A new randomized controlled study has just come out looking at the effects of Lumosity’s brain train­ing exercises on Mild Cog­ni­tive Impair­ment (MCI). I am often asked to give my view on Lumosity brain training exercises that tar­get a variety of cog­ni­tive func­tions includ­ing atten­tion, pro­cess­ing speed, visual mem­ory and exec­u­tive func­tions.

Here is one scientific study that looks directly at the effects of Lumosity training and provides evidence that - for individuals with mild cognitive impairment – it has quite limited value:

The published study can be found here: Com­put­erised Cog­ni­tive Train­ing for Older Per­sons With Mild Cog­ni­tive Impair­ment: A Pilot Study Using a Ran­domised Con­trolled Trial Design. This is what they did and what they found.

Summary

Twenty five older adults with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) were ran­domised into either the treat­ment or non-training groups. Six­teen par­tic­i­pants com­pleted the 30-session computerized cog­ni­tive train­ing pro­gram. It was found, as expected, that those who had done the training improved with practice on the trained tasks. However, the only evidence for a cognitive benefit beyond practice effects on specific exercises was for visual sustained attention – not for executive function, processing speed or memory. And there was no effect of training on the participants’ own reports of their everyday memory functioning or mood.  

These results contrast with more effective training programs reported in this scientific article. This article reports benefits in:

activ­i­ties of daily liv­ing and sub­jec­tive mea­sures of mem­ory, mood and over­all well-being

In conclusion, Lumositybrain training programs, relative to other brain training programs that have been studied in laboratory conditions, appear to have only limited value in helping with cognitive aging and mild cognitive impairment.

This has been my impression of the Lumosity tasks with respect to IQ gains for younger and middle aged adults too. In my view, Lumosity has a very good incentive system (with accumulated points, levels, and a lot of feedback), and this makes the exercises seem attractive, but it has limited benefit for really transforming brain function. Much less, certainly, than our n-back exercises with their guaranteed IQ increase!

Smooth ice is paradise for those who dance with expertise.

Nietzsche

The positive psychology concept ‘flow’ proposed by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi is based on the idea of fulfilling skilled activity.  Flow is a mental state in which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. Synonyms of ‘flow’ include: to be on the ball, in the moment, present, in the zone, wired in, in the groove, or owning.

How do we gain the high levels of skill or expertise that are required for experience of flow – whether in sports, the arts, music, science or business.  How do we ‘get in the zone’ and get the most out of our work and activities?

More mundanely, how do we perform at high levels?

Practice and Performance

Psychologists researching this question have found out that a big part of the answer is practice — lots and lots of practice. In a famous early study, Ericsson and his colleagues asked violin students at a music academy to estimate the amount of time they set aside for practice, and when they started playing. Those students who had been identified as the ‘best’ players by the academy, had accumulated an average of over 10,000 hours. ‘Good’ players had accumulated just under 8,000 hours, while the least skilled came in at under 5,000 hours.

So imagine you decided to take up the guitar NOW, and practiced 5 hours a week. How long would it take you to get really good at something according to this study? 2000 weeks – or 38 years!! This would drop to 19 years for 10 hours per week, and 9.5 years for 20 hours per week! That takes dedication – the kind of sustained practice we usually only see with professional athletes, academics and professionals.

Malcolm Gladwell, summarizing Dr Ericsson’s research in his famous book ‘Outliers’, states that practice isn’t “the thing you do once you’re good” but “the thing you do that makes you good.” General intellectual ability – a persons IQ – he argues is not that important:

Once someone has reached an I.Q. of somewhere around 120, having additional IQ points doesn’t seem to translate into any measureable real-world advantage.

In his book “Talent Is Overrated,” Geoff Colvin, argues along similar lines that IQ is not critical to high levels of skilled performance:

IQ  is a decent predictor of performance on an unfamiliar task, but once a person has been at a job for a few years, IQ predicts little or nothing about performance.

IQ and Performance

This ‘practice makes perfect’ conception of what enables us to be in the zone at the highest levels of performance  is now being augmented by recent research showing that IQ (a measure of intelligence)  matters for success in many fields — and not just up to a point.

The study that broke waves here was one done with intellectually gifted children – those who scored in the top 1 percent on the SAT by the age of 13 – directed by the researchers David Lubinski and Camilla Benbow at the Vanderbilt University. (SAT scores correlate highly with IQ. The psychologist Howard Gardner has called the SAT a “thinly disguised” intelligence test.) What Lubinski and Benbow found was that participants who were in the 99.9 percentile for intellectual ability (the ‘profoundly gifted’) were between 3-5 times more likely than those who scored in the 99.1 percentile to go on to earn a doctorate, secure a patent, publish a journal article or literary work. Here a super high level of intellectual ability gave an impressive real world advantage.

