Isegoria

Dan Hurley (Smarter: The New Science of Building Brain Power) discusses cognitive training:

What kind of effect does cognitive training have on the brain?

There is no question that training causes structural and functional improvement in the brain, as seen on MRI. Most of the changes are seen in the frontal areas of the brain, where high-level thinking occurs. Mindfulness meditation, for instance, has been shown to produce increased white-matter connections between the anterior cingulate cortex, an important region for complex decision-making, and the rest of the brain.

What cognitive functions did you find are most trainable?

Working memory is the ability to juggle multiple items of attention, to manipulate and analyze information. If you try to multiple 26 by 37 in your head, the reason it’s so hard is because of the demands it puts on your working memory. Tons of studies, including the latest one by Randy Engle, show that by training on certain kinds of working-memory tasks, you can improve your working memory overall. This is profoundly important for your ability to multi-task and think through complicated problems.

What interventions are the most effective in improving cognitive ability?

Working-memory training has proved really useful, although exactly which kinds of working-memory tasks are most useful remains unclear. Susanne Jaeggi has focused on the N-back task, which anyone can check out online at www.soakyourbrain.com.  Others prefer various other kinds of working-memory tasks. But plenty of research also shows that physical exercise, learning a musical instrument, and mindfulness meditation can all bring significant benefits. One of the coolest parts of my training was learning to play the Renaissance lute.

Teenagers everywhere want to know: are there any cognitive benefits of first-person shooter games?

Absolutely. These games are so good at improving reaction times that they are used by the U.S. military to train pilots and operators of drones. These games can also improve the “useful field of view,” your ability to see and respond to stimuli at the periphery of your vision, which is incredibly important when driving a vehicle. Other computerized games have been shown to improve older people’s ability to distinguish very fine differences in shades of gray. Strangely, this ability has been shown to be one of the single most important markers of longevity. So if you get better at it, will you actually live longer? That’s not yet clear. But improving your ability to see and respond to your environment can be potentially lifesaving.

How important is exercise?

Research has proved beyond doubt that the brain is actually connected to the heart and lungs via something called the “neck.” Physical exercise is perhaps the best-proved method for improving cognitive function in older people. It’s also critical for children and middle-aged sloths. Some researchers believe that cardiovascular exercise is best, while others insist that strength training is more important.

What about vitamins? Which one should take the most of if I want to think more quickly? Or should I just continue to drink lots and lots of caffeine?

I know that many people believe in the benefits of vitamins and dietary supplements. But there are no good studies showing that any of them really help cognitive function. Large studies of fish oil given to pregnant women have even suggested that there might be some risks to the intellectual abilities of their children. Caffeine, on the other hand, has been repeatedly shown to enhance not just attention, but motivation and even, most recently, memory. And if you can believe it, nicotine also helps. Cigarettes and other forms of tobacco are of course extremely dangerous and greatly increase the risk of cancer, heart disease, and much more. But studies in both humans and animals confirm that nicotine, given through a patch or gum, can be a great cognitive enhancer. I actually started using a 7 mg nicotine patch and found it useful, without any noticeable addictiveness.

Can mindfulness meditation make you smarter? What cognitive functions are most affected by mindfulness meditation?

A series of studies by Michael Posner and Yi-Yuan Tang have shown that mindfulness meditation can enhance all kinds of cognitive abilities. Mind-wandering is not helpful when you’re trying to write an article or take a test. On the other hand, some recent studies have suggested that allowing your mind to wander can also be helpful when you need a breakthrough. Some of the greatest scientific insights have occurred when scientists were spacing out.

How transferable are improvements in specific cognitive functions to intelligence more generally?

It’s easy for psychologists to give you a series of tests, have you practice some exercises, and then run follow-up tests to see if you improve better than people who didn’t do those exercises. But figuring out what the real-world benefits are to those improvements is much, much harder. A recent study of older adults given just ten hours of training found that even ten years later, they still enjoyed significant benefits in daily functioning. A hundred years of studies have proved that IQ tests and other tests of cognitive function are very, very predictive of real-world abilities. They’re not perfect—no test is—but on average, just like blood-pressure tests, they’re pretty good at predicting how you’ll do in the future. Many large corporations, as well as the U.S. military, give these tests not because they love tests, but because they really help pick out people who can be successful from those who just lack the ability to learn and function.

Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel summarize the science of successful learning — which, in modern Internet fashion, garners the headline, Ditch the 10,000 hour rule! Why Malcolm Gladwell’s famous advice falls short.

Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000-hour rule is often mischaracterized. First, it’s not Malcolm Gladwell’s rule; he simply popularized the work of Ericsson et al. Second, the rule is not that 10,000 hours of practice will guaranty mastery of a skill; it’s that those who had mastered a skill had spent an average of 10,000 hours in deliberate practice, often on their own, while second-tier experts had spent their time playing their instrument (or whatever) in not-so-deliberate practice.

So, that 10,000-hour cut-off isn’t hard and fast.

Anyway, the science of successful learning suggests that many popular training tactics improve performance in the very short term while reducing the amount of learning over the long term. So, if you practice the exact same thing, over and over, in dedicated training sessions, you will see clear improvement from the start of each session to the end of each session — at least until you get tired and bored — but you’ll improve less than if you if interleaved multiple skills into each session, spaced out your training, varied each challenge a bit, and so on.

Robin Hanson doesn’t see modern teaching methods as a mere misunderstanding of the science of successful learning:

If school’s purpose were to develop skills, we’d teach differently.

[...]

So, a good test of a theory of school is: how long do you predict it will take teachers to learn this lesson? The article above talks about how many coaches have learned this lesson, plausibly because they really do want to win games, and face strong competitive pressures.

