# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Do brain enhancing drugs really improve memory, focus and mental energy? Learn about their safety and effectiveness, and cognitive boosting alternatives.
A lot of smart people are using brain enhancing drugs in hope of maximizing their mental capabilities.

College students, scientists, entrepreneurs, investment bankers, and Silicon Valley geeks are among those taking these substances to sharpen their minds and stay competitive with their peers. ( 1, 2, 3)

Proponents of brain enhancement drugs say they are no different than using caffeine, a socially accepted psychoactive substance that makes you more alert and focused.

But are these drugs as safe and effective as a cup of coffee?

Let's start by considering the three most popular brain enhancing pills - piracetam, modafinil, and ADHD medications.

First, we'll explore how these drugs work and the benefits you might expect.

Then, we'll discuss the potential side effects and how to obtain these so-called smart drugs.

Piracetam

Piracetam is a popular study drug.

It's a derivative of the naturally occurring brain chemical GABA. ( 4)

Piracetam was developed by Corneliu Giurgea, PhD, who also coined the term nootropic - a substance that improves mental function while doing no harm. ( 5, 6)

It's not fully understood how piracetam works, but there are several theories.

It may improve blood flow to the brain, increase brain plasticity, or increase acetylcholine, the neurotransmitter associated with memory and learning. ( 7, 8, 9)

Piracetam is the most widely used of the racetams - a group of man-made nootropics that includes other "tams" like aniracetam and oxiracetam.

According to a review of 19 piracetam studies, it can improve memory but only in seniors experiencing age-related mental decline or dementia. ( 10)

There's evidence that it is useful for those with traumatic brain injury or stroke. ( 11)

But there's little evidence that piracetam offers any noticeable cognitive benefits in healthy people. ( 12)

Interestingly, one study found that piracetam is of more benefit for anxiety and depression than it is for memory improvement, the main reason people take it. ( 13)

Piracetam Side Effects

The most commonly reported side effect of piracetam is headache.

Especially compared to other cognitive enhancers, piracetam has low toxicity and few serious side effects. ( 14)

How to Buy Piracetam

The availability and legal status of piracetam vary by country.

Here in the US it is not approved as either a medication or supplement. ( 15)

You can't buy it in stores, or from brand name vitamin companies online.

✓ Mind Lab Pro Universal Nootropic
Optimize your mental performance and mood

But since piracetam falls into a legal grey area, you can buy it online from sites that specialize in synthetic nootropics.

Some of these proprietors are more reputable than others, so do your due diligence before ordering from any online retailer.

Piracetam goes by many other names depending on where you live.

Drugs.com has a complete list of piracetam names by country.

Modafinil (Provigil)

Provigil is the brand name for the generic drug modafinil.

It was originally created for sleep disorders and modafinil's only medically approved uses are for narcolepsy, shift work sleep disorder, and obstructive sleep apnea. ( 16)

It was found only by chance to help with focus and concentration.

Modafinil is a favorite among biohackers, Silicon Valley geeks, and Wall Street bankers.

When all goes well, the feeling you get from taking modafinil has been compared to "your younger self after a very good night's sleep." ( 17)

An analysis of 24 studies on modafinil concluded that it was effective only for very specific tasks.

Modafinil made no difference to working memory, or flexibility of thought, but did help with longer and more complex tasks such as planning and decision making. ( 18, 19)

Modafinil Side Effects

The most common side effects of modafinil are headache and nausea. ( 20)

Other reported side effects include insomnia, anxiety, nervousness, hypertension, heart palpitations, decreased appetite, and weight loss. ( 21)

Not a lot is known about long-term use of modafinil, but PET scans show it affects the same areas of the brain involved in substance abuse.

There's some evidence that its long-term use significantly upsets sleep cycles, creating similar brainwave patterns during sleep as those of cocaine users. ( 22)

How to Obtain Modafinil

Modafinil is available by prescription only in the US, but it's widely known that there is a lot of off-label use.

The legal status varies by country; for example, it is legal to possess and use modafinil in the United Kingdom without a prescription. ( 23)

A quick Google search will reveal many places to buy it online.

According to Vice.com, finding modafinil online is not hard but finding a good quality source is.

ADHD Medications

ADHD medications like Adderall and Ritalin work by increasing levels of the neurotransmitters dopamine or norepinephrine. ( 24)

They are helpful for the inattentiveness, poor memory, impulsiveness, and mood swings experienced by people with ADHD.

But even if you don't have ADHD, these drugs will undoubtedly make you feel alert and mentally clear.

They can help you focus and stay awake and possibly help with rote memorization, but they are not helpful for more complex mental tasks.

And even though they are widely used as study drugs, there's no evidence they help with studying for exams or writing term papers. ( 25)

Adderall and Ritalin Side Effects

Adderall's major side effects are bladder pain, trouble urinating, racing heartbeat, and flu-like symptoms. ( 26)

Ritalin's most common side effects are increased heart rate, chest pain, joint pain, fever, and rashes. ( 27)

The worst side effects can be extremely serious - suicidal thoughts, heart attack, and stroke. ( 28)

These drugs are highly addictive amphetamines which are on the list of Schedule II controlled substances, a category that includes opium and cocaine.

✓ Peak mental performance

What would your life be like if your thinking were sharper, your attention more focused, and you had energy to burn?

The right brain supplement can do that. And that means you can go longer, get more done, and achieve your personal goals.

We're very careful about anything we recommend. It must be effective, evidence-based, and safe.

This nootropic ticks all the boxes.
Deane & Dr. Pat
How to Obtain ADHD Medications

In the US, Adderall and Ritalin are legal only with a doctor's prescription.

You can buy these drugs online without a prescription however, but buyer beware.

This is illegal and quality is not assured.

Who's Using Brain Enhancing Drugs (and Why)

The use of brain enhancing drugs is exploding and some of the smartest people on the planet rely on them for a mental edge.

All these smart people can't be wrong ... or can they?

Let's see who is using them and why.

People in high pressure careers use brain enhancing drugs to stay competitive.

Working in Silicon Valley may be the best gig on earth.

The perks and the pay can't be beat.

But the long hours and constant pressure to stay on top of your game can be unbearable. ( 29)

Provigil helps employees stay alert so they can code for 12 hours at a time. ( 30)

Modafinil is popular among Wall Street bankers who liken it to "Viagra for the brain." ( 31)

The military uses mind enhancement drugs for overcoming combat fatigue.

Somewhat disturbingly, soldiers have been called "the weakest instrument of warfare" since they have to eat and sleep. ( 32)

The US military spends $100 million looking for ways to overcome this "weakness," to help personnel stay mentally sharp while reducing their need for sleep.

The United States is not alone in this endeavor. ( 33, 34)

In studies funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, it was found that when using modafinil subjects not only improved their cognitive test scores but could stay awake as long as 90 hours.

College students use brain boosting pills to cram for exams.

As many as one in five college students uses brain enhancers to stay on top of demanding studies. ( 35, 36)

On college campuses, Adderall, Ritalin, piracetam, and modafinil are known as "study drugs" or "professor's little helpers."

These drugs enable students to go extended periods without sleep so they can cram for exams.

Adderall use on college campuses has gotten so out of control, their use has created occasional nationwide Adderall shortages. ( 37)

Scientists use cognitive enhancers to increase memory, focus, and concentration.

Surprisingly, scientists are coming down on the side of legalizing mental enhancers for everyone ... because they use them themselves!

Nature.com conducted an informal survey of 1,400 scientists from 60 countries.

Over 20% admitted using brain enhancing drugs for non-medical reasons to increase focus, memory, and concentration. ( 38)

And nearly 70% of the scientists said they would consider boosting their brain power by taking a brain boosting drug if there was "a normal risk of mild side effects."

Biohackers use brain boosting drugs to achieve peak mental performance.

Biohackers seek optimal brain performance - increased IQ, creativity, and productivity - through any means possible.

One serious, outspoken proponent of modafinil is Dave Asprey, who has built a small industry around his Bulletproof coffee concept.

In his new book Head Strong, Asprey claims he has spent over $1,000,000 hacking his own brain!

Asprey is such a huge fan of modafinil, he's gone on record saying that he would continue to take it even if he knew it would shorten his life. ( 39)

Many fellow biohackers embrace his philosophy with cult-like enthusiasm.

Seniors use memory enhancing drugs to stay mentally sharp.

And lastly, many baby boomers and seniors take memory enhancing drugs. ( 40)

With epidemics of dementia and Alzheimer's looming, these older folks are highly motivated to do whatever they can to stay mentally sharp and retain their memories.

Do Brain Enhancing Drugs Really Work?

With brain enhancing drugs being used by so many intelligent, educated people, you might be surprised to learn that there's plenty of doubt as to whether these drugs work as intended.

In fact, some research has found that these drugs impair, rather than boost, mental performance.

When healthy students were given modafinil, their thinking slowed down with no improvement in performance and they showed a decline in creative thinking. ( 41)

Brain Enhancers Instill False Confidence

These brain boosting pills can give you a false sense of confidence.

Interestingly, studies have repeatedly shown that they don't make you smarter, but they're pretty good at making you think you're performing better.

One study found that when participants expected to receive Ritalin, they reported better focus regardless of whether they were given Ritalin or a placebo.

Conversely, when they didn't expect to get Ritalin, their cognitive performance declined, even when they got the real drug. ( 42)

Most users believe the drugs are working.

In one study, participants given Adderall reported they performed better on tests.

In reality, however, their performance showed no improvement at all. ( 43)

It's not hard to see how false confidence in your mental powers could have disastrous effects in your academic or professional life.

The Downside of Brain Enhancing Drugs

Besides the shadow of doubt on their effectiveness, here are some other compelling arguments against the use of brain enhancing drugs.

Like all drugs, brain enhancers can have side effects. (44, 45) Some are highly addictive and quitting can be an ordeal. (46)

Brain drug use is most prevalent among 19-25 year-olds, but they are particularly hazardous for young brains. (47) Even modafinil enthusiast Dave Asprey emphatically warns students under 25 to skip these drugs while their brains are still forming. (48) He recommends that they stick with coffee instead.

Unless you have a legitimate doctor's prescription, buying brain enhancing drugs is a legal grey area. You really have no idea what you are getting and while unlikely, you could get into legal trouble. In the UK, possession of Ritalin without a prescription can get you five years in jail. (49)

Taking these drugs without a doctor's supervision can be dangerous. There are interactions and contraindications that can cause serious problems. These drugs should not be used if you drink alcohol or take an antidepressant. (50) The possibility of adverse drug reactions should not be taken lightly. By some calculations, adverse drug reactions are now the fourth leading cause of death in the US. (51)

These brain enhancers allow users to go without sleep for extended periods of time. But in the long-term, insomnia is a hazardous side effect, not a so-called benefit. Lack of sleep is extremely detrimental to your brain health and function. It's during sleep that your brain consolidates memories, builds new brain cells, repairs itself, and creates new brain cells. (52, 53, 54, 55)

Brain enhancement drugs may work at the expense of creativity. (56) US Memory Champion Joshua Foer describes experiencing "concentrated thinking with blinders on" under the influence of these drugs. (57)

Learning from the Experiences of Others

It's been said that "Intelligence is the ability to learn from your mistakes. Wisdom is the ability to learn from the mistakes of others."

It might be wise to avail yourself of the experiences of others.

Tim Ferriss, bestselling author of The 4-Hour Workweek, has experimented extensively with brain enhancing substances of all kinds.

Tim warns that there is "no biological free lunch." ( 58)

He's found that time spent in an artificially obtained state of peak brain performance has "payback time" later.

He cautions that if you're going to experiment with brain enhancers, you must "track your hack."

He gets his blood chemistry tested every 4 to 8 weeks and recommends that anyone experimenting with brain enhancing drugs does the same. ( 59)

If you're still on the fence, take a look at this mini-documentary Can Pills Make Me Smarter? where one British university student reports on his experience using modafinil.

Alternatives to Brain Enhancement Drugs

For better or worse, the prevalent use of brain enhancing drugs has started a weird arms race.

Will employees eventually be tested for brain pills along with illicit drugs like marijuana, cocaine, and opiates?

Or will employers put them in the water cooler to make their staff more productive?

Fortunately, synthetic mental enhancers are not the only way to power up your brain.

There's an entire group of brain enhancers that are true nootropics, based on natural substances that "do no harm" and, in fact, make your brain healthier while boosting mental performance.

And for long-term sustained focus, productivity and mental energy, you can't beat proven mind enhancing lifestyle habits.

Some of the most successful people on the planet attribute their success to meditation or other mind-body techniques such as guided imagery or self-hypnosis.

✓ Zen12 Meditation
Feel more relaxed, focused and creative in 12 minutes a day

Corporations like Google, Apple, and Nike offer structured meditation programs for executives and encourage employees at all levels to do it. ( 60)

Richard Branson, the world's most fun-loving billionaire, reveals that his top productivity hack is physical exercise. ( 61)

Some of the greatest minds of all time - Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, and Leonardo DaVinci - believed in the restorative power of sleep and refreshed their brains by taking power naps.

Tim Ferriss starts his day with " titanium tea", a blend of Cruz De Malta Yerba Mate to which he adds ginger, turmeric, coconut oil and pu-erh, a prized ancient tea. ( 62)

Lastly, there's an eating plan called the MIND diet that's been proven over decades of study to be a brain enhancer.

Brain Enhancing Drugs: The Bottom Line

Just because some people are taking drugs they believe will increase their brain power doesn't mean it's a smart idea.

These drugs have side effects, are almost always obtained quasi-legally, and may not work as claimed.

Only you can decide if they are right for you, but be aware that brain enhancing drugs are not the only way to increase your cognitive abilities.

Take the time to investigate natural brain enhancers - the true nootropics.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Do Brain Enhancing Drugs Work? Know the Risks, Benefits

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Do brain enhancing drugs really improve memory, focus and mental energy? Learn about their safety and effectiveness, and cognitive boosting alternatives. A lot of smart people are using brain enhancing drugs in hope of maximizing their mental capabilities.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
What is surprising is what else it improved. In a 2008 study, Susanne Jaeggi and Martin Buschkuehl, now of the University of Maryland, found that young adults who practiced a stripped-down, less cartoonish version of the game also showed improvement in a fundamental cognitive ability known as "fluid" intelligence: the capacity to solve novel problems, to learn, to reason, to see connections and to get to the bottom of things. The implication was that playing the game literally makes people smarter.

Psychologists have long regarded intelligence as coming in two flavors: crystallized intelligence, the treasure trove of stored-up information and how-to knowledge (the sort of thing tested on "Jeopardy!" or put to use when you ride a bicycle); and fluid intelligence. Crystallized intelligence grows as you age; fluid intelligence has long been known to peak in early adulthood, around college age, and then to decline gradually. And unlike physical conditioning, which can transform 98-pound weaklings into hunks, fluid intelligence has always been considered impervious to training.

That, after all, is the premise of I.Q. tests, or at least the portion that measures fluid intelligence: we can test you now and predict all sorts of things in the future, because fluid intelligence supposedly sets in early and is fairly immutable. While parents, teachers and others play an essential role in establishing an environment in which a child's intellect can grow, even Tiger Mothers generally expect only higher grades will come from their children's diligence - not better brains.

How, then, could watching black cats in a haunted house possibly increase something as profound as fluid intelligence? Because the deceptively simple game, it turns out, targets the most elemental of cognitive skills: "working" memory. What long-term memory is to crystallized intelligence, working memory is to fluid intelligence. Working memory is more than just the ability to remember a telephone number long enough to dial it; it's the capacity to manipulate the information you're holding in your head - to add or subtract those numbers, place them in reverse order or sort them from high to low. Understanding a metaphor or an analogy is equally dependent on working memory; you can't follow even a simple statement like "See Jane run" if you can't put together how "see" and "Jane" connect with "run." Without it, you can't make sense of anything.