The work of the psychologists David Hambrick and Elizabeth Meinz, in addition,  has shown that working memory capacity, the key component of IQ targeted by the IQMindware training applications, predicts performance in a wide variety of complex skills. In one study, they recorded both the practice habits and working memory capacity of pianists. The pianists were then asked to sight read pieces of music without preparation, and scores on this were recorded. The most important factor determining how well a pianist performed in their sight-reading performance was amount of practice. But working memory capacity made a sizeable contribution too. As they explain:

… if you took two pianists with the same amount of practice, but different levels of working memory capacity, it’s likely that the one higher in working memory capacity would have performed considerably better on the sight-reading task.

The take home is that working memory capacity and IQ level impact performance levels – impact our ability to ‘get in the zone’ and enjoy exercising our skills. IQ impacts the performance levels we can achieve with practice. Practice alone doesn’t make perfect. Practice and IQ makes perfect! Geoff Golving was wrong. IQ predicts quite a bit about performance.  Increase your IQ and you can increase the performance levels of your well-practiced skills.

Trouble being motivated to complete your BrainPower, HighIQPro or i3Mindware training?

Want to post your working memory (n-back) or IQ gain, or know how others have done?

Want to learn about brainwave entrainment and other effective neuroplasticity methods that increase IQ?

Want to learn more about the concept of neuroplasticity and how to transform your cognition and behavior through changing your brain circuitry?

We have just today put up an entirely new IQMindware Forum which we invite you to visit.

A biohacker is like a computer hacker who creates and modifies computer software or computer hardware as a hobby, but he or she does it with their body and biology.

One branch of biohacking has evolved into in a philosophy of scientifically based self-experimentation and interventions to improve the brain’s potential and performance.

Below are the key interventions that improve brain function and performance.

Brain Foods

Brain nutrition can have a direct impact on brain plasticity and cognitive efficiency. A diet high in saturated fat and sugar (junk foods) not only increases risk of cardio-vascular disease and cancer, but sharply reduces the brain’s production of new neurons and results in cognitive decline. On the positive side, several natural brain foods and brain supplements have been shown in laboratory tests to promote brain plasticity and improve brain function & cognitive efficiency. For a summary of our best brain nutrients and their brain function benefits, click on the table below. Many of the brain foods directly impact IQ level, but there are diverse brain function benefits.

For detailed information on these brain nutrients, explore these external natural brain food and brain supplements web pages.

For one well research general nutrition plan check out the complete illustrated one page bulletproof diet over at The Bulletproof Executive.

Exercise

Regular physical exercise (walking, jogging, cycling, swimming, yoga) is known to be effective in the prevention of hyper-tension, heart disease, cancer, type II diabetes, osteoporosis and depression. It is less well known that exercise is one of the best ways to stimulate brain plasticity in the hippocampus and improve brain function & cognitive efficiency throughout the lifespan. Regular exercise on some measures results in 2-3 times as many new neurons being produced by the brain. A physically active lifestyle can also prevent or delay loss of cognitive efficiency with aging, and neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s.

Sleep

Sleep is needed to regenerate certain parts of the body, especially the brain, so that it may continue to function optimally. After periods of sleep deprivation the brain may begin to malfunction, affecting many behaviors. Certain stages of sleep are needed for the regeneration of neurons in the brain while other stages of sleep seem to be used for creating new brain circuits in learning and forming new memories.

Sleep deprivation affects frontal lobe function in problem solving and novel and creative thinking. Processing speed decreases in sleep deprived people – they have a more difficult time reacting well to unpredicted rapid changes. Lack of sleep lowers our ability to simultaneously focus on several different related tasks. Also, we may be able to react to a complex scenario but we are more likely pick an unoriginal solution.

Part of the frontal lobe, the prefrontal cortex, is targeted specifically by IQMindware software. It serves several functions including short term memory, impulse control, attention, and problem solving. While the prefrontal cortex becomes more active as a person remains awake for long periods of time, metabolic activity in this part of the brain can drop as much as eleven percent after a person has missed sleep for only twenty four hours.

REM sleep (dreaming sleep) stimulates areas of the brain used for learning and memory. When a person is taught a new skill performance improvements depend largely on adequate REM sleep.

Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.

Abraham Lincoln

‘Screw-up’ brainwaves

There are two universal reactions to mistakes in the brain, both of which can be detected as distinct electrical waves measured by an electrode cap.

The first – 50 milliseconds after a screw-up, originating in the anterior cingulate cortex that helps monitor performance for errors. This neural reaction is quick and involuntary and can occur below the radar of awareness. This is a signal for the brain that reality is not flowing as it should do.

