Boost your intelligence unz.com/jthompson/boos…
Most people would like to be cleverer: shortcuts are alluring. Master a training routine: boost IQ. Jude the Obscure was disappointed to find that language learning books required rote learning, not an all-illuminating trick. Reality can be tedious.
Brain training: brain is not a muscle. Some evidence for “near transfer” of specific skills but no convincing evidence for “far transfer”, as when the specific learned skill leads to improvements in other wider abilities.
Mindset: increase people’s beliefs that mental skills can be strengthened. Effectiveness of interventions on academic achievement was very weak overall, with almost all analyses yielding small or null effects.
GRIT: perseverance. In a study of 4,642 twins, Rimfeld, Kovas, Dale, and Plomin (2016) found that grit was substantially heritable, but found no evidence for a shared environmental influence on grit. "Shared environmental influence is negligible” (p. 786).
We are often told that the fact that a trait is heritable does not mean that it cannot be manipulated by environmental means. True, as a general warning, but in the case of GROIT it seems that the trait is heritable and not manipulatible by educational means.
GRIT, not GROIT, though if someone want to launch a national schools program to train GROIT I will help.
Deliberate practice: can lead to major improvements in performance within an individual, but it leaves the majority of variance in performance across individuals unexplained and potentially explainable by other factors (see also Platz et al., 2014).
Macnamara, Moreau, and Hambrick (2016): deliberate practice accounted for a non-significant 1% of variance in performance among elite-level athletes, and they were no more likely to have begun practicing their sport at a younger age than their lower-level counterparts.
Bilingual advantage: high degree of publication bias. Recent, large-scale meta-analysis showed no evidence for bilingual advantage in any executive functioning domain after correcting for pub bias. 80% of the tests assessing bilingual advantage since 2011 yielded null findings
Is there any harm in getting people to practice useless brain exercise tasks? Certainly. It wastes time they could spend learning something useful. For example: methodology, statistics, and detecting publication bias.
