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Can You Make Yourself Smarter?
By DAN HURLEY
Published: April 18, 2012
[计时一]
Early on a drab afternoon in January, a dozen third graders from the working-class suburb of Chicago Heights, Ill., burst into the Mac Lab on the ground floor of Washington-McKinley School in a blur of blue pants, blue vests and white shirts. Minutes later, they were hunkered down in front of the Apple computers lining the room’s perimeter, hoping to do what was, until recently, considered impossible: increase their intelligence through training.
“Can somebody raise their hand,” asked Kate Wulfson, the instructor, “and explain to me how you get points?”
On each of the children’s monitors, there was a cartoon image of a haunted house, with bats and a crescent moon in a midnight blue sky. Every few seconds, a black cat appeared in one of the house’s five windows, then vanished. The exercise was divided into levels. On Level 1, the children earned a point by remembering which window the cat was just in. Easy. But the game is progressive: the cats keep coming, and the kids have to keep watching and remembering.
“And here’s where it gets confusing,” Wulfson continued. “If you get to Level 2, you have to remember where the cat was two windows ago. The time before last. For Level 3, you have to remember where it was three times ago. Level 4 is four times ago. That’s hard. You have to keep track. O.K., ready? Once we start, anyone who talks loses a star.”
So began 10 minutes of a remarkably demanding concentration game. At Level 2, even adults find the task somewhat taxing. Almost no one gets past Level 3 without training. But most people who stick with the game do get better with practice. This isn’t surprising: practice improves performance on almost every task humans engage in, whether it’s learning to read or playing horseshoes.
What is surprising is what else it improved. In a 2008 study, Susanne Jaeggi and Martin Buschkuehl, now of the University of Maryland, found that young adults who practiced a stripped-down, less cartoonish version of the game also showed improvement in a fundamental cognitive ability known as “fluid” intelligence: the capacity to solve novel problems, to learn, to reason, to see connections and to get to the bottom of things. The implication was that playing the game literally makes people smarter.
[386 words]
[计时二]
Psychologists have long regarded intelligence as coming in two flavors: crystallized intelligence, the treasure trove of stored-up information and how-to knowledge (the sort of thing tested on “Jeopardy!” or put to use when you ride a bicycle); and fluid intelligence. Crystallized intelligence grows as you age; fluid intelligence has long been known to peak in early adulthood, around college age, and then to decline gradually. And unlike physical conditioning, which can transform 98-pound weaklings into hunks, fluid intelligence has always been considered impervious to training.
That, after all, is the premise of I.Q. tests, or at least the portion that measures fluid intelligence: we can test you now and predict all sorts of things in the future, because fluid intelligence supposedly sets in early and is fairly immutable. While parents, teachers and others play an essential role in establishing an environment in which a child’s intellect can grow, even Tiger Mothers generally expect only higher grades will come from their children’s diligence — not better brains.
How, then, could watching black cats in a haunted house possibly increase something as profound as fluid intelligence? Because the deceptively simple game, it turns out, targets the most elemental of cognitive skills: “working” memory. What long-term memory is to crystallized intelligence, working memory is to fluid intelligence. Working memory is more than just the ability to remember a telephone number long enough to dial it; it’s the capacity to manipulate the information you’re holding in your head — to add or subtract those numbers, place them in reverse order or sort them from high to low. Understanding a metaphor or an analogy is equally dependent on working memory; you can’t follow even a simple statement like “See Jane run” if you can’t put together how “see” and “Jane” connect with “run.” Without it, you can’t make sense of anything.
Over the past three decades, theorists and researchers alike have made significant headway in understanding how working memory functions. They have developed a variety of sensitive tests to measure it and determine its relationship to fluid intelligence. Then, in 2008, Jaeggi turned one of these tests of working memory into a training task for building it up, in the same way that push-ups can be used both as a measure of physical fitness and as a strength-building task. “We see attention and working memory as the cardiovascular function of the brain,” Jaeggi says.“If you train your attention and working memory, you increase your basic cognitive skills that help you for many different complex tasks.”
