Importance Of Human Memory

January 2nd, 2009

3 comments

French psychologist Alfred Binet, a keen student of human individualities and potentials and the inventor of the first IQ test, considered the concept of fixed intelligence a "brutal pessimism." He worried that a low IQ score might carry with it an indelible stigma. But others soon sought to use IQ to discriminate and categorize; Henry Goddard, for instance, the father of IQ testing in the United States, privately favored forced sterilization of those he thought of as mental defectives and publicly advocated programs of segregation. [inline]

[/inline] The idea that a person's relative intelligence was inherent and unchanging soon became conventional wisdom. But in the decades since Goddard championed the testing of immigrants as they landed at Ellis Island, a growing body of research has proven that Binet was right and Goddard was wrong. All kinds of environmental and circumstantial factors determine and modify a person's intelligence over time. Which means, of course, that we should be able to take steps to increase our IQ. But until a remarkable study made public in April of this year, no one had any clue how to do it. Boosting Intelligence With Memory Training Last year, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Queensland, Graeme Halford, theorized that as we work on a mental task, our brain has a finite degree of processing power. It divides this processing power, Halford suggested, between managing our short term memory (known as working-memory in this application) and fluid intelligence, or problem-solving functions. The more we have to think about what we need to remember, the less we can focus on solving the problem. A team of researchers from the Universities of Michigan and Bern picked up on Halford's theory and took it a step further. If working-memory can be increased by training, they posited, perhaps this would lead to an increase in fluid intelligence. To test this idea, the scientists developed a task that would develop a subject's working-memory. To measure fluid intelligence the researchers employed questions from a standard IQ test. The study recorded significant increases in fluid intelligence in all participants compared to a control group who weren't trained. After only 19 days of training, each participant in the trained group (as compared to the control group) improved on the fluid intelligence test by more than 40%. The team published its results in April of this year, engendering a good deal of attention. Not surprisingly, many people who read about the study wanted to try the training for themselves. (In the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that I was one of those people; my company launched a commercial version of the working-memory training back in June. I've experienced myself and heard from many customers that the training works just as well outside the lab. We've even had people increase IQ scores on full-scale moderated tests - a finding that the researchers hesitated to predict.) Finally then we can relegate the concept of fixed IQ to the scrap-heap of mistaken ideas. Alfred Binet would appreciate this advance, I bet, although he might wonder why it took so long for us to get here. By: Martin G. Walker Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com Learn more: increasing fluid intelligence by training working-memory. Martin Walker is a member of The British Neuroscience Association, Learning and The Brain, and MENSA. Mind Evolve, LLC publishes free information on the field of neuroscience and brain training, as well as effective, affordable brain fitness software under the Mind Sparke brand.

The Buck Stops Here To emphasize the importance of absorbing a pile of information is to support a larger worldview that sees the primary purpose of education as reproducing our current culture. Human memory is THE factor Take for example Professor Bartlett's experiments which were created not as laboratory experiments, but as real life tests of human memory. Brain Facts for Human Memory The human brain, with roughly 100 billion neurons, can be equated to a computer with a 1000000000000 bit per second processor. Researchers discover brain's memory buffer These cellular findings have implications for how the human brain stores rapidly changing information, like the temporary memory a card shark uses when counting cards. Howtoincreasememory.com