The anterior cingulate cortex

The second electrical wave (called the Pe signal) arrives later after the cock up – up to half a second into the perceptual event. It occurs over the parietal cortex and signals the subjective experience of actively paying attention to the error and evaluating it, perhaps engaging emotions of regret, guilt, disappointment or anger and imaging what could have been better in the mind’s eye.

The learning brain – Pe brainwave signals

A distinct brainwave profile of these two signals helps us identify good learners. Many studies show the best learning brains have: 1) a bigger initial brainwave response to the mistake and 2) a stronger and more consistent later Pe brainwave.

A question arises: Why do some people have better Pe waves? Why are some people so much more effective at learning from their mistakes?

Enter Jason Moser at Michigan State University:

In a study coming out in Psychological Science Moser and his colleagues show that our subjective belief about intelligence and learning is a major factor in determining the size of our Pe wave, our ability to learn from mistakes, and our performance gains.

Fixed mindsets vs growth mindsets on IQ

Some people have a fixed mindset, believing IQ to be fixed in stone, impervious to change. IQ is like height – fixed in young adulthood. Others have a growth mindset about their mental capacities, believing they can get better at almost anything with enough time and effort.

Mosner found that our mindsets about our brainpower determine how we respond to cock-ups, which in turn determines how well we learn and improve our performance.

One big difference between people who think intelligence is malleable and those who think intelligence is fixed is how they respond to mistakes.

Jason S. Moser

Mosner’s mindsets-Pe wave experiment

Moser first gave out a questionnaire to determine which participants in his experiment had a fixed mindset or a growth mindset about intelligence. In the experiment a simple task was used in which performance was monitored. It was boring enough that people would frequently zone out and make mistakes. While performing the task, participants wore EEG caps, monitoring their brain waves.

Results showed that those participants with a growth mindset were significantly better at learning from their mistakes. Those with a growth mindset generated a much larger Pe signal (up to x3 as big), revealing increased attention to their mistakes.

And what’s more, this increased Pe signal was closely linked to improvement in performance on the task after the errors. Because the subjects were thinking about what they got wrong, they learned how to get it right.

It’s how you deal with failure that determines how you achieve success.

David Feherty

Failure in the classroom: Lessons for all of us

Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck is known for her research on fixed vs growth mindsets.

Her most famous study was done in twelve different schools involved giving more than 400 fifth graders. Students were given feedback that either induced a fixed or a growth mindset, and Dweck looked at the effect of this on how they tackled a series of tests.

Test Set 1: Creating the mindset

First they were given a test of nonverbal puzzles – not a hard test at first. After the test, the students were told their score, and given a single line of praise. Half of the kids were praised for their intelligence.

“You must be smart at this,” the researcher said.  This encouraged a ‘fixed mindset’.

The other students were praised for their effort:

“You must have worked really hard.” This encouraged a ‘growth mindset’.

Test Set 2: Choosing a challenge

The students were then allowed to choose between two follow up tests – the first described as a more difficult set of puzzles, the second an easy test, similar to the one they just took.

Depending on the ‘fixed’ vs ‘growth’ feedback, there was a dramatic difference in the choice of test:  nearly 90% of the kids praised for their effort chose the harder test. But most of the kids who were praised for their intelligence chose the easier test.

Why? According to Dweck, praising children for intelligence encourages them to hold onto an image of ‘looking’ smart. Making a mistake could threaten this privileged (fixed) status. Those who were praised for effort were focusing more on the learning process itself, not concerned about protecting a fixed image of themselves as good or bad.

Test Set 3: Grit

Dweck went on to show that fear of failure actually impairs learning. She gave the same fifth graders yet another test. This test was difficult — it was originally written for eighth graders – and Dweck wanted to see how the children would respond to the challenge.

Again another dramatic difference: The kids who had the growth mindset worked hard at figuring out the puzzles. Those with the fixed ‘I’m bright’ mindset were easily discouraged. Mistakes were seen as a sign of failure.

Test Set 4: Learning from others

After test set 3, the two groups of students were then given the option of looking either at the exams of students who did worse or those who did better. Another big difference: Students praised for their intelligence almost always wanted to see the poor performers – to affirm their status as bright. Students praised for hard work were more interested in looking at the higher scoring exams. They wanted to learn from their errors and do better.

Test Set 5: Overall gains in performance

The final round of tests was the same difficulty level as the first test. Students who were praised for their effort – with a growth mindset – exhibited significant improvement, raising their average score by 30 percent. With a growth mindset these students were willing to challenge themselves, even if it meant failing at first, they ended up performing at a much higher level.

By contrast, those who were praised for being smart saw their scores drop by nearly 20 percent. The aversion to failure and error had actually resulted in regression for these children.

