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Maybe I'll just forget the Book Club and spend my time hanging out on the web doing exercises intended to increase my working memory. (Sorry - I didn't write down the source that put me onto those two sites, but I remember it being serious.)
UNTIL recently, a person's IQ - a measure of all kinds of mental problem-solving abilities, including spatial skills, memory and verbal reasoning - was thought to be a fixed commodity largely determined by genetics. But recent hints suggest that a very basic brain function called working memory might underlie our general intelligence, opening up the intriguing possibility that if you improve your working memory, you could boost your IQ too.
Working memory is the brain's short-term information storage system. It's a workbench for solving mental problems. For example if you calculate 73 - 6 + 7, your working memory will store the intermediate steps necessary to work out the answer. And the amount of information that the working memory can hold is strongly related to general intelligence.
A team led by Torkel Klingberg at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, has found signs that the neural systems that underlie working memory may grow in response to training. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scans, they measured the brain activity of adults before and after a working-memory training programme, which involved tasks such as memorising the positions of a series of dots on a grid. After five weeks of training, their brain activity had increased in the regions associated with this type of memory (Nature Neuroscience, vol 7, p 75).
Perhaps more significantly, when the group studied children who had completed these types of mental workouts, they saw improvement in a range of cognitive abilities not related to the training, and a leap in IQ test scores of 8 per cent (Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, vol 44, p 177). It's early days yet, but Klingberg thinks working-memory training could be a key to unlocking brain power. "Genetics determines a lot and so does the early gestation period," he says. "On top of that, there is a few per cent - we don't know how much - that can be improved by training."
As far as I can tell, the idea that working memory is highly related to IQ is solid and not likely to be significantly revised any time soon. I have the impression that, for awhile there, neuroscientists were thinking that IQ might actually be working memory, but that hypothesis seems to have been abandoned.
15 comments:
The links for "hanging out on the web" and "exercises" are broken.
oh heck - thanks; I'll fix
I've re-done the links & they work for me.
If they're still not working for you, try Googling these phrases:
"Memory Game - Test Your Memory"
"Memory Gym" or "The original memory gym"
If you are into brain stuff, you are definitely going to want to follow this blog:
IQ's Corner
Kevin McGrew posts weekly multifarious updates, combines wit with erudition and perspicuous writing, and provides annotated links to other blogs and sites of interest. You can't afford to miss it. He also runs a Yahoo group (I lurk on it; most of the contributors are PhD psychologists, but I learn a lot).
I duked it out with Google over my password, and won. I saw my name was on the member list on the sidebar (there's another a in palisadesk -- think root word, palisade), so now I can log in and try to figure out how to post something. I'll work on that intrinsic/extrinsic item (still in my "drafts" folder).
BTW, those links worked fine for me, and I have a cranky dial-up connection.
You're not on the "Contributors" list. You've got an entry because I posted one of your comments "up front" and assigned your name as the category label.
Send me an email!
cijohn@verizon.net
hmmm
If you've got a "drafts" folder then you should be a Contributor....
Let me go look.
good grief!
you're right!
how'd you do that?
I am desperately in need of an intrinsic/extrinsic motivation post.
(Partly for me, but partly also for a friend who is dealing with a "school refusal" situation...)
It's been interesting, because I've dived into the best behavioral/behaviorist books I can find, and they have nothing to say about intrinsic motivation!
I read "Misbehavior of Organisms" today --- woo hoo!
(Will post.)
Now I can't tell whether C's misbehaviors are bad management on my part or teen instinct on his.
Good grief.
He's got a long post on academic motivation.
THANK YOU!
His first post asks whether E.F. (executive function) is real (or, rather, a "valid construct").
My view, at the moment, is that it is....I'll have to try to find the latest study I read that differentiated E.F. from IQ. (I think I posted it, but who knows?)
There is an excellent article on academic motivation by Zig Engelmann and Don Crawford in the latest issue of Direct Instruction News.
I think you have to buy the issue to get it (they put previous years' issues on the adihome website for free) but it's worth the price of a year's subscription for that one article.
Very in-depth -- the sort of thing you need to read and reread and mull over. Zig is probably one of the most perceptive observers of children who ever lived.
I don't know if you can buy a pdf of the article (I have a paper copy). It's from the Fall 2007 issue, pp. 24-31. The title is "Fixing Motivation Problems."
