11 ms·

You can increase your intelligence

519 points by bootload 15y ago

aresant 15y ago
The bullet point version extracted from the 4,474 words: 1. Seek Novelty 2. Challenge Yourself 3. Think Creatively 4. Do Things The Hard Way 5. Network
- jacques_chester 15y ago
  Perhaps in meeting point 4, we should skip your summary?
  - thaumaturgy 15y ago
    Yeah, the TL;DR thing really grates on my nerves. Are we so miswired now that we can't take the time out to read 4,500 well-written words on a subject, and instead need it condensed to a list appropriate for Twitter? Is there really no other value in the entire essay other than the list items themselves?
    - Groxx 15y ago
      Are we so not-interested in other things that we take several other articles' worth in time to read a single one, when a concise summary could get the point across just as well? Why stop at using 4500 words? Why not put it in an hour-long Youtube video, and not provide a description / transcription? Sometimes all you want is the shorter option.
      - thaumaturgy 15y ago
        I have serious doubts about the value of an endless series of ever-shorter summaries in the name of consuming more information.
        jacques_chester 15y ago
        And indeed some summaries lack the colour, pathos and delight of the original. Here's a summary of Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: * There was a republic. * Then there was an empire. * Christianity emerged. * The empire split up. * The empire declined. More or less factually what you might glean from Gibbon, but it lacks the sheer delight of that fascinating masterpiece of the English language.
        Eliezer 15y ago
        Thanks! You saved me a lot of time there.
        rowaway1 15y ago
        tl;dr summaries bad
        rowaway1 15y ago
        tl;dr summaries bad
    - jamesbritt 15y ago
      Are we so miswired now that we can't take the time out to read 4,500 well-written words on a subject, ... I'd love too, but there's a lot to choose from, so some guidance on what may be worth the time investment is invaluable.
      - thaumaturgy 15y ago
        I hear you, but that way lie dragons. Ultimately, you will be the only person capable of deciding whether a particular thing was worth your time or not, and you can only decide that in hindsight, having experienced it. The finest accumulation of the greatest reviews of a work will not make up for the fact that you might glean some valuable tidbit from it that nobody else noticed. You also have to accept that you simply aren't going to ever be able to know everything about everything that you'd like to; you will have to make choices, pick and choose. Accepting that, would you then rather memorize a pile of summaries and tidbits and factoids, or would you rather take the time to read and consider a complete discourse on a subject? For example: I'm sitting here thinking about my argument and wondering if I'm really just full of shit, but then I suddenly remembered a bit of "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman", where Feynman talks about some of his experiences in Brazil, and how the teaching at the time resulted in students that had memorized everything but understood very little. And it strikes me that this relatively recent addiction to summaries is very similar to that kind of Brazilian education.
        Groxx 15y ago
        An interesting comparison. Largely accurate, I think, but I do want to make a counter-point: reading a summary != memorization The problem with students who only memorize is that they are incapable of creation. They can answer a set of questions, but not use what they know to respond to something new. A summary, in the best cases (far from always achieved, of course), is all that is needed to get a thinking brain from zero to the conclusions the full text would bring you to. Any gaps can be logically deduced and filled through mental effort, ideally more quickly than it could be told. Especially if one already has experience in the area. Memorization, meanwhile, creates gaps, and provides no tools to fill them.
    - wging 15y ago
      Not every summary is necessarily a TL;DR. Even for the most diligent reader, a cogent explanation of what exactly the author believes to be the most important information can help clarify and distill knowledge.
    - Deestan 15y ago
      Depends on what you use the TL;DR for. For me, the TL;DR summary helps me get the gist of the article and then decide whether I should read the whole thing or not. If I just go ahead and read, and after 1200 words, the author promotes inhaling magnet dust or sleeping 4 hours each night as a way to improve intelligence, the entire article is a complete waste of time and I will be annoyed. The summary, as presented here, firmly places the article in my "read when I get home" queue.
      - pygy_ 15y ago
        tl;dr summaries often address the 'what', but they neglect the 'how', which is often as useful to decide whether or not to read something.
    - Jach 15y ago
      Go read How to Read a Book. The second level of reading is about skimming, picking up the general point of something, then deciding if it's worth a careful, analytical (and perhaps synoptic) reading. I don't think this article deserves it, so I didn't give it the full time to read everything, and since I've read other stuff in this area before, I think the bullet points really do sum it up.
      - pygy_ 15y ago
        The article focuses on the motivations behind these advices and how to apply them in practice. A big part of thevalue of the article comes from this and your bullet list fails to account for that.
      - lurker19 15y ago
        Or How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read http://www.amazon.com/x/dp/1596914696 http://www.amazon.com/x/dp/1596914696
    - rglover 15y ago
      I had absolutely zero idea what TL;DR meant until I saw it here and looked it up. I agree with you, this article was extremely well-written and I feel that just summarizing the key points doesn't really help you to understand what the author was trying to convey. It's unfortunate that we've trained ourselves as a society to participate in info-snacking (gorging ourselves on as many tiny bits of info as possible). This is why there's so much short-form content. As opposed to circulating great content like this article (and subsequently discussing it), we go out of our way to publish less-circumstantial lists ad nausea that make us feel like we've done/learned something.
      - thaumaturgy 15y ago
        > ...info-snacking... Wow, this is going to be my favorite new piece of vocabulary for a while. It's perfect.
    - nvarsj 15y ago
      I read the original 4,500 words, and I don't think it adds anything beyond the tl;dr. Most opinion pieces are terrible at being concise.
  - FrojoS 15y ago
    I like the humor but I disagree. Its called an abstract and I'm glad that you can't publish any peer reviewed science paper without it. You can only read a mind blogging tiny fraction of all the information out there. Even in a narrow field of specialization its hard to read everything relevant. Whats better? Reading 10 articles in depth or reading 9 articles in depth and 10 abstracts? I'm pretty sure, the latter is better for point 4. I really wish, abstracts where standard for longer online posts. Maybe, there should be a field for abstracts in the HN submission form.
    - FrojoS 15y ago
      I apologize, if the second paragraph sounds rude. That was not my aim. Now its to late to edit.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
  - adamc 15y ago
    Not indefinitely. Eventually you will likely run low on novelty.
- thaumaturgy 15y ago
  Hmm. So, according to #2, I should be able to help increase my own intelligence by playing Sudoku?
  - dcreemer 15y ago
    In fact that exact strategy is specifically addressed in the article. The answer is yes, but only until you get good at it. Then you need to move on to something else.
    - thaumaturgy 15y ago
      I know. I wanted to see if I could hook anyone into responding who hadn't bothered to read the whole article, because they read the summary points instead. I was hoping to make a point in a sneaky, underhanded way.
      - craze3 15y ago
        If somebody were to have read only the summary points and agreed with your post, you would have caught somebody who misunderstood the article because they didn't read it...but how do you plan to "hook" the people that skim articles and extract the summary points themselves? Aren't they just as susceptible to misunderstanding the content as well? I believe that summaries [and skimming] are definitely useful and do not detract from the spreading of information or the gaining of knowledge. In fact, I would say that they contribute to both.
        thaumaturgy 15y ago