Dweck’s Mindset Model

Here’s Dweck’s mindset model:

Take Home: Succeed through failure over self-image safehavens

Don’t fear failure and seek to avoid it, but embrace it as one of the best mindhacks for performance gains that’s out there. The better you think you might be, the more you should be doing this to cultivate your ability.

Unless we experience the unpleasant symptoms of being wrong — that surge of Pe activity a few hundred milliseconds after the error, directing our attention to the very thing we’d like to ignore — the brain will never rewire itself to do better. We’ll keep on making the same mistakes, forsaking self-improvement for the sake of our self-image.

I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. ..I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.

Michael Jordan

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A biohacker (or “wetware hacker”) is similar to a computer hacker who creates and modifies computer software or computer hardware as a hobby, but he or she does it with their body and biology.

Biohacking has joined forces with the ‘quantified self’ movement resulting in a philosophy of self-experimentation and scientifically based training and technological intervention to improve human potential and performance. Self quantification involves using measurement gadgets such as non-invasive blood glucose monitoring, or EEG sleep stage monitoring, to track the body’s biological states for self-knowledge and control.

Gary Wolf

Here is a well known self-quantifier – Gary Wolf - explaining what can be done here at a TED talk:

Two renound bloggers tapping into biohacking and self-quantification movements are Tim Ferriss and Dave Asprey.

Tim Ferriss

Author and blogger Tim Ferriss is someone who has specialized in biohacking his body. His blog can be found here, and here is an introduction to his latest best selling body biohacking book: ‘The 4-Hour Body’:

Dave Asprey

Dave Asprey has focused on brain biohacking, also known as ‘mindhacking’. To quote from his blog The Bullet Proof Executive:

The Bulletproof Executive was born out of a fifteen-year single-minded crusade to upgrade the human being using every available technology. It distills the knowledge of more than 120 world-class MDs, biochemists, Olympic nutritionists, meditation experts, and more than $250,000 spent on personal self-experiments.

The Financial Times calls Dave Asprey a “bio-hacker who takes self-quantification to the extreme of self-experimentation.”  Here is a good introduction to Dave’s background as an Internet entrepreneur, and his biohacking work: 

Dave has made use of our i3Mindware software, and saw a 12 point IQ gain. An article on our mindware can be found on his Bullet Proof Executive blog ‘How to Add 2.75 IQ Points Per Hour of Training’.

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The marshmallow test was first conducted in 1968 by Professor Walter Mischel, a groundbreaking psychologist in the field of self-control and will power. This ingenious experiment concerning kids wrestling with temptation is now a fixture of pop culture, as shown in the amusing video  below.

The experiment goes like this: Mischel invited a four-year old pupil at the Bing Nursery School into a small room, and he makes her an offer. She could either eat one marshmallow straight away or eat two if she was willing to wait fifteen minutes while he went to do something out of the room. This pupil, like most children, decided to wait.

Toddlers can delay gratification like this no problem. But then Mischel added a devious twist to the experiment. He left the room, first telling the child that if she rang the bell on the table he would come back straight away, and she could eat the marshmallow.  But – and this was the deal – this meant giving up the chance to get a second marshmallow after fifteen minutes.

In this case, the big majority of four-year-olds struggled to resist the marshmallow with the average waiting time being less than two minutes! The average waiting time was less than a dismal two minutes.  

To help strengthen their shaky will power the kids conjured up an assortment of mental strategies. Some tried to deprive their senses of the temptation by covered their eyes with their hands or standing in the corner of the room. Others used distraction tactics by kicking the desk or tugging at their hair.  Others stroked the marshmallow as if it were a stuffed animal. Tactics like this enabled about 25% of four-year olds to fend off temptation until the experiment was over. They were the ones who got the second marshmallow.

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Why will power is so crucial

And they got more than that. Fast forward twelve years to high-school. About 600 pupils participated in the marshmallow study, and when these participants were sixteen, Professor Mischel sent out a questionnaire to their parents, teachers and academic advisors, asking about every trait he could think of from their ability to control their temper to whether they got on with their peers. He also got copies of their SAT scores.

Striking correlations revealed themselves: The children who rang the bell within a minute – who were more deficient in self-control – were much more likely to have behavioral problems, both in school and at home. They had coping difficulties in stressful situations, had attention problems in class, and had anger management problems.

Most strikingly, the difference in SAT scores between a 30 second delay child and a fifteen minute delay child was on average 210 points!

(For a list of college entrance SAT scores, click here).

As noted by the cognitive neuroscientist columnist Johah Lehrer, the marshmallow task has had a big impact on how we understand will power and its importance.

Mischel’s work has helped focus scientific attention on the non-cognitive personality traits, such as self-control and conscientiousness, which are incredibly important in the real world. (In many studies, self-control explains more of the individual variation in success than IQ scores.)

