Brain training exercises might just make you better at brain training exercises

And instead of perhaps trying to solve a hard challenge at once in a day, such as learning something very complex, it's helpful to comprehend parts of it and spread it out over a course of a week, not unlike how it's better to learn an instrument by practicing a little bit everyday instead of cramming it into one day a week.

Furthermore, instead of just jumping for a quick answer (e.g. StackOverflow, forums, answers sheet), it's helpful to try to solve it on your own even if it takes a much longer time. There's a big difference between 'knowing' something because you saw the solution and reverse engineered the method, vs. coming up with it yourself.

Some of this might be stupidly obvious but it's nice to know there is science/other anecdotes behind it.

That course is something I wish I had known decades ago before I went to University and in the workplace.

He wouldn't just learn something new. He'd learn it and then navigate in its world.

But I think if I grew up being taught that intelligence != knowledge + trivia, I wouldn't have spent my earlier years fighting the impostor syndrome on a near daily basis.

"Why can’t an average person make those kinds of gains as well? Or even more gains, considering they don’t have the additional challenge of an autism spectrum disorder?"

This betrays a complete lack of understanding of the body of knowledge around intellectual improvement. No one would say "we took this broken Honda and were able to get a 100% improvement in it's speed, and gas efficiency by just fixing the leaky gas hose, if we can make these kinds of gains with a broken car imagine what we do with a new Honda". This would of course be as silly.

Perhaps the only "real" secret to intelligence is avoiding malnutrition or any type of poisoning such as from lead.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but the linked article doesn't really seem to present evidence for its claims, either.

The article brings up children, who are already known to have very variable IQ compared to the IQ of adults. From what I've seen, the evidence for IQ as such not being very fluid is more solid than for it being fluid. At the very least, the statement that anyone can increase their IQ would sound really strange in light of current research.

Furthermore, raising the IQ of disadvantaged children and then saying that means IQ is like the analogy in another comment where being able to take a broken car from 0 MPH to 100 MPH by fixing it implies you'd be able to take a Honda and make it run 100 MPH faster. It doesn't work that way. Consider that the average person gets no such help. The more intelligent ones often get negative help.

IQ, though, is not necessarily the same as intelligence, or even the ability to learn new information. I don't disagree with the advice the article suggests, and I think it has a high chance of raising one's intelligence, I'm just not sure if it would raise one's IQ. Given that we don't really know the relationship between IQ, g, and "intelligence" yet, even that claim is definitely suspect. There's nothing obvious about it, unless you sign up for the pain == progress hypothesis, which is the just-world hypothesis.

The greater danger is that we have convinced quite a few people that intelligence == IQ and not being able to raise one means you can't raise the other. I'm pretty sure my IQ hasn't risen one point for the past 6 years but I definitely feel more intelligent per the definition in the italicized paragraph.

And I think the point of brain exercises was specifically to raise the raw processing power of the brain without information aids, i.e., IQ.

This exists. It's called an audience and publishing something every day will get you good real quick.

A lot of famous authors started as journalists and more recently bloggers for exactly this reason.

For a couple of years I've been a high school computer science teacher. Having 50 students making the same errors over and over, made me very good at spotting syntactical errors in other people's code. Furthermore, I was also able to easily identify "beginners' bad patterns", which are basically the inverse of the usual best practices. The downside of this was that some students tried to use me as a human compiler/linter because I was seemingly able to spot the problematic areas in their code in almost no time at all. Of course, at such moments I had been monitoring their progress for some time. Nevertheless, it helped me enormously to support my students in learning to debug their own code because I could have them reflect on their own practices and design choices.

Just an anecdote.

Another anecdote: I experienced a noticeable improvement in my abilities at Chess by studying and playing Go. I'm still not real good at Chess because I haven't studied it, but I can now beat people I didn't used to be able to beat.

http://www.gimpel.com/html/bugs.htm

A strong understanding of cognitive biases, logic and informal fallacies allows one to better reason from first principles. Without this, even an intelligent person will only think derivative thoughts because their truth value will come from their similarity to those of authority figures or what they read in a book.

If one can reason from first principles, one can come up with ideas that haven't been thought before and develop them in a structured way without getting stuck in delusions. It's also important to be able to detect mistakes in one's thinking, especially when there is no one else to ask if you're wrong.

