Is it possible to boost your intelligence by training?

Some actual science from Salon

Scientists achieved astonishing results when training a student with a memory training program in a landmark experiment in 1982. After 44 weeks of practice, the student, dubbed SF, expanded his ability to remember digits from seven numbers to 82. However, this remarkable ability did not extend beyond digits – they also tried with consonants.

The study can be considered the beginning of cognitive training research, investigating how practice in areas ranging from music to chess and puzzles impacts our intelligence. So what’s the state of this research 35 years later – have scientists discovered any foolproof ways to make us smarter? We reviewed the evidence to find out.

The topic of cognitive training is still very controversial, with scientists expressing opposing views about its effectiveness. Enthusiastic claims about the effects of cognitive training programs usually follow the publication of a single experiment reporting positive findings.

Much less attention is paid when a study reports negative results. This phenomenon is quite common in many areas of social and life sciences and often provides a biased view of a particular research field. That is why systematic reviews such as ours are essential to rule out the risk of such bias.

Making sense of conflicting evidence

In a new paper, published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, we synthesize what the reviews say about several cognitive training programs. Our main method was meta-analysis – that is, a set of statistical techniques for estimating the true overall effect of a treatment.

To begin with, music expertise has been associated with superior memory for music material (notes on a stave). Remarkably, music experts exhibit a superior memory even when the musical material is meaningless (random notes). In the same vein, musical aptitude predicts music skills such as pitch and chord discrimination.

However, music instruction does not seem to exert any true effect on skills outside of music. Indeed, our meta-analysis shows that engaging in music has no impact on general measures of intelligence, when placebo effects are controlled for with active control groups. Music training does not affect either cognitive skills – fluid intelligence, memory, phonological processing, spatial ability and cognitive control – or academic achievement. These outcomes have been recently confirmed by other independent labs.

The field of chess presents an analogous pattern of findings. Chess masters’ exceptional memory for chess positions is renowned. However, to date, chess training appears to exert only a small effect on cognitive and academic skills. What’s more, almost none of the studies reporting such effects actually used a control group – suggesting that the results were mainly due to placebos (such as being excited about a new activity).

Similar results have been observed in the field of working memory training. Working memory is a cognitive system, related to short-term memory, that stores and manipulates the information necessary to solve complex cognitive tasks. Participants undergoing working memory training programs systematically improve their performance in several working memory tasks. However, experimental groups consistently fail to show any improvement over active controls in other skills such as fluid intelligence, cognitive control or academic achievement. These findings were confirmed in three independent meta-analyses about children, adults, and the general population.

Video game training also fails to enhance cognitive function. In another recent meta-analysis, to be published in Psychological Bulletin, we show that video game players outperform non-gamers on a variety of cognitive tasks. However, when non-players take part in video game training experiments, no appreciable effect is observed in any of the outcome measures. This suggests the video game players may just have been better at those tasks to start with.

Another group of scientists also recently carried out a systematic review on general brain training programs (often including puzzles, tasks and drills). While the researchers reported some effects, they found an inverse relationship between the size of the effects and the quality of experimental designs of training programs. Put simply, when the experiment includes essential features such as active control groups and large samples, the benefits are very modest at best.

The problem with misinterpretation

A pervasive problem with cognitive training studies is that improved performance in isolated cognitive tasks is often seen as a proof for cognitive enhancement. This is a common misinterpretation. To provide solid evidence, it is necessary to investigate the effects of training programs on “latent cognitive constructs” – the variables underlying the performance in a set of cognitive tasks.

For example, working memory skill is a cognitive construct and can be measured by collecting data such as digit span. But if the training exerts an actual effect on the cognitive skill (construct) you should see the effects on many different tasks and latent factors – multiple measures of the same cognitive skill. And it is rare that these training programs are set up to do that.

That means that, to date, cognitive training programs do not even necessarily boost those cognitive functions that the trained tasks are supposed to involve. What is enhanced is just the ability to perform the trained task and similar tasks.

Researchers and the general public should be fully aware of the limits of benefits from training the brain. However, these negative findings shouldn’t discourage us from searching for ways to boost intelligence and other skills. We do know that our cognition is extraordinarily malleable to training. What we need now is more promising pathways to general cognitive enhancement rather than domain-specific enhancement. Our best bet for achieving that is probably by carrying out research on genetics and neuroscience.

SOURCE

******************************

The Bureaucratic Blind Eye

A brand new scandal has broken out at the Department of Veterans Affairs, where the fingerprints of the department’s bureaucrats are all over the latest evidence of misconduct. USA Today’s Donavan Slack broke the story:

Neurosurgeon John Henry Schneider racked up more than a dozen malpractice claims and settlements in two states, including cases alleging he made surgical mistakes that left patients maimed, paralyzed or dead.

He was accused of costing one patient bladder and bowel control after placing spinal screws incorrectly, he allegedly left another paralyzed from the waist down after placing a device improperly in his spinal canal. The state of Wyoming revoked his medical license after another surgical patient died.