The technical term for ability to regulate one’s attention and exert self-control and willpower is ‘executive function’. Researchers have found that levels of executive function have a deep impact on nearly every important aspect of life. In a recent study that measured levels of executive function in 1,037 New Zealand children, following them up into their teenage years and adulthood, it was found that children who could better regulate their impulses and attention were four times less likely to have a criminal record, three times less likely to be addicted to drugs and half as likely to become single parents. In many dimensions of successful, healthy living, the level of executive functioning was more predictive of adult outcomes than either IQ scores or socioeconomic status.

How ‘will power’ has been redefined

Professor Mischel has helped cognitive psychologists redefine willpower. A traditional view of willpower is gritting our teeth and overpowering a temptation, like pushing down a wall. Mischel realized that far from focusing on the temptation, the ability to be self-controlled lies in knowing how to distract yourself –  “the strategic allocation of attention” to relase your mind from the incentives of the temptation. Instead of obsessing over the marshmallow the self-controlled children covered their eyes or looked away or pulled their hair.

If you’re thinking about the marshmallow and how delicious it is, then you’re going to eat it. The key is to avoid thinking about it in the first place.

Mischel

Paradoxically, the most successful resistance is only possible when we’re not actively trying to resist.

In an age of information overload, simply paying attention is the hardest thing

The ability to deal with distraction, and resist temptation, is of prime value in our age of information overload, where an abundance of easily accessed information and digital stimulation can be overwhelming. As an exercise, just look at your ‘history’ for a day’s use of the Internet, and see just how much information you’re typically churning through, much of which is simply distracting.

The problem is that attentional resources are a limited pool, easily consumed and diluted. As the cognitive psychologist Herbert Simon memorably said:

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

Training self-control and will power

The good news is that although attention will always be a scare resource, easily pulled into distracting information tributaries and eddies, it’s possible to improve our executive functioning and become better at managing attention and managing how we interact with the deluge of information.

The key to this, as explained in Jonah Lehrer’s Wall Street Journal column (link here), is strengthening what psychologists call executive function – the cognitive skills that allow us to manage and control our thoughts and impulses. When we make a phone call we don’t ‘want’ to make, or do homework instead of watch television, or concentrate for hours on a skill we want to improve, we are using our executive functioning. In the current issue of Science, Adele Diamond, a neuroscientist at the University of British Columbia, reviews the activities that can reliably boosts executive function. We will review these later, and they include school curricula such as Montessori, as well as engaging and challenging exercises such as board games, yoga, tae-kown-do and – with notable effectiveness – dual n-back working memory / short term memory training exercises, which form the basis of our IQ Mindware software applications.

As Lehrer points out, despite this impressive evidence, most schools (a) have not developed metrics to assess executive functioning skills, and (b) do virtually nothing to develop these skills.

Even worse, education departments are slashing the very activities, such as physical exercise and the arts, that boost executive function among the broadest range of students….That’s almost certainly a mistake. We need to teach the skills of executive function directly and creatively…If we want our children to succeed in the age of information, we need to give them the mental tools that matter. The world has changed. The mind can’t stay the same.

According to the CIA Factbook for 2010, the per capita income of Qatar is a staggering $179,000 per year.  Not far behind, Lichtenstein comes in at $141,100. The US is $47,200, and the UK is $34, 800. At the bottom of the income pyramid we have Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo at $300 per year. Pirate infested Somalia comes in at $600/year. Over 70 countries have per capita incomes of less than $5000 per year.

Some economies are flourishing, some are not. Why?

IQ wealth & cognitive capital

There are many factors that make a difference of course – including economic freedom, natural resources, trade-relations, and so on. In the last 50 years or so, economists have started taking an interest in the value of human capital – sometimes called social capital: that is, the qualities of the people who make up the workforce. Heiner Rindermann, of the Chemnitz University of Technology, wanted to look more closely at one aspect of human capital – which may be called cognitive capital: the individuals cognitive ability:

“In other words, it’s the ability of a person to solve a problem in the most efficient way — not with violence, but by thinking”

A study co-authored with  James Thompson of University College London, shortly to be published Psychological Science, Rindermann has demonstrated a strong IQ-wealth link. Researchers analyzed IQ test scores from 90 countries and found that the intelligence of the people – especially the smartest 5 percent – made a big contribution to the strength of their economies.

What does IQ Mean? 1 IQ Point = $468 per year for the smartest

For each one-point increase in a country’s average IQ, the per capita gross domestic product (GDP) was $229 higher. For the smartest 5% of the population in each country – the cognitive elites –  it made an even more dramatic difference to salary: for every additional IQ point in that group, a country’s per capita GDP was $468 higher. In other words, the IQ level of Lichtenstein’s cognitive elite is much, much higher than the IQ level of Burundi’s cognitive elite.