        > Aren't they just as susceptible to misunderstanding the content as well? Yep! The only distinction between skimming and reading a summary is that skimming at least gives you the opportunity to spot something interesting, stop, and read it fully. I also wouldn't confuse speed-reading with skimming, so long as the speed-reading gleaned as much from the text as slower reading would. > I believe that summaries [and skimming] are definitely useful and do not detract from the spreading of information or the gaining of knowledge. In fact, I would say that they contribute to both. I disagree. I think that they are dangerous tools -- useful occasionally, but too easy to abuse. I'm being more vocal about it nowadays because "TL:DR" has recently become a "thing", and I'm concerned that larger numbers of people seem to be considering it acceptable to skip reading a 10-minute article in favor of reading a 10-second summary of it. Rather than debate that here though, I'd just point to my comments elsewhere on this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2563051 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2563051
bendmorris 15y ago
You can increase your measurable intelligence. This is only true to the degree that intelligence tests measure what they're supposed to.
- hackinthebochs 15y ago
  I don't agree with the downvotes here. I tend to think people downvote short comments without really attempting to understand the value they're bringing to the conversation. Conversely, people assume a long comment is insightful. It is a reasonable explanation that any increase in intelligence is just the subject getting better at the tests that are measuring intelligence. If you take the same IQ test over again, you're likely going to score a bit higher. But this certainly doesn't mean the act of taking the test made you smarter. You're simply getting better at using the tool used to measure intelligence. This made sense at least before the most recent study cited with the Dual-N-Back training. You're going to be hard pressed to explain that away.
- arethuza 15y ago
  I've suspected this for a long long time - when I was a young kid (around 5 years old) my oldest sister was at university studying psychology with an emphasis on child development - so for years I got bombarded with "intelligence" tests to the point where I could do them very easily and I used to get extremely high results in IQ tests in my teens. However, I've never thought I was particularly brighter than anyone else, just that I had done a lot of these silly tests and had acquired the skill of doing them.
  - rimantas 15y ago
    But by doing that you also acquired a skill to spot patterns and connections: I'd argue, that this ability is important part of intelligence.
    - arethuza 15y ago
      I've thought about this quite a bit (I was motivated by those experiences to go into AI research - which I did for six years) and I'm not convinced that the kinds of problems used in the tests I did map too well to "real world" problems - in essence all of the difficulties have already been abstracted away. Of course, I have no evidence for this but the fact that the logical/symbolic approaches to AI failed to live up to their early promise more or less supports my views.
ambertch 15y ago
'#4 Do Things The Hard Way' I think this is so important for our young generation b/c everybody is trying to "hack" or "game" the system. The problem is that you don't actually internalize things by hacking your way through So it depends on your goals. Let's take a computer science degree for example: if your goal is to do investment banking and having a CS/engineering degree from a top university really puts you apart from all those econ/business majors in the finance interviews (which it does), sure hack your way through CS/EE: you're not planning to go into that field anyways so copy-change homework and study past tests to hack the system and get a good GPA. But if you're doing CS to be a software engineer, you DON'T want to hack your way through, you'd want to "do things the hard way" and really learn the material.
- ankrgyl 15y ago
  I think your definition of "hack" is confusing with respect to this forum. Hackers are people who understand the system so well that they can manipulate it to their advantage. Good hackers have done things the hard way and use those experiences to make things easy in the future.
  - Retric 15y ago
    You can hack collage just like any other complex system. The #1 secret to a inflated GPA in collage is knowing which teachers take and which ones to avoid. I knew one teacher who basically gave every student an A in his advanced math classes. "Ok so everyone has an A, but we have 2 weeks left and I have more material I would like to cover so please show up." Not only that but he actually knew how to teach so you where ready to use the material in the future. Unfortunately I knew a history teacher who like to base essay questions off of obscure references in the ~3,000 pages of text you where apparently supposed to memorize for the test. In his words two A's in the same class was a sign he was going soft.
  - hackinthebochs 15y ago
    I'm no authority but I'm gonna have to disagree. Hackers as understood on this forum are people who find the shortest path to an intended outcome. This usually takes a novel way of looking at the system. But it by no means requires a complete understanding of it. Hacking requires a clever insight that allows you to quickly accomplish your goal. Total understanding is usually too time consuming for the hacker.
tokenadult 15y ago
The author raises a number of interesting questions after citing several path-breaking research studies. Why, indeed, aren't school systems adopting some of these techniques known to improve children's learning and problem-solving ability? Quite a few mathematicians have written critiques of United States practice in teaching primary and secondary school mathematics, informed by practice in other countries, for example Hung-hsi Wu, http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/Lisbon2010_2.pdf http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/Lisbon2010_2.pdf http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/Lisbon2010_3.pdf http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/Lisbon2010_3.pdf http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/Lisbon2010_4.pdf http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/Lisbon2010_4.pdf http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/NoticesAMS2011.pdf http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/NoticesAMS2011.pdf Richard Askey, http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/fall1999/amed1.pdf http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/fall1999/amed1.pdf http://www.math.wisc.edu/~askey/ask-gian.pdf http://www.math.wisc.edu/~askey/ask-gian.pdf Roger E. Howe, http://www.ams.org/notices/199908/rev-howe.pdf http://www.ams.org/notices/199908/rev-howe.pdf Patricia Kenschaft, http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf and James Milgram. ftp://math.stanford.edu/pub/papers/milgram/milgram-msri.pdf ftp://math.stanford.edu/pub/papers/milgram/report-on-cmp.html All those mathematicians think that the United States could do much better than it does in teaching elementary mathematics in the public school system. I think so too after living in Taiwan twice in my adult life (January 1982 through February 1985, and December 1998 through July 2001). Taiwan is not the only place where elementary mathematics instruction is better than it is in the United States. Chapter 1: "International Student Achievement in Mathematics" from the TIMSS 2007 study of mathematics achievement in many different countries includes, in Exhibit 1.1 (pages 34 and 35) http://pirls.bc.edu/timss2007/PDF/T07_M_IR_Chapter1.pdf http://pirls.bc.edu/timss2007/PDF/T07_M_IR_Chapter1.pdf a chart of mathematics achievement levels in various countries. Although the United States is above the international average score among the countries surveyed, as we would expect from the level of economic development in the United States, the United States is well below the top country listed, which is Singapore. An average United States student is at the bottom quartile level for Singapore, or from another point of view, a top quartile student in the United States is only at the level of an average student in Singapore. I've been curious about mathematics education in Singapore ever since I heard of these results from an earlier TIMSS sample in the 1990s. The article "The Singaporean Mathematics Curriculum: Connections to TIMSS" http://www.merga.net.au/documents/RP182006.pdf http://www.merga.net.au/documents/RP182006.pdf by a Singaporean author explains some of the background to the Singapore math materials and how they approach topics that are foundational for later mathematics study. I am amazed that persons