Can you make yourself, your kids, and your parents smarter? Expanding upon one of the mostread New York Times Magazine features of 2012, Smarter 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 Dan 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, roadtesting commercial braintraining programs, learning to play the Renaissance lute, getting physically fit, even undergoing transcranial directcurrent stimulation. Smarter speaks to the audience that made bestsellers out of Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain and Moonwalking with Einstein.
[...]... smartphones the only thing we can make smarter? What is this intelligence thing anyway: is it some kind of forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge? Does it not have a real, physical basis? Are these researchers who tell us it can never be changed actually scientists—or are they high priests of an IQ cult? Are we not smart enough to figure out how to make ourselves smarter? The first new answer in a... explain why driving a car while using a hands-free cell phone is just as dangerous as holding the phone in your hands: because your ability to make sense of things is a precious, limited commodity The most colorful and outrageous example I have ever seen of a powerful working memory in practice is credited to my oldest friend, Dan Feigelson Beginning when we were teenagers, he discovered that he could,... that impersonation is a major problem for standardized tests As I drove, I wondered whether, if I got smarter through my training regimen, would that mean I would actually be able to write a better book? Would I be better at playing, say, chess? There was something unnerving about this idea of becoming smarter Was it really possible? It all seemed insane, like I was preparing to jump out of a plane without... and Buschkuehl’s 2008 study, the new science of building brain power is barely six years old This book tells the story of the birth of that science and what it may mean for anyone who ever wanted to be smarter CHAPTER 1 Expanding the Mind’s Workspace Our story begins in June 1997 on a kayak floating on Mälaren, Sweden’s third-largest lake, its nooks and crannies sprawling for more than fifty miles west... Moonwalking with Einstein, are powerful as far as they go But in the end, they are tricks They help you remember lists of stuff But they do not help you make sense of those lists They do not make a person smarter They do not improve working memory Here, perhaps, I should make clear the important distinction between short-term memory and working memory It’s a distinction that many journalists writing for... million Americans who are losing not only their long-term memory but their ability to follow a conversation and balance their checkbook due to Alzheimer’s that intelligence doesn’t matter (By the way, the smarter you are, the later in age you are ever likely to be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, due to something researchers call “cognitive reserve.”) Try telling people with major depression or schizophrenia... equivalent of vision tests, not as training programs Practicing them made about as much sense as practicing an IQ test over and over, since improvement on the test would not mean you were actually getting smarter, but only that you were getting better at taking the test But here is where the results proved startling: the seven kids who trained adaptively not only got better on the trained tasks, they also... Klingberg’s study also did much better on the Raven’s progressive matrices, long regarded as psychology’s single best measure of fluid intelligence If the results were to be believed, the kids had gotten smarter “This is impossible This doesn’t work.” In June 2002, having just completed the Swiss equivalent of a master’s degree in psychology at the University of Bern, Switzerland, Martin Buschkuehl was... claiming to have done just that: “Training of Working Memory in Children with ADHD.” After five weeks, twenty-five minutes a day, of practicing a bunch of goofy little working-memory tests, the kids were smarter and less hyperactive? “This is impossible,” Buschkuehl muttered to himself after reading the paper “This doesn’t work.” He showed the paper to his girlfriend and fellow psychology graduate student,... task.” He put the computer back on the desk “So on that 2008 study,” I said, “where the students increased their score on the matrices test by 40 percent, does that mean they literally became 40 percent smarter? ” “I would certainly not say that,” answered Jaeggi “We used just one measure of intelligence or reasoning behavior What we need to do in the future is to incorporate some real-world measures to . repeated twice in a row. That’s 1-back. That’s easy. So if you hear the list n-a-m-m-a-m, you press the button when you hear the second m, right? But now let’s try 2-back: this time, you have to. using her own favorite working-memory test, the N-back. Perhaps, they agreed, they should see if they could run a study with the N-back as their training task. This N-back is quite the beast, not. Yourself Smarter? ” on April 18, 2012; and in the Education Living section of the New York Times as “The Brain Trainers” on October 31, 2012. REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA ISBN 97 8-0 -6 9 8-1 484 9-9 While