Could research increase IQ 50 points or more?

IQ is a rough measure of many mental skills and a number of those mental skills are never taught, but rather, people either figure them out for themselves (rather hit or miss), or they are learned by osmosis from parents, teachers, mentors, spouses, and so forth by people who are lucky enough to end up with just the right people around them. These mental skills which aren't taught include things such as how one divides information into chunks to be worked on, how one handles contexts, what part of a problem one should focus on first, what associations one should try in order to bring in additional information which is likely to turn out to be relevant, and so forth.

Since there are many untaught mental skills which some people stumble upon while other people don't, it looks like IQ scores could be increased by teaching the best mental skills of the above kind to everyone. The only question is how much IQ scores could be increased for everyone except those with organic brain problems? For example, except for those with organic brain problems, could everyone's IQ be increased 50% or more?

We haven't even identified all the subtle mental processes, so research would need to be done to identify all of them. Then, we would have to teach the subtle mental skills to people to see how much that would raise their IQ scores. I don't mean just having people do traditional kinds of problems and exercises with a vague short suggestion that they might try doing X or Y. What I mean is developing specific short training programs for each skill which would teach the skills for sure.

Most psychological research involves anything from less than an hour to several hours, and that research has serious limitations. However, research grants are usually given only for that kind of research.

What I think would work better would be long term research projects in which each subject would be paid to work for five to ten years at learning various skills which researchers created over at least several decades. Five to ten years would be long enough to determine which groups of short training programs would raise IQ the most. Subjects might be paid as much per year as the mean income for high school teachers in the area, so they could support themselves and their families during the lengthy 5 to 10 years that they would be research subjects. Researchers would continually try to improve training programs from what they learned as a result of subjects trying the programs, and would continually try to use the information they learn from the research to discover new subtle skills and create new training programs for them.

There is no guarantee that we would be able to increase everyone's IQ by 50 points or more so this would be somewhat a gamble. However, if we did discover how to increase everyone's IQ by 50 points or more, that would change everything for humanity for the better in major ways. Even if we gave 10 major research universities 200 million dollars a year each to run parallel research programs, which would be 2 billion dollars per year, that would be a very small amount of money compared with the approximately 15 trillion dollars per year American Gross Domestic Product, and 60 trillion dollars per year Gross World Product. Compared to what the results would be if we can increase IQ by fifty points or more, that would be like an individual gambling a few dollars in order to have a 50-50 chance of winning a million dollars.

Doing the research would also make it possible for Washington to say something like, "Everyone...if you can be patient, stop, and keep from getting into further wars, we have a research program going which has a good chance of giving all of you a wonderful future. "

 

The most effective research would be to research the answers to the IQ test questions in advance. This works great.

 

I assume that you're making a joke means you approve of the proposal.

 

This may be a rather weird method to increase IQ... but a brush with death..... seems to have exactly that effect as well?????!!!!


https://apps.facebook.com/forumforpages/347674598652896/8999d971-b3e9-429e-902a-53756602d375/0

http://thomastwin.com/10 A Background to Silence.html

 

Most people with brain damage don't become more intelligent, but if there are some exceptions, perhaps that might point us towards some important knowledge. Of course, we would never give a person brain damage on purpose. There is something odd about what the doctor supposedly said, but let us give this the benefit of the doubt.

It is possible that the exceptions were actually people who were even more intelligent to begin with, so their IQ scores were really lower, but still high. Just because someone is less educated and works at a laboring job doesn't mean that the person might not be intelligent. Our system doesn't pull out everyone who is intelligent and set them on a path in which they could use their intelligence.

Even though there are things like education also involved, let us look at the people with a genetic ability to have an IQ score in the top 10%, whether or not they are provided with the education needed to make good use of their intelligence. Now consider: 10% of the world's population are in the top 10% of potential intelligence if everything works out well. Ten percent of the 7 plus billion people in the world is 700 million. The world doesn't employ that many scientists, school teachers, an so forth. The majority of those 700 million people are poorly educated and work at jobs that aren't intellectual.

In the United States, with 300 million people, ten percent is 30 million people. We are far from employing 30 million people in intellectual jobs. Thus, even in the United States, many people who have never been to college and so forth are in the top 10% in genetic intelligence.

One thing this shows is that if we would do a better job of educating people and making better use of their abilities, the United States would be doing much better than we are know.

