Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums GT Research Boot Camp for Boosting IQ

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304432304576371462612272884.html
Boot Camp for Boosting IQ
by Jonah Lehrer
Wall Street Journal
June 11, 2011

...

When children learn to count, for instance, they show gains on crystallized intelligence, even as their fluid intelligence remains constant. Scientists have typically regarded fluid intelligence as the aspect of our thinking that is most determined by genetics, since it can't be easily taught.

And yet these schoolchildren showed gains in fluid intelligence roughly equal to five IQ points after one month of training. The IQs of 68.2% of the populace fall within a 30-point range, so this is a significant change. These kids weren't learning facts they would soon forget. They were learning how to think better.

These improvements were triggered by a mental exercise known as the n-back task. The exercise is not fun, even when translated into videogame format. It begins with the presentation of a visual cue. For the kids in the experiment, the cue was the precise location of a cartoon character.

In the next round, the cue is altered�the cartoon character has moved to a new location. The job of the child is to press the space bar whenever the character returns to a spot where it has previously been, and to ignore the other irrelevant locations. As the children advance in the task, these locations move further back in time, forcing them to sort through an increasing amount of information.

How does this tedious exercise boost intelligence? The crucial change concerned the nature of the children's attention. After repeatedly playing the n-back game, the young subjects were better able to focus on the necessary facts. As a result, they squandered less short-term memory on irrelevant details, such as cartoon locations they didn't need to recall. The children "got better at separating the wheat from the chaff across a variety of different tasks," says John Jonides, a senior author on the paper.

There are two important caveats to this research. The first is that not every kid showed such dramatic improvements after training. Initial evidence suggests that children who failed to increase their fluid intelligence found the exercise too difficult or boring and thus didn't fully engage with the training.

The second caveat concerns the relevance of the mental improvement. Scott Barry Kaufman, a cognitive scientist at New York University who was not involved in the research, believes that while this study has "incredibly important potential implications," it's unclear if the children's performance changed on anything besides an abstract intelligence test.

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Lehrer writes more about the research at http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/06/a-simple-exercise-to-boost-iq/ , and another account is

http://www.thecuttingedgenews.com/index.php?article=52128&pageid=24&pagename=Society
Brain Training Increases I.Q. and Short-Term Memory
by Diane Swanbrow
June 3rd 2011

I recall someone posing a question about raising your IQ to Dr. Ruf at the Mensa World Gathering a few years back. She was speaking about intelligence testing. Her response was essentially that you can raise your IQ scores by practicing the types of tasks tested on an IQ test but that was not increasing your actual intelligence or making your brain actually function better.

Insert these cliches.
"birds of a feather flock togeather."
And
"one sword sharpens another."

I thought we only used 10% of our brain at a time and that's why our intelligence seems to fluctuate in such a large range over our life. (that's a lot of spare and the 10% can't be set in stone). I was just informed that this just ain't so because our brain is compartmentalized in such a way that each cell group is assigned a specific function, so using more than the current percent would not only not increase intelligence it would be painful as well. That's what I get from forming all my theories from cliche's and old wives tales. But, then, why do people become wiser?

I think Dr. Ruf is wrong on that one. IQ continues to change in children through the age of 21, as the brain continues develop, even in the teen years. There is much research to support that.

And even adults can improve function with practice, like cross word puzzles, math puzzles done on a regular basis. Exercise is exercise, for body or brain.

Ren

Yes, and even after that, your brain can "rewire." Look at stroke patients- other parts of the brain can take over parts that were damaged, obviously after age 21. IQ is not static and your brain development is not static.

I also think Dr. Ruf is quite obviously wrong, but I'd be interested to know the basis of her opinion, if it's more than just a hunch. Perhaps she's seen evidence that practice on particular tasks can boost performance on specific tasks on one type of test (for example, the types of matrix operations on the WISC) without having any effect on the magical g, as extrapolated from measurements by other tests.

Of course, the fact that one can presumably prep for or affect just a specific test doesn't mean at all that one can't raise one's intelligence through training. Objections to the idea seem to usually boil down to a claimed lack of evidence, just as there is a complete lack of evidence that it doesn't work.

The raised-by-wild-dogs example is often trotted out in these discussions, to show as a threshold matter that training can boost general intelligence; I've done it myself. Then someone may raise in counterpoint that the need for a threshold level of environment/"nurture" doesn't mean that benefits from enhanced nurture extend throughout the whole continuum of intelligence. A counterargument to that, of course, is that there's no reason to suppose that training effects are simply truncated at any point, and there's evidence that intelligence can be increased in various ways even for people above the mean. Then someone may cite a study showing a decrease in training effect with lapse of time, someone else cites to an inapposite twin study on effects of living with bright mothers, and the whole mess degenerates into petty bickering. At least that's the way I've seen it go down.

It's interesting to note the extent to which crystallized intelligence can affect scores on modern IQ tests. Are those crystallization-heavy submeasures not meant to test g at all? And I seem to remember that there is some correlation between crystallized and fluid intelligence.

This also gets at the fact that IQ is closely linked to the family's income level and the mother's (and probably father's) educational level. IQ isn't simply a set-in-stone number that cannot be changed up or down.
Studies have shown that babies in wealthy families are exposed to more words and more complex words during development than babies in poor families. Maybe that alone would affect your verbal IQ tested at age 5.

This effect fades out as children get older:

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/07/the-case-for-having-more-kids/
April 7, 2011, 9:00 AM
The Case for Having More Kids
By DAVID LEONHARDT

Q. My sense of the research on nature and nurture is that both matter. On the one hand, genes clearly matter. On the other, young children of college graduates, for instance, know hundreds and hundreds more words on average than young children of high school dropouts. That difference is not mostly genetic.

You seem to have a different sense of the research. You write, �Adoption and twin research provides strong evidence that parents barely affect their children�s prospects.� What�s the brief version of how you try to persuade skeptics like me?

Mr. Caplan: The central idea of twin and adoption research is that disentangling nature from nurture is hard. Our intuition isn�t very helpful. Yes, kids of college-educated parents know more words. But why? Maybe their upbringing is the reason, as you suggest. But babies from college-educated families might excel even if raised by high school dropouts, by learning a higher fraction of the words they hear, or spending more time reading.

So what does the twin and adoption data say? Language fits a standard pattern. Consistent with your skepticism, upbringing has a noticeable effect on the vocabulary of young children. But as children mature, this effect largely fades away. The Colorado Adoption Project found, for example, that 2-year-olds adopted by high-vocabulary parents had noticeably larger vocabularies. But as the kids grew up, their vocabulary scores looked more and more like their biological parents�. By age 12, the effect of enriched upbringing on vocabulary was barely visible.

I guess that the question then becomes whether knowing more words due to enrichment actually indicates that you are more intelligent. I view intelligence as the capacity to learn -- like Bostonian mentions, absorbing more. I suppose that's why IQ isn't viewed as "set," per se in early childhood b/c environmental impacts matter more the younger you are. I agree that IQ isn't set in stone, but I'd imagine that a range at which you will eventually land once the environmental factors settle out is fairly set. I don't, personally, believe that you can take someone who is wired as average and change the brain wiring so dramatically as to make that person way out of the norm either way (of course, save for a brain injury or some other injury like prenatal drug exposure).