazily.

In reality, creativity is, perhaps, our only advantage when trying to not get killed by other animals. Picking up a stick and fighting off a larger animal -- great example of creative solution. It's novel.

Before, no one ever thought to pick up a stick. Perhaps sticks were viewed as merely lying there, to be carefully avoided in case somebody steps on one. Maybe those who tried to pick up sticks were viewed as crazy, sinful by some sort of primitive Republicans (not that Republicans now are more evolved :)... I mean, who cares about sticks, animals were usually fighting with their own teeth, hands, or horns (I wish I had a horn).

It's not until an animal with a stick has beaten the shit out of another animal without a stick for calling him crazy, that the sticks became a useful tool.

I mean, face it -- we're just animals, and without creative approaches to our problems we wouldn't be talking about this on a giant electronic mind-network-thing.

john2x• 15 years ago

Haven't read the entire article yet, but(this is off topic), highlighting any word on the website shows a "Learn More" tooltip which automatically loads more info for the highlighted text. Awesome.

amirmc• 15 years ago

Wow. I'd never have discovered that if I hadn't read your comment, so thanks. I'm not sure how useful it would be in general but for an article like this quickly looking up terms seemed pretty neat (e.g fluid intelligence).

You can increase your intelligence

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