Over the past three decades, theorists and researchers alike have made significant headway in understanding how working memory functions. They have developed a variety of sensitive tests to measure it and determine its relationship to fluid intelligence. Then, in 2008, Jaeggi turned one of these tests of working memory into a training task for building it up, in the same way that push-ups can be used both as a measure of physical fitness and as a strength-building task. "We see attention and working memory as the cardiovascular function of the brain," Jaeggi says."If you train your attention and working memory, you increase your basic cognitive skills that help you for many different complex tasks."

Jaeggi's study has been widely influential. Since its publication, others have achieved results similar to Jaeggi's not only in elementary-school children but also in preschoolers, college students and the elderly. The training tasks generally require only 15 to 25 minutes of work per day, five days a week, and have been found to improve scores on tests of fluid intelligence in as little as four weeks. Follow-up studies linking that improvement to real-world gains in schooling and job performance are just getting under way. But already, people with disorders including attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (A.D.H.D.) and traumatic brain injury have seen benefits from training. Gains can persist for up to eight months after treatment.

In a town like Chicago Heights, where only 16 percent of high schoolers met the Illinois version of the No Child Left Behind standards in 2011, finding a clear way to increase cognitive abilities has obvious appeal. But it has other uses too, at all ages and aptitudes. Even high-level professionals have begun training their working memory in hopes of boosting their fluid intelligence - and, with it, their job performance. If the effect is real - if fluid intelligence can be raised in just a few minutes a day, even by a bit, and not just on a test but in real life - then it would seem to offer, as Jaeggi's 2008 study concluded with Spock-like understatement, "a wide range of applications."

Since the first reliable intelligence test was created just over a hundred years ago, researchers have searched for a way to increase scores meaningfully, with little success. The track record was so dismal that by 2002, when Jaeggi and her research partner (and now her husband), Martin Buschkuehl, came across a study claiming to have done so, they simply didn't believe it.

The study, by a Swedish neuroscientist named Torkel Klingberg, involved just 14 children, all with A.D.H.D. Half participated in computerized tasks designed to strengthen their working memory, while the other half played less challenging computer games. After just five weeks, Klingberg found that those who played the working-memory games fidgeted less and moved about less. More remarkable, they also scored higher on one of the single best measures of fluid intelligence, the Raven's Progressive Matrices. Improvement in working memory, in other words, transferred to improvement on a task the children weren't training for.

Even if the sample was small, the results were provocative (three years later Klingberg replicated most of the results in a group of 50 children), because matrices are considered the gold standard of fluid-intelligence tests. Anyone who has taken an intelligence test has seen matrices like those used in the Raven's: three rows, with three graphic items in each row, made up of squares, circles, dots or the like. Do the squares get larger as they move from left to right? Do the circles inside the squares fill in, changing from white to gray to black, as they go downward? One of the nine items is missing from the matrix, and the challenge is to find the underlying patterns - up, down and across - from six possible choices. Initially the solutions are readily apparent to most people, but they get progressively harder to discern. By the end of the test, most test takers are baffled.

If measuring intelligence through matrices seems arbitrary, consider how central pattern recognition is to success in life. If you're going to find buried treasure in baseball statistics to give your team an edge by signing players unappreciated by others, you'd better be good at matrices. If you want to exploit cycles in the stock market, or find a legal precedent in 10 cases, or for that matter, if you need to suss out a woolly mammoth's nature to trap, kill and eat it - you're essentially using the same cognitive skills tested by matrices.

When Klingberg's study came out, both Jaeggi and Buschkuehl were doctoral candidates in cognitive psychology at the University of Bern, Switzerland. Since his high-school days as a Swiss national-champion rower, Buschkuehl had been interested in the degree to which skills - physical and mental - could be trained. Intrigued by Klingberg's suggestion that training working memory could improve fluid intelligence, he showed the paper to Jaeggi, who was studying working memory with a test known as the N-back. "At that time there was pretty much no evidence whatsoever that you can train on one particular task and get transfer to another task that was totally different," Jaeggi says. That is, while most skills improve with practice, the improvement is generally domain-specific: you don't get better at Sudoku by doing crosswords. And fluid intelligence was not just another skill; it was the ultimate cognitive ability underlying all mental skills, and supposedly immune from the usual benefits of practice. To find that training on a working-memory task could result in an increase in fluid intelligence would be cognitive psychology's equivalent of discovering particles traveling faster than light.

Together, Jaeggi and Buschkuehl decided to see if they could replicate the Klingberg transfer effect. To do so, they used the N-back test as the basis of a training regimen. As seen in the game played by the children at Washington-McKinley, N-back challenges users to remember something - the location of a cat or the sound of a particular letter - that is presented immediately before (1-back), the time before last (2-back), the time before that (3-back), and so on. If you do well at 2-back, the computer moves you up to 3-back. Do well at that, and you'll jump to 4-back. On the other hand, if you do poorly at any level, you're nudged down a level. The point is to keep the game just challenging enough that you stay fully engaged.
Play a free online version of the N-back game.
To make it harder, Jaeggi and Buschkuehl used what's called the dual N-back task. As a random sequence of letters is heard over earphones, a square appears on a computer screen moving, apparently at random, among eight possible spots on a grid. Your mission is to keep track of both the letters and the squares. So, for example, at the 3-back level, you would press one button on the keyboard if you recall that a spoken letter is the same one that was spoken three times ago, while simultaneously pressing another key if the square on the screen is in the same place as it was three times ago.

The point of making the task more difficult is to overwhelm the usual task-specific strategies that people develop with games like chess and Scrabble. "We wanted to train underlying attention and working-memory skills," Jaeggi says.

Jaeggi and Buschkuehl gave progressive matrix tests to students at Bern and then asked them to practice the dual N-back for 20 to 25 minutes a day. When they retested them at the end of a few weeks, they were surprised and delighted to find significant improvement. Jaeggi and Buschkuehl later expanded the study as postdoctoral fellows at the University of Michigan, in the laboratory of John Jonides, professor of psychology and neuroscience.

"Those two things, working memory and cognitive control, I think, are at the heart of intellectual functioning," Jonides told me when I met with him, Jaeggi and Buschkuehl in their basement office. "They are part of what differentiates us from other species. They allow us to selectively process information from the environment, and to use that information to do all kinds of problem-solving and reasoning."

When they finally published their study, in a May 2008 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the results were striking. Before training, participants were able to correctly answer between 9 and 10 of the matrix questions. Afterward, the 34 young adults who participated in dual N-back training for 12 weeks correctly answered approximately one extra matrix item, while those who trained for 17 weeks were able to answer about three more correctly. After 19 weeks, the improvement was 4.4 additional matrix questions.

"It's not just a little bit higher," Jaeggi says. "It's a large effect."

The study did have its shortcomings. "We used just one reasoning task to measure their performance," she says. "We showed improvements in this one fluid-reasoning task, which is usually highly correlated with other measures as well." Whether the improved scores on the Raven's would translate into school grades, job performance and real-world gains remained to be seen. Even so, accompanying the paper's publication in Proceedings was a commentary titled, "Increasing Fluid Intelligence Is Possible After All," in which the senior psychologist Robert J. Sternberg (now provost at Oklahoma State University) called Jaeggi's and Buschkuehl's research "pioneering." The study, he wrote, "seems, in some measure, to resolve the debate over whether fluid intelligence is, in at least some meaningful measure, trainable."

For some, the debate is far from settled. Randall Engle, a leading intelligence researcher at the Georgia Tech School of Psychology, views the proposition that I.Q. can be increased through training with a skepticism verging on disdain. "May I remind you of 'cold fusion'?" he says, referring to the infamous claim, long since discredited, that nuclear fusion could be achieved at room temperature in a desktop device. "People were like, 'Oh, my God, we've solved our energy crisis.' People were rushing to throw money at that science. Well, not so fast. The military is now preparing to spend millions trying to make soldiers smarter, based on working-memory training. What that one 2008 paper did was to send hundreds of people off on a wild-goose chase, in my opinion.

"Fluid intelligence is not culturally derived," he continues. "It is almost certainly the biologically driven part of intelligence. We have a real good idea of the parts of the brain that are important for it. The prefrontal cortex is especially important for the control of attention. Do I think you can change fluid intelligence? No, I don't think you can. There have been hundreds of other attempts to increase intelligence over the years, with little or no - just no - success."

At a meeting of cognitive scientists last August, and again in November, Engle presented a withering critique of Jaeggi and her colleagues' 2008 paper. He pointed to a variety of methodological weaknesses (many of which have been addressed in subsequent papers by Jaeggi and others) and then presented the results from his own attempt to replicate the study, which found no effect whatsoever. (Those results have yet to be published.)

The most prominent takedown of I.Q. training came in June 2010, when the neuroscientist Adrian Owen published the results of an experiment conducted in coordination with the BBC television show "Bang Goes the Theory." After inviting British viewers to participate, Owen recruited 11,430 of them to take a battery of I.Q. tests before and after a six-week online program designed to replicate commercially available "brain building" software. (The N-back was not among the tasks offered.) "Although improvements were observed in every one of the cognitive tasks that were trained," he concluded in the journal Nature, "no evidence was found for transfer effects to untrained tasks, even when those tasks were cognitively closely related."

But even Owen, reached by telephone, told me that he respects Jaeggi's studies and looks forward to seeing others like it. If before Jaeggi's study, scientists' attempts to raise I.Q. were largely unsuccessful, other lines of evidence have long supported the view that intelligence is far from immutable. While studies of twins suggest that intelligence has a fixed genetic component, at least 20 to 50 percent of the variation in I.Q. is due to other factors, whether social, school or family-based. Even more telling, average I.Q.'s have been rising steadily for a century as access to schooling and technology expands, a phenomenon known as the Flynn Effect. As Jaeggi and others see it, the genetic component of intelligence is undeniable, but it functions less like the genes that control for eye color and more like the complex of interacting genes that affect weight and height (both of which have also been rising, on average, for decades). "We know that height is heavily genetically determined," Jonides told me during our meeting at the University of Michigan. "But we also know there are powerful environmental influences on height, like nutrition. So the fact that intelligence is partly heritable doesn't mean you can't modify it."

Harold Hawkins, a cognitive psychologist at the Office of Naval Research who oversees most of the U.S. military's studies in the area, expressed a common view. For him, the question now is not whether cognitive training works but how strongly and how best to achieve it. "Until about four or five years ago, we believed that fluid intelligence is immutable in adulthood," Hawkins told me. "No one believed that training could possibly achieve dramatic improvements in this very fundamental cognitive ability. Then Jaeggi's work came along. That's when I started to move my funding from some other areas into this area. I personally believe, and if I didn't believe it I wouldn't be making an investment of the taxpayers' money, that there's something here. It's potentially of extremely profound importance." A similar view was expressed by Jason Chein, assistant professor of psychology at Temple University in Philadelphia, who published a series of studies - using another method, not N-back, for training working memory - that showed an increase in cognitive abilities. "My findings support what they've done," he says, referring to the work of Jaeggi and her colleagues. "I've never replicated exactly what they do. But across a number of labs, using similar but different approaches to training, we have related successes. I think there's a great deal of work to be done, but on the whole we are seeing positive signs."

This past winter, I went to visit Jason Chein's lab in Philadelphia, where he has begun to train subjects with something called a complex working memory span task. "It's a terrible name," he said with a laugh. "And you could call it a gimmicky psychological task. But there are 20 years of research behind it." Chein invited me to try my hand at it. Once he clicked "start" on the computer program, the screen showed a checkerboard of 16 squares, with all of them white except 1; I was supposed to remember the red square's location. Then it showed a series of three checkerboard patterns; for each, I had to decide whether the pattern was symmetrical or not. This sequence - having to remember the one red square, and then having to decide on symmetry - was repeated three more times. At the end, I had to click, in order, on the location of those four red squares.

I got only three right.

"Everyone gets better with practice," he said. "Some people get up to being able to remember a string of 11 or higher."

Of course, the goal is not to get better at remembering the location of red squares on a checkerboard but to expand a subject's underlying working memory. Doing so, Chein has found, translates into the kind of real-world improvements associated with increases in cognitive capabilities. "We've seen, in college kids who do it, improvements in their reading-comprehension scores," Chein said. "And in a sample of adults, 65 and older, it appears to improve their ability to keep track of what they recently said, so they don't repeat themselves."

In addition to working memory, researchers are seeking to improve fluid intelligence by training other basic mental skills - perceptual speed (deciding, in a matter of seconds, whether a number is odd or even), visual tracking (on a shoot-'em-up computer game, for instance) or quickly switching between a variety of tasks. Ulman Lindenberger and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin used 12 different tasks to train 101 younger and 103 older adults. Compared with those who received no training, those who participated in 100 daily one-hour training sessions (both young and old) showed significant improvements on tests that measured reasoning, working memory, perceptual speed (in young adults only) and episodic memory (the ability to remember a short list, for example). A statistical measure of how those improvements correlated to one another suggested, Lindenberger concluded, systematic improvements "at the level of broad abilities."

At the University of California, Berkeley, Silvia Bunge, director of a laboratory on the building blocks of cognition, takes what she calls "an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach." Working with 28 children from low socioeconomic backgrounds, she assigned half of them to play games designed to boost the speed of response times, and the other half to play games that target reasoning skills. "Quirkle," for instance, challenges children to align tiles on a grid to match shapes and colors. After eight weeks of training - 75 minutes per day, twice a week - Bunge found that the children in the reasoning group scored, on average, 10 points higher on a nonverbal I.Q. test than they had before the training. Four of the 17 children who played the reasoning games gained an average of more than 20 points. In another study, not yet published, Bunge found improvements in college students preparing to take the LSAT.

Torkel Klingberg, meanwhile, has continued studying the effects of training children with his own variety of working-memory tasks. In October 2010, a company he founded to offer those tasks as a package through psychologists and other training professionals, was bought by Pearson Education, the world's largest provider of educational assessment tools.

Despite continuing academic debates, other commercial enterprises are rushing in to offer an array of "brain building" games that make bold promises to improve all kinds of cognitive abilities. Within a block of each other in downtown San Francisco are two of the best known. Posit Science, among the oldest in the field, remains relatively small, giving special attention to those with cognitive disorders. Lumosity began in 2007 and is now by far the biggest of the services, with more than 20 million subscribers. Its games include a sleeker, more entertaining version of the N-back task.

In Chicago Heights, the magic was definitely not happening for one boy staring blankly at the black cats in the Mac Lab. Sipping from a juice box he held in one hand, jabbing at a computer key over and over with the other, he periodically sneaked a peak at his instructor, a look of abject boredom on his freckled face.

"That's the biggest challenge we have as researchers in this field," Jaeggi told me, "to get people engaged and motivated to play our working-memory game and to really stick with it. Some people say it's hard and really frustrating and really challenging and tiring."

In a follow-up to their 2008 study in young adults, Jaeggi, Buschkuehl and their colleagues published a paper last year that described the effects of N-back training in 76 elementary- and middle-school children from a broad range of social and economic backgrounds. Only those children who improved substantially on the N-back training had gains in fluid intelligence. But their improvement wasn't linked to how high they originally scored on Raven's; children at all levels of cognitive ability improved. And those gains persisted for three months after the training ended, a heartening sign of possible long-term benefits. Although it's unknown how much longer the improvement in fluid intelligence will last, Jaeggi doubts the effects will be permanent without continued practice. "Do we think they're now smarter for the rest of their lives by just four weeks of training?" she asks. "We probably don't think so. We think of it like physical training: if you go running for a month, you increase your fitness. But does it stay like that for the rest of your life? Probably not."

