Here is a well-defined strategy game played out in CBS’s Survivor in Thailand.

The Game

There are 21 flags planted in the field between two ‘tribes’ – Chuay Gahn and Sook Jai. Each tribe takes turns removing flags. Each tribe at its turn can choose to remove 1 or 2 or 3 flags. The team to take the last flag, whether standing alone or part of a group of 2 or 3 flags, wins the game.

The first tribe – Sook Jai – chose to remove 2 flags. Was this the right move?

Clue

During the discussion within one of the teams, Ted Rogers – an African American software developer, said:

At the end, we must leave them with four flags.

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Four angels sat on the Christmas tree amidst other ornaments. Two had blue halos and two yellow. However, none of them could see above his head.

Angel A sat on the top branch and could see the angels B and C, who sat below him. Angel B, could see angel C who sat on the lower branch. And angel D stood at the base of the tree obscured from view by a thicket of branches, so no one could see him and he could not see anyone either.

Which one of them could be the first to guess the color of his halo and speak it out loud for all other angels to hear?

From Brainden.com

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What is Mensa

Founded in 1946 by Roland Berrill, an Australian barrister, and Dr. Lancelot Ware, a British scientist and lawyer, Mensa is a high IQ society – the only qualification for membership being an IQ is in the top 2% of the population.  Mensa members are also known as ‘Mensans’.

The word ‘Mensa’ comprises two Latin words: mens, which means “mind” and mensa, which means “table”, indicating that it is a round-table (open discussion) society of minds.

There are now around 100,000 Mensans in 100 countries throughout the world. There are active Mensa organizations in over 40 countries on every continent except Antarctica.

The website for Mensa International can be found here.

Websites for national groups can be found here.

What are the advantages of being a Mensa member?

1. Intellectual stimulation. You can find intellectual resources to exercise your brain in national magazines, in local newsletters, and at regional, national and international conventions. Mensans (Mensa members) have a profusion of special interest groups. To quote from Mensa International:

Whatever your passion, there’s almost certain to be a Special Interest Group (SIG) filled with other Mensans who share it! Mensa offers approximately 200 SIGs, in mind-boggling profusion from African Violets to zoology. Along the way you’ll find microbiology, and systems analysis, but you’ll also find Sherlock Holmes, chocolate and Star Trek. There are the expected: biochemistry, space science, economics — and the unexpected: poker, roller-skating, scuba diving, UFOs and witchcraft. There are SIGs for breadmaking, winemaking, cartooning, silversmithing, and clowning. Heraldry, semantics and Egyptology co-exist with beekeeping, motorcycling and tap dancing. Sports SIGs cover the classics (baseball, basketball, and football) and the not-so-classic (skeet shooting, hang gliding, skydiving). And any Mensan who can’t find a SIG to join can easily start one.

2. Social life. Local groups meet monthly or even more regularly. There are widely attended annual conventions offering workshops, seminars, and parties.

3. Mensa publications. You will receive your national magazine with contributions by Mensans on a wide variety of subjects. In some countries, in addition to the national magazine you may receive lively local newsletters. Mensa also publishes it’s own research journal on IQ related topics – The Mensa Research Journal – for the general public. http://www.mensafoundation.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Journal

4. Miscellaneous benefits. In some countries Mensa sponsors a members-only credit card and insurance program. There is also a program that aids traveling Mensans. There have been reports that job applications have been easier with Mensa membership on your CV – particularly if the hiring person is also a Mensan.

How to become a Mensa member?

Mensa membership is open to people who score at the 98^th percentile or higher on a standardized, supervised intelligence test.

American Mensa accepts scores from approximately 200 different standardized intelligence tests, as well as Mensa’s own dedicated IQ test. Some of these test one’s spatial and analytical abilities using non-verbal questions only. We call these tests “culture fair” because they don’t require general knowledge, vocabulary or math skills that are learned in school and which differ from culture to culture. Other IQ tests include questions that present verbal analogies or puzzles that test comprehension and mathematical ability.

A list of some of the authorized IQ tests for Mensa membership with Mensa membership are listed here.

Results from tests given by an institution, agency or clinic must include the full name of the test, the score and the percentile rank. This documentation must be on the letterhead of the institution, agency or clinic; it also must be signed by the psychologist responsible for the testing and must include the psychologist’s license/certification number as issued by the state in which the psychologist practices. Applications are individually assessed by Mensa. The American Mensa application form can be found here. This month the evaluation is free. Normally it is $40.

You may already be qualified!

If you took your SAT exam before 1/31/94 or GRE before 9/30/01 you may find your score qualifies you for membership. For details click here.

