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.

Comments

The biggest news was left out

[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

[bluefoxlucid]

Intelligence is largely similar between all humans: we don't have actual boundaries. The normal intellectual boundary is artificial; even physical limits are artificial.

One of the most famous examples of the human artificial boundary phenomena is running. For the longest time, a four-minute mile was considered physiologically impossible. When the record was broken, it was swiftly broken again by another bloke a month later. Within a few years, everyone was running four-minute miles. It's now a standard, and the record is much lower than four minutes.

What held humans back from breaking the four-minute mile was not believing they could run a mile that fast. By not believing in the possibility, they trained themselves to assess those last precious seconds as the best they could do; they would push themselves, find difficulty, and assume this was as good as it gets. They wouldn't push themselves further because the exertion was interpreted as some sort of dangerous violation of what is possible, safe, or sane: it's hard because it can't be done, so the pain and exhaustion mean it's time to stop here.

In modern times, Olympic records are broken every year; mental mathematics are continuously improved; and humans at the World Memory Competition continuously break previous records for memorizing lots of shit in little time. Typists type faster, bicyclists bicycle faster, and 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. People are of the mind that anything that can be done can be done slightly better, and continue to progress by degrees over their predecessors.

What makes this progress possible--and what impedes it--is the form of practice taken. Time spent practicing has little to no impact on skill; it is the mode of practice that matters most. K. Anders Ericsson published a theory of Deliberate Practice: that a person practices in a goal-oriented manner with a focus on technique, folding in constant, continuous feedback to improve upon his deficiencies. In short: a person who simply tries repeatedly to memorize a deck of 52 cards will make small gains; while a person who reviews and notices himself confusing or slowing on specific cards will target those cards, correct the issue, and make rapid gains both small and large.

All of this brings us to a head about intelligence, and about the permanence of training.

Intelligence is a matter of creativity: a person must be able to apply knowledge to solve problems, rather than repeat back rote facts. Creativity is, in turn, a matter of knowledge: invention and inventory are the same; you invent by reassembling the inventory of your mind into new forms, dividing a problem into recognizable components and adjusting solutions to similar components so as to produce a solution. Knowledge is, of course, a matter of memory: you cannot know what you do not remember.

Memory is improved by technique. The primary considerations are meaningfulness: information is best memorized when it is organized (grouped) and attached to well-understood ideas. Images are immediately well-understood, and so visualization is used to convert complex thoughts into meaningful representations of known topics (i.e. a running duck--both "running" and "duck" are meaningful--can be visualized). 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.

Synesthetes make concepts meaningful by attaching other concepts. Sound forms its own imagery, or numbers have their own smells. The mimicry of this is a core technique in memory improvement: speed card participants attach playing cards to images, emotions, smells, sounds, textures, and whatever else they can; while numeric memory is aided by a PAO system, converting numbers into people, actio

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?

Re:IQ is not a simple measure

[Chrisq]

It's an interesting result, but nobody should pretend they really know how to interpret it.

Green with a hint of ginger

Re:simulate it?

[bluefoxlucid]

LSD will induce it. I don't recommend this. Psilocybin will do it as well; I also don't recommend this, but it may be safer than LSD. Some research suggests LSD is safer. Both are poisons. My understanding of LSD is it allows far too much neuroplasticity: traumatic experiences when on LSD can reform the brain such that a later trigger may cause a drug state, which can be disastrous (i.e. high while driving, decide you're a bird and leap out a window, etc.). There is dispute over this being an actual possibility.