If future studies confirm the benefits of working-memory training on fluid intelligence, the implications could be enormous. Might children with A.D.H.D. receive working-memory training rather than stimulant drugs like Ritalin? Might students in high school and college do N-back training rather than cramming for their finals? Could a journalist like me write better articles?

Of course, in order to improve, you need to do the training. For some, whether brilliant or not so much, training may simply be too hard - or too boring.

To increase motivation, the study in Chicago Heights offers third graders a chance to win a $10 prepaid Visa card each week. In collaboration with researchers from the University of Chicago's Initiative on Chicago Price Theory (directed by Steven D. Levitt, of "Freakonomics" fame), the study pits the kids against one another, sometimes one on one, sometimes in groups, to see if competition will spur them to try harder. Each week, whichever group receives more points on the N-back is rewarded with the Visa cards. To isolate the motivating effects of the cash prizes, a group of fourth graders is undergoing N-back training with the same black-cats-in-haunted-house program, but with no Visa cards, only inexpensive prizes - plastic sunglasses, inflatable globes - as a reward for not talking and staying in their seats.

The boy tapping randomly at his computer without even paying attention to the game? He was in the fourth-grade class. Although the study is not yet complete, perhaps it will show that the opportunity to increase intelligence is not motivation enough. Just like physical exercise, cognitive exercises may prove to be up against something even more resistant to training than fluid intelligence: human nature.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
What is surprising is what else it improved. In a 2008 study, Susanne Jaeggi and Martin Buschkuehl, now of the University of Maryland, found that young adults who practiced a stripped-down, less cartoonish version of the game also showed improvement in a fundamental cognitive ability known as "fluid" intelligence: the capacity to solve novel problems, to learn, to reason, to see connections and to get to the bottom of things.

# data[].attributes.body
How to Improve All 9 Types of Intelligences

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Traditionally, intelligence was measured by short aptitude tests that measures competence in core subjects such as reading and mathematics. And to a large extent, intelligence is still defined by how well you do on aptitude tests. However Howard Gardner, an academician from Harvard University, thinks that being intelligent doesn't mean that you can easily comprehend what you read or can easily solve an equation. That is why he presented the Theory of Multiple Intelligences, which states that there are actually multiple types of intelligences, 9 to be exact.

In this theory, Gardner explains that there should be no single ability that defines intelligence. The hypothesis, as printed in his 1983 book 'Frames of Mind: the Theory of Multiple Intelligences,' proposed that several criteria should be looked upon in order to predict the intelligence of a person. Whatever you excel in makes you intelligent in your own right. But if you are looking for more ways to improve your multiple smarts, then read on below to find out how you can do so:

Naturalist Intelligence

This type of intelligence is defined as the ability to distinguish and classify animals, plants and other naturally-occurring objects in the environment. As such, individuals who are touted as 'nature smart' excel in applying scientific theories to real-life scenarios. Landscape architects, naturalists and scientists are said to be 'nature smart.' Do you want to become just like them? Then here are ways on how you can improve your Naturalist Intelligence:

1) Experience the great outdoors.

In order to be one with nature, you must expose yourself to nature. Break away from the comfortable confines of your home. Trek, hike and bike your way through forests and mountains. These exhilarating activities will help you improve your skills in categorizing and recognizing plants, animals, even rock formations!

2) Do gardening.

Bring out the green thumb in you by transforming your home's vacant spaces into a plant sanctuary. It is one of the best ways to connect you with your primal state, according to James Jiller of Urban GreenWorks. By tending to your garden on a regular basis, you can boost your knowledge of the environment.

Visual-Spatial Intelligence

Accurate and abstract visualization is just one of the many skills possessed by 'picture smart' persons. With their exceptional ability in thinking in pictures, visually-spatially intelligent people can paint, construct and design objects with relative ease.

If you want to hone this kind of smartness - then make sure to do the following mental workouts:

1) Play Puzzles.

Yes, you can have fun while you hone your visual-spatial intelligence. In fact, the most entertaining way to hike your IQ by a few notches is to play puzzles. Games such as Rubik's Cube, Jigsaw puzzles and spatial puzzles that require you to maneuver items inside your head will do wonders for your visual-spatial skills.

2) Play Chess.

Another enjoyable way to improve your 'picture smarts' is to play chess. It cannot be denied that this game has multitudes of brain benefits. Apart from boosting memory and enhancing problem-solving skills, chess improves one's creativity - one of the most important aspects for visual-spatial intelligence. With enhanced creativity, you will be able to create and design items just like picture-smart architects and painters.

3) Utilize Google Earth and Google Maps often.

Apart from helping you find your way in an unfamiliar place, Google Earth and Google Maps applications can help you boost your visual-spatial intelligence. These programs, after all, help develop your sense of direction. One of the best things about these tools is that they can transform you into a navigational pro, even without the need for a map.

However, it is important that you do not use GPS navigation to navigate though as that will turn you into a mindless drone. Instead, use maps and learn how to navigate from place to place on your own, with the assistance of a navigation system. Research has been done on this topic and it shows that navigating the city without the use of GPS is how you would improve your visual-spatial skills.

Verbal-Linguistic Intelligence

Word smart people - or those who possess verbal-linguistic intelligence - feature exceptional verbal skills. They are highly-sensitive to meanings, sounds and rhythms of words. In essence, they possess great capacities in writing, reading, teaching and listening. If you want to be smart in the verbal-linguistic aspect, take heed of the following tips:

1) Keep a journal of things that fascinate or interest you.

Go through the things you find noteworthy - a unique news article or a famous celebrity, perhaps. Write all the thoughts that draw you to this appealing event/entity.

2) Write about a country or city you want to visit.

Are you dreaming of visiting Paris or living in the United Kingdom? What if you were given the chance to live out your fantasy? Talk about what you plan on doing, if ever you are given the opportunity to live a life different from the one you have right now.

3) Write a literary masterpiece.

It can be a story, poem, novel or even a play. Let your imagination fly and allow the words from your mind to trickle down to your journal. Show your write-up to your English teacher or Literature professor and ask for some feedback. What parts are exceptional? What sections need improvement? While you might not write down an award-winning novel on your first try, your dedication and hard work might help you pen down the next Harry Potter series.

Mathematical-Logical Intelligence

Defined as the skill to think abstractly and conceptually, this intelligence is often seen in number smart people such as engineers, scientists and mathematicians. If you want to develop exceptional skills in logical and mathematical problem solving, then these brain exercises can definitely help you out:

1) Play card games.

Contrary to popular beliefs, you need not engage in a boring activity just to improve your logical smarts. One of the most entertaining ways for you to increase your number IQ is to play card games that stimulate your brain to perform mental math. Fun pastimes such as Crazy Eight, Go Fish and Gin Rummy are perfect for the young ones, while matured players will benefit a lot from the addicting game of Black Jack.

3) Break secret codes.

Take the role of Sherlock Holmes by playing detective with your friends. Let your friends create secret codes - or lift some from the web - and try to break them without the help of anybody. Once you get the hang of cracking codes, you will find it easier to solve logical and mathematical problems along the way.

4) Join a math club.

If you are really determined to improve your mathematical smarts, a knowledgeable and fun way to do so is to join a math club. While this might sound boring - it is not! Such a club allows you to learn in a supportive yet sociable environment. Learning with your colleagues and participating in events and competitions will give you the math IQ boost you are looking for.

Musical Intelligence

Singers, composers and musicians usually possess this kind of intelligence. Such 'musical smart' persons can appreciate and produce perfect timbre, rhythm and pitch. Become the musical virtuoso you aspire to be by training your mental faculties with these methods:

1) Sing!

You might think singing doesn't like you, but it does not mean that you should not sing to your heart's content! Sing whenever you can: in the shower, in the car, even in the office pantry during break time! While you might not be able to hit the high notes just like your favorite singers, singing constantly is a great way for you to perfect your music smarts.

2) Learn how to play an instrument.

This is perhaps the best thing you can do in order to hone your musical intelligence. Studying an instrument - no matter how simple or complicated it might be - enables you to learn the basic tones, rhythms and pitches. And as you improve your instrument-playing capacities, you will be able to demonstrate the music smarts that your idols possess.

3) Listen to different types of music.

Musical intelligence is not just about singing well and playing a plethora of instruments, it is about appreciating the beauty of music - no matter how peculiar or weird it might be. Hone your music smarts by lending an ear to different kinds of symphonies - from classic to pop, even from native to eclectic. By immersing your ears in multitudes of melodies, you will be able to distinguish the different tones that govern the world of music.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How to Improve All 9 Types of Intelligences

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Traditionally, intelligence was measured by short aptitude tests that measures competence in core subjects such as reading and mathematics. And to a large extent, intelligence is still defined by how well you do on aptitude tests. However Howard Gardner, an academician from Harvard University, thinks that being intelligent doesn't mean that you can easily comprehend what you read or can easily solve an equation.

# data[].attributes.body
Our brains have a basic algorithm that enables our intelligence.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Our brains have a basic algorithm that enables us to not just recognize a traditional Thanksgiving meal, but the intelligence to ponder the broader implications of a bountiful harvest as well as good family and friends.

"A relatively simple mathematical logic underlies our complex brain computations," said Dr. Joe Z. Tsien, neuroscientist at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University, co-director of the Augusta University Brain and Behavior Discovery Institute and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Cognitive and Systems Neurobiology.

Tsien is talking about his Theory of Connectivity, a fundamental principle for how our billions of neurons assemble and align not just to acquire knowledge, but to generalize and draw conclusions from it.

"Intelligence is really about dealing with uncertainty and infinite possibilities," Tsien said. It appears to be enabled when a group of similar neurons form a variety of cliques to handle each basic like recognizing food, shelter, friends and foes. Groups of cliques then cluster into functional connectivity motifs, or FCMs, to handle every possibility in each of these basics like extrapolating that rice is part of an important food group that might be a good side dish at your meaningful Thanksgiving gathering. The more complex the thought, the more cliques join in.

That means, for example, we cannot only recognize an office chair, but an office when we see one and know that the chair is where we sit in that office.

"You know an office is an office whether it's at your house or the White House," Tsien said of the ability to conceptualize knowledge, one of many things that distinguishes us from computers.

Tsien first published his theory in a 1,000-word essay in October 2015 in the journal Trends in Neuroscience. Now he and his colleagues have documented the algorithm at work in seven different brain regions involved with those basics like food and fear in mice and hamsters. Their documentation is published in the journal Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience.

"For it to be a universal principle, it needs to be operating in many neural circuits, so we selected seven different brain regions and, surprisingly, we indeed saw this principle operating in all these regions," he said.

Intricate organization seems plausible, even essential, in a human brain, which has about 86 billion neurons and where each neuron can have tens of thousands of synapses, putting potential connections and communications between neurons into the trillions. On top of the seemingly endless connections is the reality of the infinite things each of us can presumably experience and learn.

Neuroscientists as well as computer experts have long been curious about how the brain is able to not only hold specific information, like a computer, but -- unlike even the most sophisticated technology -- to also categorize and generalize the information into abstract knowledge and concepts.

"Many people have long speculated that there has to be a basic design principle from which intelligence originates and the brain evolves, like how the double helix of DNA and genetic codes are universal for every organism," Tsien said. "We present evidence that the brain may operate on an amazingly simple mathematical logic."

"In my view, Joe Tsien proposes an interesting idea that proposes a simple organizational principle of the brain, and that is supported by intriguing and suggestive evidence," said Dr. Thomas C. Südhof, Avram Goldstein Professor in the Stanford University School of Medicine, neuroscientist studying synapse formation and function and a winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

"This idea is very much worth testing further," said Südhof, a sentiment echoed by Tsien and his colleagues and needed in additional neural circuits as well as other animal species and artificial intelligence systems.

At the heart of Tsien's Theory of Connectivity is the algorithm, n=2-1, which defines how many cliques are needed for an FCM and which enabled the scientists to predict the number of cliques needed to recognize food options, for example, in their testing of the theory.

N is the number of neural cliques connected in different possible ways; 2 means the neurons in those cliques are receiving the input or not; i is the information they are receiving; and -1 is just part of the math that enables you to account for all possibilities, Tsien explained.

To test the theory, they placed electrodes in the areas of the brain so they could "listen" to the response of neurons, or their action potential, and examine the unique waveforms resulting from each.

They gave the animals, for example, different combinations of four different foods, such as usual rodent biscuits as well as sugar pellets, rice and milk, and as the Theory of Connectivity would predict, the scientists could identify all 15 different cliques, or groupings of neurons, that responded to the potential variety of food combinations.

The neuronal cliques appear prewired during brain development because they showed up immediately when the food choices did. The fundamental mathematical rule even remained largely intact when the NMDA receptor, a master switch for learning and memory, was disabled after the brain matured.

The scientists also learned that size does mostly matter, because while the human and animal brain both have a six-layered cerebral cortex -- the lumpy outer layer of the brain that plays a key role in higher brain functions like learning and memory -- the extra longitudinal length of the human cortex provides more room for cliques and FCMs, Tsien said. And while the overall girth of the elephant brain is definitely larger than the human brain, for example, most of its neurons reside in the cerebellum with far less in their super-sized cerebral cortex. The cerebellum is more involved in muscle coordination, which may help explain the agility of the huge mammal, particularly its trunk.

Tsien noted exceptions to the brain's mathematical rule, such as in the reward circuits where the dopamine neurons reside. These cells tend to be more binary where we judge, for example, something as either good or bad, Tsien said.

The project grew out of Tsien's early work in the creation of smart mouse Doogie 17 years ago while on faculty at Princeton University, in studying how changes in neuronal connections lay down memories in the brain.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
neuroscience; brain-computer interfaces; intelligence; brain injury; psychology; disorders and syndromes; perception; language acquisition

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Our brains have a basic algorithm that enables our intelligence

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Our brains have a basic algorithm that enables us to not just recognize a traditional Thanksgiving meal, but the intelligence to ponder the broader implications of a bountiful harvest as well as good family and friends. "A relatively simple mathematical logic underlies our complex brain computations," said Dr. Joe Z.

# data[].attributes.body
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/quora/15-ways-to-increase-your_b_6802418.html

# data[].attributes.body
http://www.zmescience.com/medicine/mind-and-brain/epilepsy-drugs-enhances-brain-07012014/

# data[].attributes.headline
Does this drug make you smarter or does it make you think you are 

# data[].attributes.subject
Does this drug make you smarter or does it make you think you are 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
JB Reed/Bloomberg News via Getty Images

Adderall, Ritalin and other "smart drugs" have become popular among college students and young professionals, who use them to enhance performance. The drugs are normally prescribed to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), but healthy students use them to get a leg up in school, by improving focus, concentration and memory. The question is, do they work?

Maybe not, according to a new study from the University of Pennsylvania. Students who took Adderall didn't actually perform better on tests of cognitive function - they only thought they did. Casey Schwartz blogged about the findings on the Daily Beast:

The research team tested 47 subjects, all in their twenties, all without a diagnosis of ADHD, on a variety of cognitive functions, from working memory - how much information they could keep in mind and manipulate - to raw intelligence, to memories for specific events and faces. Each subject was tested both while on Adderall and on a placebo; in each condition, the subjects didn't know which kind of pill they were receiving.

