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See the original image at eurekalert.org —

Plastic brain outsmarts experts

eurekalert.org — Training can increase fluid intelligence, once thought to be fixed at birth Fluid intelligence, an aspect of a person's IQ, allows people to solve unfamiliar problems by understanding relationships between various concepts independent of previous knowledge or skills.

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  • NightVortez, on 06/06/2008, -20/+6Artificial products becoming smarter than men? Tinfoil hat time.
    • zyl0x, on 06/06/2008, -0/+17You didn't read the article, did you.

      Guess how I know.
      • NightVortez, on 06/06/2008, -7/+1I skimmed through it, but honestly, the title itself was much more interesting.
        • InferiorWang, on 06/06/2008, -0/+6I'll give you a hint...plastic doesn't refer to the oil-based product.
    • adiman7, on 06/06/2008, -6/+1How about women? :)
  • zyl0x, on 06/06/2008, -0/+20Not going to show us the tests? Selfish bastards..

    Also, the article title is incredibly misleading.
  • ElAssoWipo, on 06/06/2008, -1/+7Short term memory = Ram. Long term memory = HDD.

    Poorly explained in this article. It's not about remembering for a short time, it's the space you use to think.
    • donkeySays, on 06/06/2008, -0/+1The thinking space == processor.
    • ozydingo, on 06/08/2008, -0/+1Along that line, other than the physical separation, what makes the HDD / RAM analogy valid? It always seemed like a poor one to me.
      • ElAssoWipo, on 06/08/2008, -0/+1Well that's easy, the HDD is your long term memory, it stores everything, but it doesn't actually do anything on its own, it just contains information.
        The Ram is your short term memory, it's where programs (thoughts) are executed by selecting relevant information from the HDD.

        The cognitive areas of the brain (what allows you to think) is the CPU. Programs would be intelligence and personnal experience. As in, if you spill something, your "clean the spill" program relies entirely on previous "cleaning the spills" executions.

        The heart is the power supply and the nervous system is the motherboard infrastructure.
        • ozydingo, on 06/08/2008, -0/+1Ok, yeah, I guess that was easy. I was only thinking along the lines of noting the obvious differences in functional mechanisms & structure (parallelism, single-word access, exact addressing & content addressing, etc), that RAM isn't really "short term" unless you power down, etc etc blah blah.
  • bbrosemer, on 06/06/2008, -12/+2In other news plastic phallic shaped vibration devices outlast man....
    Plastic wins again :(
  • Shaggy63, on 06/06/2008, -3/+22I'm constantly tired of people referring to being smart as being able to remember facts.

    Smart == being able to figure things out.
    Smart != memory.
    • themarq, on 06/06/2008, -0/+11Memory has a lot to do with intelligence, but you're right that it's not the "definition of intelligence." Plenty of research points to memory being the quality that feeds intelligence so to speak. For example, you're intelligent if you can figure something out, and the way we figure stuff out it by comparing a problem to our past experiences. IE: we recognize a pattern in a new problem and look for similar patterns in our memories to find a solution to a wholly new problem.
      Obviously, intelligence is far more complex than that... but that's the basic gist of it. :)
    • tweak567, on 06/06/2008, -0/+5While I understand what your trying to say I don't think you can completely separate those two things. Implying the ability figure things out implies intelligence is just as inaccurate as referring to being smart as being able to remember facts.

      Being able to figure things out is by no means independent of being able to remember things. In many cases the more information you have to base decisions/problem-solving on, the more accurate your solutions are likely to be. I think you are oversimplifying by a large degree.



      • synwolf, on 06/06/2008, -0/+2Interesting. Essentially, you and themarq are referencing fluid and crystallized intelligence, both of which you'll find mentioned in the article. Here's the wikipedia article on the two: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_and_crystallize ...
        ...upon reading the wikipedia article, it actually seems like you're talking about different aspects of fluid intelligence, it's just that shaggy is assuming that gF (fluid intelligence) doesn't necessarily have anything to do with prior experience, while tweak567 makes the point that patterns in experiences are easier to point out when you have more data...or experience.
      • enicholas, on 06/06/2008, -0/+1tweak567 is correct. The human brain is a pattern matching machine, and it works better when it has more data to work with. When confronted with an unfamiliar problem, a person with a very good memory is more likely to be able to tease out any subtle patterns that exist, and therefore more likely to be able to solve the problem.