[418 words]
[计时三]
Jaeggi’s study has been widely influential. Since its publication, others have achieved results similar to Jaeggi’s not only in elementary-school children but also in preschoolers, college students and the elderly. The training tasks generally require only 15 to 25 minutes of work per day, five days a week, and have been found to improve scores on tests of fluid intelligence in as little as four weeks. Follow-up studies linking that improvement to real-world gains in schooling and job performance are just getting under way. But already, people with disorders including attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (A.D.H.D.) and traumatic brain injury have seen benefits from training. Gains can persist for up to eight months after treatment.
In a town like Chicago Heights, where only 16 percent of high schoolers met the Illinois version of the No Child Left Behind standards in 2011, finding a clear way to increase cognitive abilities has obvious appeal. But it has other uses too, at all ages and aptitudes. Even high-level professionals have begun training their working memory in hopes of boosting their fluid intelligence — and, with it, their job performance. If the effect is real — if fluid intelligence can be raised in just a few minutes a day, even by a bit, and not just on a test but in real life — then it would seem to offer, as Jaeggi’s 2008 study concluded with Spock-like understatement, “a wide range of applications.”
Since the first reliable intelligence test was created just over a hundred years ago, researchers have searched for a way to increase scores meaningfully, with little success. The track record was so dismal that by 2002, when Jaeggi and her research partner (and now her husband), Martin Buschkuehl, came across a study claiming to have done so, they simply didn’t believe it.
The study, by a Swedish neuroscientist named Torkel Klingberg, involved just 14 children, all with A.D.H.D. Half participated in computerized tasks designed to strengthen their working memory, while the other half played less challenging computer games. After just five weeks, Klingberg found that those who played the working-memory games fidgeted less and moved about less. More remarkable, they also scored higher on one of the single best measures of fluid intelligence, the Raven’s Progressive Matrices. Improvement in working memory, in other words, transferred to improvement on a task the children weren’t training for.
[389 words]
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Even if the sample was small, the results were provocative (three years later Klingberg replicated most of the results in a group of 50 children), because matrices are considered the gold standard of fluid-intelligence tests. Anyone who has taken an intelligence test has seen matrices like those used in the Raven’s: three rows, with three graphic items in each row, made up of squares, circles, dots or the like. Do the squares get larger as they move from left to right? Do the circles inside the squares fill in, changing from white to gray to black, as they go downward? One of the nine items is missing from the matrix, and the challenge is to find the underlying patterns — up, down and across — from six possible choices. Initially the solutions are readily apparent to most people, but they get progressively harder to discern. By the end of the test, most test takers are baffled.
If measuring intelligence through matrices seems arbitrary, consider how central pattern recognition is to success in life. If you’re going to find buried treasure in baseball statistics to give your team an edge by signing players unappreciated by others, you’d better be good at matrices. If you want to exploit cycles in the stock market, or find a legal precedent in 10 cases, or for that matter, if you need to suss out a woolly mammoth’s nature to trap, kill and eat it — you’re essentially using the same cognitive skills tested by matrices.
When Klingberg’s study came out, both Jaeggi and Buschkuehl were doctoral candidates in cognitive psychology at the University of Bern, Switzerland. Since his high-school days as a Swiss national-champion rower, Buschkuehl had been interested in the degree to which skills — physical and mental — could be trained. Intrigued by Klingberg’s suggestion that training working memory could improve fluid intelligence, he showed the paper to Jaeggi, who was studying working memory with a test known as the N-back. “At that time there was pretty much no evidence whatsoever that you can train on one particular task and get transfer to another task that was totally different,” Jaeggi says. That is, while most skills improve with practice, the improvement is generally domain-specific: you don’t get better at Sudoku by doing crosswords. And fluid intelligence was not just another skill; it was the ultimate cognitive ability underlying all mental skills, and supposedly immune from the usual benefits of practice. To find that training on a working-memory task could result in an increase in fluid intelligence would be cognitive psychology’s equivalent of discovering particles traveling faster than light.