This doesn't just happen with students who are bad at math. If you sit in on most introductory advanced math classes (eg. introduction to abstract algebra), you will see the same thing: students imminently understand what is being asked when it is phrased in terms of something concrete, but have more difficulty answering even basic questions when they are asked in the abstract.

The main difference, in my experience, is that in advanced classes, a "concrete" example would be something like the set of 2x2 real valued matrixes; so non mathamaticians do not recognize it as being simple.

There is also the difference that experienced mathematicians have learned that "simple" things will become simple with enough exposure; and have honed the ability brute force their way through while they get that exposure.

I was with you until I read that. Maybe I just don't buy into the whole meditation thing, but from where I stand, at least Chess seems like it actively improves/encourages/practices strategic thinking skills.

Flynn believes that the rising IQ scores over the generations are due to us dealing better with abstractions and using logic on these abstractions.

There's an even more extreme example with street kids in Brazil who had de facto knowledge of mathematics (they worked as peddlers) but weren't able to do the same thing they did during daily life in a school setting.

I wouldn't say that concept transfer is a skill, however. The two things that come to my mind when I think of the issue of transfer are: the feeling of a student being hung up on a particular problem, anxiously waiting for a solution to come up to his mind; people who seemed to try to tackle lots of different problems from lots of different angles (Wheeler, Feynman). So it seems to me to be more constrained by openess to experience on one hand (the willingness to try and fail) and creativity (willingness to look for and propose solutions) on the other, both of which are more like inclinations than skills.

https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/devlin_05_05.htm...

For example, proving an identity looks like solving an equation. So that is why many students naturally put down a proof that looks like solving an equation. And it can be a proof if the observation is that for each x, the statement holds as all steps are observable. Students rarely make that last step, however, because the pattern they are following breaks down: 1=1 has no expression of x. They kind of just move on at that point.

By contrast, someone trained in mathematics would most likely prove an identity by taking one side and transforming it into the other side as they have the experience of that flow of proofs and the goal there is clear: one stops with the right-hand side.

It is not logical thinking, but logical pattern application. Transfer skills are similarly learned. We all have them, after all. I have never met anyone bothered by counting markers being a different skill than counting pebbles. But that is a skill transfer too. It just happens at such a young age and is so ubiquitous that we don't even notice it.

I would be surprised if meditation helps with any of this. It helps with many other things, such as being more aware of events, particularly emotional states, as that is the pattern being developed, but it is hard to imagine it will help bridge the gap of checkbook balancing to general numbers. What one needs is the experience of numbers in multiple contexts.

The pattern in the patterns is the path to abstraction and it no doubt takes a number of patterns to get there. And learning the different kinds of abstractions requires different kinds of patterns.

Games are about reasoning and reacting to external stimuli. Meditation usually involves more passive observation of self's inner self.

To put it another way - games are dissociative, while meditation (the mindfulness kind anyway) aims to be anti-dissociative.

One more point of view: I can play a game hours without being aware of the time that has gone by. When meditating I'm aware of each breath I take.

I have no vocabulary to exactly specify how games and meditation are different - I can only state that the experience is different.

I currently do language learning and music apps, AFAIK I am actually learning things that are directly applicable to the real world and that supposedly have cognative benefits correlated with having learned them traditionally. Do those benefits evaporate when I learn them in "games"?

The evidence for mindfulness and meditation is questionable at best. There's a lot of bad science, undeclared conflicts of interest and weak studies in that space.

> For example, I was just reading one about how meditation can reduce pain perception by 40% and that measurement was backed up by MRI imaging of reduced brain activity in pain centers.

This is a completely meaningless statement. What kind of study is that based on? An RCT or observational data? How many participants? A single study or a metaanalysis? Has it been replicated? Was it preregistered? All of that matters to decide whether that's just "a study" or reliable science.

There are plenty of studies showing that brain games work, too. They're just of low quality.