 

After his brush with death.... Mellen Benedict patented six products..... that he stated were given to him during his experience?????!!!!!

http://www.near-death.com/experiences/reincarnation04.html

 

there is undeveloped potenial, optimum physica health and optimal mental stimulation....we have a genetic potential we are born with but require the the conditions I listed to reach full potential...someone with poor nutrition and lack of proper mental stimulation in childhood will likely never reach their full potential even if those conditions are improved...learned music proficiency has been claimed to add up to 7 points to iq scores....our general populations average iq scores have gone up over the generations, so better nutrition and education/stimulation obviously does have an effect...

Can Iq scores can be raised but 50pts? seems high imo, how do you measure the progress? What is the baseline for comparison?

 

Well supposedly you can teach people how to remember lots of things with "memory palaces" and to be able to do complex math in your head (if you believe the infomercials) so I would imagine that it is indeed possible to teach people to be smarter. We already know that people that routinely play puzzle games or work in jobs that require constant think have more resilient brains into their very very very very old age years of anything above 40.

 

Intelligence is quite far down the list of desirable traits for me. It's really very over-hyped. Far more valuable is being a down to Earth guy, having good motivational skills, a solid work ethic, and being able to learn from your mistakes.

Take it from someone with social phobia - intelligence is overrated. My biggest wish in life is to be 35 with a wife, two kids, and an average middle class job. If you have that, intelligence is entirely irrelevant. Society pushes us toward prestigious careers like medicine, law, and engineering. This is a mistake. Value is in the eye of the beholder, there is no "right" direction to go in. Pick what you love, regardless of pay. Try your best to be self-employed. If you don't know what you want to do, don't default to what others want you to do. Keep looking until you find something.

 

I have a difficult time believing that ANY program can increase IQ points by 50 percent. In my experience IQ points can only go down over time.

I have taken some IQ tests over the years and have always gotten bottom rung, moron results. If they're right I'm lucky to be breathing, and I should have drool running down my face.


I also object on the grounds that I may or may not have one of those biological brain problems that will prevent me from benefiting from such a program, who can say?


Also I'm wondering about the problems of people learning new stuff, I have personal experience, from having to pay for my own education though working a job and part-time college that took me 10 years to finish a 2 year associates degree, but where I didn't owe college debt after it, that people's best years of learning are childhood up to their 20s decade of life and than, afterwards, learning stuff becomes MUCH harder. People can finish up their education after the end of their 20s into their 30s but it becomes a very grating process and they have to kick against their own brain as it slows down on them.


But I never say die!!! I doubt I could ever enjoy the full benefits of such a program (oh how I wish I could), but if it helps others I'm all for it. I wouldn't object to participating, as I have little better going for me now. And, a lot of other people might be desperate for this as well...

But, a slight problem, I think, a lot of people --both researchers AND test subjects-- might be desperate for the money, ONLY the money, and not interested in the sake of participating for education, enrichment, and research knowledge.

 

yup, the brain reaches maturity in our mid twenties and goes downhill from there, if you look at the great minds of history, Galileo, Newton, Tesla, Einstein, Darwin all made their breakthroughs in their mid 20s to early 30s, not many breakthroughs are made past the age of 35 ...

 

A reason I think there might be a potential for a large increase is that one of the sub-processes in perception seems to be something that would require more intelligence than humans display in conscious problem solving. In visual perception, the brain processes information with developing nerve impulse patterns. Even at the retina, the nerve impulse pattern is already being processes and doesn't look exactly like the image. For example, some neurons in the retina only respond to edges, or diagonals. Colors are broken up into relative activation of cones coding for each color. Then, as the nerve impulse patterns move into the brain, the patterns become further processed. So we end up with a final complex pattern of nerve impulses which codes for an image, but is different from the image itself. For example, locations are distorted, nerve impulses are all the same, not having color, brightness, and so forth.

Then, this complex coded pattern has to be decoded into the actual image we see with all its color, texture, varied brightnesses, and so forth. It is the decoding which seems to require more intelligence than humans show in things like solving mathematical problems.

Let us say that we are taken blindfolded somewhere we have never been before, with a complex landscape. Then, we are allowed to look at the landscape and in less than a second, we can see it. The landscape has a lot of information in it, so the relevant nerve impulse pattern will have hundreds of thousands of nerve impulses. We then decode that massive nerve impulse pattern in less than a second. If we were aware of the decoding process, rather than it being unconscious, it would be like looking at a wall with hundreds of thousands of dots, all the same, on it, with the code being the distances of the dots from one another. Then, we would turn that into an image of the landscape in less than a second.

That ability is more than the ability to solve mathematical problems, and so forth.

Therefore, if we could get some of that ability from the unconscious into consciousness, it does seem like there would be an increase in IQ.

