You can increase your intelligence

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/03/07/you-can-increase-your-intelligence-5-ways-to-maximize-your-cognitive-potential/

by jwdunne • 13 years ago

259 111 13 years ago

blogs.scientificamerican.com

moocowduckquack2• 13 years ago

I've always been surprised people thought any different, given the content of IQ tests. Is basically just puzzles and you usually get much better at puzzles if you do them all the time.

cliveowen2• 13 years ago

True, but since virtually no one takes IQ tests on a daily basis, the IQ test is still a valid measure of one's intelligence (or potential, I don't really know what IQ is supposed to measure).

gohrt• 13 years ago

People who score high on IQ tests do take IQ tests (or similar puzles on a daily basis).

I don't really know what IQ is supposed to measure

Neither does anyone else.

gojomo• 13 years ago

Increasing your score on an IQ test is one thing; getting the benefits expected from more "intelligence" may be another.

In such matters, keep in mind Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

In the domain of IQ, we might observe a very high correlation between higher-IQ and certain desirable results, like a longer/healthier life, lower rates of victimization, higher incomes, and so forth. And we might have a strong case that the test is, at least at the outset, measuring some sort of "general intelligence", and that there is a causal link from "general intelligence" to the other correlated beneficial outcomes.

But, then you start aiming to increase "general intelligence", and your only measure is the IQ test, so your target for evaluating all interventions is the IQ score. Now you are quite likely finding interventions that only raise the IQ score, and perhaps skip any "general intelligence" benefits. Even if your IQ score goes up, you might not get the other benefits. Meanwhile, others still researching the correlation/causation questions may see the original correlations start to weaken, or the case that IQ measures "general intelligence" weaken.

And in fact the originally-valid ideas are weakening! Motivated action around that target has started to thwart whatever signal it once offered.

The problem is universal - in regulation, in education, in investment, in semantics. It's why a lot of high-performing organizations keep their true 'measures' secret... to slow their dilution through motivated optimizations.

moocowduckquack2• 13 years ago

The other thing with optimising as a strategy is while it likes small changes, it really hates structural ones as they make it very hard to compare what you have now with what went before, so anything that is hard to measure is resisted. But usefulness and ease of measurement are not always particularly aligned.

jessriedel2• 13 years ago

IQ tests are very robust. The correlation between scores is greater than 0.9. These working memory results are usually good for just a few extra IQ points (as in, literally 2 or 3), and they are far and away the largest boosts people have been able to induce through training.

cliveowen2• 13 years ago

This may seem very good and useful at first sight but it actually doesn't mean anything. The classical stance is that intelligence it's something fixed and can't be improved, so the smart guy will outsmart the average guy. Now they say that intelligence can actually improve so it's possible for the average guy to outsmart the smart guy. Well, not at all. If intelligence can improve this means that the average guy can achieve an intelligence on par with that of the smart guy, but the smart guy can also, so the gap still remains. Maybe I'm missing the point but I don't really know what make of the whole article.

itsybitsycoder• 13 years ago

It means that effort becomes more of a factor. OK, if you hold effort constant, maybe the gap remains, but not everyone is equally hard-working.

ekm22• 13 years ago

Are you suggesting that if both weak and strong people go to the gym regularly then the differences between them will remain?

csomar2• 13 years ago

Not weak and strong, but rather big and small. If someone is 1.6m and another one is 1.8m; the second guy obviously has an advantage (being a bigger guy).

Sure the 1.6m can beat him. (exercise often, learn fighting techniques...) but if they both exercise in the same amount, the difference will remain.

BigChiefSmokem2• 13 years ago

The Holy One can elaborate: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYfNvmF0Bqw

dnissley• 13 years ago

You're forgetting that plenty of intelligent people don't work to maintain their intelligence, which means their intelligence will flatline or even decline.

