The scientific evidence for Dual N Back improving fluid intelligence is actually fairly weak as far as I can tell, see this critique and the other studies discussed:<p><a href="http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20FAQ#criticism" rel="nofollow">http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20FAQ#criticism</a><p>My personal theory is that solving difficult math and programming problems is a better use of time than doing working memory training exercises. I'd guess that solving math and programming problems improve working memory just as fast as playing 'brain games', and they have the additional benefit of improving one's math and programming skill.<p>Of course, this is just a guess of mine that is unsupported by any experimental evidence.
Not yet HN ready and I wanted to post this later .
I have been working on a HTML 5 implementation , If you want to try the tasks mentioned.<p><a href="http://alpha.brainturk.com" rel="nofollow">http://alpha.brainturk.com</a><p>the chein task can be found here
<a href="http://alpha.brainturk.com/chein" rel="nofollow">http://alpha.brainturk.com/chein</a><p>Please let me know your suggestions on how to improve this
. I need to make a few more changes for this to be played on ipad but for now works with the keyboard
Superficially, the answer to this question is, obviously, yes. We reason spatially and with mental simulation, but we also reason by applying the linguistic conventions learned from our culture (e.g., "if this statement were false, then ...").<p>What most people seem to fail to realize is just how different people are from each other cognitively, and how many different ways there are of getting to a particular conclusion. "Intelligence" is like a country's GDP -- a complicated, non-stationary mess that, taken together and measured in a way our culture deems important, ends up representing our "Gross Cognitive Product".<p>So, dual n-back probably improves working memory in most people, which will probably improve their problem solving ability, most of the time. But there are, without a doubt, many other subtle, complicated, and idiosyncratic aspects of cognition that are likely to have far more dramatic effects if appropriately tweaked.
Their sidebar explaining IQ scores seems a little silly. I'd like to see a citations for average scores of Nobel prize winners. Also, who went back in time to administer an intelligence test to Mozart?
Wow, the timing here seems auspicious.<p>Lately I've been thinking about the limitations that being human puts on a programmer. We work very hard (and should) to reduce cognitive load on ourselves through good development tools that act as crutches for memory---REPL's and good debuggers allow us to try something and see what happens, as opposed to simulating a multivariate operation in our heads. Intellisense and easily-available docs allow us to cheat a bit on learning(and what I really mean is memorizing) API's.<p>But what if we could do these things without relying on JIT computer aids? What if I could simulate more levels of abstraction in my head? The private dream of many a Lisper(this one, anyway)---writing programs that write programs that write programs---would be a bit more attainable.<p>I've been using Anki with great success to learn API's and keyboard shortcuts (Anki+emacs is a match made in heaven), but I despaired at my inability to hold the <i>whole</i> stack, from top to bottom, in my head at once.
So I posted a badly phrased question on Stack Exchange, ("How can I increase the number of levels of abstraction I can reason about at once?), and kept Googling. Eventually I came across Jaeggi's research. It looks promising, but hasn't passed the wide-replication test yet. I'm glad this came up on HN, because I'm eager to see more research in the area and get come confirmation or refutation of the findings.<p>In the meantime, the premise of Jaeggi's conclusion raises two questions---if working memory can be trained, can it decay with disuse? In that case, are with our fancy debugging tools mere shadows of Real Programmers that used to walk the earth? The other question is this---if the brain is likened to a computer, working memory corresponds to RAM. If we are successful at training working memory and making people "smarter," will we in the future face a bottleneck of processing speed rather than space?
I did some moderately serious dual n-backing a year or so back in an effort to improve my chess game. Of course it wasn't a remotely scientific experiment so I can't tell if it really helped, but I did feel that my ability to concentrate increased, if not my ability to reason. I felt more able to take a breath after working out a variation and take a few seconds to really concentrate on the final (imagined) position and scrutinize it for tricks.<p>(My USCF rating did go up fairly significantly around then but it's no proof of any causation, plus I was doing plenty of other things at the same time to increase my chess results anyway.)
