Did you ever wonder if children's brains can be trained to be more intelligent? The New York Times published the following article on April 29, 2008 about a study that explored if memory training can enhance intelligence. The study highlighted in this article can be helpful for parents as they try to improve children's mental performance and better manage learning disabilities. The article was written by Nicholas Bakalar.
Memory Training Shown to Turn Up Brainpower
A new study has found that it may be possible to train people to be more intelligent, increasing the brainpower they had at birth.
Until now, it had been widely assumed that the kind of mental ability that allows us to solve new problems without having any relevant previous experience, what psychologists call fluid intelligence, is innate and cannot be taught (though people can raise their grades on tests of it by practicing).
But in the new study, researchers describe a method for improving this skill, along with experiments to prove it works.
The key, researchers found, was carefully structured training in working memory, the kind that allows memorization of a telephone number just long enough to dial it. This type of memory is closely related to fluid intelligence, according to background information in the article, and appears to rely on the same brain circuitry. So the researchers reasoned that improving it might lead to improvements in fluid intelligence.
The results, published Monday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, were striking. Although the control groups also made gains, presumably because they had practice with the fluid intelligence tests, improvement in the trained groups was substantially greater. Moreover, the longer they trained, the higher their scores were. All performers, from the weakest to the strongest, showed significant improvement.
"Intelligence has always been considered principally an immutable inherited trait," said Susanne M. Jaeggi, a postdoctoral fellow in psychology at the University of Michigan and a co-author of the paper. "Our results show you can increase your intelligence with appropriate training."
Why did the training work? The authors suggest several aspects of the exercise relevant to solving new problems: ignoring irrelevant items, monitoring ongoing performance, managing two tasks simultaneously and connecting related items to one another in space and time.
No one knows how long the gains will last after training stops, Dr. Jaeggi said, and the experiment's design did not allow the researchers to determine whether more training would continue to produce further gains.