from Singapore in my generation (born in the late 1950s) grew up in a country that was extremely poor (it's hard to remember that about Singapore, but until the 1970s Singapore was definitely part of the Third World) and were educated in a foreign language (the language of schooling in Singapore has long been English, but the home languages of most Singaporeans are south Chinese languages like my wife's native Hokkien or Malay or Indian languages like Tamil) and yet received very thorough instruction in mathematics. I hope that all of us here in the United States can do at least that well in the current generation. P.S. Another reply mentions the Flynn effect (secular increase in raw scores on IQ tests from generation to generation in most countries worldwide), and links to the Wikipedia article. Thanks for bringing that up. Being aware that the Wikipedia article on that subject has been subject to edit wars that have gone to the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Race_and_intelligence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/... I think it may be helpful to link to another source about the Flynn effect http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/flynn-beyond/ http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/flynn-beyond/ that has had the influence of better informed and more impartial editors. There are several good discussions of the Flynn effect in recent books on IQ testing, and citations to those can be found in Wikipedia user space. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/IntelligenceCitations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Intellige...
notsosmart 15y ago
I really enjoyed this article. I wish she had given specific tips on how to think more creatively. She mentioned what happens "when" you think creatively, but did not really go into the "how."
- vishaldpatel 15y ago
  If you come up with a few on your own, then you're thinking creatively!! =)
- jfoutz 15y ago
  Try to fit math ideas. What does zero mean? what does one mean? does addition make sense? can you take the limit of something? What if something blows up to infinity? So... try cars. zero being no car. one being a "standard" car. say a honda civic. how much honda can you take a way and still be a car? like taking the limit at zero. There are crazy efficient cars with tiny little internal combustion engines and bicycle wheels that get 100+ mpg but piss poor acceleration. hmm. what would a car be at the other end? a ferrari? Do cars associate? do cars commute? :) Creativity isn't painting. It's looking at the same crap you look at all the time and playing with it. Math has a lot of tricks for labeling things, then seeing what shows up when you try do stuff with the labels. New dimensions will pop out.
latch 15y ago
Anyone interested in this might also be interested in the broader Flynn effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect I've always believed that additional/new stimulations is largely responsible for our increased intelligence.
- absconditus 15y ago
  Flynn recently found the opposite effect among British teens: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/4548943/British-teenagers-have-lower-IQs-than-their-counterparts-did-30-years-ago.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/4548943/B...
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
MetallicCloud 15y ago
Excellent post. It's made me realise how much I have been taking the easy road lately. I used to always be looking into new areas to learn about new things and really pushing myself, but I realise now that lately to solve a problem I reach for a familiar way to solve it, because it's easier and faster. This could be the reason why I am getting less satisfaction with solving problems lately. Time to get back on that horse...
mberning 15y ago
I take exception to the 'Think Creatively' item. It's kind of like making a to-do list with 'lose 20 lbs' as a line item. Much easier said than done. That being said, I think one of the best ways to improve your creative thinking is to work directly with other people that YOU consider to be creative thinkers. At my previous job I always enjoyed working with the CEO, sales, and marketing folks because they almost always approached problems from a completely different angle than I would. Experiencing how others ideate is very mind opening and often times humbling.
abeppu 15y ago
The author juxtaposes his recommendations against his unnamed professor's claim that intelligence is genetic and fixed at birth, pointing out that there are broad classes of behaviors that can improve our intelligence -- but he neglects half of the response to his professor's genetic predestination view, namely the whole host of physical/chemical/biological factors impacting both brain development and cognition later in life. As just an example, I was recently impressed by a study (http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/270/1529/2147.full.pdf http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/270/1529/2147...) demonstrating improvements on both a memory task and an intelligence task through creatine supplements. The explanation suggested by the authors (and it looks like some other literature as well, though I haven't really dug into it yet) is basically that creatine is part of a mechanism for rapid ATP synthesis, that the ion pumps in your neurons run on ATP, and that if you're sometimes "fuel-limited" (their word) creatine levels matter, in the same way that oxygen and glucose do. This make sense, but I was quite surprised to read this, I think in part because I'm used to seeing my brain as being a relatively static thing. Stepping down a level of abstraction, and thinking about the instant to instant chemical resource needs of individual cells and gates is kind of eye-opening. And for all I know there's hundreds or thousands of other documented effects, where increasing or decreasing the presence of some reagent associated with running ion pumps, or growing axons or synthesizing neurotransmitters has some measurable effect on intelligence.
- dcreemer 15y ago
  minor nit: the author is female.
- wging 15y ago
  You can probably induce similar effects (in the reverse direction) by entering states of dehydration or low blood sugar. I've observed that dehydration can be a big cause of poor performance on my part.
- gwern 15y ago
  > As just an example, I was recently impressed by a study (http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/270/1529/2147... http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/270/1529/2147...) demonstrating improvements on both a memory task and an intelligence task through creatine supplements. I would point out that Rae 2003 was conducted using vegetarian subjects. When you run tests on normal subjects, no benefit is found. To quote what I've said the last few times creatine came up http://www.gwern.net/Nootropics#creatine http://www.gwern.net/Nootropics#creatine : > I’m not a bodybuilder, but my interest was sparked by several studies showing IQ boosts (such as Rae 2003; however, Rae 2003 was only in vegetarians, who are known to be creatine deficient (much like B vitamins, creatine is usually gotten in one’s diet from meat), and the other studies are likewise of subpopulations. Rawson 2008 studied young omnivores who are not stupid or sleep-deprived, and found no mental benefit. The summary of the DNB ML discussion was that Rawson 2008 is a broad null result for healthy young omnivores who aren’t idiots. Vegetarians, idiots, the sleep-deprived, and old people may benefit from creatine supplementation.
bluekeybox 15y ago
My addition (6): observe others, be inquisitive about other people. This will not only help you appear smarter to others (believe it or not, there is such thing as behaving/appearing smart), but will also help you with networking because (a) people respond positively when someone displays genuine interest in them (well as long as you are being nonthreatening) and (b) smart people tend to seek out others like them.
bumbledraven 15y ago
http://sourceforge.net/projects/brainworkshop/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/brainworkshop/ is an open-source implementation of the dual n-back test for Windows, Linux, and OS-X. "Following training of working memory using the dual n-back test, the subjects were indeed able to transfer those gains to a significant improvement in their score on a completely unrelated cognitive task. This was a super-big deal."
- Splines 15y ago
  FYI, this game crashed on me at launch (W2K8 R2). Setting the exe to run under WinXP compat mode made it work. It's also devilishly hard. Dual 1-back is easy, but Dual 2-back is surprisingly difficult. I think it'd be fun to get good at this :).
  - Kutta 15y ago
    I usually play it at d9b with 2,5 sec intervals. I intend to advance higher though.