To take the gym metaphor you used, some people are naturally athletic and some are not. A non-athletic person can work out to improve their fitness level, and a naturally athletic person can eat pizza and smoke a pack of cigarettes every day. In not too much time at all they will have traded places as far as their athletic ability goes.

regularfry2• 13 years ago

You don't see the point for the average guy to be better than they themselves were 6 months ago? Why must this be adversarial?

epo• 13 years ago

"The point" is that, with work, intelligence can allegedly be improved. Your comparison is false as the not-smart guy who works hard will almost always outperform the smart guy who doesn't work hard. The smart guy who works hard is something to be feared (or followed). HN is full of people who were told they were smart and then stopped trying. That is why they are on websites like HN rather than, you know, actually achieving anything.

tokenadult• 13 years ago

The article kindly submitted here is from 2011. There is a new article, from today,

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/2013/10/...

that follows up on recent cognitive training research. The research conclusions are becoming more and more nuanced, and thus are better and better guides to practical things you can do for your own intelligence boosting.

mathattack• 13 years ago

Thanks for the update! I do believe that there may be diminishing returns to focusing on intellectual improvement (a genius that can't get a date won't be happy) but it's clear that our minds are indeed malleable.

mikevm• 13 years ago

It appears that the new study is as flawed as Jaeggi's previous one: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/2013/10/... (comment by this guy: http://www.uncg.edu/~mjkane/)

coryfklein• 13 years ago

But will I get dumber by wasting my intellectual capacity?

ukoki2• 13 years ago

Interesting! If anyone wants to give it a go, I just made a quick Dual-N-back app a couple of days ago, after reading Gwern's (who else?) excellent FAQ on the subject.

My web app: http://nnback.ukoki.com

Gwern's FAQ: http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20FAQ

jerf• 13 years ago

Incidentally, if this is intended as some sort of response to gwern's other post [1] as if he's never heard of dual n-back... please do read that FAQ. All 124 pages of it, according to my Firefox print preview.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6521885

gwern4• 13 years ago

Or if you're lazy, just check the latest version of my n-back meta-analysis (http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20meta-analysis#control-groups): looks like the current point estimate for n-back's increase of IQ is 0.15 (so, 2 IQ points), and is not statistically-significant (p=0.14).

A few of the researchers in the area have encouraged me to clean this up for publication, which would be nice.

(Not that the rest of OP is much better than the n-back material. 'I worked with autistic kids and I can cherrypick a few examples of improvement!' As if he had never heard of regression to the mean or selection effects.)

Flip-per• 13 years ago

The instructions of the webapp are incorrect, isn't LEFT and RIGHT mixed up? At least for 1n and 2n, I didn't try more. update yep, the instruction text doesn't match the keyboard shortcut list

ukoki2• 13 years ago

oops thanks. Updating the instructions now.

auctiontheory• 13 years ago

Most of us on HN have enough intelligence. Other qualities (focus, dedication, ambition, sociability) will have much greater impact on our success in life.

arrfscarf• 13 years ago

Focus!

Here I am wasting time/procrastinating. There certain days, that no matter what I do, consistent concentration is impossible.

nostromo• 13 years ago

I wish my brain had a switch.

Monday: follow crazy ideas, absorb everything, novelty hunting. Tuesday - Friday: focus.

larrys• 13 years ago

"Here I am wasting time/procrastinating."

Interesting though that there is no data with regards to how much time people spend on HN and whether it results in success or not. Or just adds to entertainment, knowledge, or enjoyment.

Even anecdotal although I do know there are some outliers like tpatcek and patio11 that have benefited. But we don't know how that compares to time that they spent.

arkitaip• 13 years ago

Hear, hear. I'm getting kinda desperate in my non existing pursuit of being able to focus / getting things done. I am considering meditation but I'm not sure there's actual evidence that it actually makes it easier to focus.

lgieron2• 13 years ago

In my opinion, the urge to procrastinate is just our brain telling us that the kind and amount of effort we're demanding from it is not natural. People aren't meant to spend 40+ hours a week sitting behind a desk and concentrating on stuff they have little connection with. Marx wrote about that (the alienation of workers) 150 years ago.

interstitial• 13 years ago

Have you read Steven Pressfield's "The War of Art"?

frozenport2• 13 years ago

The right solution is to do something else and have more then one task on your plate.

darkmighty• 13 years ago

Yes, it's been known for a while that IQ works in a "good enough" fashion -- once it's good enough there are so many other things more important. A good example is of course Einstein, which was tested and had a normal IQ.

chrischen• 13 years ago

Really? I never knew that! Can you point me to some sources?

kroger• 13 years ago

There's no evidence Einstein had done an IQ test:

http://www.einstein-website.de/z_information/variousthings.h...

narrator• 13 years ago

I don't think he ever took an IQ test and that anecdote he failed math was made up[1]. His estimated IQ was 160[2]:

1.http://physics.about.com/b/2007/09/19/physics-myth-month-ein...

