Skip to comments.Can You Make Yourself Smarter?
Posted on 04/22/2012 10:39:10 PM PDT by neverdem
Early on a drab afternoon in January, a dozen third graders from the working-class suburb of Chicago Heights, Ill., burst into the Mac Lab on the ground floor of Washington-McKinley School in a blur of blue pants, blue vests and white shirts. Minutes later, they were hunkered down in front of the Apple computers lining the rooms perimeter, hoping to do what was, until recently, considered impossible: increase their intelligence through training.
Can somebody raise their hand, asked Kate Wulfson, the instructor, and explain to me how you get points?
On each of the childrens monitors, there was a cartoon image of a haunted house, with bats and a crescent moon in a midnight blue sky. Every few seconds, a black cat appeared in one of the houses five windows, then vanished. The exercise was divided into levels. On Level 1, the children earned a point by remembering which window the cat was just in. Easy. But the game is progressive: the cats keep coming, and...
So began 10 minutes of a remarkably demanding concentration game. At Level 2, even adults find the task somewhat taxing. Almost no one gets past Level 3 without training. But most people who stick with the game do get better with practice. This isnt surprising: practice improves performance on almost every task humans engage in, whether its learning to read or playing horseshoes.
What is surprising is what else it improved. In a 2008 study, Susanne Jaeggi and Martin Buschkuehl, now of the University of Maryland, found that young adults who practiced a stripped-down, less cartoonish version of the game also showed improvement in a fundamental cognitive ability known as fluid intelligence: the capacity to solve novel problems, to learn, to reason, to see connections and to get to the bottom of things...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
>>>Dan Hurley is an award-winning writer, a former contributing editor of Psychology Today, and serves as a vice president of the American Society of Journalists and Authors. He is the creator of the #1 online writing-site, “Amazing Instant Novelist.”
Whew! At first, I thought he was another alleged “expert” from Harvard... like Howard Gardner of “multiple intelligences” fame.
Sooo... if all the school systems buy these computer systems, then IMAGINE how smart people we’ll have. /s/
I wonder if the alleged IQ increase ends up decreasing if the computer is not used.
Yes, watch MSNBC.
with a teleprompter, yes you can!
Wait a minute, aren’t IQ tests supposed to be bogus?
Wasn’t “The Bell Curve” marginalized on that basis?
The NYSlimes better be careful - they don’t realize what can of worms they are re-opening with such articles.
Sure. Just put on a pair of glasses duh..
I just wanted to throw this out there...
How many of you realize that IQ tests are designed to give men and women the same average score? In other words, when they’re making the tests, if a question is answered correctly more often by men than by women, it is thrown out. Did you know this? It turns out that without this cheat, men would outscore women by several points.
Why would they do this? What else are they doing to our vital bodily fluids?
Smarter than what?..
Serious? Have they always done this?
You can certainly make yourself dumber.
You could start by cancelling your subscription.
Dr Sheldon Cooper was born a genius and puts the lie to all this bootstrapping idiocy.
This article has some problems. Here are some:
Presumably, the boys who attended the school were Lutherans.
Von Neumann, Wigner, Szilard, Teller, Erdos were all Jewish.
Also, of these five, only Von Neumann and Wigner went to the Lutheran High School.
Also the article speculates that the Lutheran High School was a neighborhood school, when it was a private school with students from all over Budapest.
I never post anything that needs a subscription.
While I'm always curious about neuroscience, I'm more interested in the potential to treat traumatic brain injury(TBI) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, attention deficit disorder(ADHD/ADD).
The message in the graphic wasn’t directed to you ....... I liked the photo of DR Cooper and it came with the admonition.