Phooey, Blogger is refusing my password again. Maybe I have to log in on the main page, not when doing comments.
It's been interesting, because I've dived into the best behavioral/behaviorist books I can find, and they have nothing to say about intrinsic motivation!
Language is probably the issue here. As a rule, behavior analysts et alia do not go about using terminology like "intrinsic motivation" or any other reified abstractions for hypothesized interior states. They confine themselves to discussing, measuring and shaping behavior. That includes inner behavior (Skinner's term), but only as it can be observed, measured, shaped etc.
There are some folks in the PT community who have done a lot of work in this area -- Dr. Abigail Calkin is one; I believe Dr. Nancy Merbitz may be well-informed on this topic too. If you don't already subscribe to the PT listserve you might wish to do so; several people there can doubless point you towards the sources you need in the behavioral sciences. They definitely deal with motivation, but don't use the same words for it.
BTW, a really excellent book is by the late Michael Pressley et al , Motivating Primary Grade Students. Guilford, 2004 I think. It is outstanding -- subject for another dozen posts.
Buy it now!
Signing in on the main page seems to be the key to success. Blogger won't let me log in to do comments.
Liz here from I Speak of Dreams.
Drat. I'm not currently signed into to Google.
Does PT = Precision Teaching?
Rick LaVoie has a new book on motivation: The Motivation Breakthrough.
It was on my Xmas list, but Santa didn't come through.
I have found his previous work (F.A.T. City, It's So Much Work to Be Your Friend) very sound.
Now I can't tell whether C's misbehaviors are bad management on my part or teen instinct on his.
My immediate thought: look for the third choice. 2nd thought: invoke Miller's Law.
Dale H. Emery:
When communications get tangled, a helpful principle for untangling them is Jerry Weinberg's Rule of Three Interpretations: If I can't think of at least three different interpretations of what I received, I haven't thought enough about what it might mean. Before responding to any one meaning, think of at least two other possible meanings.
Also helpful is Miller's Law, which says, "To understand what another person is saying, you have to assume that it is true and try to imagine what it might be true of." To apply Miller's Law, ask yourself, "If what the person said were true, what else would have to be true? Under what circumstances would it be true? In order for me to believe that, what else would I have to believe?" The answers you get are presuppositions — the unstated, but implied, meanings in the message. Identifying the presuppositions helps you to fill in the information that the sender left out of the message.
One of my goals for 2008 is to really understand executive function (in the sense that I understand the underlying cognitive structures leading to accurate, fluent reading, for example).
The 19 yo darling dyslexic daughter (ddd) is having psychoeducational evaluation this week, the first since 2003, in order to have appropriate accommodations at college. It will be interesting to see what has changed and what has not changed. The main issue seems to be processing speed. My metaphor has been engine size (IQ) and transmission efficiency (processing speed).
Yes, PT=precision teaching. My knowledge of same is superficial (I would have to work in an environment that supported PT practices to incorporate them reliably into my repertoire). From lurking and studying I do know they deal with what we commonly call "motivation" but from a different angle. Instead of analyzing the child -- "How can we get Joey to be 'motivated,' "PT'ers ask themselves what behaviors Joey needs to exhibit to demonstrate "motivation," and how do we increase the frequency of those behaviors? The locus of responsibility is on the adult/teacher, not the child.
Dog agility is not a bad parallel. When I flub a course at an agility trial, nobody comes up and says, "Gee, that dog is so unmotivated. No wonder you didn't qualify." Er, no. People may commiserate and say they had a similar training problem -- but there is no suggestion that the dog has the "deficiency" -- it's the trainer. Dogs (like kids) are motivated differently, but the principles of shaping and reinforcement are the same. Your dog may be "motivated" by the opportunity to play with a tug-toy, mine by fetching a tennis ball, still another by food or tummy rubs. Whatever -- you develop a graduated program to use the dog's natural reinforcers to shape an unnatural, learned sequence of complex behaviors. In working with kids, PT'ers greatly accelerate this process by their data collection, display and target-setting based upon what the learner does.
Two thumbs up to Rick L., have followed his contributions to LD Online and Middleweb over the years (and the videos). His terminology (as with most people in the popular education press) is inexact, behaviorally speaking -- reward, incentive, etc. do not carry their scientific meanings. No problem as long as we make that distinction when reading.
well tonight I learned, again, that I should never allow myself to be tired
tired results in very poor behavior management In The Home
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