The researchers did come up with one significant finding. The last question they asked their subjects was: "How and how much did the pill influence your performance on today's tests?" Those subjects who had been given Adderall were significantly more likely to report that the pill had caused them to do a better job on the tasks they'd been given, even though their performance did not show an improvement over that of those who had taken the placebo.

It's not surprising that Adderall gave students an inflated sense of productivity, Schwartz writes, given that the drug - a close cousin of amphetamine - "unleashes the feel-good neurotransmitter dopamine, triggers the brain's reward system, and can produce a mild sense of euphoria." ( More on Time.com: Drug Surprise: Meth Makes You Feel Almost As Cuddly as Ecstasy)

So whether or not the drug boosts performance on cognitive tests in the short-term, could it be possible that its "euphoric" effect simply makes studying more pleasurable, helping student achievement by ramping up enthusiasm for academics overall? ( More on Time.com: Clues to the Genetic Roots of ADHD)

Schwartz points to a personal essay about performance enhancement by a recent college senior, Molly Young. Writing for N+1, Young noted, "Of course, I could have studied in college without Adderall, just like I did in high school - I just couldn't have studied with such ecstasy."

Then again, ecstasy doesn't necessarily mean creativity, which is another marker of cognitive performance, and one that's hard to pin down in a scientific study. "Though I could put more words to the page per hour on Adderall, I had a nagging suspicion that I was thinking with blinders on," wrote Slate's Joshua Foer in 2005. ( More on Time.com: A Five-Minute Brain Scan Tracks Kids' Development and May Spot Disorders)

UPDATE: It bears noting that the new study, which has not yet been published (it was presented at the annual Society of Neuroscience conference in November), is contradicted by a body of evidence showing actual cognitive benefits of the drug. Healthland's Maia Szalavitz reported:

The benefits of enhancement include increased alertness and focus and improvement in some types of memory. Research shows that in normal people, stimulants consistently and significantly improve learning of material that must be recalled days later - exactly what you want from a drug when you are prepping for exams. The drugs even seem to improve certain aspects of judgment. One study of 36 normal women and men found that they were more likely to choose to delay gratification and receive a larger monetary reward when given amphetamines than settle for a smaller amount of money immediately. Improvements in memory and cognitive control have been reported in multiple studies, mainly using Ritalin and amphetamines.

Research suggests, however, that the drug doesn't improve performance evenly. Many users receive no performance boost, as evidenced by the current University of Pennsylvania study as well as previous work. Szalavitz wrote:

Interestingly, those who have the least ability in a particular area are likely to see the greatest drug-related improvement. In fact, on some tests of cognition, the smartest people actually showed performance reductions, a result that may address some of the concerns over "cheating": on tasks involving working memory and impulsivity, stimulants had a leveling effect, allowing below-average performers to catch up to their peers, not dominate them. According to Farah, the typical student user is actually not the overachieving brainiac but a "white male frat brother with a B average."

Why it works for some and not others isn't entirely clear, but nota bene: don't take Adderall or Ritalin without a doctor's prescription, especially if you suffer from psychosis, mood disorders or high blood pressure.
This post has been updated to reflect the fact that past research suggests taking "smart drugs" may have a significant effect on performance. Related Links: ADHD: A Global Epidemic or Just a Bunch of Fidgety Kids? Training Your Brain to Learn Better (Even Without Drugs) They're Baaaack! How to Avoid a Holiday Clash When the Kids Come Home From College

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Adderall May Not Make You Smarter, But It Makes You Think You Are

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Adderall, Ritalin and other "smart drugs" have become popular among college students and young professionals, who use them to enhance performance. The drugs are normally prescribed to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), but healthy students use them to get a leg up in school, by i...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Neuroscientists have discovered that reading a novel can improve brain function on a variety of levels. The recent study on the brain benefits of reading fiction was conducted at Emory University. The study titled, "Short- and Long-Term Effects of a Novel on Connectivity in the Brain," was recently published in the journal Brain Connectivity.

The researchers found that becoming engrossed in a novel enhances connectivity in the brain and improves brain function. Interestingly, reading fiction was found to improve the reader's ability to put themselves in another person's shoes and flex the imagination in a way that is similar to the visualization of a muscle memory in sports.

Modern day reading habits continue to evolve in a digital age. Statistics vary on exactly how many people are reading novels this decade compared to decades past. There is a definite trend for general readers to buy more fiction than nonfiction books-and to get facts, news and crystallized knowledge from the internet. In 2012, only four of the top twenty books were nonfiction titles.

"People are interested in escape," says Carol Fitzgerald of the Book Report Network. "In a number of pages, the story will open, evolve and close, and a lot of what's going on in the world today is not like that. You've got this encapsulated escape that you can enjoy."
When Was the Last Time You Read a Good Novel?
Are you someone who likes to read novels? Surprisingly, 42% of college graduates will never read a book again after graduating college. A 2012 "Pew Internet and American Life Project" survey found that people who like to read fiction are driven by personal enrichment and described what they liked about reading saying things like: "I love being exposed to ideas and being able to experience so many times, places, and events." Another person was quoted as saying, "I look at it as a mind stimulant, and it is relaxing." Others expressed the pleasure of living vicariously through a character and having another "life of the mind."

According to the study, reading is a lifestyle choice that is also driven by a desire to unplug from a constant stream of visual information. Readers said things like: "It's better for me to imagine things in my head than watch them on TV ... It's an alternate to TV that beats TV every time ... Reading is better than anything electronic." One respondent captured the general sentiment of avid fiction readers by saying, "I love being able to get outside myself."

One of the benefits of getting outside yourself by putting yourself in someone else's shoes through a novel is that it improves theory of mind. As the father of a 6-year-old, I realize the imaginative and cognitive benefits of children losing themselves in a good story and learning to empathize with a fictional character. Although lots of people are still reading fiction, this new study confirms that people of all ages should be encouraged to increase reading time while striving to reduce TV time.

The average American home has 2.86 TV sets, which is roughly 18% higher than in the year 2000 (2.43 sets per home), and 43% higher than in 1990 (2.0 sets). In America, there are currently more televisions per home than human beings. On average, children under the age of 8 spend over 90 minutes a day watching television or DVDs.

Nearly 33% of American children live in a household where the television is on all or most of the time. Children between the ages 8-18 years old watch an average of three hours of television a day. On average, 61% of children under two use some type of screen technology and 43% watch television every day. This is disturbing to me.

One of the problems of watching television is that it reduces theory of mind. Theory of mind (often abbreviated "ToM") is the ability to attribute mental states-beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge, etc.-to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires, and intentions that are different from one's own.

Unfortunately, television is the least interactive of any new media and is the one most likely to reduce theory of mind. A paper titled "The Relation Between Television Exposure and Theory of Mind Among Preschoolers" was published in November 2013 in the Journal of Communication. The researchers found that preschoolers who have a TV in their bedroom and are exposed to more background TV have a weaker understanding of other people's beliefs and desires, and reduced cognitive development.
Reading Improves Brain Connectivity
The changes caused by reading a novel were registered in the left temporal cortex, an area of the brain associated with receptivity for language, as well as the the primary sensorimotor region of the brain. Neurons of this region have been associated with tricking the mind into thinking it is doing something it is not, a phenomenon known as grounded, or embodied cognition.

An example of embodied cognition is similar to visualization in sports-just thinking about playing basketball, can activate the neurons associated with the physical act of playing basketball.

"The neural changes that we found associated with physical sensation and movement systems suggest that reading a novel can transport you into the body of the protagonist," said neuroscientist Professor Gregory S. Berns, lead author of the study. The ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes improves theory of mind.

"Stories shape our lives and in some cases help define a person," said Dr. Berns, director of Emory University's Center for Neuropolicy in Atlanta. He added, "We want to understand how stories get into your brain, and what they do to it."

The storytelling aspect of a novel is a multi-faceted form of communication that engages a broad range of brain regions. Although several linguistic and literary theories describe what constitutes a story, neurobiological research has just begun to identify the brain networks that are active when processing stories.

To determine a time frame of which connectivity in the brain lasted the longest, the researchers measured changes in resting-state connectivity before and after reading a novel. The researchers chose a novel over a short story because the length and depth of the novel would allow them to a set of repeated engagements with associated, unique stimuli (sections of the novel) set in a broader, controlled stimulus context that could be consumed between several periods in a brain scan.

The researchers took fMRI scans of the brains of 21 undergraduate students while they rested. Then the students were asked to read sections of the 2003 thriller novel "Pompeii" by Robert Harris over nine nights. The students' brains were scanned each morning following the nightly reading assignment, and then again daily for five days after they had finished the book.
Conclusion: Reading Improves Embodied Cognition and Theory of Mind
The scans revealed heightened connectivity within the students' brains on the mornings following the reading assignments. The areas with enhanced connectivity included the students' left temporal cortex, an area of the brain associated with language comprehension, as well as in the brain's central sulcus, which is associated with sensations and movement.

"The anterior (front) bank of the sulcus contains neurons that control movement of parts of the body," Berns noted. Adding, "The posterior (rear) bank contains neurons that receive sensory input from the parts of the body. Enhanced connectivity here was a surprise finding, but it implies that, perhaps, the act of reading puts the reader in the body of the protagonist."

The ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes through embodied cognition is key to improving theory of mind and also the ability to be compassionate. Although this study does not directly draw these conclusions, it seems like common sense that if we encourage our children to read-as opposed to tuning out through television-theory of mind and the ability to be compassionate to another person's suffering will improve.

Reading a good novel allows your imagination to take flight. Novels allow you to forget about your day-to-day troubles and to transport yourself to a fantasy world that becomes a reality in your mind's eye. Rarely is the movie adaptation of a book ever quite as good as the original novel. Even the most advanced special effects will always fall short of the visual power of your own imagination.

Berns concluded, "At a minimum, we can say that reading stories-especially those with strong narrative arcs-reconfigures brain networks for at least a few days. It shows how stories can stay with us. This may have profound implications for children and the role of reading in shaping their brains."

Finding a good novel can be tough. I generally only finish about a third of the books I start. Goodreads did a year end ' Best Fiction of 2013 ' reader's choice awards which has some terrific suggestions for novels that you might enjoy.

If you'd like to read more on this topic, check out my Psychology Today blogs:
Follow me on Twitter @ckbergland for updates on The Athlete's Way blog posts.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Reading Fiction Improves Brain Connectivity and Function

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Neuroscientists have discovered that reading a novel can improve brain function on a variety of levels. The recent study on the brain benefits of reading fiction was conducted at Emory University. The study titled, "Short- and Long-Term Effects of a Novel on Connectivity in the Brain," was recently published in the journal Brain Connectivity.

# data[].attributes.body
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BknXJ24POywhttps://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BknXJ24POyw

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Crows are as intelligent as 7-year-old CHILDREN

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Scientists at the Univeristy of Aukland came to the conclusion after subjecting six wild crows to a battery of tests.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Forget the old saying: Birds are pretty bright. They're capable of navigating thousands of miles during biannual migrations, using tools to better access their food, and even counting from left to right. The basic definition of intelligence is the ability to solve novel problems, says Damian Scarf, a psychology professor at the University of Otago in New Zealand. And at least some birds have the knack-heck, crows' reasoning skills might even be on par with those of a 7-year-old child.

Unlike kids, however, birds can't be convinced to sit down and take IQ tests. So how do researchers suss out avian smarts? They have a battery of bird-specific tests that assess the baseline braininess of species as a whole, and show the range of avian intelligence between species and individuals (just like humans, some individual birds are brighter than others).

Here is a sampling of standardized tests and creative assessments that scientists have used to gauge bird intelligence.

String Test

Skill: Problem solving

Test: A bird is presented with two strings. One is visibly connected to a piece of food. Can the bird pull the string that will bring it its reward?

Result: If the animal successfully chooses the right string more often than it chooses the wrong one in a series of trials, it shows that the bird can solve problems in its head, not just through trial and error. Many bird species have passed the test, including parrots, ravens, turkey vultures, and crows (though because the inexperienced crows didn't consistently choose the strings attached to food, researchers are still not quite sure if the test showed that the birds understand connectivity, or if it just proved they could be trained to pull the right strings). In one 2013 study, researchers found that pigeons could successfully "pull" the right string when the experiment was simulated on a touch screen (a new method that helps researchers use the same test on species whose beaks or feet prevent them from physical string-pulling). Other species, such as chimpanzees and human children, have also successfully completed the test, though it stumped man's best friend.

Box Test

Skills: Problem solving, comparative intelligence

Test: Researchers place food inside a clear box that has several different access points. The smarter the animal, the faster it will figure out how to get to the chow.

Result: In one experiment, chickadees that live at higher altitudes completed the task much more quickly than those that dwell at lower elevations; the finding could indicate that difficult survival conditions lead to better problem-solving skills. In another trial, researchers used the box test to compare the manner and speed with which crows and parrots explore their surroundings-the different methods the species employed to complete the same tasks helped the researchers conclude that, though their minds work differently, the two species probably have similar cognition-something that has been difficult to assess in the past.

Aesop's Fable Test

Skills: Tool use, problem solving

Test: In one ancient Greek lesson, a crow sates its thirst by dropping small stones into a pitcher until the water is easily accessible at the top of the vessel. In a 2014 experiment, researchers set up a similar scenario, providing birds a water-filled tube with floating food just out of reach, and sinkable objects.

Result: The crows consistently put objects into the tube until the treats were high enough to munch. Scientists have conducted similar tests on rooks and jays, and even on children.

Birds also possess a number of different cognitive abilities that can't be assessed with the standardized tests above. So researchers have developed new and creative ways to better understand specific elements of their brains.

Spoiled Food Test

Skills: Understanding time, memory

Study: In 1998, researchers in a lab gave scrub jays perishable wax worms (one of their favorite foods) and the birds hid them to eat later-a common practice among corvids. Tracking the birds revealed that the jays stopped retrieving the worms after about five days, by which time the wigglers had started to decay.

Takeaway: The researchers concluded that birds understand the passage of time.

Family Ties Test

Skills: Social intelligence, visual abilities

Test: Researchers observed Siberian jays around a birdfeeder, noting which acted aggressively. They also tested each bird's genetic makeup.

Takeaway: When researchers looked at the genetic analyses and the aggressive behavior, they discovered that jays were less friendly toward birds that aren't closely related to them. How exactly they identify their kin is unknown, but they may be able to tell by physical appearance. The researchers hypothesize that jays, which live and work cooperatively, wanted to keep outsiders away, so as to limit competition from birds outside of their gene pool.

Facial Recognition Test

Skills: Visual abilities, rapid learning, long-term memory

Test: Researchers at the University of Washington had a feeling that crows on campus, some of which they occasionally temporarily brought into the lab, could recognize them. To see if the birds truly did remember human faces, in 2010 the researchers donned masks, then behaved in a way that was "dangerous"-capturing and banding crows-or neutral, not capturing crows. They caught and released five groups of up to 15 crows around Seattle.

Takeaway: For the next three years, the crows scolded and mobbed (swooped around, pooped on) anyone wearing the "dangerous" mask, even if it was on a different person or if the wearer was in a large crowd. The study revealed that a single negative interaction is all it takes for crows to form a grudge. What's more, the antagonized birds recruited other crows to scold the offending humans, though the researchers aren't quite sure how they did that.

Matching Memory Test

Skills: Memory, vision, creative problem solving, analogous learning

Test: In the first, simpler phase of one 2014 experiment, crows were shown three cards, each with a color or shape on it. The middle card matched one of the two cards on either side, both of which were on top of small cups; a reward was placed in the cup with the matching card. The two crows quickly became very skilled at locating the reward by matching. Then the researchers changed the task: none of the cards matched, but two had similar qualities. For example, the middle card might have two similarly sized squares, and its match would have two similarly sized circles.