kmt 15y ago
I always slack when it comes to number 5 (networking). I'm always busy with something "more important" and kinda have to force myself to get out and meet people.
ashbrahma 15y ago
Dual N-Back test: http://www.soakyourhead.com/ http://www.soakyourhead.com/
keyle 15y ago
You can play dual n-back here: http://cognitivefun.net/test/5 http://cognitivefun.net/test/5
- joelthelion 15y ago
  There is also a very good app for android, called n-back if I recall correctly. Very handy to kill time during the daily commute!
  - phucnguyen 15y ago
    Hey Joel, try out mine too ;) https://market.android.com/details?id=phuc.entertainment.dualnback https://market.android.com/details?id=phuc.entertainment.dua...
eande 15y ago
Excellent article and here is a link to an open source Dual N-Back game, have fun. http://brainworkshop.sourceforge.net/ http://brainworkshop.sourceforge.net/
- pella 15y ago
  "Join the Dual N-Back, Brain Training & Intelligence forum & mailing list at Google Groups for some interesting discussions on dual n-back, memory, intelligence and the brain" http://groups.google.com/group/brain-training http://groups.google.com/group/brain-training
anthuswilliams 15y ago
#4) Do things the hard way. It's hard for me to agree with this. In principle, I want to bemoan the decline of my ability to spell as a result of auto-correct. But I think that casts an unfair negative light on the idea of doing things "the easy way". Think about math. There is no question that the Arabic numbering system makes doing math easier. Why should I to go back to scratching out base-60 cuneiform? I can challenge myself just as easily by pushing on to more powerful and abstract mathematical concepts made possible by timesavers like the Arabic numbering system. I'm sure that having access to high-level languages limits my understanding of the bits and bytes. But I can use these new tools of abstraction to do things that I would have found impossible if I were writing machine code. I'm not sure I see the value in doing things the hard way, when my brain will be challenged enough probing the depths of what these new innovations have made possible. I think the author misses one crucial part of intelligence - intelligence, insofar as it is about abstract thought, is positively correlated with the sorts of things I can do without thinking about them.
- melvinmt 15y ago
  "Any fool can make things bigger and more complex. But it takes a genius to move in the opposite direction." - Einstein Solving things in the easiest way, is often the hardest challenge there is.
  - sophacles 15y ago
    Simple and easy are not the same thing. Please stop being lazy and bother to learn the words you are using. It is simple to do, just read the dictionary. This really isn't easy tho, you have to cross reference other words, take time to do so, bother to remember, and so on - lots of effort.
- bluedanieru 15y ago
  Doing math in base-60 would have a number of benefits over base-10. 60 is highly factor-able, after all (this is probably why it was chosen as base for some numbering systems, e.g. time). Had you compared Roman numerals with Arabic numerals, I'd agree with you.
- 15y ago
chalst 15y ago
The key study cited by the article is available in full as a PDF. Jaeggi, Buschkuehl, Jonides, and Perrig (2008), Improving Fluid Intelligence with Training on Working Memory: http://lowellinstitute.com/downloads/BrainLearning/Fluid%20Intelligence.pdf http://lowellinstitute.com/downloads/BrainLearning/Fluid%20I...
dopkew 15y ago
"So to make the most of your intelligence, improving your working memory will help this significantly" This reminds me of how RAM is underestimated in improving computer performance.
- sayemm 15y ago
  Excellent analogy
IvarTJ 15y ago
PDD-NOS – Pervasive Development Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, is not necessarily a mild form of autism. The meaning is in the name. It means that the diagnosed doesn’t fit more specific diagnoses such as Kanner’s autism or Asperger syndrome. Even though someone who’s autistic fail to show intelligence through a test, I believe they still may be very intelligent and can show this better through training. I personally still believe reasoning skills can be trained by learning new heuristics at least.
chegra 15y ago
I don't think people on HN need more intelligence. After 120 IQ points, it doesn't make much of a difference to winning a Nobel Prize. I think what people need here is an increase in their willpower to see boring stuff through to the end.
- adaml_623 15y ago
  I disagree totally. I find it annoying to have a limited short term memory. When coding multiple files I wish I had a little more space in my brain.
- barry-cotter 15y ago
  http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2008/07/annals-of-psychometry-iqs-of-eminent.html http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2008/07/annals-of-psychometry-i... [Review] Anne Roe: The Making of a Scientist After 120 IQ points, it doesn't make much of a difference to winning a Nobel Prize. Not true Test (Low / Median / High) Verbal 121 / 166 / 177 Spatial 123 / 137 / 164 Mathematical 128 / 154 / 194
  - xutopia 15y ago
    Still though the correlation with making money and intelligence is really low (I think I read it was 0.2%). And what if wether or not you are happier might be inversely proportional to how intelligent you are? I'm just saying that being happy with your life should not be based on winning a Nobel prize.
  - ArbitraryLimits 15y ago
    If you follow that link, you'll find that in the study referenced the researchers made up their own more or less ad hoc tests of "ability" precisely because "most IQ tests are not good indicators of true high level ability (e.g., beyond +3 SD or so)." It seems to me this study supports the idea that IQ is irrelevant to winning a Nobel Prized past a threshold instead of refuting it.
    - barry-cotter 15y ago
alexandros 15y ago
The subtitle for this piece is '5 ways to maximize your cognitive potential'. Shouldn't that be -realize- your cognitive potential, or maximize the utilization of your cognitive potential or some such? What good does it do to maximize my potential?
pella 15y ago
"Brain fog - poor memory, difficulty thinking clearly etc" http://www.drmyhill.co.uk/wiki/Brain_fog_-_poor_memory,_difficulty_thinking_clearly_etc http://www.drmyhill.co.uk/wiki/Brain_fog_-_poor_memory,_diff...
c0nsilience 15y ago
Good god, really? 1. Seek Novelty 2. Challenge Yourself 3. Think Creatively 4. Do Things The Hard Way 5. Network How on earth did Scientific American allow an article that resembles a content-farm link-bait piece on its site? (Other than the obvious reasons for traffic.) I have seen those five rules on articles like, "How to Become a Better Writer," and "How to Stick to a Workout Program."
gwern 15y ago
'I know what the statistics say - but gosh darn, I have an anecdote to the contrary!' OP spends a lot of time & space on Jaeggi 2008... and she quietly omits all of the other results and considerations: http://www.gwern.net/N-back%20FAQ#criticism http://www.gwern.net/N-back%20FAQ#criticism
mannicken 15y ago
From what I saw, society reserves creativity to artists, writers, composers, and other "creative types". For some reason creativity has become associated with creating useless inventions that no one will ever buy; sometimes people see creative person as a loner who spends days and nights on drugs throwing paint around or mumbling crazily. In reality, creativity is, perhaps, our only advantage when trying to not get killed by other animals. Picking up a stick and fighting off a larger animal -- great example of creative solution. It's novel. Before, no one ever thought to pick up a stick. Perhaps sticks were viewed as merely lying there, to be carefully avoided in case somebody steps on one. Maybe those who tried to pick up sticks were viewed as crazy, sinful by some sort of primitive Republicans (not that Republicans now are more evolved :)... I mean, who cares about sticks, animals were usually fighting with their own teeth, hands, or horns (I wish I had a horn). It's not until an animal with a stick has beaten the shit out of another animal without a stick for calling him crazy, that the sticks became a useful tool. I mean, face it -- we're just animals, and without creative approaches to our problems we wouldn't be talking about this on a giant electronic mind-network-thing.
john2x 15y ago
Haven't read the entire article yet, but(this is off topic), highlighting any word on the website shows a "Learn More" tooltip which automatically loads more info for the highlighted text. Awesome.
- amirmc 15y ago
  Wow. I'd never have discovered that if I hadn't read your comment, so thanks. I'm not sure how useful it would be in general but for an article like this quickly looking up terms seemed pretty neat (e.g fluid intelligence).