Mensa Admission Test

If you have not taken an official IQ test by a qualified administrator, you can choose to take Mensa’s own Admission Test.  This involves certified volunteer Proctors supervising a testing session in your area! You can contact your national Mensa organisation to find out about the schedules for these tests – click here for details.

If you score at or above the 98th percentile on either of the two tests, you’ll qualify and be invited to join Mensa.

If English isn’t your primary language, American Mensa offers a battery of culture fair, non-language tests.

How to prepare for an IQ test to join Mensa

This will be the topic of our next blog. Practice makes a very big difference.  Improving your fluid intelligence with High IQ Pro® training will also help substantially.

To get you limbered up, try the Mensa Workout.

Or take the Mensa home test.

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Here we report the effects of two inter­ac­tive com­put­er­ized train­ing pro­grams devel­oped for preschool chil­dren: one for music and one for visual art. After only 20 days of train­ing, only chil­dren in the music (but not the visual art) group exhib­ited enhanced per­for­mance on a mea­sure of ver­bal intel­li­gence, with 90% of the sam­ple show­ing this improve­ment.

The children who participated in the study were between the ages of 4 and 6. The results clearly connect IQ improvement.

“These results are dra­matic not only because they clearly con­nect cog­ni­tive improve­ment to musi­cal train­ing, but also because the improve­ments in lan­guage and atten­tion are found in com­pletely dif­fer­ent domains than the one used for train­ing. This has enor­mous impli­ca­tions for devel­op­ment and education.”

York Uni­ver­sity psy­chol­o­gist Ellen Bia­lystok, one of the paper’s co-authors.

The music program “included training in rhythm, pitch, melody, voice and basic musical concepts”. All received the training in a classroom in groups led by a teacher – one hour per day, five days per week for four weeks.

This finding is consistent with a recent study of second-graders, that found the reading skills of those who had musical training were superior to those of their peers.

In addition, earlier research has shown that music training is far greater than computer instruction in improving children’s abstract reasoning skills (link).

These studies show that cutting music education to concentrate on “the basics” is based on a misunderstanding of the way the brain works.

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The Experiment

In a study published in the prestigious Journal of Cognitive Psychology, graduate student Carlos Salas and his colleagues had students try to memorize 30 words. Half of the students (randomly chosen) went for a 10 minute walk before being given the world list to learn.  They were told to walk briskly but without feelings of anxiety. The remaining students  spent the same time sitting, looking at natural landscapes.

It was found that the students who went for a walk before the study period remembered 25% more words compared to those who simply sat still. That’s a big advantage.

Before Study or Before the Exam?

So an energizing walk before study helps the learning process. What about a walk before the test – after the study period? Would that help? The research team also looked at this, and found in this case a brisk walk before the memory test didn’t help. The effect of light exercise here was confined to just BEFORE study, not just before the test.

Why Does It Work?

Why does a brisk walk help? The researchers asked the students to report their levels of arousal after the 10 minute stints of walking or sitting, and arousal was higher after walking, as you’d expect. Increased arousal is known from previous research to be important in forming robust memories. ‘Consolidating’ memories from short term memory to long term memory depends on a part of the brain in the temporal lobe called the hippocampus.  Stress hormones related to emotional arousal are crucial for enhanced hippocampal-dependent memory consolidation of an experience.

The researchers conclude:

Overall, these results suggest that individuals can gain a memory advantage from a ten-minute walk before studying. Given [these] positive results … and [their] potentially important practical applications, we hope that researchers will continue to explore the relationship between walking [and] memory.

Reference

Salas, C., Minakata, K., and Kelemen, W. (2011). Walking before study enhances free recall but not judgement-of-learning magnitude. Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 23 (4), 507-513 DOI: 10.1080/20445911.2011.532207

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Here is a traditional Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices test item. This kind of test item is often used in job aptitude tests.

Why do we use this kind of test question for our pre- and post-training IQ test?

Matrix items are a reasoning task using figures.  They offer these advantages over other IQ-related tasks (listed below) and for this reason they are a good test for an overall assessment of general intelligence, and are a popular choice for job aptitude tests.