Result: To the researchers' surprise, crows were able to complete this more complicated task with ease, even without training. They used the skills they'd gained in the first experiment to master the second. Apes and monkeys had aced similar tests in the past and proved to scientists that they have analogical reasoning-the ability to transfer skills learned in one task to a different one. The crow study marked the first time an animal other than a mammal was shown to have analogical reasoning.

Rhythm Test

Skill: Tempo sensitivity

Test: In 2008, a cockatoo named Snowball took the Internet by storm when his owners posted several videos of him dancing to popular songs, apparently keeping the rhythm. Scientists saw the video, and put him to the test. They played a number of different songs and watched to see if the speed of the bird's movements changed accordingly, and too often to be pure chance.

Result: Snowball is a good dancer (as are, probably, other birds like parrots)-about as good as a human four-year-old. His sweet moves are the first evidence that birds have tempo sensitivity, and add to the evidence that animals (including us) have a natural musical inclination.

* * *

Even though scientists have learned a lot about birds' cognition and have developed creative ways to test it, there are also some aspects of bird intelligence that are hard for us to grasp, let alone study. We don't have homing abilities, for example, so scientists still struggle to develop tests to understand how that works. However, scientists have made impressive progress in bird cognition in the last decade alone-and technological advances such as touch screens have enabled researchers to find new and creative testing methods. "These new sorts of tests provide us with another view into birds' intelligence," Scarf says.

While we're still a long way from bird-brained being a compliment, maybe corvid-clever will take hold in the interim.

Correction: This story has been updated to reflect the fact that the dancing cockatoo is named Snowball, not Snowflake.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Bird IQ Tests: 8 Ways Researchers Test Bird Intelligence

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Forget the old saying: Birds are pretty bright. They're capable of navigating thousands of miles during biannual migrations, using tools to better access their food, and even counting from left to right. The basic definition of intelligence is the ability to solve novel problems, says Damian Scarf, a psychology professor at the University of Otago in New Zealand.

# data[].attributes.headline
Toward a Pill That Helps Us Learn as Fast as Kids

# data[].attributes.subject
Toward a Pill That Helps Us Learn as Fast as Kids

# data[].attributes.body
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/03/toward-a-pill-that-helps-us-learn-as-fast-as-kids/359757/

# data[].attributes.headline
Psychedelics reduce brain function and expand mind

# data[].attributes.subject
Psychedelics reduce brain function and expand mind

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
What would you see if you could look inside a hallucinating brain? Despite decades of scientific investigation, we still lack a clear understanding of how hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), mescaline, and psilocybin (the main active ingredient in magic mushrooms) work in the brain. Modern science has demonstrated that hallucinogens activate receptors for serotonin, one of the brain's key chemical messengers. Specifically, of the 15 different serotonin receptors, the 2A subtype (5-HT2A), seems to be the one that produces profound alterations of thought and perception. It is uncertain, however, why activation of the 5-HT2A receptor by hallucinogens produces psychedelic effects, but many scientists believe that the effects are linked to increases in brain activity. Although it is not known why this activation would lead to profound alterations of consciousness, one speculation is that an increase in the spontaneous firing of certain types of brain cells leads to altered sensory and perceptual processing, uncontrolled memory retrieval, and the projection of mental "noise" into the mind's eye.

The English author Aldous Huxley believed that the brain acts as a "reducing valve" that constrains conscious awareness, with mescaline and other hallucinogens inducing psychedelic effects by inhibiting this filtering mechanism. Huxley based this explanation entirely on his personal experiences with mescaline, which was given to him by Humphrey Osmond, the psychiatrist who coined the term psychedelic. Even though Huxley proposed this idea in 1954, decades before the advent of modern brain science, it turns out that he may have been correct. Although the prevailing view has been that hallucinogens work by activating the brain, rather than by inhibiting it as Huxley proposed, the results of a recent imaging study are challenging these conventional explanations.

The study in question was conducted by Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris in conjunction with Professor David Nutt, a psychiatrist who was formerly a scientific advisor to the UK government on drugs policy. Drs. Carhart-Harris, Nutt, and colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the effects of psilocybin on brain activity in 30 experienced hallucinogen users. In this study, intravenous administration of 2 mg of psilocybin induced a moderately intense psychedelic state that was associated with reductions of neuronal activity in brain regions such as the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC).

The mPFC and ACC are highly interconnected with other brain regions and are believed to be involved in functions such as emotional regulation, cognitive processing, and introspection. Based on their findings, the authors of the study concluded that hallucinogens reduce activity in specific "hub" regions of the brain, potentially diminishing their ability to coordinate activity in downstream brain regions. In effect, psilocybin appears to inhibit brain regions that are responsible for constraining consciousness within the narrow boundaries of the normal waking state, an interpretation that is remarkably similar to what Huxley proposed over half a century ago.

The findings reported by Dr. Carhart-Harris are notable because they run counter to the results of previous imaging studies with hallucinogens. Generally, these imaging studies in humans have confirmed what previous studies in animals had suggested: hallucinogens act by increasing the activity of certain types of cells in multiple brain regions, rather than by decreasing activity as indicated by Dr. Nutt's fMRI study. For example, Positron Emission Tomography (PET) experiments conducted by Dr. Franz Vollenweider in Zürich demonstrated that administration of psilocybin orally to humans increases metabolic activity in mPFC and ACC, effects that were found to be directly correlated with the intensity of the psychedelic response. Preclinical studies, using a variety of different techniques, have shown that hallucinogens increase network activity in the prefrontal cortex and in other cortical regions by activating excitatory and inhibitory neurons, leading to increased release of excitatory and inhibitory neurotransmitters.

Given those earlier findings, the fMRI data reported by Dr. Nutt's group are somewhat surprising. Methodological issues (such as route of administration, dose, and the spectrum and extent of psilocybin-induced symptoms) may be at least partially responsible for these differences, since the processes being measured are not identical. It is also important to consider that the 5-HT2A receptor is not the only type of serotonin receptor that is activated by psilocybin. Dr. Vollenweider's experiments have confirmed that the increase in metabolic activity detected by PET is mediated by the 5-HT2A receptor (the serotonin receptor responsible for the psychedelic effects of psilocybin). Because Dr. Nutt's group did not conduct a similar test to verify that the effects they observed are mediated by the 5-HT2A receptor, this would be a logical next step.

Hopefully, follow-up studies will provide an explanation for these discrepant findings, and will settle the debate over whether hallucinogens act by increasing or reducing brain activity. Clinical trials are currently being conducted to investigate whether hallucinogens can be used to relieve stress and anxiety in terminal cancer patients, to attenuate the symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder, and to reduce the frequency of cluster headaches, so it is important to determine the mechanism for the therapeutic effects of hallucinogens. Additionally, there appears to be some overlap between the effects of hallucinogens and the symptoms of psychosis, so understanding how hallucinogens work could potentially provide insight into the causes of schizophrenia and facilitate the development of more effective treatments. In any event, it is important to note that studies have consistently identified the mPFC and ACC as playing key roles in mediating the effects of hallucinogens. In light of what is known about the core functions of these brain regions, it is not unreasonable that they would be involved in mediating the effects of hallucinogenic drugs. Therefore, although it is not yet clear whether hallucinogens act on the mind through the mechanism proposed by Huxley, it appears that we have succeeded in identifying some of the key brain regions targeted by these powerful agents.

Adam Halberstadt is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California San Diego. He studies the serotonin system and its involvement in psychiatric disorders. Mark Geyer is a Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Neurosciences at the University of California San Diego. His laboratory uses animal models to study human drug effects and schizophrenia. He is also a co-founder of the Heffter Research Institute, an organization that promotes scientific research with hallucinogens.

Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about? Please send suggestions to Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist at the Boston Globe. He can be reached at garethideas AT gmail.com or Twitter @garethideas.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Do Psychedelics Expand the Mind by Reducing Brain Activity?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
What would you see if you could look inside a hallucinating brain? Despite decades of scientific investigation, we still lack a clear understanding of how hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), mescaline, and psilocybin (the main active ingredient in magic mushrooms) work in the brain.

# data[].attributes.body
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/nazi_experiments.html

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Researchers have increased the size of mouse brains by giving the rodents a piece of human DNA that controls gene activity. The work provides some of the strongest genetic evidence yet for how the human intellect surpassed those of all other apes.

"[The DNA] could easily be a huge component in how the human brain expanded," says Mary Ann Raghanti, a biological anthropologist at Kent State University in Ohio, who was not involved with the work. "It opens up a whole world of possibilities about brain evolution."

For centuries, biologists have wondered what made humans human. Once the human and chimp genomes were deciphered about a decade ago, they realized they could now begin to pinpoint the molecular underpinnings of our big brain, bipedalism, varied diet, and other traits that have made our species so successful. By 2008, almost two dozen computerized comparisons of human and ape genomes had come up with hundreds of pieces of DNA that might be important. But rarely have researchers taken the next steps to try to prove that a piece of DNA really made a difference in human evolution. "You could imagine [their roles], but they were just sort of 'just so' stories," says Greg Wray, an evolutionary biologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

Wray is particularly interested in DNA segments called enhancers, which control the activity of genes nearby. He and Duke graduate student Lomax Boyd scanned the genomic databases and combed the scientific literature for enhancers that were different between humans and chimps and that were near genes that play a role in the brain. Out of more than 100 candidates, they and Duke developmental neurobiologist Debra Silver tested a half-dozen. They first inserted each enhancer into embryonic mice to learn whether it really did turn genes on. Then for HARE5, the most active enhancer in an area of the brain called the cortex, they made minigenes containing either the chimp or human version of the enhancer linked to a "reporter" gene that caused the developing mouse embryo to turn blue wherever the enhancer turned the gene on. Embryos' developing brains turned blue sooner and over a broader expanse if they carried the human version of the enhancer, Silver, Wray, and their colleagues report online today in Current Biology.

The researchers determined that HARE5 likely controls a gene called Frizzled 8, which is part of a molecular pathway important in brain development. Their further studies showed that the human version of the enhancer causes cells that are destined to become nerve cells to divide more frequently, thereby providing a larger of pool of cells that become part of the cortex. As a result, the embryos carrying human HARE5 have brains that are 12% larger than the brains of mice carrying the chimp version of the enhancer. Silver and Wray plan to test these mice to see if the bigger brains made them any smarter.

"They have found a smoking gun in the human genome that connects a regulatory element with a proposed pathway for increasing brain size," says Todd Preuss, a neuroanatomist at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta, who was not involved with the work.

But he; geneticist Evan Eichler of the University of Washington, Seattle; and others point out that there's more to be done. Several researchers worry that more extensive studies are needed to nail down that the HARE5 effects are not by chance. They'd like to see Silver and her colleagues replace the mouse HARE5 with the human and chimp HARE5-a feat the Duke group has yet to succeed in doing.

Even so, Eichler is pleased with just how much the Duke team has learned so far. And, Wray says, given the growing ability of researchers to study enhancers and other DNA in mice, "my guess is there are probably other stories like this in the works."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Researchers have increased the size of mouse brains by giving the rodents a piece of human DNA that controls gene activity. The work provides some of the strongest genetic evidence yet for how the human intellect surpassed those of all other apes.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Results showed that the treatment improved subjects' vision, decision making, problem-solving, mathematical, language, memory, and attention capabilities.

The positive effects can last up to 12 months, researchers claim.

Dr Roi Cohen Kadosh, who led the research, said: "The idea is to stimulate the brain in order to make it easier to learn new information such as maths.

"What we find with adults is that the improvement is not only in maths but actually in language, attention and decision making - they not only become better for a short time, but for long periods.

"It is not a magic pill like you might find in Hollywood movies, it's not going to make you Einstein in one day - you still need to work hard - but together with that it makes an enhancement to your performance."

Their research, published in the journal Current Biology, also claims there are no apparent negative side effects from undergoing the treatment, if applied correctly.

Capable of being administered through portable devices worth little more than £500, the research raises questions over whether the treatment should be widely available to help improve people's academic performance, including schoolchildren.

However, Dr Cohen Kadosh warned that as the technology is so new, there are no training or licensing rules, which could lead to poorly qualified clinicians misusing the treatment and causing brain damage to patients.

He added: "Inadequately trained clinicians might misidentify suitable sites for stimulation - an important issue as different cognitive abilities may be subserved by different brain areas at different stages across the lifespan.

"These unique features of TDCS technology raise important ethical issues for scientists, ethicists, policy-makers and the general public.

"At best, this situation could result in the exploitation of vulnerable patients or parents for financial gain; at worst, it may risk long-term damage to the brain and exacerbate the disadvantage, potentially worsening other psychological functions."

Julian Savulescu, Uehiro Professor of Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford, said if proved safe, TDCS could be widely used to maximise people's cognitive potential.

He said: "This could be the first step down a path to not only maximising human potential but perhaps even increasing it.

"It has significant potential advantages to every human being because the capacity to learn is fundamental to our humanity.

"If some people have access to a technology and others don't it creates inequality and in a sense that's having an unfair advantage but this is relatively cheap and if it's as cheap as caffeine then it should be made available to everyone."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Electric shock treatment 'improves academic performance'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Results showed that the treatment improved subjects' vision, decision making, problem-solving, mathematical, language, memory, and attention capabilities. The positive effects can last up to 12 months, researchers claim. Dr Roi Cohen Kadosh, who led the research, said: "The idea is to stimulate the brain in order to make it easier to learn new information such as maths.

# data[].attributes.headline
the drug that helps adults learn as fast as children

# data[].attributes.subject
the drug that helps adults learn as fast as children

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The real-life Limitless pill? Drug helps adults learn as fast as children by making the brain more 'elastic'

Donepezil is used to improve memory function in Alzheimer's patients

Children learn skills quickly as their brains go through 'critical periods'

Researchers found donepezil can revert adult brains to these periods

It increases the 'elasticity' of the brain making it capable of learning rapidly

Researchers rewired a visually impaired patient's brain to process images

The drug works by boosting chemicals in the brain that reduce with age

It may sound like something from 2011 thriller Limitless, but researchers have discovered a pill that helps adults learn new skills as quickly as children.

A professor at Harvard rewired the brain of a visually impaired women to process images by giving her Alzheimer's drug donepezil.

The pill boosts chemicals in the brain, such as serotonin and acetylcholine, which are both found in high concentrations in the brains of young children.

These chemicals naturally reduce with age.

Children under seven develop new skills rapidly because their brains go through what's called 'critical periods' of development.

Due to high levels of certain chemicals and the fast growth of the brain, young children learn new languages, absorb information and pick up musical skills, for example, much faster than adults.

In adults, these skills become harder as the brain reaches peak development and loses this 'elasticity'.

In Limitless, Bradley Cooper takes a pill that opens up closed regions of his brain to boost his intelligence, motor skills and more.

The drug donepezil is a cholinesterase inhibitor. This means it increases the amount of acetylcholine around nerve endings and helps boost brain function.

Professor Takao Hensch gave donepezil to a 14-year-old girl called Shannon, a patient at the Boston Children's Hospital.

Shannon has a condition called amblyopia that impairs her vision, also known as a 'lazy eye.'

EPILEPSY DRUGS CAN MAKE US MORE MUSICAL

Following tests with donepezil, Shannon was able to process images with her affected eye, in the same way a newborn would.

In December, Professor Hensch similarly used an epilepsy drug called valproate to teach tone-deaf adults how to pick out different musical notes.

