intelligence Archives | Page 4 of 5

Tagintelligence

How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect

October 8, 2009 / Klint Finley

Reading Mutate makes you smarter:

In addition to assorted bad breaks and pleasant surprises, opportunities and insults, life serves up the occasional pink unicorn. The three-dollar bill; the nun with a beard; the sentence, to borrow from the Lewis Carroll poem, that gyres and gimbles in the wabe.

An experience, in short, that violates all logic and expectation. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote that such anomalies produced a profound “sensation of the absurd,” and he wasn’t the only one who took them seriously. Freud, in an essay called “The Uncanny,” traced the sensation to a fear of death, of castration or of “something that ought to have remained hidden but has come to light.”

At best, the feeling is disorienting. At worst, it’s creepy.

Now a study suggests that, paradoxically, this same sensation may prime the brain to sense patterns it would otherwise miss — in mathematical equations, in language, in the world at large.

New York Times: How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect

(via Cryptogon)

XKCD: Idiocracy

June 30, 2009 / Klint Finley

idiocracy

From: XKCD

Remember folks:

we occur at random among your children

(Image via Johnny Brainwash)

Cognitive Training Can Alter Biochemistry Of The Brain

June 11, 2009 / Klint Finley

Follow-up related to the dual n-back test and its use in intelligence amplification:

Researchers at the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet have shown for the first time that the active training of the working memory brings about visible changes in the number of dopamine receptors in the human brain. The study, which is published in the journal Science, was conducted with the help of PET scanning and provides deeper insight into the complex interplay between cognition and the brain’s biological structure. […]

Professor Klingberg and his colleagues have previously shown that the working memory can be improved with a few weeks’ intensive training. Through a collaborative project conducted under the Stockholm Brain Institute, the researchers have now taken a step further and monitored the brain using Positron Emission Tomography (PET scans), and have confirmed that intensive brain training leads to a change in the number of dopamine D1 receptors in the cortex.

Science Daily: Cognitive Training Can Alter Biochemistry Of The Brain

Previously: Increase your intelligence with 20mins a day brain excerise

Dual n-back training apps:

Soak Your Head (Microsoft Silverline based)

Cognitive Fun (Javascript based)

Brain Workshop (Windows, Mac, possibly Linux)

hback (Linux)

N-Back Suite (iPhone)

IQ Boost (iPhone)

At the Bridge Table, Clues to a Lucid Old Age

May 26, 2009 / Klint Finley

So far, scientists here have found little evidence that diet or exercise affects the risk of dementia in people over 90. But some researchers argue that mental engagement — doing crossword puzzles, reading books — may delay the arrival of symptoms. And social connections, including interaction with friends, may be very important, some suspect. In isolation, a healthy human mind can go blank and quickly become disoriented, psychologists have found.

“There is quite a bit of evidence now suggesting that the more people you have contact with, in your own home or outside, the better you do” mentally and physically, Dr. Kawas said. “Interacting with people regularly, even strangers, uses easily as much brain power as doing puzzles, and it wouldn’t surprise me if this is what it’s all about.”

New York Times: At the Bridge Table, Clues to a Lucid Old Age

An article about Red Bull drinking 92 year old bridge players is a good compliment to this New Yorker article about 20 and 30 somethings trying to squeeze as much performance out of their brains as possible.

Smart drugs article from the New Yorker

May 22, 2009 / Klint Finley

This has been in my virtual “to read” pile for a long time. It’s more interesting than I expected.

If we eventually decide that neuroenhancers work, and are basically safe, will we one day enforce their use? Lawmakers might compel certain workers—emergency-room doctors, air-traffic controllers—to take them. (Indeed, the Air Force already makes modafinil available to pilots embarking on long missions.)

New Yorker: The underground world of “neuroenhancing” drugs.

I tried piracetam in college, but between the cost (I had to order it from Biogenesis Labs and the way it made my stomach feel, I didn’t think it was worth the slight boost.

I have found that Biotest Laboratory’s Spike is an effective “cognitive enhancer,” however. I used it during both Esozones to keep alert and productive on very little sleep under high pressure circumstances. You used to be able to buy it at GNC, but it seems they don’t carry it any more. You can still buy it online. I didn’t find the energy drink they market to be as effective as the pills.

Spike’s “secret sauce” is “thiamine di(2-methylpropionate) disulfide.” It sounds fancy, and they make an effort to make it appear they have something new and exclusive, but it’s really just a chemical name for sulbutiamine, which has been around since the classic Smart Drugs book and was reviewed in Mondo 2000.

Although it’s old, by no means do I consider this product “safe” – use at your own risk.

Games as work

January 15, 2009 / Klint Finley

This is “human computation,” the art of using massive groups of networked human minds to solve problems that computers cannot. Ask a machine to point to a picture of a bird or pick out a particular voice in a crowd, and it usually fails. But even the most dim-witted human can do this easily. Von Ahn has realized that our normal view of the human-computer relationship can be inverted. Most of us assume computers make people smarter. He sees people as a way to make computers smarter.

