Individual brain training games don't make you smarter —they make you more proficient at the brain training games. Now, they do serve a purpose, but it is short-lived. The key to getting something out of those types of cognitive activities sort of relates to the first principle of seeking novelty.
Once you master one of those cognitive activities in the brain-training game, you need to move on to the next challenging activity. Figure out how to play Sudoku? Now move along to the next type of challenging game.
There is research that supports this logic. A few years ago, scientist Richard Haier wanted to see if you could increase your cognitive ability by intensely training on novel mental activities for a period of several weeks. They used the video game Tetris as the novel activity, and used people who had never played the game before as subjects I know—can you believe they exist?!
What they found, was that after training for several weeks on the game Tetris, the subjects experienced an increase in cortical thickness, as well as an increase in cortical activity, as evidenced by the increase in how much glucose was used in that area of the brain. Basically, the brain used more energy during those training times, and bulked up in thickness—which means more neural connections, or new learned expertise—after this intense training.
And they became experts at Tetris. Cool, right? However, they remained just as good at Tetris; their skill did not decrease. The brain scans showed less brain activity during the game-playing, instead of more, as in the previous days. Why the drop? Their brains got more efficient. Once their brain figured out how to play Tetris, and got really good at it, it got lazy. Efficiency is not your friend when it comes to cognitive growth. In order to keep your brain making new connections and keeping them active, you need to keep moving on to another challenging activity as soon as you reach the point of mastery in the one you are engaging in.
You want to be in a constant state of slight discomfort, struggling to barely achieve whatever it is you are trying to do, as Einstein alluded to in his quote. This keeps your brain on its toes, so to speak. When I say thinking creatively will help you achieve neural growth, I am not talking about painting a picture, or doing something artsy, like we discussed in the first principle, Seeking Novelty. When I speak of creative thinking, I am talking about creative cognition itself, and what that means as far as the process going on in your brain.
Contrary to popular belief, creative thinking does not equal "thinking with the right side of your brain". It involves recruitment from both halves of your brain, not just the right. In order to do this well, you need both right and left hemispheres working in conjunction with each other.
Sternberg has been on a quest to not only understand the fundamental concept of intelligence, but also to find ways in which any one person can maximize his or her intelligence through training, and especially, through teaching in schools. As part of a research study, The Rainbow Project [pdf], he created not only innovative methods of creative teaching in the classroom, but generated assessment procedures that tested the students in ways that got them to think about the problems in creative and practical ways, as well as analytical, instead of just memorizing facts.
He wanted to find out if by teaching students to think creatively and practically about a problem, as well as for memory, he could get them to i Learn more about the topic, ii Have more fun learning, and iii Transfer that knowledge gained to other areas of academic performance.
He wanted to see if by varying the teaching and assessment methods, he could prevent "teaching to the test" and get the students to actually learn more in general. He collected data on this, and boy, did he get great results. In a nutshell? On average, the students in the test group the ones taught using creative methods received higher final grades in the college course than the control group taught with traditional methods and assessments. But—just to make things fair— he also gave the test group the very same analytical-type exam that the regular students got a multiple choice test , and they scored higher on that test as well.
That means they were able to transfer the knowledge they gained using creative, multimodal teaching methods, and score higher on a completely different cognitive test of achievement on that same material. Sound familiar? I mentioned earlier that efficiency is not your friend if you are trying to increase your intelligence.
Unfortunately, many things in life are centered on trying to make everything more efficient. This is so we can do more things, in a shorter amount of time, expending the least amount of physical and mental energy possible. Take one object of modern convenience, GPS. GPS is an amazing invention. I am one of those people GPS was invented for. My sense of direction is terrible. I get lost all the time. So when GPS came along, I was thanking my lucky stars. But you know what?
After using GPS for a short time, I found that my sense of direction was worse. If I failed to have it with me, I was even more lost than before. So when I moved to Boston—the city that horror movies and nightmares about getting lost are modeled after—I stopped using GPS.
I had a new job which involved traveling all over the burbs of Boston, and I got lost every single day for at least 4 weeks. I got lost so much, I thought I was going to lose my job due to chronic lateness I even got written up for it. But—in time, I started learning my way around, due to the sheer amount of practice I was getting at navigation using only my brain and a map.
I began to actually get a sense of where things in Boston were, using logic and memory, not GPS. I can still remember how proud I was the day a friend was in town visiting, and I was able to effectively find his hotel downtown with only a name and a location description to go on—not even an address.
