Increase your Fluid Intelligence with just 20mins a day brain excerise
From PhysOrg: Plastic Brain Outsmarts Experts
Fluid intelligence…draws on the ability to understand relationships between various concepts, independent of any previous knowledge or skills, to solve new problems. The research shows that this part of intelligence can be improved through memory training.
[The researchers...] reasoned that just as crystallized intelligence relies on long-term memory, fluid intelligence relies on short-term memory, or “working memory,” as it is more accurately called. This is the same type of memory people use to remember a phone number or an e-mail address for a short time, but beyond that, working memory refers to the ability to both manipulate and use information briefly stored in the mind in the face of distraction.
Researchers gathered four groups of volunteers and trained their working memories using a complex training task called “dual n-back training,” which presented both auditory and visual cues that participants had to temporarily store and recall.
The results were surprising. While the control groups made gains, presumably because they had practice with the fluid intelligence tests, the trained groups improved considerably more than the control groups. Further, the longer the participants trained, the larger were their intelligence gains.
Want to test it out? Here are two Dual N-Back tools developed off the original paper:
- Soak Your Head – online for PC/Mac
- hback – installable for Linux
The test subjects only spent twenty minutes each day to improve their Fluid Intelligence. Why not give it a go and see how it works for you?
hat-tip to Futurismic
The task is surprisingly hard. But I’ve found that practice really helps. In addition, we’re putting up a new update tonight that takes into account user feedback.
Good luck!
@Erik – any chance you could simplify the instructions so lazy people like me who balk at lengthy instructions and instead adopt the Man-Strategy (i.e. I am a man; I refuse to accept that I don’t instinctively understand how this thing in front of me works, where the place I’m driving to is, or that not arguing over whether or not to leave the toilet seat up is actually more effort than just moving the thing) don’t have to figure out for themselves. Something like:
“How To Play (short version) Press the button if the thing you see matches what happened two goes back.”
Or am I just being a pain?
Either way, thanks for putting this up for free. I’m now trying to get up to 3-back level….
Hey. Thanks for the feedback. I’ve found it difficult to find a short bit of text that everyone understands. I think yours is pretty good. But one thing that I get a lot of email on is which button to push when. Also, we do have the demo, and that’s supposed to be the easy way (push the “demo” button on the application page). But even that isn’t fast :(
Thanks.
-Erik
Hi friends, really these dual n-back tool games are good. I used to think that these things were not real. But then I was referred to one of the best products in the market by a friend…I am surprised with the result. The software really works. The software is called Brain Fitness Pro
It helps in making my mind more active by making it perform various activities at the same time. I take training on this software for 25-30 minutes every day. I think the software is the best not only for the young guy but also for the children’s brain.