A short quote to sum up the main idea behind the article:
[…] according to researchers at the University of Warwick and the University of Basel, we’ve pretty much hit the limits, and we’re never going to develop a science fiction-style ‘supermind’.
Thomas Hills and Ralph Hertwig looked at a range of studies, including research into the use of drugs like Ritalan which help with attention, studies of people with autism and a study of the Ashkenazi Jewish population.
And they’ve concluded that there’s just too severe a penalty. For every gain in cognitive functions, they say – such as a better memory, increased attention or improved intelligence – there’s a price to pay elsewhere. […]
I have no doubt that their facts are correct, but their conclusion is simply wrong. It doesn’t take into account the fact that we barely scratch the surface of what we can do right now. I’m not talking about the mythical “we only use 10% of our brains” crap, but proven techniques. There’s one that allows anyone with a normally working brain to remember essentially anything they want to for as long as they want to. There’s a second that lets you defuse limiting emotions and painful memories at will. Those two alone would allow most people to get a lot smarter, probably twenty additional IQ points easily, forty if they put some effort into it.
That’s just the low-hanging fruit, too. I have no doubt that there are other techniques I don’t know about, and more that will be developed in the future… things that will let people evaluate logic statements more easily and with more certainty, shut off internal mental distractions and focus your entire energy on a project, completely control your emotional state and emotional health (rather than just put the brakes on damaging emotions), tap creativity that only a lucky few can now touch, and all sorts of other things. In the self-improvement industry I’ve seen a number of attempts at such things, many of which seem to work for at least a few people. These will only get better over time, as people find the similarities between the ones that it works for and determine the deeper reasons behind their successes and failures.
Is there a price, as the article says? Sure. You’ve got to work to get those kinds of benefits. But that’s a price that’s easily met, for those who are willing — the people who can do such things “naturally” paid that price, usually without even noticing they were doing so, and time is the one thing that almost everyone has. The work doesn’t have to be difficult either, it can even be fun if you approach it the right way.
And for the future, there’s technological enhancements. We’ll inevitably come up with a working brain/computer interface sooner or later, and that pretty much defines the much-touted technological singularity — the point beyond which we unenhanced humans can only speculate on. But even without it, I suspect nearly everyone could reach an IQ of 140 with a few years of part-time effort, if they had the desire and the willingness to work on it.
Of course, I can’t prove that at present, because so few people have any such desire. But that will change. Some people will learn because they enjoy learning, or excelling at something; others will learn because it’s a way to get an edge when competing with the other presently-seven-billion warm bodies on this planet. Eventually most people will learn techniques like those, for whatever personal reasons they have — and the world will be a lot better for it.
HG, when you have an IQ of 140, if you don’t already have one before you began the techniques you describe, let us know so we can evaluate these techniques. I’m talking about on the WAIS or the Stanford-Binet, not on a popular “IQ test” such as you’d find online.
IQ tests, though they are of limited practical application other than at the extremes of these curves due to this restriction, tend to test things that rarely change throughout a person’s lifetime. Has your IQ test results changed a lot over your lifetime? Mine haven’t, nor does that of anyone else I know of other than people who’ve gotten organic brain damage or severe mental disease.
I don’t deny that the ability to use one’s mind can be improved, but the IQ tests don’t measure the ability to use one’s mind, something you advocate (and with good reason) in your essay. They purport to measure what inherent potential in this department a person has. (Which is usually quite a bit – more than enough to do better than they’re doing often.)
They specifically try to avoid in designing these tests, measuring factors of a person’s intelligence that change over time – barring organic problems such as Alzheimers or other brain damage. Intelligence, measured as how well you use your mind, you might be able to improve, an intelligence quotient, rarely does that change. They’ve been researching and designing them for a long time to ensure that’s the case.
If you have a WAIS or Stanford-Binet that’s changed significantly though, or can find someone who has had it change more than a statistically insignificant amount, present it. Also present it to the peer-reviewed psychological journals, as I’m sure they’d like to hear about it, as it’d be foiling something those two approved IQ tests have been designed to factor out.
If I ever get down to an IQ of 140 I’ll let you know. 😉
And yes, I know how those tests are designed, and how the designers try to “normalize” them so that the scores are generally roughly the same throughout a person’s life. I also know that it’s bullshit — nothing more than an approximation based on when most people’s curiosity is balanced by the difficulty they have with the problem, so that they stop looking for better ways to solve it. Geniuses are simply people who continue to explore a subject and wrest information from it long after everyone else is satisfied and has moved on, they otherwise have little if anything over everyone else.
That measurement of IQ roughly corresponds to a person’s “natural” level of problem-solving ability, but as you say, it has nothing to do with his potential or limitations. Techniques that make the subject matter easier for a person let him remain curious for longer and figure out better ways of handling that type of problem.
I’m aware that there is another way to do well on IQ tests, which is to simply memorize answers and techniques. It’s useful in its place, and someone with that ability could do very well in most school subjects, but alone it’s inferior because it relies on someone else figuring things out first, and is useless when confronted with things that the person hasn’t studied beforehand. It’s also massively vulnerable to misinformation, as such people have no way to evaluate competing ideas and choose the best one. A person with that ability alone will usually accept the first thing he’s told and thereafter reject anything that contradicts it, even if the later information is more correct — as a sad example, I’ve heard that many scientists of the day rejected quantum physics in the early 1900s simply because it wasn’t like the Bohr model of the atom that they’d learned first, even though it is provably more correct.
I think you’re confusing successful people who are smart, and how to become a more successful smarter person, with people who have a high IQ, and how to change an IQ test score.
The two aren’t the same, and frankly, the latter doesn’t interest me as much, because changing an IQ score is going to be not only a frustrating (since they’re designed to counter such things) but a meaningless exercise, much as the IQ tests are themselves. 😉
You can always game a test by studying only the things that are going to be on it. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m referring to improving a person’s general problem-solving ability, which would improve his IQ test scores only as a byproduct.
I agree that IQ itself is fairly meaningless, but it does give a way to compare a person’s problem-solving skills and knowledge with that of others.
It would improve it if IQ tests were designed to measure general problem-solving skills. They aren’t, they’re designed to measure what is the most inate and unchangeable factors in a person’s intellegence. Even the knowledge questions, not a large factor in an IQ test if you’ve ever taken one, aren’t designed to test knowledge, they’re designed to test long-term memory. Other aspects of the test are designed to test short term memory, pattern solving in puzzles, and other such things, with normalization designed to factor out someone attempting to game the test, or normal variations that occur through a person’s lifetime. They aren’t perfect, and I consider it a waste of time to try to change what they measure anyway, which has nothing to do with the ability to be either “smart” in the conventional sense or successful.
The only way to measure any form of intelligence is to pose problems and see how the testee solves them. That’s one of the main weaknesses in the concept of intelligence testing, and for that matter, in the whole concept of a person having any kind of fixed level of intelligence. Any problem-solving skill can be learned, if the person has enough desire to do so. And the more problem solving skills you have, and the better you can apply them, the more successful you’ll be, in general.