519 points by bootload 15y ago

The bullet point version extracted from the 4,474 words: 1. Seek Novelty 2. Challenge Yourself 3. Think Creatively 4. Do Things The Hard Way 5. Network

jacques_chester 15y ago
Perhaps in meeting point 4, we should skip your summary?
- thaumaturgy 15y ago
  Yeah, the TL;DR thing really grates on my nerves. Are we so miswired now that we can't take the time out to read 4,500 well-written words on a subject, and instead need it condensed to a list appropriate for Twitter? Is there really no other value in the entire essay other than the list items themselves?
  - Groxx 15y ago
    Are we so not-interested in other things that we take several other articles' worth in time to read a single one, when a concise summary could get the point across just as well? Why stop at using 4500 words? Why not put it in an hour-long Youtube video, and not provide a description / transcription? Sometimes all you want is the shorter option.
    - thaumaturgy 15y ago
      I have serious doubts about the value of an endless series of ever-shorter summaries in the name of consuming more information.
      - jacques_chester 15y ago
        And indeed some summaries lack the colour, pathos and delight of the original. Here's a summary of Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: * There was a republic. * Then there was an empire. * Christianity emerged. * The empire split up. * The empire declined. More or less factually what you might glean from Gibbon, but it lacks the sheer delight of that fascinating masterpiece of the English language.
        Eliezer 15y ago
        Thanks! You saved me a lot of time there.
      - rowaway1 15y ago
        tl;dr summaries bad
      - rowaway1 15y ago
        tl;dr summaries bad
  - jamesbritt 15y ago
    Are we so miswired now that we can't take the time out to read 4,500 well-written words on a subject, ... I'd love too, but there's a lot to choose from, so some guidance on what may be worth the time investment is invaluable.
    - thaumaturgy 15y ago
      I hear you, but that way lie dragons. Ultimately, you will be the only person capable of deciding whether a particular thing was worth your time or not, and you can only decide that in hindsight, having experienced it. The finest accumulation of the greatest reviews of a work will not make up for the fact that you might glean some valuable tidbit from it that nobody else noticed. You also have to accept that you simply aren't going to ever be able to know everything about everything that you'd like to; you will have to make choices, pick and choose. Accepting that, would you then rather memorize a pile of summaries and tidbits and factoids, or would you rather take the time to read and consider a complete discourse on a subject? For example: I'm sitting here thinking about my argument and wondering if I'm really just full of shit, but then I suddenly remembered a bit of "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman", where Feynman talks about some of his experiences in Brazil, and how the teaching at the time resulted in students that had memorized everything but understood very little. And it strikes me that this relatively recent addiction to summaries is very similar to that kind of Brazilian education.
      - Groxx 15y ago
        An interesting comparison. Largely accurate, I think, but I do want to make a counter-point: reading a summary != memorization The problem with students who only memorize is that they are incapable of creation. They can answer a set of questions, but not use what they know to respond to something new. A summary, in the best cases (far from always achieved, of course), is all that is needed to get a thinking brain from zero to the conclusions the full text would bring you to. Any gaps can be logically deduced and filled through mental effort, ideally more quickly than it could be told. Especially if one already has experience in the area. Memorization, meanwhile, creates gaps, and provides no tools to fill them.
  - wging 15y ago
    Not every summary is necessarily a TL;DR. Even for the most diligent reader, a cogent explanation of what exactly the author believes to be the most important information can help clarify and distill knowledge.
  - Deestan 15y ago
    Depends on what you use the TL;DR for. For me, the TL;DR summary helps me get the gist of the article and then decide whether I should read the whole thing or not. If I just go ahead and read, and after 1200 words, the author promotes inhaling magnet dust or sleeping 4 hours each night as a way to improve intelligence, the entire article is a complete waste of time and I will be annoyed. The summary, as presented here, firmly places the article in my "read when I get home" queue.
    - pygy_ 15y ago
      tl;dr summaries often address the 'what', but they neglect the 'how', which is often as useful to decide whether or not to read something.
  - Jach 15y ago
    Go read How to Read a Book. The second level of reading is about skimming, picking up the general point of something, then deciding if it's worth a careful, analytical (and perhaps synoptic) reading. I don't think this article deserves it, so I didn't give it the full time to read everything, and since I've read other stuff in this area before, I think the bullet points really do sum it up.
    - pygy_ 15y ago
      The article focuses on the motivations behind these advices and how to apply them in practice. A big part of thevalue of the article comes from this and your bullet list fails to account for that.
    - lurker19 15y ago
      Or How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read http://www.amazon.com/x/dp/1596914696 http://www.amazon.com/x/dp/1596914696
  - rglover 15y ago
    I had absolutely zero idea what TL;DR meant until I saw it here and looked it up. I agree with you, this article was extremely well-written and I feel that just summarizing the key points doesn't really help you to understand what the author was trying to convey. It's unfortunate that we've trained ourselves as a society to participate in info-snacking (gorging ourselves on as many tiny bits of info as possible). This is why there's so much short-form content. As opposed to circulating great content like this article (and subsequently discussing it), we go out of our way to publish less-circumstantial lists ad nausea that make us feel like we've done/learned something.
    - thaumaturgy 15y ago
      > ...info-snacking... Wow, this is going to be my favorite new piece of vocabulary for a while. It's perfect.
  - nvarsj 15y ago
    I read the original 4,500 words, and I don't think it adds anything beyond the tl;dr. Most opinion pieces are terrible at being concise.
- FrojoS 15y ago
  I like the humor but I disagree. Its called an abstract and I'm glad that you can't publish any peer reviewed science paper without it. You can only read a mind blogging tiny fraction of all the information out there. Even in a narrow field of specialization its hard to read everything relevant. Whats better? Reading 10 articles in depth or reading 9 articles in depth and 10 abstracts? I'm pretty sure, the latter is better for point 4. I really wish, abstracts where standard for longer online posts. Maybe, there should be a field for abstracts in the HN submission form.
  - FrojoS 15y ago
    I apologize, if the second paragraph sounds rude. That was not my aim. Now its to late to edit.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
- adamc 15y ago
  Not indefinitely. Eventually you will likely run low on novelty.
thaumaturgy 15y ago
Hmm. So, according to #2, I should be able to help increase my own intelligence by playing Sudoku?
- dcreemer 15y ago
  In fact that exact strategy is specifically addressed in the article. The answer is yes, but only until you get good at it. Then you need to move on to something else.
  - thaumaturgy 15y ago
    I know. I wanted to see if I could hook anyone into responding who hadn't bothered to read the whole article, because they read the summary points instead. I was hoping to make a point in a sneaky, underhanded way.
    - craze3 15y ago
      If somebody were to have read only the summary points and agreed with your post, you would have caught somebody who misunderstood the article because they didn't read it...but how do you plan to "hook" the people that skim articles and extract the summary points themselves? Aren't they just as susceptible to misunderstanding the content as well? I believe that summaries [and skimming] are definitely useful and do not detract from the spreading of information or the gaining of knowledge. In fact, I would say that they contribute to both.
      - thaumaturgy 15y ago
        > Aren't they just as susceptible to misunderstanding the content as well? Yep! The only distinction between skimming and reading a summary is that skimming at least gives you the opportunity to spot something interesting, stop, and read it fully. I also wouldn't confuse speed-reading with skimming, so long as the speed-reading gleaned as much from the text as slower reading would. > I believe that summaries [and skimming] are definitely useful and do not detract from the spreading of information or the gaining of knowledge. In fact, I would say that they contribute to both. I disagree. I think that they are dangerous tools -- useful occasionally, but too easy to abuse. I'm being more vocal about it nowadays because "TL:DR" has recently become a "thing", and I'm concerned that larger numbers of people seem to be considering it acceptable to skip reading a 10-minute article in favor of reading a 10-second summary of it. Rather than debate that here though, I'd just point to my comments elsewhere on this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2563051 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2563051

bendmorris 15y ago

You can increase your measurable intelligence. This is only true to the degree that intelligence tests measure what they're supposed to.