It's interesting to think about what <i>intelligence</i> really means. In some ways, this has been frequently discussed (ie multiple types of intelligence) and in other ways it seems that this has never been discussed (ie what are we actually talking about when we call someone intelligent?) Is intelligence the ability to learn something quickly? Is it the ability to understand something quickly? Is it the ability to solve a particular type of problem quickly?<p>Depending on what we mean, "Can you make yourself smarter?" has fairly obvious answers.<p>Start by looking at children. In one regard, we rarely learn faster than when we are kids. Everything is foreign to us, and we are constantly learning, our brains little sponges in a wet world. But clearly, our 25-year old selves could solve far more complex problems than our 6-year old selves. Did we get smarter between 6 and 25?<p>In the same vein, think about how severely retarded people are described: "He has the mind of a 4 year old." Whether that description is medically accurate or not isn't the point. We certainly think of children as intellectually inferior, even though all of our brains started out that way.<p>So what changed? Why is a 25 year old "more intelligent" than a 6 year old? Is it the creation of new neural pathways? Is it simply the way they've learned to look at the world or quickly apply answers and processes they already know to fit new problems?<p>Maybe you can provide more answers? Because it seems to me that the fact that we got to where we are today indicates that you can absolutely make yourself more intelligent, depending on how you define that. But I'm open to objections.
This reminds me of an old New York Times article that categorized people into two categories:<p>1. Those who believe that intelligence is fixed from birth, and<p>2. Those who believe that intelligence can be improved<p>The finding was that folks in category (1) tended to be fearful of being wrong, and had trouble succeeding in life whereas the folks in category (2) felt it was OK or good to make mistakes, and tended to be more successful.<p>EDIT: article is <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/business/06unbox.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/business/06unbox.html</a>
When learning to program, my first major project was a feature-loaded N-back in C#/XNA. I crammed in every option I could think of. The game and code is available at <a href="http://workingmemoryworkout.codeplex.com" rel="nofollow">http://workingmemoryworkout.codeplex.com</a>, and it's worth noting that the inspiration came from Brain Workshop. (<a href="http://brainworkshop.sourceforge.net/" rel="nofollow">http://brainworkshop.sourceforge.net/</a>)
Another generic "intelligence" booster, for certain definitions of intelligence, is learning about cognitive biases and certain reasoning skills - "rationality". When I read the Sequences (<a href="http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences" rel="nofollow">http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences</a>) on Less Wrong (<a href="http://lesswrong.com/" rel="nofollow">http://lesswrong.com/</a>), I think my reasoning and analysis skills improved, and I was able to avoid some thinking mistakes, such as by training myself to be "fair" to all sides of an argument. I also found reading the Sequences fun; their subjects include interesting mental puzzles. Go check them out.
I'm probably just being overly critical here but his example of "deciding if a number is odd or even in a matter of seconds" seems odd, I think 2nd graders and up can tell you in half a second or less whether or not a number's even or odd.<p>He says:<p>"In addition to working memory, researchers are seeking to improve fluid intelligence by training other basic mental skills — perceptual speed (deciding, in a matter of seconds, whether a number is odd or even), visual tracking (on a shoot-’em-up computer game, for instance) or quickly switching between a variety of tasks."<p><a href="http://i.imgur.com/k9PXE.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/k9PXE.png</a>
from the article, one of the games is <a href="http://www.soakyourhead.com/dual-n-back.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://www.soakyourhead.com/dual-n-back.aspx</a><p>update:<p>You need a speaker to play<p>should say "Press A when the box appears in the same location _since the start of the game_"
Working memory is convenient for mental dexterity. But it doesn't help you see deeper associations between the apparently unrelated, which is the true crux of genius and of all revolutionary insight and progress, IMHO. <i>That</i> comes from long-term associative memory, seeded by persevering immersion and experiment.<p>IQ!=genius. Genius is what you <i>do</i>.
Don't know about the specifics in the article, but modern research is showing (has already shown, I think...) that the brain shows far more plasticity than they thought not long ago.
Things (not specificially intelligence) that were thought to be invariable turn out to not exist.... the brain can learn.
While I can't read the article. My answer to this question was always along the lines of "Oh I'm sure you can, but the problem is that thanks to the Dunning-Kruger effect, <i>dumb people won't feel that they need to put in the effort to get smarter.</i>"<p>So the smart get smarter and the dumb get dumber; so to speak.