        Obviously this mostly happens below the level of consciousness, so you don't think about the fact that you are matching patterns, but it's what the brain does.
      • themarq, on 06/06/2008, -0/+1Yes I was highly simplifying what I was talking about; the pattern matching machine idea.

        Essentially when your brain is working on a problem it is working with two separate streams of data so come to a solution. First is your sensory data, what you are seeing and hearing (among others), the other stream of data is your memories. More often than not, it's this stream of memories or experience that are more important to solving a new problem.
      • plnegative1, on 06/06/2008, -0/+1Wouldn't that make long term memory more important? Since this is where you access information to solve problems
    • Varz, on 06/07/2008, -0/+1Short term memory is one component to intelligence.
  • kingofinternet, on 06/06/2008, -16/+1IT'LL GO GREAT WITH MY PLASTIC *****
  • 13373h4X0r, on 06/06/2008, -1/+5There's a glowing ball of energy in that guy's head!!!!!
  • GordonClass, on 06/06/2008, -6/+1For some reason this reminds me of this Homer Simpson pic.
    http://i19.photobucket.com/albums/b189/jokerswild1 ...
  • chompapotamus, on 06/06/2008, -8/+1is it "outsmarting" if we developed it?
  • Vodd9, on 06/06/2008, -3/+17READ THE GODDAMN ARTICLE BEFORE COMMENTING
  • FloorModel, on 06/06/2008, -6/+1plastic brains would be a step up for some... just sayin'
  • jboettcher, on 06/06/2008, -1/+9Title on this sucks - clearly few people here are actually reading the article and we get comments about a "plastic brain" when in fact the article was referring to the plastic qualities of real human brains... and that in fact was a small part of the article. Should be more along the lines of "RESEARCHERS FIGURE OUT A WAY TO INCREASE IQ BY TRAINING"
    • themarq, on 06/06/2008, -1/+3The article title is fine as it was written for a scholarly journal and intended for a scientific audience. In brain research a term like 'plastic' is used all the time to describe the flexible and adaptive qualities of intelligence and the brain.

      It sounds to me like you're suggesting that the title needs to be dumbed down for diggers, then I suggest to you that the problem isn't the article title, rather it's the digg community.
  • miketh01, on 06/06/2008, -4/+0leave it to someone at the university of michigan to waste their research funds on something totally worthless..
  • belthesar, on 06/06/2008, -0/+3So does this mean that those DS brain training games really do make one smarter? Damn... *hands $50 to a friend*
  • s4g4n, on 06/06/2008, -0/+3summed up: Study for an IQ test and you'll do better than if you didn't study.
  • robinthehood, on 06/06/2008, -1/+0some people learn better than others. Surprise surprise.

    I wonder how many tax dollars went to find out this nugget of genious?
  • daeus, on 06/06/2008, -0/+1I've heard of something similar before, a way of thinking which is fairly easy to do, in order to understand a new concept you see everything as components and link them together to form the concept as a whole...something like that.
  • plnegative1, on 06/06/2008, -0/+1All this article said to me was that you can improve your short term memory.
  • davidhallstrom, on 06/06/2008, -0/+2I found this article to be interesting. Thank you.
  • lheat123, on 06/06/2008, -0/+0http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W__uztA6htE&feature ...
  • Ortheos, on 06/07/2008, -0/+1No ***** sherlock, this is why 90% of all regular school teachers can easily score 150+ in IQ tests (supposed genius level). Because they use the mental skills just about everybody has every day. Their thinking is fine tuned and sharpened. The average shmuck is blunt and untuned in his thinking.
  • NanoStuff, on 06/07/2008, -0/+1http://cognitivefun.net/test/8
    http://cognitivefun.net/test/5
  • knifemonkey, on 06/09/2008, -0/+0We wrote a web application that does this dual n-back training. It's at: http://www.soakyourhead.com/N-Back.aspx . It's really hard! Anyway, it gives you a sense of what the trainees in the article had to do. And maybe it'll even show how it helped them.
  • SunAlex, on 08/30/2008, -0/+0in England there is a boy who can count numbers like this 15849856745454+154687956845 and this is fantastic.
    http://sooslic.com/?id=674
    http://www.dvci.org/programs.htm
    http://shpe-sac.org/membership.htm
    http://www.mkzine.com/References.html
    http://search.ashtech.info/science
  •  

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