130 IQ – Cognitive Elites

In the US, UK, Australia, Europe and other western countries, assuming an average population IQ of 100, the data indicates that  individuals with a 130 IQ  – putting you in the top 2.3% of the population – are powerful wealth creators. An IQ of 125 puts you in the top 5% – a member of your society’s cognitive elite!

Why the IQ Wealth Link? What does IQ mean?

Why is the level of the most intelligent people important for economic productivity? Rindermann offers the following explanation:

” IQ is relevant for technological progress, for innovation, for leading a nation, for leading organizations, as entrepreneurs, and so on.

To quote from the article’s abstract:

this group’s cognitive ability predicts the quality of economic and political institutions, which further determines the economic affluence of the nation.

According to Rindermann, cognitive capital is the major determiner of economic productivity – more important than economic freedom itself.

“I think in the modern economy, human capital and cognitive ability are more important than economic freedom.”  

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References

H. Rindermann, J. Thompson. Cognitive Capitalism: The Effect of Cognitive Ability on Wealth, as Mediated Through Scientific Achievement and Economic Freedom. Psychological Science, 2011; 22 (6): 754 DOI: 10.1177/0956797611407207

A related book is:

IQ and the Wealth of Nations (2002). This is a book by Dr. Richard Lynn, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland, and Dr. Tatu Vanhanen, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland. The book argues that differences in national income (in the form of per capita gross domestic product) correlate with differences in the average national intelligence quotient (IQ). The authors further argue that differences in average national IQs is one important factor, but not the only one, contributing to differences in national wealth and rates of economic growth.

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“Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power.”

Seneca.

‘I want to sleep in, but I should get up and get to work’. ‘I want to watch this movie, but I should do my paper.’ ‘I want to tell my partner that he’s totally irresponsible, but I should talk it through’. Every day we are tested between what we want to do – impulsively or through temptation – and what we should do with our long term interests in mind.

Our ability to actively resist our impulses or cravings is known as self-control or will power.

Self-control definition

According to Roy Baumeister, a psychology professor at Florida State Universty who specializes in self-control research, “Learning self-control produces a wide range of positive outcomes,’’

“Kids do better in school, people do better at work. Look at just about any major category of problem that people are suffering from and odds are pretty good that self-control is implicated in some way…Learning to bring your behavior under control even with arbitrary rules does build character in that it makes you better able to achieve the things you want to achieve later on.’’

Baumeister and his research team define self-control as:

 ”Self-control refers to the capacity for altering one’s own responses, especially to bring them into line with standards such as ideals, values, morals, and social expectations, and to support the pursuit of long-term goals. … Self-control enables a person to restrain or override one response, thereby making a different response possible.”

Baumeister, Vohs & Tice (review paper)

Why do some people stick to their New Year’s resolutions while others don’t? Why can some people withstand distraction and temptation and buckle down to the job at hand for as long as it takes to get it done? Why do some people seem to lack the necessary self-discipline in their diets, becoming obese or substance abusers? Why do some people succeed in giving up smoking while others do not?

Self-control depletion and glucose

What researchers are finding is that willpower is very much like a muscle – a mental muscle – that can be depleted through use. Muscle power depends on glucose levels – with sustained exertion the glucose gets burned up. Similarly, self-control is a limited resource that depends on glucose levels in the blood. This is not a surprise because glucose is the main energy supply for the brain. The more the glucose is used up through exerting will power on one task, the less will power is left in reserve for other subsequent activities that depend on it. This has been called ‘ego depletion’, since loss of self-control involves losing control of the ego.

Self-control depletion experiments

Baumeister and his colleagues have demonstrated ego-depletion  in the laboratory. To exercise self-control, in one study they watched an emotionally charged video but were asked to suppress smiles and other facial reactions.

Both groups of video-watchers were then given a test (called the ‘Stroop task’) that taxed their concentration and attention. This test pits the meaning of color words against the colors they are printed in. Participants are asked to name the color in which words are printed, ignoring what they say – and this is a challenging task to do quickly – as you can see for yourself in the example below. The correct answers in the first line would be “green, red, blue”. Try the other lines as quickly as you can. The video watchers who had previously exercised their self-control by controlling their facial expressions did the worst on this test – in speed and accuracy – showing that their self-control had already been depleted by the film challenge.

How to self-control with glucose

In the experiment described above, glucose levels were also recorded. After the video, those who had suppressed their facial reactions (smiles, etc) had their blood glucose levels measured. Glucose levels had dropped significantly. The other participants who watched the same video but did not force a poker face, did not see a drop in their glucose levels: they still had a lot in the tank.