Schneider then applied for a job earlier this year at the Department of Veterans Affairs hospital in Iowa City, Iowa. He was forthright in his application about the license revocation and other malpractice troubles.

But the VA hired him anyway.

He started work in April at a hospital that serves 184,000 veterans in 50 counties in Iowa, Illinois and Missouri.

Some of his patients already have suffered complications. Schneider performed four brain surgeries in a span of four weeks on one 65-year-old veteran who died in August, according to interviews with Schneider and family members. He has performed three spine surgeries on a 77-year-old Army veteran since July—the last two to try and clean up a lumbar infection from the first, the patient said.

Schneider’s hiring is not an isolated case.

Slack goes on to document several other instances in which the VA’s bureaucrats knowingly overlooked the history of the medical professionals they hired, where evidence and findings of malpractice, license suspensions and other misconduct were either ignored or dismissed, where the consequences of those hiring decisions have negatively impacted the quality of treatment that America’s miltary veterans receive at the VA. The new scandal has already drawn bipartisan attention on Capitol Hill demanding an investigation.

Alas, the knowing hiring of individuals with shady track records is not an isolated to the bureaucrats at the VA. The scandal-plagued Internal Revenue Service has behaved similarly. Accounting Today‘s Michael Cohn reports:

The Internal Revenue Service rehired more than 200 employees with previous conduct and performance issues, according to a new government report.

The report, from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, found that 10 percent of the more than 2,000 former employees rehired by the IRS between January 2015 and March 2016 had been previously fired while under investigation for a substantiated conduct or performance issue.

Of the more than 200 rehired employees, 86 had been “separated” from the IRS while they under investigation for absences and leave, workplace disruption, or failure to follow instructions. Four had been terminated or resigned for willful failure to properly file their federal tax returns; while another four employees had been separated from their jobs while under investigation for unauthorized accesses to taxpayer information. On top of that, 27 former employees didn’t disclose a previous termination or conviction on their application, as required, but were nonetheless rehired by the IRS.

Both hiring scandals can be considered to be evidence of a culture of corrupt cronyism within the U.S. government, where its bureaucrats care first and foremost about putting their own interests before all others and to the exclusion of serving the interests of regular Americans. A third case of insider cronyism within a U.S. government agency can be found in recent news headlines involving the largely redundant Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where the quitting head of the bureau attempted to install his deputy as his replacement in defiance of federal laws governing the filling of permanent vacancies, where the deputy’s legal claim to the position was subsequently refused by a federal court.

To quote Ian Fleming from his James Bond novel Goldfinger: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.” At what point will regular Americans receive both the answers and accountability they deserve from the bureaucrats in these agencies who claim to serve the public?

SOURCE

********************************

Contra Activist Judges, It’s Not Discriminatory to Prohibit Transgender Individuals From Joining Military

On Dec. 11, a federal lower court judge in Washington, D.C., refused to stay her earlier Oct. 30 order blocking President Donald Trump’s Aug. 25 directive regarding transgender military service.

That directive, transmitted to the departments of Defense and Homeland Security, put to a halt the Obama administration’s June 2016 plan to allow transgender individuals to serve openly in the U.S. armed forces, beginning in July 2017 (but put on hold until Jan. 1, 2018, by Defense Secretary James Mattis).

If allowed to stand, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly’s decision—coupled with similar Nov.  21 and Dec. 11 holdings in separate case by federal judges in Maryland and Seattle—would have enormous negative consequences.

It would mean that effective Jan. 1, 2018, the U.S. armed services would have to begin admitting transgender individuals, subject to certain guidelines. The armed services also (based on the ruling by the Maryland judge) would have to fund sex reassignment surgical procedures for military personnel—on the taxpayer’s dime.

As a legal matter, these federal court decisions are deficient. Judges have no business displacing the reasoned decision of the president, under his constitutional authority as commander-in-chief, to promote military readiness by establishing sound principles for eligibility to serve in the armed forces.

The lower court decisions acknowledge this presidential authority, but nevertheless claim that, by being prevented from serving in the military, transgender individuals would be denied “equal protection of the law” guaranteed by the Constitution.

But equal protection prohibits invidious discrimination based on immutable characteristics such as race—discrimination lacking any rational justification. It does not apply to rationally based noninvidious differentiation among classes of individuals needed to advance national goals, such as a strong military.

Rules denying military service opportunities to individuals who have serious medical problems (for example, heart disease, chronic asthma, or cancer) are not invidious discrimination—they are fully rational efforts to promote well-run and effective military services. Because individuals suffering from significant medical difficulties drive up costs and tend to impair combat effectiveness, it is perfectly rational to bar them from military recruitment.

These medical considerations apply directly to transgender individuals, who often must cope with serious physical and psychological problems

More HERE 

********************************

For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

***************************