hackinthebochs 15y ago
I don't agree with the downvotes here. I tend to think people downvote short comments without really attempting to understand the value they're bringing to the conversation. Conversely, people assume a long comment is insightful. It is a reasonable explanation that any increase in intelligence is just the subject getting better at the tests that are measuring intelligence. If you take the same IQ test over again, you're likely going to score a bit higher. But this certainly doesn't mean the act of taking the test made you smarter. You're simply getting better at using the tool used to measure intelligence. This made sense at least before the most recent study cited with the Dual-N-Back training. You're going to be hard pressed to explain that away.
arethuza 15y ago
I've suspected this for a long long time - when I was a young kid (around 5 years old) my oldest sister was at university studying psychology with an emphasis on child development - so for years I got bombarded with "intelligence" tests to the point where I could do them very easily and I used to get extremely high results in IQ tests in my teens. However, I've never thought I was particularly brighter than anyone else, just that I had done a lot of these silly tests and had acquired the skill of doing them.
- rimantas 15y ago
  But by doing that you also acquired a skill to spot patterns and connections: I'd argue, that this ability is important part of intelligence.
  - arethuza 15y ago
    I've thought about this quite a bit (I was motivated by those experiences to go into AI research - which I did for six years) and I'm not convinced that the kinds of problems used in the tests I did map too well to "real world" problems - in essence all of the difficulties have already been abstracted away. Of course, I have no evidence for this but the fact that the logical/symbolic approaches to AI failed to live up to their early promise more or less supports my views.

ambertch 15y ago

'#4 Do Things The Hard Way' I think this is so important for our young generation b/c everybody is trying to "hack" or "game" the system. The problem is that you don't actually internalize things by hacking your way through So it depends on your goals. Let's take a computer science degree for example: if your goal is to do investment banking and having a CS/engineering degree from a top university really puts you apart from all those econ/business majors in the finance interviews (which it does), sure hack your way through CS/EE: you're not planning to go into that field anyways so copy-change homework and study past tests to hack the system and get a good GPA. But if you're doing CS to be a software engineer, you DON'T want to hack your way through, you'd want to "do things the hard way" and really learn the material.

ankrgyl 15y ago
I think your definition of "hack" is confusing with respect to this forum. Hackers are people who understand the system so well that they can manipulate it to their advantage. Good hackers have done things the hard way and use those experiences to make things easy in the future.
- Retric 15y ago
  You can hack collage just like any other complex system. The #1 secret to a inflated GPA in collage is knowing which teachers take and which ones to avoid. I knew one teacher who basically gave every student an A in his advanced math classes. "Ok so everyone has an A, but we have 2 weeks left and I have more material I would like to cover so please show up." Not only that but he actually knew how to teach so you where ready to use the material in the future. Unfortunately I knew a history teacher who like to base essay questions off of obscure references in the ~3,000 pages of text you where apparently supposed to memorize for the test. In his words two A's in the same class was a sign he was going soft.
- hackinthebochs 15y ago
  I'm no authority but I'm gonna have to disagree. Hackers as understood on this forum are people who find the shortest path to an intended outcome. This usually takes a novel way of looking at the system. But it by no means requires a complete understanding of it. Hacking requires a clever insight that allows you to quickly accomplish your goal. Total understanding is usually too time consuming for the hacker.

tokenadult 15y ago

The author raises a number of interesting questions after citing several path-breaking research studies. Why, indeed, aren't school systems adopting some of these techniques known to improve children's learning and problem-solving ability? Quite a few mathematicians have written critiques of United States practice in teaching primary and secondary school mathematics, informed by practice in other countries, for example Hung-hsi Wu, http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/Lisbon2010_2.pdf http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/Lisbon2010_2.pdf http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/Lisbon2010_3.pdf http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/Lisbon2010_3.pdf http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/Lisbon2010_4.pdf http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/Lisbon2010_4.pdf http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/NoticesAMS2011.pdf http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/NoticesAMS2011.pdf Richard Askey, http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/fall1999/amed1.pdf http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/fall1999/amed1.pdf http://www.math.wisc.edu/~askey/ask-gian.pdf http://www.math.wisc.edu/~askey/ask-gian.pdf Roger E. Howe, http://www.ams.org/notices/199908/rev-howe.pdf http://www.ams.org/notices/199908/rev-howe.pdf Patricia Kenschaft, http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf and James Milgram. ftp://math.stanford.edu/pub/papers/milgram/milgram-msri.pdf ftp://math.stanford.edu/pub/papers/milgram/report-on-cmp.html All those mathematicians think that the United States could do much better than it does in teaching elementary mathematics in the public school system. I think so too after living in Taiwan twice in my adult life (January 1982 through February 1985, and December 1998 through July 2001). Taiwan is not the only place where elementary mathematics instruction is better than it is in the United States. Chapter 1: "International Student Achievement in Mathematics" from the TIMSS 2007 study of mathematics achievement in many different countries includes, in Exhibit 1.1 (pages 34 and 35) http://pirls.bc.edu/timss2007/PDF/T07_M_IR_Chapter1.pdf http://pirls.bc.edu/timss2007/PDF/T07_M_IR_Chapter1.pdf a chart of mathematics achievement levels in various countries. Although the United States is above the international average score among the countries surveyed, as we would expect from the level of economic development in the United States, the United States is well below the top country listed, which is Singapore. An average United States student is at the bottom quartile level for Singapore, or from another point of view, a top quartile student in the United States is only at the level of an average student in Singapore. I've been curious about mathematics education in Singapore ever since I heard of these results from an earlier TIMSS sample in the 1990s. The article "The Singaporean Mathematics Curriculum: Connections to TIMSS" http://www.merga.net.au/documents/RP182006.pdf http://www.merga.net.au/documents/RP182006.pdf by a Singaporean author explains some of the background to the Singapore math materials and how they approach topics that are foundational for later mathematics study. I am amazed that persons from Singapore in my generation (born in the late 1950s) grew up in a country that was extremely poor (it's hard to remember that about Singapore, but until the 1970s Singapore was definitely part of the Third World) and were educated in a foreign language (the language of schooling in Singapore has long been English, but the home languages of most Singaporeans are south Chinese languages like my wife's native Hokkien or Malay or Indian languages like Tamil) and yet received very thorough instruction in mathematics. I hope that all of us here in the United States can do at least that well in the current generation. P.S. Another reply mentions the Flynn effect (secular increase in raw scores on IQ tests from generation to generation in most countries worldwide), and links to the Wikipedia article. Thanks for bringing that up. Being aware that the Wikipedia article on that subject has been subject to edit wars that have gone to the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Race_and_intelligence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/... I think it may be helpful to link to another source about the Flynn effect http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/flynn-beyond/ http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/flynn-beyond/ that has had the influence of better informed and more impartial editors. There are several good discussions of the Flynn effect in recent books on IQ testing, and citations to those can be found in Wikipedia user space. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/IntelligenceCitations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Intellige...