I recommend drawing as a meditative activity. The following books have been helpful:

Pragmatic Thinking and Learning by Andy Hunt

Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards

Search Inside Yourself by Chade-Meng Tan

The games usually focus on the frontal cortex development (http://www.webmd.com/balance/features/believe-it-or-not-comp..., admittedly with with mixed success https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20407435) while meditation seems to lead to an increase of brain cells in hippocampus https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3004979/

Let me give you an example of a popular form of meditation:

You sit up straight in a comfortable place, not doing anything special, just listening to what's going on in your environment and tuning into sensations in your body (this happens automatically as long as you haven't 'assigned' yourself something else to do; once you get into this state, you might recognize it as familiar from when you were younger, or from a time when you were feeling particularly like "everything's okay" and you are just at home). Before starting this, you understand that you are going to watch/listen/feel your breath—and if you've had some practice, you don't try to do anything about it: you just wait and feel whatever comes up as time passes. Eventually it's like the queue of other things clears and you start tuning into your breath more and more until the sensations become very rich and relaxing.

Thoughts will continue emerging for a good long while during this, and meditation teaches a certain response to noticing their arrival: you acknowledge them, as if you'd heard a small sound in the room, turned around and saw what it was, and then returned to what you were doing (often times meditators are encouraged to use a quick label for whatever mental thing comes up, e.g. 'thinking' or 'fear')—then, assuming you haven't got too wrapped up in the thought (either by following it, or by trying somehow to making it go away), the sensations of your breath return to the forefront.

Two big things come from this: you become more relaxed afterward, which aids task performance in most domains directly; and, you learn all these pitfalls and techniques for maintaining focus on what you choose to focus on. One big one, for instance, is that a lot of people approach focus by seeing distractions as problems to be solved (whether they are thoughts, pains, environmental sounds—whatever), but eventually you see that what works is maintaining an equanimous attitude toward distractions, and simply returning your attention to what you're doing, while understanding you might get pulled away again shortly (and it's not enough to just 'know' this; you have to practice it).

Lastly, meditators are typically encouraged to practice being in this 'aware but not trying to do anything' state while doing other things than sitting, which has got to help with generalizing. (Not to mention the desired mental state is just domain agnostic to begin with. When you're doing a task you either believe you know how to do it and go at it confidently, with little meta-thought; or you're observing/critiquing how you're doing it and trying to change routines you've stored for doing it. In the first state you're way more tuned into sense data which is relevant for actually executing the task in the present moment. Meditation helps you learn to enter the first state intentionally.)

The point about exercise or college is they are guaranteed to have some benefit, unlike playing a brain training game, which has at least a 50-50 chance of being a waste of time.

The reality is that our brains are constantly changing. I could memorize a thousand fart jokes and my brain would have changed. Does that make me more intelligent?

I think the "brain training" apps are only really good for older or other people who are at risk of dementia, or other cognitive diseases, and even then I'm pretty sure the science is out on most of that.

No wonder the brain training industry gets bashed every now and then when a new study debunks most of the allegedly benefits. So we have a group of folks that don't understand what they are doing and are publishing bad papers, and another group of folks that read those papers without fully understanding what is going on under the hood and create a "brain training" app. The fine on Lumosity by FTC was fair and expected.

At the very least, playing a sufficient amount of Chess against sufficiently skilled opponents will teach you things that are easily generalizable.

Just one example, thinking strategically over the long term (several moves ahead), rather than short term (only thinking about your next move).

In general, better physical workout and diet does genuinely improve brain function.

Hard for the brain to function well in a 500lbs diabetic body...

Brain training does work for some people; around 20% of the population won't gain anything from it, regardless of what you make em do. And even for those that works it has limited scope on the benefits.

Everyone really should try it. I firmly believe there is nothing that you can do in 20 mins a day that will improve your life more.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_on_meditation

> Finally, at the end of the study, we gave everyone different versions of the cognitive ability tests. The results were clear: the dual n-back group was no higher in fluid intelligence than the control groups. Not long after we published these results, another group of researchers published a second failure to replicate Jaeggi and colleagues’ findings.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brain-training-do...

Using an app to learn a new language, extend your vocabulary, or learning new arithmetic tricks would seem to fall into this category. If the Elevate app actually does any of these, then I'd call it "learning" instead of "brain training".

This indicates that the medium effect size is due to methodological problems and that n-back training does not increase subjects’ underlying fluid intelligence

In this case though they slipped up, "might just make you better" means "likely to make you better" and the "just" no longer conveys "only" at all anymore.