Odds are you’ve already benefited from von Ahn’s work. Like when you type in one of those stretched and skewed words before getting access to a Yahoo email account or the Ticketmaster store. That’s a Captcha, which von Ahn developed in 2000 to thwart spambots. Or there’s von Ahn’s picture-labeling games, which have lured thousands of bored Web surfers into tagging 300,000 photos online — doing it so effectively that Google bought his idea last year to improve its Image Search engine.

Full Story: Wired

(via mathpunk)

How to add 1 billion points to the global I.Q. cheaply and easily

January 6, 2009 / Klint Finley

Almost one-third of the world’s people don’t get enough iodine from food and water. The result in extreme cases is large goiters that swell their necks, or other obvious impairments such as dwarfism or cretinism. But far more common is mental slowness.

When a pregnant woman doesn’t have enough iodine in her body, her child may suffer irreversible brain damage and could have an I.Q. that is 10 to 15 points lower than it would otherwise be. An educated guess is that iodine deficiency results in a needless loss of more than 1 billion I.Q. points around the world. […]

“Probably no other technology,” the World Bank said of micronutrients, “offers as large an opportunity to improve lives … at such low cost and in such a short time.”

Yet the strategy hasn’t been fully put in place, partly because micronutrients have zero glamour. There are no starlets embracing iodine. And guess which country has taken the lead in this area by sponsoring the Micronutrient Initiative? Hint: It’s earnest and dull, just like micronutrients themselves.

Ta-da — Canada!

Full Story: New York Times

(Thanks Justin)

Chocolate, Wine And Tea Improve Brain Performance

December 30, 2008 / Klint Finley

All that chocolate might actually help finish the bumper Christmas crossword over the seasonal period. According to Oxford researchers working with colleagues in Norway, chocolate, wine and tea enhance cognitive performance.

The team from Oxford’s Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics and Norway examined the relation between cognitive performance and the intake of three common foodstuffs that contain flavonoids (chocolate, wine, and tea) in 2,031 older people (aged between 70 and 74).

Participants filled in information about their habitual food intake and underwent a battery of cognitive tests.Those who consumed chocolate, wine, or tea had significantly better mean test scores and lower prevalence of poor cognitive performance than those who did not. The team reported their findings in the Journal of Nutrition.

The role of micronutrients in age-related cognitive decline is being increasingly studied. Fruits and beverages such as tea, red wine, cocoa, and coffee are major dietary sources of polyphenols, micronutrients found in plant-derived foods. The largest subclass of dietary polyphenols is flavonoids, and it has been reported in the past that those who consume lots of flavonoids have a lower incidence of dementia.

Full Story: Science Daily

(via Steven Walling)

Drugs to Grow Your Brain

June 16, 2008 / Klint Finley

Drugs that encourage the growth of new neurons in the brain are now headed for clinical trials. The drugs, which have already shown success in alleviating symptoms of depression and boosting memory in animal models, are being developed by BrainCells, a San Diego-based start-up that screens drugs for their brain-growing power. The company hopes the compounds will provide an alternative to existing antidepressants and says they may also prove effective in treating cognitive disorders, such as Alzheimer’s.

“The fact that you might be able to take small molecules to stimulate specific cells to regenerate in the brain is paradigm-shifting,” says Christopher Eckman, a neuroscientist at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, FL. “[This approach] takes advantage of the body’s innate ability to correct itself when given appropriate cues.” Eckman studies compounds that boost brain cell growth in models of neurodegenerative disease and is not involved with BrainCells.

Full Story: Technology Review

(via Tomorrow Museum)

See also: ergoloid, Albert Hoffman’s other invention.

Increase your intelligence with 20mins a day brain excerise

June 10, 2008 / Klint Finley

We’ve mentioned before purported benefits of the N-Back Task on fluid intelligence:

In this case, subjects trained on a complex version of the so-called ‘n-back task’ – a difficult visual/auditory memory test – improved their scores on a set of IQ questions drawn from a German intelligence measure called the Bochumer Matrizen-Test. (The Bochumer Matrizen-Test is a harder version of the well-known Ravens Progressive Matrices).

Initially, the test subjects scored an average of 10 questions correctly on the IQ test.

But after the group trained on the n-back task for 25 minutes a day for 19 days, they averaged 14.7 correct answers, an increase of more than 40 percent. (A control group that was not trained showed only a very slight performance increase.)

Buschkuehl’s team postulates that the n-back task improves working memory – how many pieces of information subjects can keep in their head – as well as the ability to control the brain’s attention. Fluid intelligence tests require those types of thinking, and the training improved performance in these underlying skills.

Grinding points out two applications you can use to practice n-Back Tasks on your own:

Web based N-Back test (requires Microsoft Silverlight)

hback (for Linux)

Theme by Anders Norén — Up ↑

Technoccult

Mutate Your Mind