[430 words]
[计时五]
Together, Jaeggi and Buschkuehl decided to see if they could replicate the Klingberg transfer effect. To do so, they used the N-back test as the basis of a training regimen. As seen in the game played by the children at Washington-McKinley, N-back challenges users to remember something — the location of a cat or the sound of a particular letter — that is presented immediately before (1-back), the time before last (2-back), the time before that (3-back), and so on. If you do well at 2-back, the computer moves you up to 3-back. Do well at that, and you’ll jump to 4-back. On the other hand, if you do poorly at any level, you’re nudged down a level. The point is to keep the game just challenging enough that you stay fully engaged.
To make it harder, Jaeggi and Buschkuehl used what’s called the dual N-back task. As a random sequence of letters is heard over earphones, a square appears on a computer screen moving, apparently at random, among eight possible spots on a grid. Your mission is to keep track of both the letters and the squares. So, for example, at the 3-back level, you would press one button on the keyboard if you recall that a spoken letter is the same one that was spoken three times ago, while simultaneously pressing another key if the square on the screen is in the same place as it was three times ago.
The point of making the task more difficult is to overwhelm the usual task-specific strategies that people develop with games like chess and Scrabble. “We wanted to train underlying attention and working-memory skills,” Jaeggi says.
Jaeggi and Buschkuehl gave progressive matrix tests to students at Bern and then asked them to practice the dual N-back for 20 to 25 minutes a day. When they retested them at the end of a few weeks, they were surprised and delighted to find significant improvement. Jaeggi and Buschkuehl later expanded the study as postdoctoral fellows at the University of Michigan, in the laboratory of John Jonides, professor of psychology and neuroscience.
“Those two things, working memory and cognitive control, I think, are at the heart of intellectual functioning,” Jonides told me when I met with him, Jaeggi and Buschkuehl in their basement office. “They are part of what differentiates us from other species. They allow us to selectively process information from the environment, and to use that information to do all kinds of problem-solving and reasoning.”
[414 words]
Continue reading
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/magazine/can-you-make-yourself-smarter.html?pagewanted=4&ref=general&src=me
or see the attached document
[越障]
A Conversation With Eric R. Kandel
A Quest to Understand How Memory Works
By CLAUDIA DREIFUS
Published: March 5, 2012
At 82, the Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Dr. Eric R. Kandel is still constantly coming up with new ideas for research.
This winter, he has been working on a project that he hopes will lead to a new class of drugs for treating schizophrenia. Last year he collaborated, for the first time, with Denise B. Kandel — his fellow Columbia University research scientist and wife of 55 years — investigating the biological links between cigarette and cocaine addiction. And this month his newest book, “The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind and Brain, From Vienna 1900 to the Present,” is to be released by Random House.
A condensed and edited version of our two interviews follows. As in his new book, the conversation begins with memories of Vienna, his birthplace.
How old were you when the Nazis marched into Vienna?
I was 8 ½. Immediately, we saw that our lives were in danger. We were completely abandoned by our non-Jewish friends and neighbors. No one spoke to me in school. One boy walked up to me and said, “My father said I’m not to speak to you anymore.” When we went to the park, we were roughed up. Then, on Nov. 9, 1938, Kristallnacht, we were booted out of our apartment, which was looted. We knew we had to get out.
Fortunately, my mother had the foresight to apply for visas to the United States earlier. For more than a year, we waited in the terror of Vienna for our immigration quota number to come up. When it finally did, my older brother, Ludwig, and I made the Atlantic crossing alone. Our parents came later. On the trip, it’s amazing how unfrightened I was, considering that even before the Nazis, I was an apprehensive child. You rise to the occasion.
After you won the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, did the Austrians reach out to you?
Yes. Their newspaper people said, “Oh, wonderful, another Austrian Nobel Prize!” I said: “You’ve got this wrong. This is an American, an American Jewish Nobel Prize.” The president of Austria wrote me a note: “What can we do to recognize you?” I said, “I do not need any more recognition, but it would it be nice to have a symposium at the University of Vienna on the response of Austria to National Socialism.” He said, “That’s fine.” I’m very close to Fritz Stern, the historian, and he helped me put the symposium together. Ultimately, a book came out of it. It had a modest impact.
