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Andrea Kuszewski
I was told that intelligence was fixed at birth, that it was genetic. I of course disagree. I have been working as a therapist. I had a 4 year old client. His IQ was tested to be in the low 80s. After about two and a half years of working with him, and his IQ tested over 100. That's a significant gain: over one standard deviation, training about how to look at the world, how to think and problem solve, and he achieved things that blew me away. When people tell you that you can increase your intelligence, I disagree.
You can increase your intelligence. Working with that child was a life-changing event for me. For a couple of reasons. What can happen when you set the bar high and challenge yourself, and work hard and reach goals that seemed unreachable. This got me interested in intelligence and creativity, but also the high-end and exceptional abilities. It's a matter of tapping into the strenghts to help bring up the weaknesses. So there's a study that came out a couple of years ago about improving fluid intelligence through working memory. This shook up the world in intelligence research, up to that point there had been no study about transferring a new ability to another task. They trained people in working memory, a test where you hold a stimuli in working memory, and they try to distract you from encoding. The trained group was able to increase their scores over different lengths of time. There's a different number of days that they were trained. There was a remarkable improvement in their skills. When they started off the study, they had a test of cognition, and after training, the group that was trained scored higher. There was more to it than that. It wasn't just that they were able to score better on the ENVAC test, they showed that fluid intelligence is trainable, and the more you train, the more you gain. If you train harder and longer, you have an increase in your skill. This was across all ability levels, it wasn't due to low IQ or something to start with. Every group showed an increase. The most important thing was that they weren't training them on test questions, but rather on WM. It wasn't training to the test.
So. What you could do is, take the ENVAC test and take it every day for every day for the next 30 years. I don't want to do that. What I did was, I thought we could take one reality theory, and apply that kind of training and skill, to every day life and what's practical. So I produced 5 concepts: novelty seeking, challenge seeking, creativity, networking, and ... and if you do all of those things, you can increase your intelligence.
Seeking novelty. Of the five personality factors, openness is the only personality trait that correlates with intelligence. People with higher IQ are involving themselves in more things, they are crossing domains, not just a specialized domain, they sought out other means of knowledge also. They are making more connections, associating ideas with more than one processee path, you have an exponential increase in the ability to understand things.
Challenging yourself. There's been a lot of cruft about brain training gains. People play Soduko to make themselves smarter. You watch your skill improve, blah. Well that's good, you have growth. Once you learn how to play that brain, and learn the necessary skill, it goes into hibernation mode. Your brain figures out how to do it, and it stops working as hard. So, you get deficient at it. Once you learn it, you move on to the next game. There's a famous study done, quite a few years ago, the tetris study, they trained people on playing Tetris, and it got more popular after the study, anyway, it got popular, they trained people on how to play tetris. After several weeks of training, but after 50 days of training they became experts, the growth stopped. You can't just keep doing the same thing over and over, you have to push it to the next level. You're not doing any more growth, you're just keeping on.
Think creatively. This is my favorite topic. I study creativity, and it's important and often overlooked. When you look at a problem in a multi-modal fashion, you're processing it differently, you're able to come up with new solutions to ideas, and sparking ideas that you wouldn't have had otherwise. Someone that is my big idol, he did a study a couple years ago, a dean at Tufts, at looking how you teach in the classroom. The way that we assess students is not the best measure of ability, or the best way to teach to become better. He had one way that was in one class, and he took the other class and turned it into a multi-modal class room, multiple stories, teaching to learning, problem solving, practical applications for htings, and at the end of the semester, the students scored higher on the course, and on the test, and the pure memory test, they scored higher on that one too. They learned the material, and they were carrying that information over into other tests of memory. It's the same thing going on here.
Doing things the hard way. I cannot say enough about this. You need to struggle in order to see improvement in your intellectual capacity. How many people use GPS? I have a terrible sense of direction. GPS is useful. I try to use it as little as possible. When I'm told where to go, I'm not paying attention to what side of town, and other reasoning skills like that. Instead of blindly going through with GPS. I try to not focus on that. It's helping my sense of direction by getting lost, and I learn more skill in navigating myself around Boston. So, trying to quickly get through here.
Networking. When you network with other people, you're thinking outside the box, people are encouraging you to think of a new solution, in a different field, and you collaborate, and making new connections, and having multiple disciplines. And that's all I have to say about that.
How can we tak eall of these things and put them together and figure out how much we can improve intelligence? How much can you improve? I am inviting all of you to become a citizen scientist, fill out my survey, it's a short test that would take maybe only 20 minutes or 30 minutes top. Be a citizen scientist. (Wait, doesn't this make you a test subject, not a scientist?)
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