In another experiment, two groups did the Stroop task two times each, drinking a sweetened drink in between. One group drank lemonade with a sugar-free sweetener that has no glucose effect; the other group got lemonade sweetened with real glucose. The glucose group performed better than the sweetener group on their second Stroop task because their blood sugar had been replenished. So restoring glucose levels can restore self-control.

Tips for increasing will power

Understanding of the biological and psychological underpinnings of our ability to control ourselves can help us improve our will power. It also has important application for people in the self-control business, such as coaches, therapists, teachers, and parents.

The findings by Baumeister make sense because it’s long been known that glucose fuels brain functionng. Having a bite to eat can help boost our willpower, and can help explain why smokers trying to quit or students trying to focus on studying often turn to food to sustain their resolve.

No studies have looked precisely at factors such as the Glycemic Index and its relationship to self-control and will power, but for a practical tip, if you need to muster will power for a task, try to ensure that you have not already drained doing something else, and consider drinking a sweet drink or glucose bar if you find your self-control or will power flagging.

Will power and dieting

Consuming sugary drinks or snacks isn’t practical advice for a dieter struggling with willpower. However, the research does help explain why dieters who eat several small meals a day appear to do better at sticking to a diet than dieters who skip meals.

“You need the energy from food to have the willpower to exert self-control in order to succeed on your diet”

Baumeister.

Exercising will power strengthens it

In addition to thinking about your glucose levels, you can also consider exercising your will power and self-control. Exercise can make muscles stronger, there is evidence that regular exertions of self-control can improve willpower strength.

“ Targeted efforts to control behavior in one area, such as spending money or exercise, lead to improvements in unrelated areas, such as studying or household chores.”

 Baumeister, Vohs & Tice.

There is also a good scientific basis to the claim that serious  brain training programs such Brain Power® software can efficiently target the core mechanisms of self-control, greatly improving general will power levels.  These tasks are similar to the Stroop task in some ways, involving filtering out distracting information. They also strongly engage short term memory mechanisms for flexibly updating goal-relevant information. These kinds of cognitive skills are called executive functions, and they are closely associated with self-control and will power.

Intelligence augmentation – or IA – has been defined as follows:

“IA involves supplementing our own brain’s abilities using a range of different technologies.”

Richard Yonck, Foresight Analyst.

IA technologies can be of two sorts:  mindhacking based, in which neuroplastic cognitive processes are deliberately trained or modified, or biohacking based in which physiological and biochemical processes are deliberately trained or modified.

Why is there a mushrooming interest in IA? Three factors contribute to this:

1. Cognitive capital

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…………Google Offices

It is known that the practical advantage of having a high IQ increases as our work environments become more fluid and complex – that is novel, ambiguous, changing, rapid, unpredictable, or multifaceted. A high IQ  is of high value for any strategic capacity, in which problem solving, decisions and self-control is needed to problem solve and make decisions in the midst of complexity. In rapidly changing work environments IQ is increasingly viewed as valuable ‘cognitive capital’, and there are market pressures to accumulate this capatial, much as there are market forces to accumulate social capital and financial capital.

2. Self-optimization & attaining personal potential

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The ‘quantification of the self’ – in which cognitive and biological capacities such as IQ and sleep are measured and improved through feedback loops – is part of a growing movement to optimize personal performance and potential – both physically and cognitively.  And interesting review of this movement can be found at this link.

3. Brain health and aging

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The demographics of the world are changing fast – with greatly increasing proportions of older people resulting from increasing modernization and economic development. Aging is associated with some forms of cognitive decline,– as can be seen in this graph of how IQ sub-factors decline with age. Fluid intelligence (Gf – problem solving ability) and visuo-spatial intelligence (Gv) are highlighted. The most dramatic decline is in processing speed (Gs – top most curve).

In addition, with an aging population and increasing proportion of the population suffers from dementia. The most common type of dementia is Alzheimer’s. In 2006, there were 26.6 million sufferers worldwide. Alzheimer’s is predicted to affect 1 in 85 people globally by 2050.

Thus due to the demographics of an aging population, tackling different forms of cognitive decline to ensure brain health has become a major cultural priority.

Mindhacks and Biohacks

There a number of mindhacking and biohacking fields that stand at the threshold of radical augmentation of human intelligence, which I will now review. The extent to which the augmentation of human intelligence becomes increasingly precious cognitive capital is a controversial, potentially yielding both benefits and abuses. Regardless of our feelings about it, we would be wise to anticipate the kind of future IA is likely to be a part of.

Mindhacking intelligence

Computer hacking  can be defined as:

“to be able to indirectly gain access to, and make personal use of, computer systems through skills, tactics and detailed knowledge.”