• Matrix items have been found to measure central analytical processes (g; Kyllonen & Christal, 1990).
• Correspondence finding and goal management processes are involved in the cognitive mechanisms addressed with Matrix tests (Carpenter et al., 1990).
• Matrix questions are among the intelligence task types considered to be culture-fair, as they do not rely on verbal information (e.g., [Cattell, 1979] and [Corman and Budoff, 1974]). (For verbal intelligence measures and training, there are the resources of i3 Mindware.)
• Matrix items can be generated automatically because a rational item construction framework can be established (e.g., [Embretson, 1998], [Embretson, 2002] and  [Freund et al., 2008]).  The generation of an unlimited number of items thus becomes feasible, and item-writer idiosyncrasies can be avoided
• The nature of Matrix items makes intuitive sense for the test-taker in understanding why this kind of test measures their IQ.

Here is a more complex, computer generated Matrix test item:

click to enlarge

Scientific reference source for this article here.

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In a six-week study, funded by the BBC, experts found people who played online games designed to improve their cognitive skills didn’t get any smarter.

Researchers recruited participants from viewers of the BBC’s science show “Bang Goes the Theory.” The largest ever ‘brain training’ study, recruited 11,430 people, aged 18 to 60. They were asked to play online brain games designed by the researchers to improve their memory, reasoning and other skills for at least 10 minutes a day, three times a week. These brain games are typical of the types of games offered by companies such as Nintendo and Lumosity.

Results showed clearly that while players got progressively better at the games, the gains did not transfer to general intelligence, the journal Nature reports.

Players gained nothing in terms of general reasoning, memory, planning or visuospatial abilities, experts found. Tests before and after the training showed none of the interventions boosted people’s ability to do everyday thinking tasks, although they did get better at playing the individual games and the specific cognitive tasks these involved.

Dr Adrian Owen, a neuroscientist at the Medical Research Council, said: “The results are clear. “Statistically, there are no significant differences between the improvements seen in participants who played our brain training games, and those who just went on the internet for the same length of time.”

Leading game maker Nintendo said their Dr Kawashima brain training games did not claim to be scientifically proven to improve cognitive function. In a statement Nintendo stated: “In this way it is like a workout for the brain and the challenges in the game can help stimulate the player’s brain.”

Why does High IQ Pro’s working memory training work, while other brain training games do not?

A detailed answer to this is given in this article. In over 40 years of scientific studies, this software is the only known brain training exercise that has been scientifically demonstrated to improve intelligence. And it works regardless of your starting intelligence level.

The brain training software works by exercising your ‘working memory’ -a short term memory system used to hold in mind a few items of information for a brief time and process this information in order to reason and solve problems while ignoring distracting information. There are different working memory stores for spatial and verbal information. We use working memory when we reason, plan and problem solve. In High IQ Pro you train both your spatial and verbal working memory, and as you increase your working memory capacity, your intelligence improves. Other brain training exercises do not target working memory mechanisms like High IQ Pro software does.

This doesn’t happen overnight. It takes 20 days of training, 25-30 minutes a day – a level of commitment much higher than in the BBC study, and a level of commitment higher than is needed for other commercial brain training exercises on the market.

Most brain training in the large brain training industry is designed to be low-effort, fun and brief. But this latest study, published in Nature, demonstrates this kind of brain training – although it feels like it has a benefit – in fact has no impact on your ‘brain power’ or intelligence.  Improving your intelligence takes some work! High IQ Pro is designed to not only target the right cognitive mechanism (working memory) to be effective, but also provide enough training time to be effective. Both components to effective brain training are essential.

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In recent decades, scientists have accumulated increasing evidence that our intelligence, at least as measured by the IQ test, is sharply constrained by genetics. Although estimates vary, most studies place the heritability of intelligence at somewhere between 50% and 80%. It’s an uncomfortable fact, but not all brains are created equal. …Which is why there’s so much buzz about a forthcoming study that complicates this assumption. Researchers at the University of Michigan found that it’s possible to boost a core feature of human intelligence through a simple mental training exercise.

In this study a simpler version of the training exercise used in High IQ Pro®, involving pictures instead of squares and a single modality, was tested out over a period of 4 weeks on elementary- and middle-school children from the Detroit area. They did the exercise for 15 minutes a day, and most showed gains on a widely used IQ test for fluid intelligence.

Scientists typically describe intelligence as consisting of two distinct components: fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence. Fluid intelligence refers to the general ability to solve new problems and recognize unfamiliar patterns. Crystallized intelligence, by contrast, consists of particular kinds of knowledge.  When children learn to count, for instance, they show gains on crystallized intelligence, even as their fluid intelligence remains constant. Scientists have typically regarded fluid intelligence as the aspect of our thinking that is most determined by genetics, since it can’t be easily taught.

Impressively, these gains in fluid intelligence persisted through to a three months follow up test, even though the kids had stopped training after the first 4 weeks. The IQ brain training had resulted in long term neuroplasticity changes, and enduring gains in IQ for the children.

