clair073

Common wisdom asserts that your IQ is fixed. Of course, the various “multiple intelligences” change with personal life experiences and growth, but we usually consider the standard IQ score to be inherent and unchangeable. But even the standard IQ measure changes during different life stages. Clearly, the IQ of young children changes as they mature. Several studies even show that working-memory training can raise the IQ of elementary-school children. More than one analyst claims that a rigorous PhD program can raise IQ in adults. Most obvious is the decline of IQ in those elderly who do not age well because of disease. A neglected segment along the age spectrum is the teenage years. Now, evidence indicates that this age group experiences IQ changes ranging from a decline to an increase. A study of this issue shows that both verbal and non-verbal IQ scores in teenagers relate closely to the developmental changes that occur in brain structure during the teenage years. Longitudinal brain-i...

On multiple occasions, readers of my learning and memory blog posts asked me what they could do to improve their working memory. This is an important and very practical question. Working memory affects all aspects of life success: personal, educational, and professional. I usually tell them to practice attentiveness and concentration. But I probably should tell them to adapt a healthier lifestyle. For over a decade a variety of studies have implicated lifestyle in memory function. A rigorous new study confirms these results. An Israeli research team studied 823 participants, aged 22-37 years, using brain scans taken during a difficult memory task, post-scan memory tests, and numerous measures of health and lifestyle. The brain scans identified the brain areas that particularly engage in working memory tasks, most important of which were the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, parietal cortex, and anterior cingulate cortex. These then served as a frame of reference to check for correlations...

I first got interested in memory training at age 15 when my dad was a salesman for the Dale Carnegie leadership course, which included a section on memory training. My dad taught me some tricks that enabled me to memorize the gist of what was on every page of a magazine, by page number, in 30 minutes. I used to put on demonstrations for prospective enrollees. Before the recruitment meeting started, the leader would tell the audience, "Everybody see Billy here. Stand up Billy. I am going to give him this latest magazine issue, which he has never seen, and let him study it for 30 minutes. Then we will interrupt the meeting and you can ask him what is on any given page. Or you can tell him what is on a page, and he can tell you the page number." To my own astonishment, I could do it and it was not that hard. The basic gimmick was first to memorize a number code that converted page numbers into a visual image. For example, the code for 20 was "noose," as in a hangman...

The human brain contains a distinct network that serves as its executive agent. This network is primarily based in the dorsolateral prefrontal, parietal, and cingulate cortices. It regulates the many “top down” neurobehavioral functions that are so characteristic of human brain. Deficiencies in the function of this network underlie numerous neuropsychiatric conditions, but even underlie much of the failings of us all. The ability to regulate emotions and direct rational actions is typically associated with success in life, and inability to do so often leads to dire consequences. This network can be trained to develop more robust capacity for executive control. This, as we all experience, is what parenting and schooling are about. Such training is especially crucial in early childhood when the challenges of school are first encountered. Even so, such training takes many years and for most of us may never be completed. The question arises: can such executive control training be expedited...

To follow up my prior post on jazz, I just read a scientific report published last week that suggests that training of musical creativity in jazz causes long-lasting changes in brain function. In this study, musicians completed a questionnaire that allowed researchers to know the extent of each subject's prior classical and jazz training. Functional MRI brain scans were taken with subjects lying down on their back with a piano keyboard on their lap, playing improvisations with their right hand. Ear phones allowed players to hear their improvisations. Brain scan showed distinct activity differences in the jazz musicians and that difference was greater in those with longer jazz histories. Past improvisation experience increased the functional bilateral connectivity of the dorsal premotor cortex, the pre-supplemental motor areas of cortex, and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortices. Decreased activity connectivity was noted in executive control frontal-parietal areas...

Ever try to read your physician’s prescriptions? Children increasingly print their writing because they don’t know cursive or theirs is unreadable. I have a middle-school grandson who has trouble reading his own cursive. Grandparents may find that their grandchildren can’t read the notes they send. Our new U.S. Secretary of the Treasury can’t (or won’t) write his own name on the new money being printed. When we adults went to school, one of the first things we learned was how to write the alphabet, in caps and lower case, and then to hand-write words, sentences, paragraphs, and essays. Some of us were lucky enough to have penmanship class where we learned how to make our writing pretty and readable. Today, keyboarding is in, the Common Core Standards no longer require elementary students to learn cursive, and some schools are dropping the teaching of cursive, dismissing it as an “ancient skill.” [1] The primary schools that teach handwriting spend only just over an hour a week, accordi...

Snore a lot? Get up frequently at night to urinate? Wake up at 2 A.M. with bright ideas or worries? All these disruptions of sleep are common and more so as we get older. Does it matter? Well, of course such awakenings disrupt our sleep, and maybe it is just inconvenient. But disrupted sleep not only is more likely with age, it may promote deterioration in mental functioning. A recent study compared the effects of sleeping behavior in young adults and seniors. The study involved assessing the memory after sleeping of 18 young adults in their 20s and 15 older adults in their 70s. The subjects were tested on 120 word sets before they went to bed, and an EEG machine monitored their brain activity while they slept. Upon awakening, they were tested once again on the word pairs, but this time they took the tests while undergoing functional  magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans. The quality of deep sleep among the older adults was 75 percent lower than the younger ones, and their memor...

It has taken 50 years, but memory research has finally put it all together to provide practical guidance to reduce forgetting of what we need to remember and promote forgetting of useless or disturbing memories. I have blogged before about animal studies showing that bad memories can be erased. Bad memories are often created like conditioned reflexes in Pavlov’s dogs. That is, the situational context in which bad things occur act as associational cues that help cement the memory. If the cues are repeatedly present but the bad event is not, the learned associated tends to go away. But in both animals and humans, this “extinction” as it is called is not really permanent and the bad memories can recur.   Memory researchers have recently discovered that when a memory is recalled, whether good or bad, there is a short time where it can be modified by new thought or experience, and then it is put back in storage (called “reconsolidation”). When this phenomenon was discovered, it raised t...