As a student at Harvard in the 1950s, you aspired to be a psychoanalyst. Was this because of your Viennese background?
In part I was drawn to it because it promised much. In the 1950s and early 1960s, psychoanalysis swept through the intellectual community, and it was the dominant mode of thinking about the mind. People felt that this was a completely new set of insights into human motivation and that its therapeutic potential was significant. It was seen as the treatment that solved everything in the world, from schizophrenia to ingrown toenails. It’s amazing how it was oversold. When this turned out to be more hope than reality, things flipped in the other direction. In my case, I didn’t pursue it because I fell in love with research.
Did this overselling discredit psychoanalysis?
I think so. And it’s a shame. There are many fantastically interesting components to it that are worthwhile. The problem of psychoanalysis is not the body of theory that Freud left behind, but the fact that it never became a medical science. It never tried to test its ideas. When you asked, “How come there are not outcome studies?” you were told, “You can’t study this. How are you going to measure it?”
In fact, there were questions it was possible to ask. For instance, under what circumstances does psychoanalysis work better than a placebo? Does it work better than other kinds of therapy? Who are the best therapists for what kinds of patients?
Talk about your Nobel research on the biology of memory.
I’ve long been interested in memory. What does it look like on a physical level? When I was a very young man, my mentor Harry Grundfest said, “Look, if you want to understand the brain you’re going to have to take a reductionist approach, one cell at a time.” He was so right.
So what’s the biggest problem in psychoanalysis? It’s memory! In the late 1950s, I and a colleague, Alden Spencer, had a very significant finding when we recorded the signals a hippocampus nerve cell puts out when it communicates with other cells. A psychologist named Brenda Milner had just shown that complex memory involves the hippocampus part of the brain, which is why we picked that type of cell to study. We were able to stimulate the various pathways coming into the cell and record the synaptic input. We saw how the hippocampus cell worked, but alas, that didn’t give insight into memory.
So in the 1960s, we went to a more reductionist approach. Instead of studying complicated mammalian brain cells, we studied the neural system of a simple animal — Aplysia, a snail with a very large nerve cell. We subjected them to learning and reflex tests similar to those that Pavlov had done. We’d stimulate the animals and see what kind of reflexes were produced, and then we tested them. We discovered that the snail’s reflexes could be modified by several forms of learning, and that learning involved alterations in how nerve cells communicated with one another.
We next looked at short- and long-term memory in the snail. I began to see what happens when you convert short-term memories to long-term ones. It would turn out that short-term memory involves transient changes of the connections between the cells. There is no anatomical change. Long-term memory involves enduring changes that result from the growth of new synaptic connections.
Did this surprise you?
It was astonishing! You could double the number of synaptic connections in a very simple neurocircuit as a result of experience and learning. The reason for that was that long-term memory alters the expression of genes in nerve cells, which is the cause of the growth of new synaptic connections. When you see that at the cellular level, you realize that the brain can change because of experience. It gives you a different feeling about how nature and nurture interact. They are not separate processes.
As neuroscience moves forward, there are all kinds of new possibilities emerging. There are people who are experimenting with ways to erase unpleasant memories. Do you approve?
I have no difficulty about enhancing memory. Removing memory is more complicated. If it’s to reduce the impact of a particular trauma, I have no difficulty with that, but there are other ways to deal with it — cognitive behavior therapy, exposure therapy, drugs. To go into your head and pluck out a memory of an unfortunate love experience, that’s a bad idea.
You know, in the end, we are who we are. We’re all part of what we’ve experienced. Would I have liked to have had the Viennese experience removed from me? No! And it was horrible. But it shapes you.
[1211 words]
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/06/science/a-quest-to-understand-how-memory-works.html?pagewanted=2&tntemail1=y&_r=2&emc=tnt
[视听]
http://www.nobelprize.org/mediaplayer/index.php?id=1456
The Mystery of Memory (29 minutes)
This half hour documentary takes viewers on a journey of discovery, looking at some of the most exciting scientific research being done today on the biological workings of memory.
Credits: Kikim Media (production)
Copyright © Nobel Media AB 2009 |
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