How did the training exercise increase IQ? The crucial element is attention control. After repeatedly playing the n-back game, the children were better able to focus on the essential information, and waste less of their short term memory on irrelevant detail. The children “got better at separating the wheat from the chaff across a variety of different tasks,” according to John Jonides, one of the research team, and senior author of the PNAS paper.

In his Frontal Cortex articleon the same study, Lehrer also points out that the mental skills improved by the n-back task (e.g. High IQ Pro®) improves not just IQ, but also self-control.

While we used to assume that self-control was about gritting our teeth, outlasting that damn temptation, we now know that self-control is really about “the strategic allocation of attention.” If you’re thinking about the ice cream in the fridge, you’re going to eat the ice cream, which is why you need to think about something else. (Our willpower is so weak that the only way we can resist anything is by finding a way to forget about it, directing the spotlight elsewhere.) So I’m curious if the n-back test might also improve measurements of self-control.

In fact, a study published in February this year has shown just this – with 27 adults in treatment for stimulant use.

This kind of gain in self-control is important for children because Angela Duckworth has shown that the only variable that’s more important than IQ scores when it comes to predicting academic success is self-control.

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Many scientific studies demonstrate that we perceive physically attractive individuals to be more intelligent than those who are not attractive. Beauty and brains are associated in our minds. How are we to understand this association – as a “bias” or “stereotype”, or because beautiful people are more intelligent?

According to Kanazawa and Kova the conclusion that beautiful people are more intelligent – that high iqs are typically attractive - follows from four assumptions.

• (1) Men who have high IQs are more likely to attain higher status than men who are less intelligent.
• (2) Higher-status men are more likely to mate with more beautiful women than lower-status men.
• (3) Intelligence is inherited (heritable).
• (4) Beauty is heritable.

If all four assumptions are empirically true, then the conclusion that beautiful people are more intelligent with higher IQs  is, they argue, “logically true, making it a proven theorem”. Kanazawa and Kova then provide solid scientific evidence for each of the four assumptions above, supporting their conclusion. Beauty and brains go together: they are not in opposition.

They call their line of reasoning for the link between beauty and brains an ‘evolutionary psychological explanation’.

They also argue that this kind of explanation can account for correlations between physical attractiveness and any other heritable trait that helps men attain higher status such as being aggressive or having social skills. They argue that any trait x (whether a high IQ or social skills) that pushes men up the status ladder gives them bigger chances with beautiful women. The genes for beauty in the women are then passed on to the children (whether male or female), along with the genes for the trait x (e.g. high IQ). This explains why status traits (e.g. high IQ) and beauty are correlated.

How convinced are we of this reasoning?

And how much of an effect does this evolutionary process have in explaining the beauty and brains link, compared to other effects such as biases to feel positive about attractive people?

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A lower IQ is related to higher mortality risk. This is well established, even when taking into account health and other social factors such as income and education.

General intelligence is made up of two underlying abilities or ‘subfactors’: fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence. Fluid intelligence is our on-the-spot reasoning and problem solving ability: our ability to deal with problems in new situations that we have no experience or practice with. This type of intelligence is fluid, capable of being applied flexibly to anything. It is closely related to short-term, working memory, and is improved with High IQ Pro dual n-back and brain-teaser training. Crystallized intelligence is our general knowledge and expertise, acquired through familiarity, practice or training. This component of intelligence has become crystallized and stored in long term memory.  

A recent study published in the journal Intelligence investigated which component of intelligence – fluid or crystallized – had a stronger link with mortality risk later in life. The researchers, led by Dr. Philip Batterham at the Centre for Mental Health Research, The Australian National University, recruited  nearly 900 Australians aged between 70 – 97, both males and females,  for the study. They continued monitoring these individuals for 17 years. There were 687 deaths during the follow-up period.

They measured both fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence scores for each individual. There was a clear statistical relationship between lower mortality risk and fluid intelligence, even after taking out the effects of health status, health behaviors and socio-economic status.  But the link between crystallized intelligence and mortality was found to be largely due to socioeconomic status, and health.

The take-home from this study is that fluid intelligence is the component of intelligence that is most valuable in reducing mortality risk in later life. Information about intelligence testing and a comparative measure of your fluid intelligence specifically is provided here.

We can make a prediction that can be tested experimentally: Improving fluid intelligence in the later years will lower mortality risk, and lengthen life.

Journal article reference with abstract here.

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The great philosopher Bertrand Russell, completed his well known autobiography at 97 years of age.

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