Participants who took the valproate were able to correctly identify an average of 5.09 notes, while people in a control group could only identify 3.5.

'The brain is not losing its plasticity forever as we grow older,' Professor Hensch told The Atlantic.

'Instead, it throws on the brakes at certain times. It's the brain's job to be elastic, and it wants to rewire.

'But through evolution, it's created a lot of molecules to make sure it doesn't rewire too much.'

He continued: 'Much of our adult behaviour reflects the neural circuits sculpted by experience in infancy and early childhood.

'At no other time in life does the surrounding environment so potently shape brain function - from basic motor skills, sensation or sleep to higher cognitive processes like language.

'How this plasticity waxes and wanes with age carries an impact far beyond neuroscience, including education policy, therapeutic approaches to developmental disorders or strategies for recovery from brain injury in adulthood.'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The drug that helps adults learn as fast as children

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Donepezil is used to improve memory function in Alzheimer's patients Children learn skills quickly as their brains go through 'critical periods' Researchers found donepezil can revert adult brains to these periods It increases the 'elasticity' of the brain making it capable of learning rapidly Researchers rewired a visually impaired patient's brain to process images The drug works by boosting chemicals in the brain that reduce with age It may sound like something from 2011 thriller Limitless, but researchers have discovered a pill that helps adults learn new skills as quickly as children.

# data[].attributes.body
https://medium.com/@bryan_johnson/kernels-quest-to-enhance-human-intelligence-7da5e16fa16c#.cphxwfqtt

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Quitting smoking results in a decrease in brain activity, says professor.

Positive effects of nicotine on the brain's performance is now confirmed by the Danish nicotine research at the Panum Institute in Copenhagen. We can now add another piece to the puzzle which clearly shows that smoking increases the intelligence. According to an interview with brain scientist, Professor Albert Gjedde in Ekstra Bladet.

Albert Gjedde, along with two colleagues started with nicotine tests, according to Gjedde clearly shows that if a heavy smoker suddenly stops smoking, then it bears negative consequences on his brain activity.

"The energy metabolism of oxygen in the brain decreases. This means, that one's thinking capacity is also decreased. But if you start smoking again, so does the energy sales at the usual level, "he says. Albert Gjedde explains in the interview that a number of now concluded studies that smoking increases intelligence:

"If you have to explain the concept of intelligence, it is in fact the ability to make sensible choices - to anticipate future challenges. And this is where nicotine can help"

he told the newspaper. Gjedde also refers to the Swedish professor of genetic developmental biology, Klas Kullander, who found that nicotine promotes learning and memory: "Nicotine affects receptors in the memory center. You simply get better at organizing his memory. ", said Gjedde.

Smoking increases the IQ six points in tests

The Danish and Swedish findings are an extension of the large meta-analysis of the past 40 years of nicotine research, which was created by the U.S. government's "National Institute of Drug Abuse" in 2010,

Science is conclusive: Tobacco increases work capacity

In the meta-analysis Stephen Heishman and his colleagues concluded that nicotine and smoking increases the brain's performance significantly on a wide range of areas, including concentration, speed, motor skills and memory. According to Heishman the positive effects help explain why people start to smoke on a permanent basis - and to explain why it is difficult to quit smoking again.

Or in other words: What makes quitting smoking difficult for the would-be ex-smoker is that he will get used to, the brain running in a lower gear than the gear he has been accustomed to run in while he was smoking .

With this, the withdrawal theory was shot to pieces; that smoking bears a physical addiction, in which the smoker has to maintain in order not to get withdrawal. Most eminent psychologists do not accept this, for example. Israeli Dr. Reuven Dar, who says that there is no dependence on smoking. It is a matter of habit, expectations & psychology:

Depression, fatigue and lack of concentration, as many ex-smokers experience when quitting smoking, probably reflects the ex-smoker's unfulfilled expectations of being able to solve everyday small and large tasks as easily as he always did - when he was smoking. These expectations disappearwhen he has grown accustomed to ride in the brain's natural, lower gears - without nicotine.

Research shows that tobacco simply increases the brain's capacity for work - both the speed, endurance and concentration. The effect is also using nicotine gum and patches, but not nearly the same strength as smoking. The reason is that when nicotine is inhaled through the smoke, then it hits the brain quickly & efficiently - in seconds - and gives it a "kick". The effect lasts for 25-60 minutes.

Some employers have figured this out and admit that it does not pay to prevent employees from smoking. This applies for example. the owner of the translator agency TheBigWord in Leeds, Larry Gould, who says that he was shocked when he found out that the smoking translators worked much better in the period immediately after their smoking breaks. Larry Gould now encourages all employees to take breaks and to get the same productivity out of non-smokers, of which he got from the smokers, he has supplied all levels in the company with candy and confectionery, which also stimulate the brain.

Already in 1994, the nicotine researchers Stough, Gordon and others in New Zealand attempt to quantify the strength of the effect of smoking. They found that nicotine in smoking could increase intelligence by 6 points in IQ tests. If you have an IQ of 100 - which is the average - smoking will therefore be able to increase it to 106, according to these studies.

Do successful anti-smoking campaigns reduce the population's level of intelligence?

Other researchers point out the positive impact of smoking on the major advances and artistic creativity that have taken place in Europe and the U.S. over the last few centuries. A large number of writers and artists have been known as a passionate smokers, and geniuses like Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein have praised tobacco positive effect on their thinking.

The English psychology professor Bruce Charlton asks on his blog ; "Are we sacrificing genius and great inventions with anti-smoking campaigns in favor of longevity?" His answer: Maybe ...

But - when the research now shows that smoking increases intelligence - how can the anti-smoking lobby and the pharmaceutical industry argue for the exact opposite, as the pharmaceutical company Pfizer does in this promotional item for a smoking cessation product: That one gets dumber by smoking?

As an argument for that conclusion, the article points to a study showing that Israeli soldiers who smoke have lower IQs than those who do not smoke.

The author of the article presents here the not especially talented, but very widespread confusion of statistical correlation and causation. The Israeli study does not imply that you get dumber by smoking. Quite the contrary:

The study reflects the predictable fact that there are more smokers among the less gifted because they are more motivated to increase their intelligence by means of smoking. The cigarette offers the individual a chance of promotion to a higher division in intelligence-league - and the opportunity to commit themselves there.

And who would blame the less intelligent if they seize the opportunity to get the same or a higher IQ than their peers by smoking?

More seriously, if the authorities are waging war against smoking and are forcing many people to stop, if it effectively means that you initiate a significant and measurable reduction in the population's intelligence.

Do successful anti-smoking campaigns make large groups of people more stupid and are we in effect waving goodbye to ingenuity, art & the great inventions, as Professor Bruce Charlton fear?

If this is the result, it is perhaps not surprising that the economy is running poorly in the western world ...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Brain Researchers: Smoking increases intelligence -- Sott.net

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Quitting smoking results in a decrease in brain activity, says professor. Positive effects of nicotine on the brain's performance is now confirmed by the Danish nicotine research at the Panum Institute in Copenhagen. We can now add another piece to the puzzle which clearly shows that smoking increases the intelligence.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Do you have to wear lipstick for them to work?

Pills That Increase Your Intelligence
BY DONALD G. COOLEY

CAN you feed your brain some special food to make it smarter? Scientists have always laughed at the idea. Now they aren't quite so cocksure. Maybe your brain does have faster speed and quicker getaway when it runs on certain fuels. New scientific discoveries indicate that brain power can be stepped up by swallowing tablets. These pills are not stimulating drugs but concentrates of a food element

you eat every day. Let's look into the strange story of one particular brain. It wasn't a very good brain. In fact, it belonged to a fourteen-year-old imbecile boy who had an intelligence quotient of 42 (the average I. Q. is 100). Every year the boy grew twelve months older, but his mental age increased only four and a half months. He kept running an intelligence deficit. Then he was fed little white pills, a dozen and a half daily. Within two months his mental age leaped ahead one year and five months. Sixty days on brain pills and his mental age increased as much as it had in the last five years!

The food for thought that the boy consumed contained a single ingredient: glutamic acid.

You probably took some glutamic acid yourself the last time you ate. You're made of what you eat, and, except for water, fat and minerals, you're mostly protein. Now, protein molecules are immensely complex, but they consist of infinitely varied combinations of some two dozen simpler substances known as amino acids. Glutamic acid is one of these. You obtain it as such from foods. But your body also can manufacture it, by breaking down and reassembling other amino acids. Thus, it is not considered indispensable. Yet it seems to have a surprising capacity for enabling brain tissue to hit on all cylinders.

The case of the brightened imbecile would prove little if it stood as an isolated testimonial to glutamic acid. However, there are others. The boy was a patient of Dr. Kathryn Albert, who tried glutamic acid on eight mentally deficient persons, aged six to twenty-six, but with mental ages of two to eight years, and IQ's as low as 22. All but one of them perked up mentally.

Dr. Tracy J. Putnam, a specialist in epilepsy, made one of the early reports on glutamic acid. He and his co-workers hoped that the chemical would reduce epileptic seizures. It didn't. But there was a totally unexpected byproduct. The patients brightened up, mentally and physically. They were easier to get along with, more persistent in tackling problems.

Later, nine epileptics, two of whom were mentally retarded, were fed glutamic acid. Seven of them showed mental improvement so marked that after six months on glutamic acid, the average IQ increase was nine points. This astounds psychologists, who had believed intelligence is as unalterable as fingerprints.

Science is still seeking the full answer. But it does know that glutamic acid is the only amino acid that can be oxidized directly by brain tissue. To this extent it is a specific brain food. The theory is that glutamic acid increases the rate at which acetylcholine, a powerful chemical essential for nerve activity, is formed. And nerve activity, as far as the brain is concerned, is a synonym for thought.

The brain-power properties of glutamic acid are newly discovered, but the stuff itself has been known for a long time. Indeed, one of its salts is rather widely used as a condiment in some regions, because of its agreeable meatlike flavor. The acid got its name back in 1866 when it was isolated from the gluten of wheat. Animals grow just as well whether glutamic acid is provided in dietary protein or not. Its booster role for the brain, however, is emphasized by the fact that when patients cease to take it they drop back to their former intellectual level.

Because glutamic acid is a normal food element, and is even made in the body, it is not a foreign agent. Caffein stimulates the nervous system. So do various "pep pills" containing synthetic drugs. But they work in a very different way from glutamic acid. And there is no evidence that they give a long-term lift to the intelligence, however beneficial they may be temporarily.

Are people who tend to be dullish suffering from a dietary deficiency of glutamic acid? Or are their bodies incapable of making it fast enough?

Rat brains are not too unlike human brains in structure. F. A. Zimmerman and his associates placed a large number of intelligent, healthy rats on a diet providing all known nutritional essentials. Half the group, however, received supplements of glutamic acid. To test a rat's intelligence, the rat is put at one end of a maze of blind alleys to see how long it takes it to reach food at the other end. The number of errors and the time required to eliminate false turns show the rat's ability to learn.

The glutamized rats won hands down in tests against their mates which otherwise existed upon the same diet. They were definitely smarter. Similar results were recorded by Dr. Albert in rats forced to think their way around hazards in problem boxes.

These experiments clearly suggest that glutamic acid has a specific ability to improve brain function. Zimmerman's rats were bright enough, as rats go, which is pretty bright. But on glutamic acid they became super-smart. We're all smarter than we act, in that nobody fully uses his native brain power. Even if glutamic acid does not give us new intellectual tools, it does sharpen the ones we already have.

Just how does glutamic acid quicken the brain? There is no neat answer yet, but a good case can be made for dietary deficiency. School children, on the whole, are keener when given extra milk feedings. Milk protein (casein) is an especially rich source of glutamic acid. The greater mental alertness of milk-fed students might be laid not to the milk itself but to its generous dosage of glutamic acid.

Other outstanding sources for this brain food are wheat flour, egg white, and the protein of corn. Glutamic acid still can't be bought like aspirin. You can insure a good intake with these foods, which also are high in other nutritional values. How much milk would you have to drink to obtain a dosage of glutamic acid equal to the supplements that boosted IQ's ten points or so in the cases previously noted? Three to four pints would sufficeâ€"too much liquid for the average person, but a couple of poached eggs on toast, topped off with a glass of milk, would be a nice glutamic start for a brainy day.

We have been talking as if the brain were the same thing as the mind, or intelligence. Maybe it is. However, nobody has been able to put a ringer on an intelligence center in the body and say, "This is it." If you wear a small hat size, don't be downcast, nor proud if you wear a large one. The size of your brain, within ordinary limits, is no index of genius. Two brains of relatively huge size will illustrate this. One belonged to Napoleon, the other to an idiot.

One secret of intelligence, latest neurological research, indicates, lies not in the brain itself but in the covers (meninges) that enclose it inside the skull. Here are found the vessels that supply blood to the brain. Significantly, these blood vessels are oversize and numerous in the brain-covering membranes of men of genius.

Not only the volume of blood but its composition, the ingredients it contains, affects intelligence. A satisfactory method of altering blood composition so that exactly the right elements are carried to the brain is lacking. Glutamic acid experiments may be the first step toward this goal. The problem of making everybody smarter might be stated in deceptively simple terms. All you have to do is to see that the proper fuels get into the blood, that a very generous supply of this blood constantly courses through the brain, and the world is your oyster.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Pills That Increase Your Intelligence - Mechanix Illustrated (Mar, 1948)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
BY DONALD G. COOLEY CAN you feed your brain some special food to make it smarter? Scientists have always laughed at the idea. Now they aren't quite so cocksure. Maybe your brain does have faster speed and quicker getaway when it runs on certain fuels.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"This news emphasises the need for an immediate global ban on the creation of GM designer babies," said Human Genetics Alert Director, Dr David King.

"It is critical that we avoid a eugenic future in which the rich can buy themselves a baby with built-in genetic advantages.

"It is entirely unnecessary since there are already many ethical ways to avoid thalassaemia. This research is a classic example of scientific careerism - assuring one's place in the history books even though the research is unnecessary and unethical."

* Three parent babies: House of Lord approves law despite fears babies could be sterile

The team has used a gene-editing technique known as CRISPR/Cas9 which was discovered by scientists at MIT.

It works by capitalising on the fact that bacteria attack viruses by snipping away part of their genetic code, effectively dismembering the virus. The CRISPR technique uses a bacterially derived protein to cut-away a particular gene, which is then replaced or repaired by another molecule introduced at the same time.

The technique has been used in adult cells and animal models but never in human embyos.

Advocates of gene editing say that it could eradicate devastating inherited disease. But others are worried that it crosses an ethical line, allowing children to be genetically engineered. And because the genetic changes are happening to embryos the changes will be passed down to future generations.

Huang and his colleagues set out to see if the procedure could replace a gene in a single-cell fertilized human embryo; in principle, all cells produced as the embryo developed would then have the repaired gene.

The Chinese team used embryos they obtained from the fertility clinics had been created for use in IVF but had an extra set of chromosomes, following fertilization by two sperm, which stops them resulting in a live birth.

They injected 86 embryos with the Cas9 protein and left them for two days to allow the gene-editing to take place.

* Genetically engineering 'ethical' babies is a moral obligation, says Oxford professor

Of the 71 embryos that survived, 54 were genetically tested. This revealed that just 28 were successfully spliced, and only a fraction of those contained the replacement genetic material.

They also found a number of unexpected mutations in genes which should not have been effected by the technique.

British scientists said that no more experiments should be carried out until there had been an international agreement on whether the technique was safe and ethical.