It was like I had graduated from navigational awareness school. Technology does a lot to make things in life easier, faster, more efficient, but sometimes our cognitive skills can suffer as a result of these shortcuts, and hurt us in the long run. Although not identifying direct causal links, an Imperial College London survey of over , people found that those who read a lot scored more highly for verbal intelligence and gamers scored more highly for working memory.
The most effective known intelligence booster? A University of South Wales study suggested that aerobic exercise can increase levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor, a hormone essential for new brain cells and connections. Studies that use a single test to estimate intelligence before and after an intervention are using less reliable and more variable scores bigger standard errors than studies that combine scores from a battery of tests.
Change scores are never easy to interpret and require sophisticated statistical methods and research designs with appropriate control groups. If you try a training intervention in individuals all of whom have pre-intervention scores below the population mean, for example, re-testing with or without any intervention, may result in higher scores due to the statistical phenomenon of regression to the mean, or due to simple test practice, especially if equivalent alternative forms of the test are not used.
Quasi-experimental designs like post-test only with large samples and random assignment do not have all the same interpretation difficulties as pre-post designs. They have promise but most reviewers are more inclined to value pre-post changes. Latent variable techniques also avoid many of the difficulties of pre-post interval scale changes and they have promise in large samples Ferrer and McArdle, When change scores are used, it is important to identify individual differences even within a group where the average change score statistically increases after an intervention.
Imagine a group of students received cognitive training and others received some control intervention. The mean change score in the training group may statistically show a greater increase than the controls. How many of the individuals who received the training actually show an increase? Do they differ in any way from the individuals in the same group who do not show an increase?
Does item analysis show whether increased scores are due more to easy test items or hard ones? What about any individuals in the control group that show change score increases as large as shown in the training group?
If all participants ultimately get the same training, will the rank order of individuals based on the post-training score be any different than the rank order based on the pre-training scores? If not, what has been accomplished? Most studies do not report such analyses, although newer training studies are addressing issues of multiple measure assessment of intelligence and individual differences Colom et al.
Burgaleta et al provide a good example of showing IQ changes subject-by-subject Burgaleta et al. Nonetheless, the main point is that to make the most compelling argument that intelligence increases after an intervention, a ratio scale of intelligence is required. None yet exists and meaningful progress may require a new way of defining intelligence based on measureable brain or information processing variables. For example, gray and white matter density in specific brain regions assessed by imaging and expressed as a profile of standard scores based on a normative group might substitute for intelligence test scores Haier, Work by Engle and colleagues suggests that working memory capacity and perceptual speed are possible ways to assess fluid intelligence Broadway and Engle, ; Redick et al.
He argued that the construct of intelligence could be replaced in favor of ratio scale measures of speed of information processing assessed during standardized cognitive tasks like the Hick paradigm. Such measures, for example, would help advance research about the underlying neurophysiology of mental speed and might lead to a more advanced definition of intelligence.
Its time has come. Let's get to work! This is a formidable challenge and a major priority for intelligence researchers. Collaboration among psychometricians and cognitive psychologists will be key.
There are now a number of studies that fail to replicate the claims of increased intelligence after short-term memory training and various reasons are proposed Colom et al. Given our narrow focus here, we note one failure to replicate also assessed working memory capacity and perceptual speed; no transfer effects were found Redick et al. For now, cognitive training results are more inconsistent than not, especially for putative intelligence increases. Nonetheless, it is encouraging that cognitive researchers are working on these issues despite a pervasive indifference or negativity to intelligence research in Psychology in general and for many funding agencies.
In the broader context, intelligence includes more than one component. However, the construct of interest usually is defined by psychometric methods as a general factor common to all mental abilities called the g -factor Jensen, Fluid intelligence, the focus of several cognitive training studies, is one of several broad intelligence factors and it is highly correlated to g.
I've been able to teach children to be better in mathematics without teaching them mathematics. You can teach a child to better utilize their ability to plan, and that improves their academic performance not only in math, but in reading comprehension. So, what I would say, is we didn't make the children smarter, but we taught them how to use what they have more efficiently, and better. Understanding changes in IQ also requires carefully considering how intelligence is being measured.
People confuse ability with knowledge. We all can study and improve our vocabulary. But I would argue that doesn't make us any smarter. The best way to measure intelligence is to measure those abilities that underlie the acquisition of knowledge, separately from the knowledge we have. Yes, your IQ can change over time. But [IQ] tests give you the same answer to a very substantial extent, even over a period of year.
The older you are, the more stable your test score will be. The most volatility in IQ scores is in childhood, mostly in adolescence. Offhand I can't think of a reason why it would be, it just seems to be the case.
Also, the average IQ of people is changing over time. Basically, people are gaining in modern industrialized societies. IQs are increasing three points per decade.
0コメント