Some think the effect is temporary, long-term studies underway. Still, I wouldn’t mind having to practice periodically. I’ve been at it for a few days, might retry the Mensa test in a while. (I washed out at 113 a few years ago) Download link:
http://brainworkshop.sourceforge.net/
It seems to make sense. Instead of getting a faster CPU, a cheap and easy fix is get more RAM. In a brain analogy, I’ve often thought of the “magic number seven,” isn’t there any way to up that number, have more working memory? Nicholas Negroponte said something like “Perspective is worth 50 IQ points.” I think that’s a scope fail, but good perspective, being able to hold more of the problem in your head, might be worth about 30 IQ points.
Sorry, hiatus. No haven’t been tested recently, and slacked off on the DNB, it starts to feel monotonous, and frustrating, I couldn’t break through D3B. I’ll try and pick it up again when I figure out how to get it to work on Ubuntu.
As to temporary: if it’s temporary, it’s a very long temporary. From personal experience it takes months for my scores to begin to decay more than a few percent, and other people have reported scores unaffected by breaks of weeks or months as well.
The more serious concern for people who want big boosts is that looking over the multiple IQ before-after reports I’ve collated, I have 2 general impressions: that DNB helps you think quicker, but not better, and that the benefit is limited to around +10-15 points max.
(On a personal note, ZoneSeek, if after a few weeks or months of N-backing you’ve risen at least 4 levels and you retake the Mensa test, I would be quite interested to know what your new score is.)
Dual n-back is a game that’s supposed to increase your IQ up to 40%. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_n_back#Dual_n-back
Some think the effect is temporary, long-term studies underway. Still, I wouldn’t mind having to practice periodically. I’ve been at it for a few days, might retry the Mensa test in a while. (I washed out at 113 a few years ago) Download link: http://brainworkshop.sourceforge.net/
It seems to make sense. Instead of getting a faster CPU, a cheap and easy fix is get more RAM. In a brain analogy, I’ve often thought of the “magic number seven,” isn’t there any way to up that number, have more working memory? Nicholas Negroponte said something like “Perspective is worth 50 IQ points.” I think that’s a scope fail, but good perspective, being able to hold more of the problem in your head, might be worth about 30 IQ points.
So it’s been almost 2 years. Have you taken any IQ tests after practicing?
Sorry, hiatus. No haven’t been tested recently, and slacked off on the DNB, it starts to feel monotonous, and frustrating, I couldn’t break through D3B. I’ll try and pick it up again when I figure out how to get it to work on Ubuntu.
Any progress since? (It seems to work fine for me on Debian.)
Took a crack at it again, just now worked out how to change directories in a terminal.
To shill my DNB FAQ: http://www.gwern.net/N-back%20FAQ
As to temporary: if it’s temporary, it’s a very long temporary. From personal experience it takes months for my scores to begin to decay more than a few percent, and other people have reported scores unaffected by breaks of weeks or months as well.
The more serious concern for people who want big boosts is that looking over the multiple IQ before-after reports I’ve collated, I have 2 general impressions: that DNB helps you think quicker, but not better, and that the benefit is limited to around +10-15 points max.
(On a personal note, ZoneSeek, if after a few weeks or months of N-backing you’ve risen at least 4 levels and you retake the Mensa test, I would be quite interested to know what your new score is.)