Prof Shirley Hodgson, Professor of Cancer Genetics, St George's University of London, said: "I think that this is a significant departure from currently accepted research practice. Can we be certain that the embryos that the researchers were working on were indeed non-viable?

"Any proposal to do germline genetic manipulation should be very carefully considered by international regulatory bodies before it should be considered as a serious research prospect."

Dr Philippa Brice, of the health policy think-tank the PHG Foundation, added: "This story underlines the urgent necessity for international dialogue over the ethics of germline gene editing in human embryos, well in advance of any progression towards theoretical clinical application.

"Recent calls for a moratorium on any such research to allow time for expert and public consideration of what is and is not ethically, socially and indeed legally acceptable with respect to human germline genetic modification should definitely be heeded."

British biologist Edward Lanphier, told Nature "we need to pause this research and make sure we have a broad based discussion about which direction we are going here."

George Daley, a stem-cell biologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston added: "The study is a landmark, as well as a cautionary tale.

"Their study should be a stern warning to any practitioner who thinks the technology is ready for testing to eradicate disease genes."

Huang said he had abandoned the current project to go back to working out how to minimise the unexpected mutations in adults cells and animals.

However at least four groups in China are believed to be currently working on genetically modifying human embryos.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
China shocks world by genetically engineering human embryos

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"This news emphasises the need for an immediate global ban on the creation of GM designer babies," said Human Genetics Alert Director, Dr David King. "It is critical that we avoid a eugenic future in which the rich can buy themselves a baby with built-in genetic advantages.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Because intelligence is such a strong genetic trait, rapidly advancing genetics research could result in the ability to create a class of super-intelligent humans one-thousand times higher in IQ than today's most brilliant thinkers.

Stephen Hsu, Vice-President for Research and Professor of Theoretical Physics at Michigan State University, believes we are only a decade away from identifying the many thousands of genetic variants that control for intelligence. These variants, called alleles, could then be selected for by the parents of a soon-to-be-conceived child, and possibly genetic engineering could be done on adults to boost their intelligence.

"We can imagine savant-like capabilities that, in a maximal type, might be present all at once: nearly perfect recall of images and language; super-fast thinking and calculation; powerful geometric visualization, even in higher dimensions; the ability to execute multiple analyses or trains of thought in parallel at the same time; the list goes on."

Hsu argues that it's a matter of when, not if, researchers achieve this capability. That could mean a race to the top (or bottom, depending on your point of view) where the laissez-faire policies of one nation could attract a class of wealthy and powerful people looking to get a whole lot smarter. If that were the case, a new and powerful kind of inequality could arise like never before.

In his Big Think interview, Michio Kaku explains how the same process of genetic selection could recreate lost species like the woolly mammoth and Neanderthal man. Jurassic Park, anyone?

can-we-resurrect-the-dinosaurs-neanderthal-man-2

Read more at Nautilus

Photo credit: Shutterstock

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Genetic Engineering Will Create Super-Intelligent Humans Within a Decade

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Because intelligence is such a strong genetic trait, rapidly advancing genetics research could result in the ability to create a class of super-intelligent humans one-thousand times higher in IQ than today's most brilliant thinkers.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"Eventually, we hope that this sort of analysis will provide new insights into better treatments for neurodevelopmental diseases such as epilepsy, and ameliorate or treat the cognitive impairments associated with these devastating diseases.

"Understanding the specific genetic and environmental factors influencing individual differences in educational achievement - and the complex interplay between them - could help educationalists develop effective personalised learning programmes, to help every child reach their potential by the end of compulsory education."

However, other geneticists urged caution over the findings and warned against 'intelligent genes' guaranteeing future capabilities.

Darren Griffin, Professor of Genetics at the University of Kent, said: "Genetics is the science of inheritance, not pre-determinism, and there is no substitute for hard work and application."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Scientists plot to create SUPER-SMART HUMANS after discovering an intelligence gene

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"Eventually, we hope that this sort of analysis will provide new insights into better treatments for neurodevelopmental diseases such as epilepsy, and ameliorate or treat the cognitive impairments associated with these devastating diseases.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
According to recently published results in PLoS One, researchers at the Medical College of Georgia (MCG) and East China Normal University have genetically engineered a rat to be significantly smarter than its peers. The rat was named Hobbie J, after the popular Chinese cartoon. Lest you think the world is determined to try to turn all children's fiction into reality, let me assure you that that we are far from a Secret of NIMH type scenario. Hobbie J has better memory and improved learning skills but only moderately so. The real news is that scientists have a better understanding of how one gene (NR2B) affects the brains of mammals. Using this sort of information, researchers may one day find a means to reverse dementia or increase human intelligence.

Your brain has a set of receptors known as NMDA which help with memory formation and learning. When you are younger, the NR2B gene helps control these receptors, but after puberty, the NR2A gene tends to take over. The difference between the two is slight: NR2B helps receptors stay active for just milliseconds longer, but that's enough to have a noticeable effect. The switch between expressed genes is part of the reason why we seem to learn so quickly and easily in our youth, but have difficulty with new concepts as we age. Patients with Alzheimer's disease, and some cases of dementia, have correspondingly disrupted levels in their NMDA receptors. Researchers hope that by studying the way that genes regulate the receptors in rats, they will be able to predict and effect similar changes in humans. This could lead to genetic engineering, or a chemical treatment, which may give someone 'youthful learning' throughout their entire life.

How much smarter was Hobbie-J? Well, she was a Long Evans female rat, a group already known for their intelligence. Both Hobbie and similar control rats could remember the path to a chocolate reward after a 1 minute delay. After 3 minutes, only Hobbie could find the treat quickly. After 5 minutes, both rats seemed to forget the correct path. In more complex situations (such as a water maze) Hobbie again outperformed her peers, but in a similarly rationed way.

Hobbie isn't the first super smart rodent. 10 years ago, Dr. Joe Tsien (MCG) helped create Doogie, a genetically enhanced mouse. Like Hobbie, Doogie had his NR2B gene over expressed in the hippocampus, and showed marked improvements in memory and learning. Impressively, Doogie maintained his augmented skills as he aged.

The mechanism for over-expressing the NR2B gene is through the production of CaMKII, a common protein that affects NMDA reception. Earlier work by Tsien published in the journal Neuron suggests that quantities of CaMKII can be manipulated to selectively erase memories in mice. While we've seen similar results in flies, mice have significantly more complex brains. Both experiments would indicate the importance of the NR2B pathway on mammalian memory.

As reported by the MCG News, there is some hope that magnesium could serve as a functional pathway to memory improvement in humans. Magnesium blocks some NMDA receptors, and the brain could compensate by over expressing NR2B.

But between super smart rats and super smart humans exists a range of other mammals that would need to be tested. With cats, dogs, monkeys, and chimps all possibly in the queue ahead of humans, there is likely to be years of testing before researchers will know if people could benefit from the methods used to improve Hobbie-J. Even if such a pathway exists, the only method to over express it may be through genetic engineering. If so, it will be added to a growing list of known but unexplored means by which humans could be 'improved' by altering their genes. I wonder how long that list will have to grow before it becomes seductive enough for someone to try it on their child.
[photo credit: Medical College of Georgia News]

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Manipulating Just One Gene Makes a Smarter Rat

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
According to recently published results in PLoS One, researchers at the Medical College of Georgia (MCG) and East China Normal University have genetically engineered a rat to be significantly smarter than its peers. The rat was named Hobbie J, after the popular Chinese cartoon. Lest you think the world is determined to try to turn ...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
That intelligence () in healthy people is nearly impossible to improve is clear from the failure of psychology to provide any such method. But why intelligence would be so constant is not as clear: many other cognitive abilities are improvable (like working memory), so why not intelligence?

Arthur Jensen noted the failure of interventions in the 1960s, and the failure remains complete now, half a century later: if you are a bright healthy young man or woman gifted with an IQ in the 130s, there is nothing you can do to increase your underlying intelligence by a standard deviation. New methods like dual n-back or nootropics are trumpeted in the media, and years later are discovered to increase motivation & not intelligence, or to have been overstated, or work only in damaged or deficient subpopulations, or to be statistical/ methodological artifacts, or to be tantamount to training on IQ tests themselves which destroys their meaning (like memorizing vocabulary), or to be so anomalous as to verge on fraudulent (like the Pygmalion effect). The only question worth asking is which of these explanations is the real explanation this time.

For IQ in particular, people discussing human-enhancement (especially transhumanists) have proposed a pessimistic observation & evolutionary explanation, dubbed the Algernon principle or Algernon's law or my preference, the Algernon Argument.

The famous SF story Flowers for Algernon postulates surgery which triples the IQ score of the retarded protagonist - but which comes with the devastating side-effects of the gain being both temporary and sometimes fatal; fictional evidence aside, it is curious that despite the incredible progress mankind has made in countless areas like building cars or going to the moon or fighting cancer or extincting smallpox or inventing computers or artificial intelligence, we lack any meaningful way to positively affect people's intelligence beyond curing diseases & deficiencies. If we compare the smartest people in the world now like Terence Tao to the smartest people of more than half a century ago like John von Neumann, there seems to be little difference. Eliezer Yudkowsky expands the thought out in his essay Algernon's Law, stating it as:

Any simple major enhancement to human intelligence is a net evolutionary disadvantage.

The lesson is that Mother Nature know best. Or alternately, TANSTAAFL: there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

Trade-offs are endemic in biology. Anything which isn't carrying its own weight will be eliminated - organs which are no longer used will be stunted by evolution and within a lifetime, unused muscles & bones will start weakening or being scavenged for resources, as astronauts may find out the hard way, while shrews cyclically shrink their brains & skulls by 15% to conserve resources in winter ( Lázaro et al 2017). Often, if you use a drug or surgery to optimize something, you will discover penalties elsewhere. If you delay aging & length lifespan as is possible in many species, you might find that you have encouraged cancer or - still worse - decreased reproduction as evidenced by the dramatic deaths of salmon or brown antechinus; if your immune system goes all-out against disease, you either deplete your energetic and chemical reserves or risk autoimmune disorders; similarly, we heal much slower than seems possible despite the clear advantage; if you try to enhance attention with an amphetamine, you destroy creativity, or if the amphetamines reduce sleep, you damage memory consolidation or peripheral awareness; or improving memory (which requires active effort to maintain) also increases sensitivity to pain and interferes with other mental tasks (as increased WM does, slightly); if a mouse invests in anti-aging cellular repairs, it may freeze to death, and so on. (What are we to make of inducing savant-like abilities by brute-force suppression of brain regions, or tDCS improving learning?) From this perspective, it's not too surprising that human medicine may be largely wasted effort or harmful (although most - especially doctors - would strenuously deny this). Hardly any man is clever enough to know all the evil he does.

An analogy to complex systems is a superficial analysis at best. Many complex systems are routinely optimizable on some parameter of interest by orders of magnitudes, or at least factors. Economies grow exponentially, on the back of all sorts of improving performance curves which make us richer than emperors compared with our ancestors; the miracle of economic growth, built on thousands of distinct complex systems being optimized by humans, seems to go unnoticed and be so normal and taken for granted. If we were computers, an ordinary nerd with access to some liquid nitrogen could double our clock speed.

With intelligence, on the other hand, not only do we have no interventions to make one an order of magnitude smarter on some hypothetical measure of absolute intelligence (perhaps such a man would be to us as we are to dogs?) but we have no interventions which make one a few factors smarter (the smartest man to ever live?) nor do we even have any interventions which can move one more than a few percentage points up in the general population! We remain the same. It is as if scientists and doctors, after studying cars for centuries, shamefacedly had to admit that their thousands of experimental cars all still had their speed throttles stuck on 25-30kph - but the good news was that this new oil additive might make a few of the cars run 0.1kph faster!

This is not the usual state of affairs for even extremely complex systems. This raises the question of why all these cars are so uniformly stuck at a certain top speed and how they got to be so optimized; why are we like these fantastical cars, and not computer processors?

Costs

Intelligence is an almost unalloyed good when we look at correlations in the real-world for income, longevity, happiness, contributions to science or medicine, criminality, favoring of free speech etc. Why is it, then, that we can find quotes like the rule that human beings seem to follow is to engage the brain only when all else fails - and usually not even then or In effect, all animals are under stringent selection pressure to be as stupid as they can get away with? Why does so much psychological research, especially heuristics & biases, seem to boil down to a dichotomy of a slow accurate way of thinking and a fast less-accurate way of thinking ( system I vs system II being just one of the innumerable pairs coined by researchers)?

Because thinking is expensive and slow, and while it may be an unalloyed good, it is subject to diminishing returns like anything else (if it is profitable at all in a particular niche: no bacteria needs sophisticated cognitive skills, nor most mammals) and other things become more valuable. Just another tradeoff.

EOC

In The Wisdom of Nature: An Evolutionary Heuristic for Human Enhancement ( Human Enhancement 2008), Nick Bostrom and Anders Sandberg put this principle as a question or challenge, evolutionary optimality challenge (EOC):

If the proposed intervention would result in an enhancement, why have we not already evolved to be that way?

We could take this as a biological version of Chesterton's fence. Evolution is a massively parallel search process which has been running on humans (and predecessor organisms) for billions of years, ruthlessly optimizing for reproductive fitness. It is an immensely stupid and blind idiot god which will accomplish its goal by any available means, and if that means evolutionary mechanisms will cause individuals to drive their own species extinct because this was the fittest thing for each individual to do or if the highly artificial & unlikely conditions for group selection are enforced by an experimenter and evolution causes group norms of mass infanticidal cannibalization to develop, so be it!

It is of course possible for a new mutation to be fitter or for the environment to change and render some alternative more fit. This is sometimes true, but it is overwhelmingly usually false. If you do not believe me, feel free to go try to beat just the stock market, or if you're up for a challenge, be more reproductively fit in a tuna fish's niche than the tuna fish. Every so often you hear of a hedge fund which found alpha, or of an invading alien species that is beating the native flora: but remember that they are just one such fund or species out of thousands and thousands trying. Francis Bacon:

It was a good answer that was made by one who when they showed him hanging in a temple a picture of those who had paid their vows as having escaped shipwreck, and would have him say whether he did not now acknowledge the power of the gods, - Aye, asked he again, but where are they painted that were drowned after their vows? And such is the way of all superstition, whether in astrology, dreams, omens, divine judgments, or the like; wherein men, having a delight in such vanities, mark the events where they are fulfilled, but where they fail, though this happens much oftener, neglect and pass them by.

They are exceptions which prove the rule; they are, in fact, the exceptions which cause the rule to be true, by exploiting the niche or opportunity. Suppose we turned out to be harmfully miserly with calories and there is some receptor (such as those acted upon by stimulants like caffeine or nicotine) which triggers a cascade of changes leading to behavior which is a superior tradeoff in caloric consumption vs activity. Evolution would slowly increase the market-share of alleles which affect this receptor, and after a while, the new level of activity would become optimal and now use of a stimulant affecting the receptor would cease to be fit because it cranks it too high. There may be some such opportunities available to humans today, since we know of past opportunities like adult lactose tolerance which have been sweeping through gene pools over the past thousand years, but can we really claim that all the interventions in which we differ from our distant ancestors can be traced to such reproductive fitness justifications? (And people think evolutionary psychology overreaches and speculates without evidence!) Theoretical calculations apparently indicate that in a changing environment, the reproductive fitness gap between the current allele and its alternatives will be small and large gaps exponentially rare; this seems intuitive - to continue the market analogy, the bigger the arbitrage, the faster it will be exploited.

