Brain Exercises - How to Increase Your Intelligence
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For several generations it's been commonly believed that our childhood IQ remains more or less stable throughout life. But the science on the matter contradicts this belief, disproving Goddard's prejudice. Whereas some degree of intelligence derives from inheritance, a large part is shaped and developed through our environment and formative experience.
But if IQ isn't fixed, it follows that we must be able to do something to make ourselves smarter. Until earlier this year there had been a dearth of concrete ideas about how to successfully accomplish this.
Training Working-Memory Increases Fluid Intelligence
It was Graeme Halford (a Professor of Psychology at the University of Queensland) who first proposed that the brain functions that work on problem-solving compete for processing cycles with the functions that control working-memory. Halford theorized that our capacity to hold things in our mind overlaps with the functions of fluid intelligence.
A team of researchers from the Universities of Michigan and Bern picked up on Halford's theory and took it a step further. If working-memory can be increased by training, they posited, perhaps this would lead to an increase in fluid intelligence. To test this idea, the scientists developed a task that would develop a subject's working-memory.
To measure fluid intelligence the researchers employed questions from a standard IQ test. The study recorded significant increases in fluid intelligence in all participants compared to a control group who weren't trained. After only 19 days of training, each participant in the trained group (as compared to the control group) improved on the fluid intelligence test by more than 40%.
When the results of this study were published in April, they garnered a lot of attention in the media and the scientific community. But the biggest reaction came from people who read about the results and wanted to try the training for themselves. (In the interests of full disclosure, my company has released a commercial version of the training. Feedback from those who've used the training at home have confirmed the researchers' findings; some even taking before and after IQ tests on their own dime and recording substantial increases in IQ scores on full-scale certified tests.)
With this groundbreaking study we can at last leave behind us the concept of immutable intelligence. I've no doubt that Alfred Binet would be pleased to see his principles vindicated, even though it took more than a century to come about.
Article Source: Articlelogy.com
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