notsosmart 15y ago

I really enjoyed this article. I wish she had given specific tips on how to think more creatively. She mentioned what happens "when" you think creatively, but did not really go into the "how."

vishaldpatel 15y ago
If you come up with a few on your own, then you're thinking creatively!! =)
jfoutz 15y ago
Try to fit math ideas. What does zero mean? what does one mean? does addition make sense? can you take the limit of something? What if something blows up to infinity? So... try cars. zero being no car. one being a "standard" car. say a honda civic. how much honda can you take a way and still be a car? like taking the limit at zero. There are crazy efficient cars with tiny little internal combustion engines and bicycle wheels that get 100+ mpg but piss poor acceleration. hmm. what would a car be at the other end? a ferrari? Do cars associate? do cars commute? :) Creativity isn't painting. It's looking at the same crap you look at all the time and playing with it. Math has a lot of tricks for labeling things, then seeing what shows up when you try do stuff with the labels. New dimensions will pop out.

latch 15y ago

Anyone interested in this might also be interested in the broader Flynn effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect I've always believed that additional/new stimulations is largely responsible for our increased intelligence.

absconditus 15y ago
Flynn recently found the opposite effect among British teens: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/4548943/British-teenagers-have-lower-IQs-than-their-counterparts-did-30-years-ago.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/4548943/B...

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

MetallicCloud 15y ago

Excellent post. It's made me realise how much I have been taking the easy road lately. I used to always be looking into new areas to learn about new things and really pushing myself, but I realise now that lately to solve a problem I reach for a familiar way to solve it, because it's easier and faster. This could be the reason why I am getting less satisfaction with solving problems lately. Time to get back on that horse...

mberning 15y ago

I take exception to the 'Think Creatively' item. It's kind of like making a to-do list with 'lose 20 lbs' as a line item. Much easier said than done. That being said, I think one of the best ways to improve your creative thinking is to work directly with other people that YOU consider to be creative thinkers. At my previous job I always enjoyed working with the CEO, sales, and marketing folks because they almost always approached problems from a completely different angle than I would. Experiencing how others ideate is very mind opening and often times humbling.

abeppu 15y ago

The author juxtaposes his recommendations against his unnamed professor's claim that intelligence is genetic and fixed at birth, pointing out that there are broad classes of behaviors that can improve our intelligence -- but he neglects half of the response to his professor's genetic predestination view, namely the whole host of physical/chemical/biological factors impacting both brain development and cognition later in life. As just an example, I was recently impressed by a study (http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/270/1529/2147.full.pdf http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/270/1529/2147...) demonstrating improvements on both a memory task and an intelligence task through creatine supplements. The explanation suggested by the authors (and it looks like some other literature as well, though I haven't really dug into it yet) is basically that creatine is part of a mechanism for rapid ATP synthesis, that the ion pumps in your neurons run on ATP, and that if you're sometimes "fuel-limited" (their word) creatine levels matter, in the same way that oxygen and glucose do. This make sense, but I was quite surprised to read this, I think in part because I'm used to seeing my brain as being a relatively static thing. Stepping down a level of abstraction, and thinking about the instant to instant chemical resource needs of individual cells and gates is kind of eye-opening. And for all I know there's hundreds or thousands of other documented effects, where increasing or decreasing the presence of some reagent associated with running ion pumps, or growing axons or synthesizing neurotransmitters has some measurable effect on intelligence.

dcreemer 15y ago
minor nit: the author is female.
wging 15y ago
You can probably induce similar effects (in the reverse direction) by entering states of dehydration or low blood sugar. I've observed that dehydration can be a big cause of poor performance on my part.
gwern 15y ago
> As just an example, I was recently impressed by a study (http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/270/1529/2147... http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/270/1529/2147...) demonstrating improvements on both a memory task and an intelligence task through creatine supplements. I would point out that Rae 2003 was conducted using vegetarian subjects. When you run tests on normal subjects, no benefit is found. To quote what I've said the last few times creatine came up http://www.gwern.net/Nootropics#creatine http://www.gwern.net/Nootropics#creatine : > I’m not a bodybuilder, but my interest was sparked by several studies showing IQ boosts (such as Rae 2003; however, Rae 2003 was only in vegetarians, who are known to be creatine deficient (much like B vitamins, creatine is usually gotten in one’s diet from meat), and the other studies are likewise of subpopulations. Rawson 2008 studied young omnivores who are not stupid or sleep-deprived, and found no mental benefit. The summary of the DNB ML discussion was that Rawson 2008 is a broad null result for healthy young omnivores who aren’t idiots. Vegetarians, idiots, the sleep-deprived, and old people may benefit from creatine supplementation.

bluekeybox 15y ago

My addition (6): observe others, be inquisitive about other people. This will not only help you appear smarter to others (believe it or not, there is such thing as behaving/appearing smart), but will also help you with networking because (a) people respond positively when someone displays genuine interest in them (well as long as you are being nonthreatening) and (b) smart people tend to seek out others like them.

bumbledraven 15y ago

http://sourceforge.net/projects/brainworkshop/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/brainworkshop/ is an open-source implementation of the dual n-back test for Windows, Linux, and OS-X. "Following training of working memory using the dual n-back test, the subjects were indeed able to transfer those gains to a significant improvement in their score on a completely unrelated cognitive task. This was a super-big deal."

