<story><title>Study suggests that the “brain training” industry may be a placebo</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/billion-dollar-brain-training-industry-a-sham-nothing-but-placebo-study-suggests/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>reitanqild</author><text>&amp;gt; I.e. if you have solved a lot of &amp;quot;guess the next shape&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;find the odd element&amp;quot; you are probably going to perform better because you know how the thing work.&lt;p&gt;I hear this repeated a lot. I happen to have worked with someone who was into this (former something in Mensa), and as far as I understood one of the hallmarks of a good IQ test is when previous experience have small influence on the testscore.&lt;p&gt;Some people tend to say that anyone can train for this. I guess if that was true, Mensa would have a lot more members.</text></item><item><author>riffraff</author><text>Yet, most tests of intelligence seem to be influenced by knowledge.&lt;p&gt;I.e. if you have solved a lot of &amp;quot;guess the next shape&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;find the odd element&amp;quot; you are probably going to perform better because you know how the thing work.&lt;p&gt;Likewise, literature and basic math seem to be widely influenced by education, and don&amp;#x27;t measure intelligence.&lt;p&gt;Are there tests that really measure intelligence? And if there aren&amp;#x27;t, are the qualities really separated?</text></item><item><author>Practicality</author><text>Intelligence is supposed to be a measure of intellectual capability, independent of knowledge. It&amp;#x27;s difficult to define clearly, but knowledge is definitely a different quality.&lt;p&gt;Of course &amp;quot;smart&amp;quot; is even less well-defined than intelligence, so it&amp;#x27;s not a very useful word for such a discussion.</text></item><item><author>serg_chernata</author><text>Maybe it&amp;#x27;s just me, but I&amp;#x27;ve always thought that being &amp;quot;smart&amp;quot; has everything to do with having a wealth of information and being able to draw connections between various facts and ideas.&lt;p&gt;Repeatedly solving a simple puzzle only makes you good at repeatedly solving a simple puzzle.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Frondo</author><text>Once in the distant, distant past, I had a contract job.  Full-time, they paid me for 40 hours a week, but usually I&amp;#x27;d have an hour or two of down time each day.  Like, 2pm rolls around, and I&amp;#x27;ve actually finished everything that needed to be done for the schedule, so hey, I&amp;#x27;ve got some time.&lt;p&gt;I started taking online IQ tests.  I looked around for the really hard ones, and found that they fall into a couple of categories.  Some focused on obscure vocabulary, featuring lists of hundreds of words that I, a native speaker with a pretty good vocabulary, had never seen.  Others tested spatial awareness, logic, whatever.&lt;p&gt;What I discovered, after taking a few of these tests (I skipped the vocab ones; what&amp;#x27;s the point of learnin&amp;#x27; fancy words no one else knows?), is that you get better at them, and fast.  I only took maybe 2 or 3 a day, a couple times a week, but it didn&amp;#x27;t take more than a week to start testing a lot higher.&lt;p&gt;It got kinda boring once I started seeing that kind of improvement, so I stopped.  I&amp;#x27;m curious what it&amp;#x27;d be like to try again, though.</text></comment>
<story><title>Study suggests that the “brain training” industry may be a placebo</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/billion-dollar-brain-training-industry-a-sham-nothing-but-placebo-study-suggests/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>reitanqild</author><text>&amp;gt; I.e. if you have solved a lot of &amp;quot;guess the next shape&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;find the odd element&amp;quot; you are probably going to perform better because you know how the thing work.&lt;p&gt;I hear this repeated a lot. I happen to have worked with someone who was into this (former something in Mensa), and as far as I understood one of the hallmarks of a good IQ test is when previous experience have small influence on the testscore.&lt;p&gt;Some people tend to say that anyone can train for this. I guess if that was true, Mensa would have a lot more members.</text></item><item><author>riffraff</author><text>Yet, most tests of intelligence seem to be influenced by knowledge.&lt;p&gt;I.e. if you have solved a lot of &amp;quot;guess the next shape&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;find the odd element&amp;quot; you are probably going to perform better because you know how the thing work.&lt;p&gt;Likewise, literature and basic math seem to be widely influenced by education, and don&amp;#x27;t measure intelligence.&lt;p&gt;Are there tests that really measure intelligence? And if there aren&amp;#x27;t, are the qualities really separated?</text></item><item><author>Practicality</author><text>Intelligence is supposed to be a measure of intellectual capability, independent of knowledge. It&amp;#x27;s difficult to define clearly, but knowledge is definitely a different quality.&lt;p&gt;Of course &amp;quot;smart&amp;quot; is even less well-defined than intelligence, so it&amp;#x27;s not a very useful word for such a discussion.</text></item><item><author>serg_chernata</author><text>Maybe it&amp;#x27;s just me, but I&amp;#x27;ve always thought that being &amp;quot;smart&amp;quot; has everything to do with having a wealth of information and being able to draw connections between various facts and ideas.&lt;p&gt;Repeatedly solving a simple puzzle only makes you good at repeatedly solving a simple puzzle.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jacalata</author><text>You are conflating various things.&lt;p&gt;1) it is uncontroversial that training improves performance on traditional IQ tests. It is true that people aim to minimise this when designing tests. It is also true that so far, nobody has done a great job at that. It&amp;#x27;s worth noting that Mensa presents different tests in different parts of the world - which is a pretty big hint that they think previous experience&amp;#x2F;cultural background affects how you perform on the test.&lt;p&gt;2) Anyone can improve their running performance through training. Not everyone can be a world class marathon runner. The fact that you can improve your performance on an IQ test is not disproven by the claim that not everyone is capable of reaching Mensa levels on it.</text></comment>