Analogously, mindhacking – or mindhacks – can be defined as:

“To be able to indirectly gain access to, and make personal use of, cognitive, motivational or emotional systems through skills, tactics and detailed knowledge”

Mindhacking techniques have been supported by far-reaching advances in behavioral & cognitive psychology, and cognitive neuroscience, over the past decade. More than ever in history, behavior can be conditioned, information processing  mechanisms can be manipulated, and cognitive processes and can be trained and modified indirectly.

Recent gains in cognitive neuroscientific understanding of the link between pre-frontal working memory circuitry and problem solving ability and IQ have resulted in the development of scientifically based brain training software.  This type of software selectively targets prefrontal neural networks, resulting in long term neuroplasticity changes  increasing short term memory capacity, problem solving ability, self-control and overall IQ. The scientific basis for these powerful mindhacking methods is reviewed here. Advances by psychometricians working on the factors underlying performance on IQ and aptitude tests has also enabled targeted training of the five factors of IQ, incorporated in the i3 Mindware® software.

Brain prosthetics

Brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs, are another type of IA being explored. A BCI gives a user the ability to control a computer or other device using only their thoughts. BCIs may also help with the treatment of brain disorders due to stroke, epilepsy or Alzheimer’s disease. There are also beginning to enhance cognitive functioning and intelligence. University of Pittsburgh scientists recently gave monkeys the ability to control a robotic arm to pick up food and bring it to their mouth just by thinking about it. Hair-like electrodes in a computer chip implanted in the monkey’s brains picked up nerve signals from the brain. Wires then carried the signals through the skull, and computer software converted the brain signals into a robotic arm’s movements. The world’s first human testing of a mind-controlled artificial limb has also now begun. A joint project between the Pentagon and Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), the Modular Prosthetic Limb is fully controlled by sensors implanted in the brain, and can even restore the sense of touch by sending electrical impulses from the limb back to the sensory cortex. Together with the BCIs that have been developed for the operation of computer interfaces and wheelchairs, these technologies offer hope of a more interactive and embodied life to those with spinal cord damage.

Memory systems are also now benefiting from brain-computer enhancement. Scientists have just successfully developed an artificial hippocampus in a rat. The hippocampus is a brain structure which transfers short term memories to stable, long term memories. In a breakthrough study in June 2011, rat’s memories for how to access food with a lever were pharmacologically blocked so they lost their long term memory for this action. Long-term memory capability returned to the rats when the research team activated the prosthetic hippocampus, programmed to duplicate the memory-encoding function for that specific lever-pulling memory. The researchers went on to show that if a prosthetic device with its carefully wired up electrodes were implanted in animals with a normal, functioning hippocampus, the device could actually strengthen the memory trace being generated internally in the brain and improve the memory capability of normal rats.

This research all points to a day when our ability to plug in to computer devises to enhance cognitive functioning could become an everyday reality.

Biohacking

Pharmacological methods include nootropics. Nootropics – also known as smart drugs, memory enhancers, cognitive enhancers and intelligence enhancers – are drugs, supplements, nutraceuticals (a product isolated or purified from foods) that are designed to improve mental functions such as memory, motivation, attention and intelligence. Among these are Ampakines, tested by DARPA, an agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of new technology for use by the military, in an effort to improve attention span and alertness of soldiers in the field, as well as facilitate their learning and memory. This focus compliments broader strategic goals, in which it the ‘information operations’ (IO) is now a core competence, along with air, ground, maritime and special operations. IO is defined by the Department of Defense as:

“The ability to control the information environment, including interrelated physical, informational, and cognitive dimensions, is now seen as vital to national security. And it is the cognitive dimension, in which “people think, perceive, visualize, and decide,” that is seen as most important.”

A substantial proportion of intelligence is considered to be heritable – estimates vary from 50-70% – and China has begun sequencing the genomes of 1,000 Chinese adults with IQs of 145 or higher. Therapeutic strategies to promote neuroplasticity and improve learning ability are also being explored by biochemical and genetic approaches. To quote from Richard Yonck:

A 2010 European Neuroscience Institute study found memory and learning in elderly mice restored to youthful levels when a cluster of genes was activated using a single enzyme. Several stem cell research studies offer hope not only for degenerative mental pathologies but also for restoring our ability to learn rapidly. In another study, mice exposed to the natural soil bacterium, Mycobacterium vaccae, found their learning rate and retention significantly improved, possibly the result of an autoimmune response. All of these suggest we’ve only begun to scratch the surface when it comes to improving or augmenting intelligence.

In summary our brief review makes clear that intelligence augmentation (IA) through a diversity of mindhacking and biohacking methodologies is now firmly on ‘the agenda’ of our Zeitgeist as we move into the 21^st Century.