 

The writing in your message is above a moron level, so I don't know what tests you have been given and how the scores were interpreted to you. You're right that there is almost an entire industry selling courses for increasing intelligence who are motivated by money. There just isn't enough good research out there for them to be making those claims. That is one thing which motivated me to consider what kind of research program would be needed for a real set of methods which would work, if such a set of methods is possible.

Part of that would be having the subjects work full-time for years with researchers continually inventing new methods to test, and improving old methods. Nothing like that is being done now. Often, subjects just do something for one to several hours, at the most. Just because they learn something in that short period of time doesn't mean their IQ has increased. Or they might show some improvment after doing mental exercises over a period of month, though not full time. But any mental exercise will be helpful, and that doesn't mean there has been much of an increase in IQ. People have been doing crossword puzzles, playing Bridge, and many other mental exercises for years without having a large increase in their mental skills.

In addition, simple mental exercises of traditional kinds don't get at subtle mental processes, and I think that it is those subtle mental processes which will produce a major improvement in thinking skills if such a major improvement is possible. .

 

Sure. Blessed are the poor in spirit...

 

Yes, there are many important things in life that don't require high intelligence. For example, enjoying music.

There are some things like seeing the beauty in mathematics which do require more intelligence, but that is a skill that many people wouldn't be interested in, especially since there are other things they can do.

Where intelligence is most important is in the future of humanity. We need to develop much more knowledge to reach a higher level of civilization in which people would be safe from a number of problems we don't have solved now. Then, one never knows what undiscovered knowledge might be out there in the universe of all potential knowledge. We don't know for sure, but there are probably good cures for cancer, MS, and many other diseases yet to be discovered. There might be some knowledge that we can't even guess at now that would make everyone's life better. So intelligence is important for the future welfare of humanity, But you are right that one can live a wonderful life without being all that intelligent.

 

Major breakthroughs are something complex in and of themselves because they include things like the state of the research field at the moment and a lot of luck. See Kuhn, Thomas (1970) THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

However, in terms of ordinary research results, people over the age of 35 do quite well.

There is an age discrimination wrinkle in our culture. Many high tech corporations tend to fire older engineers and computer programmers at about age fifty, and hire new engineers nd programmers just out of university at a lower salary, or hire replacement engineers and programmers in nations where salaries are lower. The high tech companies claim they are only doing this because people can't do good work after age 50. However, research on this has shown that people can still make ordinarjy discoveries and invent things after age 50. The high tech companies are merely making excuses for firing their more expensive employees and hiring lower paid ones.

This is of course ungrateful. Their older engineers and programmers have done the work creating the very products the high tech companies are making their money from, but instead of being grateful, the companies just dump them into grave financial difficulties.

 

true there is more than one type type of intelligence which makes it very difficult to quantify...how do you compare mathematical iq with musical, literary or visual artistry iq?, mathematical iq can be obvious but artistic iq is very subjective...the measurement of intelligence through iq tests seems to me to be a very unreliable indication of intelligence, more of a vague guideline than a definitive measurement...

 

if they haven't made breakthrough discoveries by age 35 they're never likely to...that doesn't mean they suddenly become stupid and can't contribute...so if a corporation is looking for that next great invention their best bet is with people under 35...if you hear of older people being credited with breakthroughs they often have young proteges/assistants doing the inspired work...

I know the agism problem personally, I've been rejected because of my age for younger applicants who know less than me so my income comes from self employment...and ya wages come into it, my accumulated knowledge deserves more so why not hire a young person for less...

 

I took magazine quizzes and stuff online. Many are pattern and math heavy and With a lack a lot of math skills I usually score 40-70 IQ points. I'm good at math, but I can only look at it for so long, and certain patterns trigger a fault in my brain that causes it to freeze. Some problems my brain can't process at all, and I actually can't put it into my brain for processing at all, I have to skip it and go on to the next question.

From my experience IQ is just a test for learned traits.

You say that you want to find a set of methods to improve IQ, I wish you all the best. I'm sorry, but I have no ideas about that. I just hope you can figure something out...

I can't even contemplate higher intelligence at this point in my life. All of my life I have had to deal with loosing my intelligence... Only the loss, never any gain. I have had amnesia from an undiagnosed medical condition from my childhood.

In recent years, as my mental abilities decreased, I've had to make real, serious choices about what I can hold onto in my brain. Should I keep the memories of my childhood? Or should I hold on to skills that will help support me and my company? Should I keep my brain's communications abilities to spell and talk with a large vocabulary? Or should I pair down my language centers so I can use the space to learn computer programming?

