Intelligence Research  

Expanding upon one of the most-read New York Times Magazine features of 2012, the new book Smarter penetrates the hot new field of intelligence training to reveal what some researchers call a revolution in human intellectual abilities-and others insist is all a bunch of baloney.

Can you make yourself, your kids, and your parents smarter?

Expanding upon one of the most-read New York Times Magazine features of 2012, in Smarter: The New Science of Building Brain Power, author Dan Hurley penetrates the hot new field of intelligence research to reveal what researchers call a revolution in human intellectual abilities. Shattering decades of dogma, scientists began publishing studies in 2008 showing that “fluid intelligence”—the ability to learn, solve novel problems, and get to the heart of things—can be increased through training.

But is it all just hype? With vivid stories of lives transformed, science journalist Hurley delivers practical findings for people of every age and ability. Along the way, he narrates with acidtongued wit his experiences as a human guinea pig, road-testing commercial brain-training programs, learning to play the Renaissance lute, getting physically fit, even undergoing transcranial directcurrent stimulation.

“Dan Hurley isolates just what cognitive exercise boosts intelligence.  Anyone who doubts that environment can make a real difference to cognition should start with this book.”
—James R. Flynn author of What is Intelligence

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Smarter speaks to the audience that made bestsellers out of Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain and Moonwalking with Einstein.

Smarter also goes after those who claim that intelligence doesn’t matter. Writers like Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers), Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence) and Paul Tough (How Children Succeed) have made the case that IQ pales in importance to hard work, grit, and emotional poise. As Dan writes: “Certainly IQ is not everything; perhaps it’s not even the most important thing, but it’s definitely one of them. It’s not the only reason, but it’s one of the reasons that Warren Buffett, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates are richer than you are. (Both Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook, and Sergey Brin, who cofounded Google, were selected in adolescence, in part on the basis of scoring high on standardized tests, to attend the Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins, as was Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, better known as Lady Gaga.) It’s how Gladwell, Goleman, and Tough wrote such awesome books. Because they’re smart, and because, as politically incorrect as it has become in polite society to say so, intelligence still matters.”

Hurley is an award-winning science journalist whose 2012 feature in the New York Times Magazine, "Can You Make Yourself Smarter?" was one of the magazine's most-read articles of the year. In 2013 he published another article for the magazine, "Jumper Cables for the Mind," describing his experience with transcranial direct-current stimulation. He has written on the science of increasing fluid intelligence for the Washington Post and Neurology, and is featured in the 2013 PBS documentary, "Smarter Brains." His books have been excerpted in Wired and Discover magazine. Hurley has written nearly two dozen science articles for the New York Times since 2005.

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 Intelligence  

The Flynn effect is the substantial increase in average scores on intelligence tests all over the world over the last century. In a recent TED Talk, the discoverer of the effect, James Flynn talks about how changes in the way we think have had surprising (and not always positive) consequences.

The Flynn effect — the fact that each generation scores higher on an IQ test than the generation before it. Are we actually getting smarter, or just thinking differently? In a fast-paced spin through the cognitive history of the 20th century, moral philosopher James Flynn suggests that changes in the way we think have had surprising (and not always positive) consequences.

IQ tests are updated periodically. For example, the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC), originally developed in 1949, was updated in 1974 and 1991. The revised versions are standardized to 100 using new standardization samples.

In ordinary use IQ tests are scored with respect to those standardization samples. The only way to compare the difficulty of two versions of a test is to conduct a separate study in which the same subjects take both versions. Doing so confirms IQ gains over time.

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The average rate of increase seems to be about three IQ points per decade in the US on tests such as the WISC. The increasing raw scores appear on every major test, in every age range and in every modern industrialized country although not necessarily at the same rate as in the US using the WISC.

The increase has been continuous and roughly linear from the earliest days of testing to the present. Though the effect is most associated with IQ increases, a similar effect has been found with increases of semantic and episodic memory.

Flynn is a  New Zealand-based researcher who discovered the effect of intelligence changes, believes that environmental factors play a greater role in intelligence than genetics does.

His latest findings, discussed in his 2012 book Are We Getting Smarter?: Rising IQ in the Twenty-First Century, also suggest that women are not only as intelligent as men, but superior when it comes to executive function. “Women, when exposed to modernity, do equal men for IQ,” Flynn said to TV ONE’s Greg Boyed. “But in the formal educational setting where they apply their intelligence, they’re outperforming men all hollow.”

Flynn, a retired university professor, has written extensively about the connection between ongoing equality and IQ gains, democracy and human rights. He also wrote a compelling book about books, The Torchlight List, in which he lists 200 must-reads.

Flynn also has researched how to improve intelligence. Each day our minds experience a deluge of conversation, lectures, newspapers, TV, the Internet, and more. But what should we really be paying attention to? Flynn poses the most challenging question of all: Who is to be the master of all this information – you or the modern world? It is you, he claims, who must be the gatekeeper that filters out what is worth remembering. Otherwise you may find yourself at the mercy of a life that you can only manage day by day.

His book, How To Improve Your Mind offers great insights into how to become an information master in the age of information overload.


SOURCE  TED

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