People Trained To Experience an Overlap In Senses Also Receive IQ Boost

Zothecula writes Tasting lemons when they see a number seven, regarding a certain letter as being yellow in color. Not a great deal is known about why some people experience an overlapping of the senses, a phenomena known as synesthesia. But a new study conducted at the University of Sussex has suggested that specific training of the mind can induce the effects of the condition. The study even suggests that such training can boost a person's IQ.

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[mr_mischief]

Is the 12-point boost in IQ permanent or does it fade over three months like the primary effects of the training?

Re:The biggest news was left out

[turing_m]

Intelligence is largely similar between all humans: we don't have actual boundaries.

You do know what a bell curve is? Sure, most people tend towards a mean but the difference between either end is immense, with very real implications. It separates hedge fund managers from janitors. Different races and ethnicities also tend towards different means. Half a century of trying to eliminate "the gap" between blacks and whites (about a standard deviation in IQ) has been a dismal failure. Billions of dollars has been thrown at this money pit with nothing to show for it. We will see commercial fusion reactors, strong AI, heck, even mass-market-popular commercial flying cars before the gap has been eliminated.

IQ tests follow a sliding scale such that Einstein was kind of dumb and we've repeatedly revamped the Culture Fair and changed the baselines for the Wechsler.

I am definitely on the right side of the bell curve, I was born a lot later than Einstein, and modern physics is still one of the hardest subjects I've taken, if not the hardest. I call BS on this one. If Einstein did not so great on an IQ test, it says more about the particular IQ test than Einstein's IQ. I suspect that there were questions on the IQ test where Einstein was right and the IQ test was wrong, and/or the IQ test was only calibrated to be accurate near the mean and not where Einstein's IQ was. You can take a hundred cram school attendees who have managed to ace the SAT through sheer bloody-mindedness and still not get the intellectual output of one Einstein.

Attaching sounds, smells, and actions makes a more vivid, accessible, memorable image; and complex techniques and systems such as linking, story forming, and mind palaces further aid in recall by providing indexing or association.

I know the technique of mind palaces and find them utterly unwieldy. Why use a mind palace to remember a fact when you can just write it down or google it?