These are the tough choices I've had to make, and all of this while I watched the number of talents I could keep active in my brain at one time dwindle down one by one. My worst days are when I can no longer access a skill, memory, or thought because another small part of my brain has shut down, and I know I'll never see it again... If I don't seem dumb, it's mearly because I've become a good actor maintaining an ever increasing, sharp focus on my paired down skills to maintain and present the outward illusion that I'm still all here. I'm not. I'm far away from what I could have been.

Now fortunately for me, I'm now seeing a doctor who goes above and beyond the call of duty with her aggressive treatments, and my condition is stabilized. My mental abilities are at least not going down anymore, it was a nutritional deficiency of Vitamin B12, something required for brain function, but, I've had this problem for a long time, I don't know how much I can get back. The brain doesn't heal itself.

But in my experience, it's my opinion that people are born with their intelligence already pretty much set up. It's only the environment and disease that can tear it down from there on out...

I don't even think there are true geniuses. I think people just make the choices to put their talents into one part of their brain or another. It's the environment, childhood, and personal disposition that turns people into who they are. That is why people have talents at some things and not others.

Now I think people with more intelligence might be able to spread their minds across multiple talents, more than usual. But even they have to make choices about what they excel at or get scatter brained over... We only have so much brain area to go around, after all.


One more thing, As for new methods of mental stimulation... I don't know it I like the sound of that! I just have one big doozy of a method that requires deep meditation... one that is scary to behold, uncomfortable for me to handle, and one which I would rather NOT be viewed in front of others while preforming it... (But I still have always wondered what it would look like on a brain scan), because I really scrub my brain HARD... Directing my blood flow in semi-random patterns around my brain, and meanwhile I send ALL of my Brain's neurons firing and resting, firing and resting, in several systematic, patterned, and/or in a random fashion across my brain. It causes extremely odd sensations...

It's a horrible experience that causes me to writhe in agony on the floor and cry out negative things. I would NOT want to do this regularly... I only use it once every several years as an emergency management system, when I come down with extreme depression, and mental stagnation, and I'm in a cloudy mental funk that I can't climb out of...

But since it's few and far between, it's totally worth it for me, because, after I recover, I become EXTREEMLY happy, positive attitude, good at my work, or whatever major project I'm doing at the moment. My brain just opens up. And if it works that's another several years of peace of mind before I have to do it again.

 

Once we begin to get into the specifics of the research, I think that researchers would end up working to improve all the skills that go into IQ. I guess I will add this to the proposal, but no doubt scientists would just end up doing this on their own.

 

Perhaps only one scientist or engineer in 100,000 ever makes a breakthrough discovery. It is possible that we might be able to discover a strategy which would make it more likely that someone over 35 would have a better chance than now of coming up with a breakthrough discovery. That would require major research, however.

 

Since the research I am proposing hasn't been done yet, I can't give you adequate methods to solve the problems you face. Even if the research is done, it could easily be several decades before enough would be known.

You are probably doing as well as you could do by developing ways you can manage using the skills you have. One of the most important parts of that is that you have become more aware of the mental processing you are using than many people. It won't necessarily lead to anything, but you might compare what is happening in your mind when a workaround is most successful, with what is happening in your mind when a workaround isn't working very well. It is possible that if you compare your best workarounds with your worst workarounds, you might gain some additional knowledge of how your workarounds work. Then, perhaps that knowledge might help you improve your workarounds and come up with new workarounds. But that is only a maybe. It might be helpful for you, or it might not. Again, we need a lot more research.

 

I understand that such research is many years away. That's okay, I'm fine with that. And, I don't have it as bad as some people, anyway. I can live a normal life.

I also want to thank you for that workaround tip. I did discover a sore spot on my brain that I didn't realize before. I did sort of massage it by altering pressure and blood flow. Sort of a straining motion. Something like clenching a fist or like blood rushing towards a blistered thumb after hitting it with a hammer, but just without inflicting injury or pain.

I can't say that it did anything useful, I don't even know why it's sore, I just felt a dull space in my brain, but I really did feel a real sense of relief for a moment after the massage. I just can't get the relief to stick around for long without constant attention.

But, I thank you for that.

 

Oh, I just remembered something else. You don't have to believe me, but maybe this idea could help you.

During what may have been an abduction, I think there was a brain drill maybe ...

It wasn't really a drill. It was a scanner of sorts that looked at a certain region of the brain, starting at a surface and working its way through, then it stored that image like an image slide, and moved to the next infinitesimal position... on and on all the way through.

