"How I Increased My IQ By 13 Points" - IQ boost via working memory training?

[Carl-Richard]

On 27.10.2024 at 8:34 PM, The Renaissance Man said:

This to say that progress in this kind of exercises doesn't necessarily mean progress in your working memory, it's just that your brain has developed better and better specific chunking and pattern recognition abilities.

8 hours ago, The Renaissance Man said:

Yes I'm not saying the problem is that the game becomes easier and easier, I'm saying why progress in the game will probably not translate to other areas.

I would think it's the specific pattern recognition and chunking that doesn't transfer between tasks, but the underlying working memory training that is indicated by the fatigue does transfer. It's like playing basketball and then one day switching to football. Your game performance will drop significantly, but your general physical fitness will stay the same.

N-Back training does load your working memory, or else there would be no platform to develop the pattern recognition or chunking abilities on. Your working memory is the general workspace of your mind, kinda like the musculoskeletal system is the general workspace of your body. The question is simply how much N-Back training loads it and whether it's more efficient than simply using your brain in other similar ways (e.g. reading a difficult text).

And indeed, I believe N-Back training is more efficient at this, because it follows the same principles of maximizing muscle growth: short and intense periods of work (e.g. 1 minute x 10 sets), short rest periods in-between (e.g. 30 seconds), and longer periods of rest (e.g. two to three rest days a week). So to speak, you can develop your muscles by simply doing manual labor all day, but you won't win the Mr. Olympia.

But how much more efficient is it? That's an empirical question, and paraphrasing one of my professors, "the evidence on the benefits of brain training on improving cognitive performance is weak to moderate", and the studies that show positive results generally point to e.g. single digit increases in IQ. However, I believe more clever research designs could show more convincing results.

Just like there are better and worse ways of training for example bench press, there are better and worse ways of training N-Back, and I don't believe this is well-controlled for in most studies. The way you structure your training, your focus, your intensity, your consistency, your technique, etc., matters a lot.

This is also not to speak about factors like internal motivation, which is unbelievably important for pursuing growth in anything and arguably one of the largest predictors of cognitive performance in itself. You will probably never find a high-quality study like a randomized controlled trial that uses internally motivated participants unless they intentionally selected for it, and that is rare (and almost practically impossible in this case: where would you find people who can't wait to start N-Back training but has not already started it?).

As for what I believe is possible, I believe you could increase your IQ by 10 points using a proper N-Back training protocol with internal motivation (and coaching) in one month of training. You could probably increase it another 5 points or so over time, like indicated by the anecdotal report mentioned by OP (although he was also maximizing other factors like diet and exercise). On the surface, this would probably get me laughed at by some scientists, but again, I would ask them for better studies.

 

So to sum up, N-Back is a very intense exercise, and it fits well within a training protocol that maximizes growth.

Edited 5 hours ago by Carl-Richard