2. http://www.cse.emory.edu/sciencenet/mismeasure/genius/resear...

zxcdw4• 13 years ago

Scoring better in IQ tests means understanding the problems better -- if you encounter similar problems, or problems which provoke the same areas of brain -- better IQ test score should correlate with better performance in the said problems. Whether this happens alot or not is another thing though. However, as the TFA implies, we can practice and better our brain, intelligence and mental skils, maybe that's exactly what happens when we "work hard". We become more intelligent, more skilled, our brains work more efficiently which, when added with the fact that we use that brain more by working hard, makes us more intelligent/mentally capable/whatever.

Of course high IQ/mental capability/intelligence means nothing if it isn't put to use, so step first is to start doing stuff which matters and learning from it.

Malus• 13 years ago

You were probably thinking of Feynman. From Wikipedia[1]:

In high school, his IQ was determined to be 125—high, but "merely respectable" according to biographer James Gleick.[14]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feynman#Education

jessriedel2• 13 years ago

This is wrong. As you move up the ladder to more and more intellectually demanding jobs, the median IQ gets higher and higher, even as the fraction of the population with such an IQ falls off exponentially. Yes, there are other important factors. And yes, if you have low conscientiousness then there will be diminishing returns going from high to very high IQ. But there is no threshold, and IQ remains the largest single predictive factor for success by far.

bicknergseng• 13 years ago

You forgot luck.

emiliobumachar• 13 years ago

I don't think one can increase that.

sidcool• 13 years ago

That oddly motivates me! Thanks!

BigChiefSmokem2• 13 years ago

Couple of points:

1) Use it or lose it, neurons act just like muscle fiber in this regard. I'd be more interest if someone can prove that deep thought and learning can lower the chances of cognitive disabilities like age-related dementia.

2) If you want to have a high IQ just retake the IQ test until you do. Maybe one day someone will make a test that will indeed measure intellect across a wide range of contexts, including social and abstract thinking.

coldcode• 13 years ago

I'm happy with mine, I want to improve other people's. I'm sure you can think of a couple places where that might be handy today.

gaelow2• 13 years ago

Of course I can. If I manage to stop drinking.

buckbova• 13 years ago

Drinking excessively makes one smarter. Consider it culling the herd. The weaker slower brain cells die off, leaving the stronger faster brain cells to propell your brain power to peak levels.

gaelow2• 13 years ago

I don't know. But for the fifteen years I've been doing it, every weekend when I go out with my friends I can feel my IQ dropping down with every drink. And don't even ask me to solve the simplest crossword puzzle on a Sunday morning. Not necessarily bad, though. It's fun and releases a lot of stress...

frozenport2• 13 years ago

Exactly my point, it also does wonders for my liver by killing the old cells so that new ones can take their place - eventually, if I stop drinking. Perhaps even a new liver!

xntrk• 13 years ago

I had to stop reading when I got to the part about GPS where the author says he almost lost his job, due to tardiness, becuase he refused to use GPS.

hownottowrite• 13 years ago

The question is... Can you make yourself less intelligent by indulging in the antithesis of the authors five principles? (viz. Seek Novelty; Challenge Yourself; Think Creatively; Do Things The Hard Way; Network)

zxcdw4• 13 years ago

I think brain can be thought to behave like a muscle and skeleton. If you put it under stress(learning) and let it recover(sleeping) it improves and grows stronger. Similarly if you let it idle, atrophy hits and it weakens. Just like muscles and bones do. Both can be trained with consistent and proper effort.

namenotrequired• 13 years ago

Let's see... Avoid novelty; Only take on easy things; Don't think creatively; Do things the most convenient way; Don't network.

...in other words, live a stationary life, do the same things you always did in the same way with the same people.

I don't know if any research exists to support this but it seems pretty likely, to me, that this will make one less intelligent.

pmelendez• 13 years ago

From the article: >"One of my first clients was a little boy w/ PDD-NOS (Pervasive Developmental Delays-Not Otherwise Specified), a mild form of autism. When we began therapy, his IQ was tested and scored in the low 80s—which is considered borderline mental retardation. After I worked with him for about three years— one on one, teaching in areas such as communication, reading, math, social functioning, play skills, leisure activities—using multimodal techniques [pdf] —he was retested. His IQ score was well over 100 (with 100 considered "average", as compared to the general population). That’s a 20 point increase, more than one standard deviation improvement, by a child with an autism spectrum disorder!"