Splines 15y ago
FYI, this game crashed on me at launch (W2K8 R2). Setting the exe to run under WinXP compat mode made it work. It's also devilishly hard. Dual 1-back is easy, but Dual 2-back is surprisingly difficult. I think it'd be fun to get good at this :).
- Kutta 15y ago
  I usually play it at d9b with 2,5 sec intervals. I intend to advance higher though.

kmt 15y ago

I always slack when it comes to number 5 (networking). I'm always busy with something "more important" and kinda have to force myself to get out and meet people.

ashbrahma 15y ago

Dual N-Back test: http://www.soakyourhead.com/ http://www.soakyourhead.com/

keyle 15y ago

You can play dual n-back here: http://cognitivefun.net/test/5 http://cognitivefun.net/test/5

joelthelion 15y ago
There is also a very good app for android, called n-back if I recall correctly. Very handy to kill time during the daily commute!
- phucnguyen 15y ago
  Hey Joel, try out mine too ;) https://market.android.com/details?id=phuc.entertainment.dualnback https://market.android.com/details?id=phuc.entertainment.dua...

eande 15y ago

Excellent article and here is a link to an open source Dual N-Back game, have fun. http://brainworkshop.sourceforge.net/ http://brainworkshop.sourceforge.net/

pella 15y ago
"Join the Dual N-Back, Brain Training & Intelligence forum & mailing list at Google Groups for some interesting discussions on dual n-back, memory, intelligence and the brain" http://groups.google.com/group/brain-training http://groups.google.com/group/brain-training

anthuswilliams 15y ago

#4) Do things the hard way. It's hard for me to agree with this. In principle, I want to bemoan the decline of my ability to spell as a result of auto-correct. But I think that casts an unfair negative light on the idea of doing things "the easy way". Think about math. There is no question that the Arabic numbering system makes doing math easier. Why should I to go back to scratching out base-60 cuneiform? I can challenge myself just as easily by pushing on to more powerful and abstract mathematical concepts made possible by timesavers like the Arabic numbering system. I'm sure that having access to high-level languages limits my understanding of the bits and bytes. But I can use these new tools of abstraction to do things that I would have found impossible if I were writing machine code. I'm not sure I see the value in doing things the hard way, when my brain will be challenged enough probing the depths of what these new innovations have made possible. I think the author misses one crucial part of intelligence - intelligence, insofar as it is about abstract thought, is positively correlated with the sorts of things I can do without thinking about them.

melvinmt 15y ago
"Any fool can make things bigger and more complex. But it takes a genius to move in the opposite direction." - Einstein Solving things in the easiest way, is often the hardest challenge there is.
- sophacles 15y ago
  Simple and easy are not the same thing. Please stop being lazy and bother to learn the words you are using. It is simple to do, just read the dictionary. This really isn't easy tho, you have to cross reference other words, take time to do so, bother to remember, and so on - lots of effort.
bluedanieru 15y ago
Doing math in base-60 would have a number of benefits over base-10. 60 is highly factor-able, after all (this is probably why it was chosen as base for some numbering systems, e.g. time). Had you compared Roman numerals with Arabic numerals, I'd agree with you.
15y ago

chalst 15y ago

The key study cited by the article is available in full as a PDF. Jaeggi, Buschkuehl, Jonides, and Perrig (2008), Improving Fluid Intelligence with Training on Working Memory: http://lowellinstitute.com/downloads/BrainLearning/Fluid%20Intelligence.pdf http://lowellinstitute.com/downloads/BrainLearning/Fluid%20I...

dopkew 15y ago

"So to make the most of your intelligence, improving your working memory will help this significantly" This reminds me of how RAM is underestimated in improving computer performance.

sayemm 15y ago
Excellent analogy

IvarTJ 15y ago

PDD-NOS – Pervasive Development Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, is not necessarily a mild form of autism. The meaning is in the name. It means that the diagnosed doesn’t fit more specific diagnoses such as Kanner’s autism or Asperger syndrome. Even though someone who’s autistic fail to show intelligence through a test, I believe they still may be very intelligent and can show this better through training. I personally still believe reasoning skills can be trained by learning new heuristics at least.

chegra 15y ago

I don't think people on HN need more intelligence. After 120 IQ points, it doesn't make much of a difference to winning a Nobel Prize. I think what people need here is an increase in their willpower to see boring stuff through to the end.

adaml_623 15y ago
I disagree totally. I find it annoying to have a limited short term memory. When coding multiple files I wish I had a little more space in my brain.
barry-cotter 15y ago
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2008/07/annals-of-psychometry-iqs-of-eminent.html http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2008/07/annals-of-psychometry-i... [Review] Anne Roe: The Making of a Scientist After 120 IQ points, it doesn't make much of a difference to winning a Nobel Prize. Not true Test (Low / Median / High) Verbal 121 / 166 / 177 Spatial 123 / 137 / 164 Mathematical 128 / 154 / 194
- xutopia 15y ago
  Still though the correlation with making money and intelligence is really low (I think I read it was 0.2%). And what if wether or not you are happier might be inversely proportional to how intelligent you are? I'm just saying that being happy with your life should not be based on winning a Nobel prize.
- ArbitraryLimits 15y ago
  If you follow that link, you'll find that in the study referenced the researchers made up their own more or less ad hoc tests of "ability" precisely because "most IQ tests are not good indicators of true high level ability (e.g., beyond +3 SD or so)." It seems to me this study supports the idea that IQ is irrelevant to winning a Nobel Prized past a threshold instead of refuting it.
  - barry-cotter 15y ago

alexandros 15y ago

The subtitle for this piece is '5 ways to maximize your cognitive potential'. Shouldn't that be -realize- your cognitive potential, or maximize the utilization of your cognitive potential or some such? What good does it do to maximize my potential?

pella 15y ago

"Brain fog - poor memory, difficulty thinking clearly etc" http://www.drmyhill.co.uk/wiki/Brain_fog_-_poor_memory,_difficulty_thinking_clearly_etc http://www.drmyhill.co.uk/wiki/Brain_fog_-_poor_memory,_diff...

c0nsilience 15y ago

Good god, really? 1. Seek Novelty 2. Challenge Yourself 3. Think Creatively 4. Do Things The Hard Way 5. Network How on earth did Scientific American allow an article that resembles a content-farm link-bait piece on its site? (Other than the obvious reasons for traffic.) I have seen those five rules on articles like, "How to Become a Better Writer," and "How to Stick to a Workout Program."

gwern 15y ago

'I know what the statistics say - but gosh darn, I have an anecdote to the contrary!' OP spends a lot of time & space on Jaeggi 2008... and she quietly omits all of the other results and considerations: http://www.gwern.net/N-back%20FAQ#criticism http://www.gwern.net/N-back%20FAQ#criticism

mannicken 15y ago

From what I saw, society reserves creativity to artists, writers, composers, and other "creative types". For some reason creativity has become associated with creating useless inventions that no one will ever buy; sometimes people see creative person as a loner who spends days and nights on drugs throwing paint around or mumbling crazily. In reality, creativity is, perhaps, our only advantage when trying to not get killed by other animals. Picking up a stick and fighting off a larger animal -- great example of creative solution. It's novel. Before, no one ever thought to pick up a stick. Perhaps sticks were viewed as merely lying there, to be carefully avoided in case somebody steps on one. Maybe those who tried to pick up sticks were viewed as crazy, sinful by some sort of primitive Republicans (not that Republicans now are more evolved :)... I mean, who cares about sticks, animals were usually fighting with their own teeth, hands, or horns (I wish I had a horn). It's not until an animal with a stick has beaten the shit out of another animal without a stick for calling him crazy, that the sticks became a useful tool. I mean, face it -- we're just animals, and without creative approaches to our problems we wouldn't be talking about this on a giant electronic mind-network-thing.

john2x 15y ago

Haven't read the entire article yet, but(this is off topic), highlighting any word on the website shows a "Learn More" tooltip which automatically loads more info for the highlighted text. Awesome.

amirmc 15y ago
Wow. I'd never have discovered that if I hadn't read your comment, so thanks. I'm not sure how useful it would be in general but for an article like this quickly looking up terms seemed pretty neat (e.g fluid intelligence).