If you think the main function of schools is something other than learning, you might think it could take a very long time before schools adopt these practices. If you think the main function of schools is learning, but that public schools face much weaker pressures to be efficient that private schools, you might predict that private schools will adopt this much faster. If you think public schools are effective at adopting better approaches, you might predict that they adopt these quickly.

Executive functions — such as reasoning, working memory, and self-control — can be improved through various acitivities, Adele Diamond has found:

The best evidence exists for computer-based training, traditional martial arts, and two school curricula. Weaker evidence, though strong enough to pass peer review, exists for aerobics, yoga, mindfulness, and other school curricula. Here I address what can be learned from the research thus far, including that EFs need to be progressively challenged as children improve and that repeated practice is key. Children devote time and effort to activities they love; therefore, EF interventions might use children’s motivation to advantage. Focusing narrowly on EFs or aerobic activity alone appears not to be as efficacious in improving EFs as also addressing children’s emotional, social, and character development (as do martial arts, yoga, and curricula shown to improve EFs). Children with poorer EFs benefit more from training; hence, training might provide them an opportunity to “catch up” with their peers and not be left behind. Remaining questions include how long benefits of EF training last and who benefits most from which activities.

Twenty-five years ago, Gina Kolata of the New York Times reported on infant IQ tests that predicted later school performance:

The tests, which attempt to measure what babies remember, are based on the assumption that they will be more interested in stimuli they have not previously encountered. One test involves showing infants photographs or pictures and measuring how long they look at them. In theory, babies will look at a new stimulus for a longer time than one they remember having seen before. Babies that are likely to be below average in intelligence will remember fewer of the stimuli they have seen before.

Working independently, Dr. Bornstein and Susan Rose of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York have found that a baby’s performance at age 4 months and 6 months on tests of visual memory correlate with I.Q. at 4 and 6 years of age. They used tests that they developed themselves but that are similar to those developed by Dr. Fagan. The predictions are independent of the parents’ education and income group, which also are correlated with I.Q.

The original article is full of fears that such tests might give already-advantaged children even more advantages.

Kenneth Change, also of the Times, revisits the original article:

For the most part, the validity of the Fagan test holds up. Indeed, Dr. Fagan (who died last August) and Dr. Holland revisited infants they had tested in the 1980s, and found that the Fagan scores were predictive of the I.Q. and academic achievement two decades later when these babies turned 21.

“It’s really good science,” said Scott Barry Kaufman, scientific director of the Imagination Institute at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of “Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined.”

But Dr. Fagan’s hope for widespread screening of infants has not come to pass. “There are some centers that have it,” Dr. Holland said. “It never came to be the kind of thing where it’s widely available.”

The trend is perhaps in the other direction, away from dividing young children by I.Q. and its surrogates out of concerns that the labels become self-fulfilling prophecies. Private schools in New York City, for example, have agreed to abandon intelligence tests for 4- and 5-year-old applicants.

This stands out:

For the last decade of his life, Dr. Fagan was unexpectedly drawn into the “genes versus environment” debate over intelligence after he found that babies from widely different cultural backgrounds performed equally well on his test. That, he argued, undercut the argument for a biological basis for the stark “achievement gap” between white and black children, or rich and poor.

In lieu of kidnapping twins, Dalton Conley explains, the way that researchers typically calculated how much a given trait — be that extraversion or earnings — was due to genetics was by comparing how alike identical twins were with respect to how alike (same sex) fraternal twins were: 

The logic is that the fraternal twins share half their genes on average and the identical twins share all of them, so the degree to which identical twins are more alike than their fraternal counterpart pairs reflects the genetic contribution to that trait.

If two-thirds of our kids’ chances in life were due to their family background, the field of behavioral genetics would have us believe that the vast lion’s share of that predictive power of family of origin was due to genetics.  According to these studies, about half of the variation in incomes or job situations was due to our genetic makeup.  And only about a sixth resulted from the household environment on which parents could exert some conscious influence.  The remaining one-third was a product of random events outside a family’s control: an inspiring teacher, a traumatic accident, or a lucky break at work.

I initially went into the field of genetics to prove these researchers wrong.  Genes couldn’t matter that much, I figured.  It just didn’t jive with what I saw around me: Siblings seemed so different from each other; I knew plenty of poor kids growing up that I could have imagined achieving great heights had they been reared in better circumstances; and, likewise, in my adulthood I had gotten to know plenty of folks who seemed to be of mediocre talent despite their huge paychecks.  Social environment had to count for more.  So I decided to go right after the geneticists’ core assumption.

That is, their nifty little calculation relies on one hugely problematic assumption known as the “equal environments assumption.”  Put in English, these researchers had to take as a given the notion that identical twins are not treated any more similarly to each other than fraternal twins are (and that identical twins don’t interact with each other more than fraternal twins do in ways that might affect the outcomes in question — i.e. that their mutual, reciprocal influence is no different than that of same gender fraternal twins).  Since in my own experience I often couldn’t even tell who was who in an identical twin set, it seemed obvious to me that identical twins were experiencing much more similar environments than fraternal twins were in ways that were not generalizable to us non-twins in the population, and thus the behavioral geneticists were inflating the effects of genes and correspondingly underestimating the impact of family environment.[2]

Determined to prove them wrong and save the day for social scientists, I thought of a trick that would have been unimaginable before the days of 23andme and the like: I would take the fraction of twins who thought they were identical when they were really fraternal (and vice versa) and run the same analysis on them.  If they thought they were fraternal twins their whole lives but the laboratory genetic test revealed they were actually identical, we could be sure that they weren’t raised with more similar environments because they had been (mistakenly) socialized as fraternal twins.  And ditto in reverse.  But when I ran these folks through the statistical models, the results didn’t refute the behavioral geneticists at all.  In fact, my models confirmed the high genetic heritability for everything from height to high school GPA to ADHD.