As a parent of a PDDNOS child this put a lot of noise in my mind. When my son got his diagnostics, the psychologist couldn't finish the IQ test because he couldn't focus on the questions. Now three years later, all people who know the case agreed that he is a brilliant boy. So was that a huge increase on his IQ? or Was just a noisy measure of the IQ at the beginning?

fersho3117• 13 years ago

Every day, I train my memory by memorizing a pack of cards. I started because I had lousy memory and I wanted to improve it. I have been going at it for a few weeks now, memorizing and shuffling a deck of cards (twice a day). I can now memorize a deck of cards in just a little over 3 minutes (I started at a painful 19 minutes). Have I noticed am improvement in my memory? Yes, and much much more.

What I've come to realize is that memorizing a deck of cards trains so much more than your memory. The way I memorize is to associate every card with an object and its corresponding action, and memorizing the deck of cards is a matter of creating a sequence of events that corresponds to the sequence of cards. So by memorizing a deck of cards I'm actually training different parts of my mind: recalling the item that is associated with the card, coming up with creative stories on the fly when I see a card, and holding the story in my mind as I add 52 objects into the story one by one.

Each of these steps was painfully difficult in the beginning, but now I'm starting to see the fruits of my training. I almost never misplace my things (keys, wallet, etc) anymore. Mind blocks like, "what was the company's name? I used to know it...", happens less frequently and I can recollect facts much faster. Most importantly though, I have seen a dramatic improvement in the speed I learn and understand things. I'm not 100% sure, but I think that the rapid association of cards to objects and creatively creating a story have somehow improved my ability to comprehend and grasp new knowledge.

I whole heartedly believe that the brain is a muscle that can be strengthened through exercise.

JakeSc• 13 years ago

How did you decide to embark on this challenge? Do you have any online resources that you can link to so we can learn more?

fersho3117• 13 years ago

I started with this 10k memory competition, did really poorly, and decided to continue after the competition because it seemed to me helping me alot. http://www.memrise.com/course/44056/the-10k-memory-competiti...

kinleyd2• 13 years ago

There are some excellent books by Harry Lorayne that are still available. I got my fix in this department some 30+ years ago in high school. Great stuff.

fersho3117• 13 years ago

Here's a bicycle shop analogy by Tim ferris about how to get started: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2013/02/07/how-to-memor...

gamegoblin• 13 years ago

My personal memory training challenge is that I don't keep anyone's name attached to their number in my phone. It has made me quite proficient at memorizing 10 digit numbers.

It is also a minimal first defense at would-be over-the-shoulder snoopers who see who I am messaging.

fersho3117• 13 years ago

Haha! I do this unconsciously because all of my contacts are on my google voice app and everytime someone calls me on my phone (and not my google voice number) I don't see their name :)

avtar• 13 years ago

"I almost never misplace my things (keys, wallet, etc) anymore. Mind blocks like, "what was the company's name? I used to know it...", happens less frequently and I can recollect facts much faster. Most importantly though, I have seen a dramatic improvement in the speed I learn and understand things."

This piqued my interest. I find myself forgetting simple things all the time and it's very unsettling given that I'm relatively young. Like JakeSc, I too would be interested in learning more about your experience and any resources that you could possibly share.

fersho3117• 13 years ago

I started here: http://www.memrise.com/course/44056/the-10k-memory-competiti...

Memrise helped me get me off my feet, and then I created my own objects/actions for each card because I had no idea who half of those people are.

d0mine• 13 years ago

What do you think about the research that says that solving crosswords only improves your solving crosswords ability and nothing more i.e., memorizing a deck of cards might only improve your performance on that particular task and everything else is just an illusion?

fersho3117• 13 years ago

If you lift weights, will it only improve your ability to lift weights? ;)

sillysaurus2• 13 years ago

Are you sure this isn't placebo effect? I.e. you've always had this capacity, but the reason you're having success is because you're now focused on utilizing it. That's somewhat different from not having the capacity in the first place.

tadfisher• 13 years ago

If one has to train themselves to utilize this ability, is there a difference?

mynameishere• 13 years ago

Ooh, anecdote time! As an experiment, many years ago I memorized the first book of paradise lost:

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/pl/book_1/inde...

...at the start, two or four lines a day. At the end? Two or four lines a day. Nothing improved. But I did memorize the whole goddamned thing.

swah2• 13 years ago

Did you use a method like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci ?

swah2• 13 years ago

Do you do the Dominic method or something similar (tell a story with the cards, etc) ?

arh68• 13 years ago

I was inspired by a thread similar to this one several weeks ago to memorize a few digits of pi. I don't think it helped me in any way, but I like the imperative to recognize and identify simple patterns. It's just the right mix of hard and easy. It's not every day, but I often just grab a pen or New text file and start recalling.

