Posted on 04/30/2008 7:11:06 PM PDT by neverdem
On the other hand, reading the NY Times is a proven way to train people to be less intelligent.
Bookmark for later reading.
Bookmark?! Can’t you just remember it? ;)
There’s no free lunch. Even if this works and has practical potential, it will require effort and concentration to achieve performance improvement. Akin to speed reading.
No. I’m 57. My mind is gone!
So skuulin is gud fer sumtin after all.
Take LSD and live to 102!
At least, you can still remember your age. I can't!
I wrote a similar program for a friend who had taken a job at a parts counter and was having trouble remembering 10 digit numbers. He said in three days he was kickin everyone elses butt, I thought he was just humoring me. Now after reading this article I tried it and I feel smarter already.
Intelligence is a very tricky concept.
To start with, it seems to be the “flip side” to creativity.
That is, people who can maintain a focused attention are able to grasp far more complex problems and solve them.
However, to have creative leaps, maintaining an unfocused state of mind for a length of time permits the imagination free reign.
But people have learned a trick that makes them vacillate back and forth between mental focus and unfocused, most likely because it increases survivability in high risk situations.
It is our talking to ourselves, our internal dialogue. It is taught to us from infancy, and we still practice it though are lives are far safer today. Unfortunately, it also interferes with both our intelligence and creativity.
Many different intellectual skills, such as meditation, must begin with task of “shutting off the noise” in the head, and with practice, a degree of control over internal dialogue allows for longer periods of both a focused and an unfocused state of mind.
In raw intelligence, you would seem to gain 10 or 20 IQ points, just by being able to concentrate on what you are doing.
This is why individuals with Asperger’s disorder seem to be very intelligent. They are incapable of maintaining an internal dialogue, so their focus on a problem may run to hours or even days without distraction.
And this is just one of the problems in intelligence.
Another is confusing intelligence with memorization, a frequent error. Techniques to improve memory are well known, yet few people practice them on a regular basis, finding little need for them. And they are usually correct.
Other abilities that are often confused with intelligence are spatial visualization, or being able to imagine abstract problems in your head; finely tuned senses; physical dexterity; empathy; verbosity and vocabulary; even appearance can be confused with intelligence.
Education and test taking ability are confused as well. Many highly educated people are not particularly bright, which is self evident.
Were you able to read the actual article yourself?
IMO.
bump
I found speed reading as useful as used toilet paper, IMHO, except for increasing scores on reading tests. It was useless for mastering any subject matter. I have enough errors of omission without trying.
No, just the abstract that I linked. Sometimes if you enclose the title within quotation marks and enter it into a search engine, e.g. Yahoo, Google, etc., you get lucky. I only found this review so far.
FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list.
“That is, people who can maintain a focused attention are able to grasp far more complex problems and solve them.
However, to have creative leaps, maintaining an unfocused state of mind for a length of time permits the imagination free reign.”
Thanks for the insight and reminder. I was just trying to get my daughter to focus on her long division and her mind got side tracked following some numbers off to who knows where. I started to get a bit frustrated and she said “Dad - you know I always have to be thinking of SOMETHING!” So I calmed down, had her stop, think of being up camping and fishing to clear her head (and mine!) and she was able to get back on task.
She does come up with the best stories though - and made-up games!
One of the better exercises I’ve heard of to increase control over the internal dialogue is based on an interesting theory.
It is that the part of the brain in charge of talking to ourselves is the same part that involves attention. It has finite resources, so if you can fully use them on attention instead of talking, with practice it gives you more and more control over that part of your mind. Sometimes described as like having a “talk to yourself on/off switch”.
By not talking to yourself, you learn how not to talk to yourself.
Thus the exercise is to do several physically undemanding things at the same time, that use a lot of attention.
Ordinary walking uses a great deal of attention, directed to the legs to keep navigating, avoiding obstacles, etc. So it is a great starting point. Added to that, as you walk, holding your hands in some unusual manner, like with two of the fingers crossed. It doesn’t matter what, just as long as your attention is directed to your arms and hands as well as your legs and feet. If you lose attention on your hands, you just change how you are holding them.
The real trick is to unfocus your eyes. And this uses some interesting psychology. Normally, when you look at things, your attention and focus is “point to point”. You look from tiny spot to tiny spot, which uses just minimal attention, seeing most things peripherally. But when you unfocus your eyes, the whole 180 degree tableau in front of you is equal, as far as your attention is concerned.
And this uses a whopping great amount of attention.
Combining all three things: walking, holding your hands funny, and unfocusing your eyes, overwhelms that small part of your brain by taking so much attention, that it just doesn’t have the ability to keep up the internal dialogue.
And you stop talking to yourself, for longer and longer times.
Walking around this way is easy to learn, and with just a mile or two, every day or two, you start to notice increased concentration in about two weeks. And the effects tend to be cumulative, so the more you do it, the better you get.
Imagine being able to sit down and do an entire SAT test without distraction.
I knew one young man who did this exercise, almost because he had to. His internal dialogue was so intense that he continually vacillated back and forth between focused and unfocused. The end result was that he sounded like a California surf bum. He could barely speak a sentence without being distracted. It was both exhaustive and very frustrating for him.
In about a month, I saw him again, and he looked revitalized. He was almost a different person, could speak in whole paragraphs, and loved the ability to actually finish things he had started. I also noted that he was bursting with energy, no longer having to commit so much brain power to internal dialogue and bouncing back and forth.
There are all sorts of ways of accomplishing much the same thing, but he is the reason I remember this exercise so well.
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