But that wasn't all... The scanner was just the front end.

In the middle was another scanner that scanned the sides of the hole and looked for connections: nerves, blood vessels, parts of cells, and it tried to find a stitching pattern to sew them up something like a hair braid but much more detailed and complicated, and also somewhat random... to mimic natural growth patterns of organic organs as they grow naturally.

And there is still more...

At the end of the device was a matter replicator that actually did the work of supplying the material and bridging the gap.

Now this process began in a VERY slow motion... like millions of years. so slow I can't understand how my brain could have comprehended what I was seeing... It began slow at first, but as the device moved on it, and as more computations were done, patterns discovered, and stitches completed it began to speed up... Like it learned what it needed to do.

In my case, it started as a small bead that was inserted into my nose, it then migrated into a space at the base of my brain, it was just like a smart liquid goo, but it was like a ball and it moved into the flesh, not by penetrating it, not by cutting it, but actually passing right through it like the tissue wall was just like the surface of water, no resistance, it was like that flesh wasn't even there or a barrier.

Now there is one other thing... After it had finished going through my brain, suddenly it couldn't pass through my skull anymore, for some reason it suddenly existed and because it had enough size to it, it couldn't finish the last segment of the pattern unless it drilled through the skull.

Now the brain doesn't really have pain receptors in Humans but that last part through the skull and the skin of the scalp was horribly painful...

If I had designed it I really would have hoped they could have created an exit point or something so it can pass out of existence without the last step through the skull... It really would have helped make it less painful of an experience. Please don't make this painful if you make it... That very last step is too painful and cruel to contemplate.

If you can't do it nice, don't do it at all... I don't want to be tolerating an operation only to jump through the roof and run out the door in pain... This might lead to unfortunate long-term damage. Even if you must develop this for some reason maybe it's best if the person was deeply unconscious if there is nothing that can be done about the pain of the last step. I'm just saying...

Now there is one other thing. There are probably down sides to using such technology. I'm not a doctor, but I have a pretty good guess that any such replaced brain matter would loose it's "muscle memory," for lack of a better word. The cells that were there had imprints and patterns of work that it had learned and was used to doing... If it's replaced the cell is new and doesn't understand what it should be doing. It has to learn, much like a baby has to learn, how to use itself and become useful. This, in the case of a brain would lead to amnesia. Not only because the replaced cells need to relearn how to use themselves, but also nearby cells might be cut off, because the new cells form a bridge from one side of the brain to the other through neural connections, a network like branches and trees, all tangled up.

Another down side would possibly be brain death. If the process results in massive trauma I imagine that the brain might just give up and shut down. Or even it it's the fighting type, maybe it just dies from blood loss or loss of oxygen, as human brains really need to have a constant supply of oxygen or it dies. Other cells in the body replace themselves through cellular mitosis (cell division). Brain cells don't do this. They can't be replaced naturally and if they die the brain looses its ability to work. It may be able to reconfigure itself to bypass this mass of dead cells and run its skills from another side of its brain, but since there is less space after left to think in the brain as cells die it reduces overall thinking.

Now many people have been deluded in the past into thinking that the brain death might heal itself given time, rest, and tender loving care. But that doesn't happen. In some animals the brain can repair itself, but not in humans. Well that's somewhat wrong. There is ONE area of the brain the olfactory nerve. It does have the ability to heal itself.

The olfactory nerve sends strands down into the nose to receive the sense of smell. Maybe this should be an area of future research. This area is vulnerable to injury... People run into walls, trees, fall face down, get hit with a fist, and so on... This area needs to rebuild itself because of the risk.

Other areas of the brain didn't learn to heal themselves, because in the early days of our distant ancestors if the brain was injured to such an extend that the brain was dying there wasn't really any justification for the brain to heal itself... Frankly if you're lying brain dead, alone, on a field somewhere you don't and can't have the ability to take care of your body, keep yourself from bleeding out, give yourself nutrients, or fend off hungry predators. Once you were that far gone there really was no need for the brain to bring you back... In fact it was a small mercy. It's not like brain dead people could fix themselves and pass those traits onto their offspring. Once you were gone, you were gone for good.

 

Those "IQ" points would be lost when the test is renormed. There isn't an absolute "IQ" that can be measured exactly, What we call IQ is a norm-referenced score that is produced to make it so that the average is 100, and a Standard deviation is about 15 points (can't remember the exact amount). Everytime that test is renormed, the average will again become 100. Hence, there is no way to increase the IQ of the population as a whole. IQ is not an absolute measurement, but is a relative one.