The patterns are what draw me. How I remember it changes slightly (as I forget old patterns) over time but today: I go by groups of 5, 100 digits. There's the 8-2-2-8 near the beginning (w/ 2^3=8, & reversed), the 5-4-6-3 right after. The 5-7-5-7 (w/ 7 49, then 7, 81, 64) comes next. The permutations of 02668, the 34s, etc.

The thing is: the numbers are random(ish), but the patterns are there. The mind can find patterns in anything, you just have to cultivate it.

Do you think card-deck-memory could pull off any magic tricks? Pi isn't really a crowd pleaser.. :|

thekbe• 13 years ago

Pi is definitely a crowd pleaser. Many a time have I captivated fellow friends with it. Say it fast though.

l0c0b0x• 13 years ago

Andrea Kuszewski is awesome! I recall reading this when it published, have been following her on twitter ever since.

piyush_soni• 13 years ago

It amuses me that even in today's times we believe that IQ = intelligence. Not true. All it requires is some practice. That doesn't make you intelligent. I mean "Einstein intelligent" :). Every few days I read the news anyway "This child has an IQ more than that of Einstein". Oh well. No wonder. He used his mind at better places than solving some puzzles "fast" enough.

akandiah• 13 years ago

If you are interested in how people learn, you may be interested in this comprehensive review published by the National Academy of Sciences: http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=0309070368

quanticle• 13 years ago

As gwern points out in his meta-analysis of Dual N-Back [1], and his Dual N-Back FAQ [2], the results of Dual N-Back have been very mixed. Some studies show massive improvement. Other studies show minor improvement, while some studies show no improvement at all. It is by no means clear in the literature that Dual N-Back actually helps more than an active placebo.

    This is very damaging to the case that dual n-back increases IQ. Not only do the
    better studies find a drastically smaller effect, they are not sufficiently 
    powered to find such a small effect at all, even aggregated in a meta-analysis, 
    with a power of ~11%, which is dismal indeed when compared to the usual 
    benchmark of 80%, and leads to worries that even that is too high an estimate 
    and that the active control studies are aberrant somehow in being subject to a 
    winner’s curse or subject to other biases. (Because most studies used convenient 
    passive control groups and the passive effect size is 3x larger, they in 
    aggregate are very well-powered: 94%; however, we already know how they are 
    skewed upwards, so we don’t care if we can detect a biased effect or not.) In 
    particular, Boot et al 2013 argues that active control groups do not suffice to 
    identify the true causal effect because the subjects in the active control group 
    can still have different expectations than the experimental group, and the 
    group’ differing awareness & expectations can cause differing performance on 
    tests; they suggest recording expectancies (somewhat similar to Redick et al 
    2013), checking for a dose-response relationship (see the following section for 
    whether dose-response exists for dual n-back/IQ), and using different 
    experimental designs which actively manipulate subject expectations to identify 
    how much effects are inflated by remaining placebo/expectancy effects.

That said, there isn't any evidence of harm, either, so at worst, you'll waste your time if it doesn't work out for you.

[1] http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20meta-analysis [2] http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20FAQ

aidenn0• 13 years ago

The author says roughly "I helped many kids raise their IQ"; there is nothing novel about that, it is well established that intervention has large effects on IQ in children, but most of those effects have disappeared by the time they are 18.

linux_devil• 13 years ago

Intelligence is just a fancy name to "determination"

gtani• 13 years ago

all well and good, for a lot of people i know the more immediate concerns are the basic trilogies of diet/exercise/rest, and learning the tiger parent things your whole life (math, programming, foreign languages, musical instruments). These things work because they require sustained effort/concentration, adn dealing with frustration and plateaus

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/216086-Mental-muscle-six-w...

(the 6 things above: bright light, tDCS, food, exercise, playing music, meditation

warmfuzzykitten• 13 years ago

By a strange coincidence, yesterday a link to this article appeared on the same Hacker News page as this.

http://www.gwern.net/Drug%20heuristics?2

The argument there is that - in healthy people - not much can be done to improve intelligence, and speculates on reasons why. The qualification suggests that experience working with autistic children is not relevant to the general population.

That this link has been voted up to the front page and the other hasn't perhaps says more about the optimism of the community than the respective merits of the two positions.

You can increase your intelligence

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