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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.
  - bendmorris 15y ago
    Did he acquire the ability to spot patterns and connections, or did he just spot the patterns and connections by getting used to the tests? It's very possible that the ability to identify patterns was an innate part of him, an "intelligence" he already possessed, which allowed him to benefit from repetition.

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.
- bendmorris 15y ago
  Did he acquire the ability to spot patterns and connections, or did he just spot the patterns and connections by getting used to the tests? It's very possible that the ability to identify patterns was an innate part of him, an "intelligence" he already possessed, which allowed him to benefit from repetition.