Can mental training improve your intelligence? No video game or mental puzzle has convincingly been shown to work. But now a group of neuropsychologists claims it has found a task that can add points to a person's IQ – and the harder you train, they say, the more you gain.
So-called "fluid intelligence", or Gf, is the ability to reason, solve new problems and think in the abstract. It correlates with professional and educational success and it appears to be largely genetic.
Past attempts to boost Gf have suggested that, although by training you can achieve great gains on the specific training task itself, those gains don't transfer to other tasks.
Now Susanne Jaeggi at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, US, and her colleagues say that is not true.
They invited 70 healthy adults to participate in a challenging training exercise known as the "dual n-back" task.
The first part of the exercise involves small squares on a screen that pop into a new location every three seconds. Volunteers have to press a button when the current location is a duplicate of two views earlier.
For the second part, the volunteers have to simultaneously carry out the same task with letters. Consonants are played through headphones and they have to press a button when they hear one that is the same as that heard two "plays" earlier.
If participants perform well, the interval to be tracked (n) increases to three or more stages earlier.
Jaeggi's volunteers were trained daily for about 20 minutes for either 8, 12, 17 or 19 days (with weekends off). They were given IQ tests both before and after the training.
The researchers found that the IQ of trained individuals increased significantly more than controls – and that the more training people got, the higher the score.
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