How to think yourself smart
HOW IT WORKS EXPLORES THE POSSIBILITY OF TAKING YOUR IQ INTO YOUR OWN HANDS AND IMPROVING IT
How It Works investigates whether brain training can really improve your IQ
Staring down at the Sunday newspaper crossword, unable to work out nine down, you might be left questioning your intelligence and wondering if there’s a way to sharpen your know-how. In recent years digital stores have been flooded with a host of different ‘brain-training’ apps all promising to help us think ourselves smart, but is that really possible?
Firstly, what exactly is intelligence? Is it something that we solely obtain from school, through our years of life experience, or perhaps a combination of the two? The concept of human intelligence is one that has been debated and researched for more than a century, with no clear answers.
However, what scientists have managed to agree upon is that it can be divided into two categories. The first is known as crystalline or crystallised intelligence. This refers to the intelligence that you might find useful in a pub quiz and centres on an acquired knowledge of the world. The second type, fluid intelligence, is the built-in smarts to problem solve and make decisions. Fluid intelligence is what is measured when taking an intelligence quotient (IQ) test.
So can we think ourselves smart? Cognitive training involves activities and tasks that are designed to help improve our intelligence or stall the inevitable decline of cognitive functions as we age. Brain-training exercises are delivered as repetitive tasks that measure
certain cognitive functions, typically assessing what is known as ‘working memory’. This is where you can retain information while at the same time completing another task without losing that information. When it comes to brain training, such tasks are a way to improve your working memory, which in turn has been found to improve your fluid intelligence. The idea is that over a set amount of time – for example five 30-minute sessions of training a week for four weeks – repeating these tasks might help you ‘think yourself smart’. By gradually improving your test score, much like lifting weights at the gym, these exercises are designed to pump up your brain.
One such breakthrough in these tests appeared in 2008 from neurobiologists Susanne Jaeggi and Martin Buschkuehl, who published a training exercise called the dual n-back task. The basis of the test centres around participants listening to a flow of letters and assessing whether or not the letter matched one previously spoken, while they simultaneously watch a grid of boxes and note when a box appears in the same position as a previous one. Yes, it’s just as mentally taxing as it sounds. It was believed that the dual n-back task showed dramatic improvements in peoples’ fluid intelligence scores over time, showcasing that what was once thought to be built-in intelligence could potentially be upgraded using these types of tasks. Although Jaeggi and Buschkuehl’s dual n-back task was one of the first intensive studies into improving fluid intelligence, ‘brain-training’ games and apps have been no stranger to the commercial market – one of the most popular being Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training for the Nintendo DS released back in 2005. However, there are still debates about the real-world applications of brain training, with some arguing that the improvements are limited to the task itself and not applied to everyday life.