Obviously we humans do intervene all the time, and many of those interventions are worthwhile. Women, for example, are big fans of birth control, and if the female reproductive system isn't controlled by evolution, nothing is. How are we to reconcile the theoretical expectation that we should find it nigh-impossible to beat evolution at its own game with the observed fact that we seem to intervene successfully all the time?

Loopholes

What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful blundering, low and horribly cruel works of nature!

It is a profound truth - realized in the nineteenth century by only a handful of astute biologists and by philosophers hardly at all (indeed, most of those who held and views on the matter held a contrary opinion) - a profound truth that Nature does not know best; that genetical evolution, if we choose to look at it liverishly instead of with fatuous good humor, is a story of waste, makeshift, compromise and blunder.

There may be no free lunches, but might there be some cheap lunches? Yudkowsky's formulation points out several ways to escape the argument:

1. interventions may not be simple
So one might find major enhancements through some very complex surgery or prosthetic; perhaps brain implants which expand memory or enable (controlled) wireheading. Evolution is a search procedure for finding1 local optima, which are not necessarily global optima. Examples like the giraffe's nerves demonstrates such traps, but how would evolution fix them? Even if a mutation sudden made the nerve go the shorter direction, it's not clear what other changes would have to be made to deal with this improvement, and this combination of multiple rare mutations may not happen enough times for the small reproductive fitness improvement (less resources used on nerves) to make it to fixation.

2. the simple interventions may not lead to a major enhancement
Nutritional supplements are examples; it makes perfect sense that fixing a chemical deficiency could be a simple matter and enhance reproductive fitness - but one would expect only minor mental enhancements and this effect would not generalize to very many people. (Similarly, most nootropics do not do very much.)

3. the intervention may be simple, give major enhancements, but result in a net loss of reproductive fitness

The famous Ashkenazi theory of intelligence comes to mind. According to this theory, the Ashkenazi were forced into occupations demanding intelligence, and micro-selected for high intelligence. Except the high IQ genes were not previously prevalent among either Jews or gentiles because - like sickle-cell anemia - when they became too prevalent, they result in horrible diseases like Tay-Sachs. In 2007, a unique mutation in a Scottish family was found to increase verbal IQ in afflicted family members vs non by something like 25 points; this would be great for them - except for how that mutation starts causing blindness in one's 20s or later. (In general, it's much easier to find mutations or other genetic changes breaking intelligence than helping in cases of retardation and autism.)

Bostrom also offers 3 categories of ways in which interventions can escape his EOC:

1. "Changed tradeoffs. Evolution designed the system for operation in one type of environment, but now we wish to deploy it in a very different type of environment. It is not surprising, then, that we might be able to modify the system better to meet the demands imposed on it by the new environment.

2. Value discordance. There is a discrepancy between the standards by which evolution measured the quality of her work, and the standards that we wish to apply. Even if evolution had managed to build the finest reproduction-and-survival machine imaginable, we may still have reason to change it because what we value is not primarily to be maximally effective inclusive-reproductive-fitness optimizers.

3. Evolutionary restrictions. We have access to various tools, materials, and techniques that were unavailable to evolution. Even if our engineering talent is far inferior to evolution's, we may nevertheless be able to achieve certain things that stumped evolution, thanks to these novel aids."

An example of how not to escape the EOC, I believe, is offered in The Likelihood of Cognitive Enhancement (Lynch et al 2012), when the authors attempt to argue that powerful nootropics are possible:

But perhaps the room for improvement issue can be recast in terms of brain evolution by asking whether comparative anatomical evidence points to strong adaptive pressures for designs that are logically related to improved cognitive performance. Anatomists often resort to allometry when dealing with questions of selective pressures on brain regions. Applied to brain proportions, this involves collecting measurements for the region of interest - e.g., frontal cortex - for a series of animals within a given taxonomic group and then relating it to the volume or weight of the brains of those animals. This can establish with a relatively small degree of error whether a brain component in a particular species is larger than would be predicted from that species' brain size. While there is not a great deal of evidence, studies of this type point to the conclusion that cortical subdivisions in humans, including association regions, are about as large as expected for an anthropoid primate with a 1350cc brain. The volume of area 10 of human frontal cortex, for example, fits on the regression line (area 10 vs. whole brain) calculated from published data (Semendeferi et al., 2001) for a series composed of gibbons, apes and humans (Lynch and Granger, 2008). Given that this region is widely assumed to play a central role in executive functions and working memory, these observations do not encourage the idea that selective pressures for cognition have differentially shaped the proportions of human cortex. Importantly, this does not mean that those proportions are in any sense typical. The allometric equations involve different exponents for different regions, meaning that absolute proportions (e.g., primary sensory cortex vs. association cortex) change as brains grow larger. The balance of parts in the cortex of the enormous human brain is dramatically different than found in the much smaller monkey brain: area 10, for instance, occupies a much greater percentage of the cortex in man. But these effects seem to reflect expansion according to rules embedded in a conserved brain plan rather than selection for the specific pattern found in humans (Finlay et al., 2001).

...But our argument here is that these expanded cortical areas are likely to use generic network designs shared by most primates; if so, then it appears unlikely that the designs are in any sense optimized for cognition. We take this as a starting position for the assumption that the designs are far from being maximally effective for specialized human functions, and therefore that it is realistic to expect that cognition-related operations can be significantly enhanced.

I would agree that the human brain's architecture does not seem to be optimal in any universal sense; and that this would constitute an interesting argument if one were arguing that artificial intelligences will not inherently be limited to a level of intelligence comparable to the greatest human geniuses.

However, this does not offer hope for nootropics because the human brain can easily be suboptimal in its gross anatomical architecture but close to optimal in any factor easily tweaked by chemicals! (A suggestion that brain region size is suboptimal is a suggestion only that a large change in brain region size might lead to large gains - but large changes are neither easy, simple, nor possible currently.)

Examples

Teleology is like a mistress to a biologist: he cannot live without her but he's unwilling to be seen with her in public.

Bostrom's criteria are more general, so we'll use them.

Birth control is a clear example of satisfying loophole #2, value discordance. Ovulation is under the body's control and is linked in evolutionary psychology to many changes in behavior; unprocreative sex is common throughout the animal kingdom where it serves other purposes like forming social connections in bonobo troupes. Hunter-gatherer women practice spaced births by letting their child suckle them for years; maternal cannibalism has been observed when mothers are under particular stress (and perhaps also in humans). So, it's clear that there is birth control capability already available to hominids, and not too surprising that it's possible to render a healthy woman entirely infertile without major health consequences. Many women would prefer evolution have done just this! They do not value having a dozen children while young; they would rather have just 2 at a time of their choosing - if any at all. Why is evolution not so obliging? Well, it obviously would not be very reproductively fit...

Pacemakers are an example of #3: evolution couldn't afford to engineer more reliable hearts, in part for lack of electronic microchips and possibly because humans are already at the limits of the performance envelope.

Many traits related to nutrition fall into the category of #1.

How about supplements? Most supplements are just tweaking biochemical processes, and don't obviously fall under 1, 2, or 3; and the few which seem to enhance healthy humans are finicky creatures (see my introduction to Nootropics). Melatonin, for example, may seem particularly questionable as one's body secretes considerable quantities in an intricate cycle (but see later).

1. the Flynn effect is limited in its gains and so will result in not major gains
the Flynn effect has already stopped in 3 of the wealthiest countries and reversed to some degree. The situation in the US is unclear, but given the outright losses in verbal & science skills seen 1981-2010 in the most intelligent of Midwestern students, this is consistent with a Flynn effect operating through eliminating deficiencies & improving the lower end or with a Flynn effect that has ceased to exist

2. the Flynn effect is apparently environmental, and one of the most plausible explanations is that it is due to either nutritional deficits or public health interventions against infectious diseases.
In neither case are interventions easy in any sense, nor are the interventions available to evolution - if one's diet is lacking in an essential element like iodine deficiency, evolution cannot simply conjure it away; nor can it invent any better immune systems than it already has as part of the usual arms race with infectious agents. As we already noted, we could expect nutritional interventions to produce small benefits, and we might expect that implementing a whole battery of possible improvements (iodine deficiency, iron deficiency, a dozen childhood infections etc) to produce much what we see with the Flynn effect. But we would expect the gains to be specific and quickly exhausted once the low-hanging fruit is exhausted. (There cannot be indefinitely many deficiencies and infections!) This too is what we observe with the halting of the Flynn effect.

3. The intelligence gains from the Flynn effect may not be reproductive-fitness-increasing; IQ correlates strongly with many desirable things like income, happiness, knowledge, education, etc. - but not having more than average children. The correlations are found both in the West and worldwide. (It is of course possible that the Flynn effect causes IQ gains and reproductive fitness increases on the lower end of the spectrum and high IQ is intrinsically reproductive-fitness-reducing in the modern environment, but the observation is suggestive.)

4. the Flynn effect does not actually reflect intelligence gains but damage to the validity of the subtest in which the gains appear, and is irrelevant

...one reason to be wary of, say, cholinergic memory enhancers [such as piracetam]: if they have no downsides, why doesn't the brain produce more acetylcholine already? Maybe you're using up a limited memory capacity, or forgetting something else...

Might piracetam escape the EOC with #3?
No. Whatever receptors or buttons piracetam pushes could already be pushed by the brain the usual way. There is nothing novel about piracetam in that sense.

Might piracetam escape the EOC with #2?
Perhaps. Hard to see how piracetam trades off reproductive fitness for something else, though. Since its synthesis in 1964, minimal side-effects or other safety issues have been noted, unlike other drugs such as caffeine or aspirin.

Might piracetam escape the EOC with #1?

Probably. Many tradeoffs are different in contemporary First World countries than in the proverbial Stone Age veldt. We should look more closely at what piracetam does and what tradeoffs it may be changing.

Administering choline supplementation to pregnant rats improved the performance of their pups, apparently as a result of changes in neural development in turn due to changes in gene expression ( Meck et al. 1988; Meck & Williams 2003; Mellott et al. 2004). Given the ready availability of choline supplements, such prenatal enhancement, may already (inadvertently) be taking place in human populations. Supplementation of a mother's diet during late and 3 months postpartum with long-chained fatty acids has also been demonstrated to improve cognitive performance in human children ( Helland et al. 2003).

What heuristic might we use?

Chemically, modafinil does not seem to be so bizarre that evolution could not stumble across it or an equivalent mechanism, so probably we cannot appeal to #3, evolutionary restrictions. Its mechanism is not very clear, but mostly seems to manipulate things like the histamine system (and to a much lesser extent, dopamine), all things Evolution could easily do.

Nor is it clear what value discordance might be involved. We could come up with one, though.
If one theorized that modafinil came with a memory penalty, inasmuch as memory consolidation and the hippocampus seem to intimately involve sleep, then we might have a discordance where we value being able to produce and act more than being able to remember things. This might even be a sensible tradeoff for a modern man: why not sacrifice some ability to learn or remember long-term, since you can immediately gain back that capacity and more by suitable use of efficient memory techniques like spaced repetition?

#1 seems promising. Like piracetam, there is something in short supply that modafinil would use more of: calories! While you are awake, you are burning more calories than while asleep. During the day, synapses build up levels of some proteins, which get wiped out by sleep; is this because synapses and memories are expensive and cannot be allowed to consume ever more resources without some sort of garbage collection, synaptic homeostasis? Fly & rat studies bear out some of the predictions of the model and may lead to interesting new findings (see also Bom & Feld 2012 discussing Chauvette et al 2012).

Previously noted was the metabolic cost of defending against infections; one animal study found the proximate cause of death in sleep deprivation to be bacterial infections. You are also - in the ancient evolutionary environment - perhaps exposing yourself to additional risks in the dark night. (This would be the preservation & protection theory of sleep.)

Resource usage is a real concern for the human brain, along with scaling issues: it uses <20% of energy; 87% in infants. One blogger says:

Although it only accounts for 2% of an adult's body weight, it accounts for 20-25% of an adult's resting oxygen and energy intake ( Attwell & Laughlin 2001: 1143). In early life, the brain even makes up for up 60-70% of the body's total energy requirements. A chimpanzee's brain, in comparison, only consumes about 8-9% of its resting metabolism ( Aiello & Wells 2002: 330). The human brain's energy demands are about 8 to 10 times higher than those of skeletal muscles ( Dunbar & Shultz 2007: 1344), and, in terms of energy consumption, it is equal to the rate of energy consumed by leg muscles of a marathon runner when running (Attwell & Laughlin 2001: 1143). All in all, its consumption rate is only topped by the energy intake of the heart (Dunbar & Shultz 2007: 1344).

There are additional disadvantages to increased intelligence - larger heads would drive maternal & infant mortality rates even higher than they are. And it's worth noting that while the human brain is disproportionately huge, yet the human cerebral cortex is not any bigger than one would predict be extrapolating from gibbon or ape cortex volumes, despite the human lineage splitting off millions of years ago. The human brain seems to be special only in being a scaled-up primate brain, with close to the metabolic limit in its number of neurons (which suggests a resolution to the question why despite convergent evolution of relatively high intelligence, only primates took off). There are other ways in which humans seem to have hit intelligence limits - why did our ancestors' brains grow in volume for millions of years, only to come to a halt with the Neanderthals & Cro-Magnons and actually start shrinking to the modern volume, and why did old age only start increasing 50,000 years ago or later, well after humans began developing technology like controlled fire (>=400,000 years ago); or why are primate guts (also resource-expensive) inversely correlated with brain size & in one fish breeding experiment, or muscles starved of sugars and brains favored; or why do the Ashkenazi seem to pay for their intelligence with endemic genetic disorders; or why does evolution permit human brains to shrink dramatically with age, as much as 15% of volume, besides the huge performance losses, while the brains of our closest relative-species (the chimpanzees), do not shrink at all? For that matter, why are heads, central nervous systems, and primate-level intelligence so extremely rare on the tree of life, with no examples of convergent evolution of intelligence (as opposed to examples like basic eye-spots, which are such a fantastically adaptive tool that they have independently evolved somewhere between 45 and 60 times)?

The obvious answer is that diminishing returns have kicked in for intelligence in primates and humans in particular. (Indeed, it's apparently been argued that not only are humans not much smarter than primates, but there is little overall intelligence differences in vertebrates. Humans lose embarrassingly on even pure tests of statistical reasoning; we are outperformed on the Monty Hall problem by pigeons and to a lesser extent monkeys!) The last few millennia aside, humans have not done well and has apparently verged on extinction before, and the demographic transition and anthropogenic existential risks suggest that our current success may be short-lived (not that agriculture & civilization were great in the first place). Some psychologists have even tried to make the case that increases in intelligence do not lead to better inferences or choices ( Hertwig & Todd 2003).

Modafinil or modafinil-like traits might be selected against due to increased calorie expenditure, decreased calorie consumption, or risks of night-time activity. Either explanation fails in a modern environment; modern societies have murder and assault rates orders of magnitude lower than that seen among aborigines, and calories are so abundant that they have begun reducing reproductive fitness (we call this poisoning-by-too-many-calories the obesity epidemic).

#1 doesn't seem too plausible - what about modern society would favor opiate consumption outside of medicinal use? If one wishes to deaden the despair and ennui of living in a degenerate atheistic material culture, we have beer for that.

#3 doesn't work either; opioids have been around for ages and work via the standard brain machinery.

#2 might work here as well, but this dumps us straight into the debate about the War on Drugs and what harm drug use does to the user & society.

With Ecstasy, I had simply stepped outside the worn paths in my brain and, in the process, gained some perspective on my life. It was an amazing feeling. Small inconsistencies became obvious. I need money, I have a $500 motorcycle that I'm too scared to ride, so why not sell it? So did big psychological ones: The more angry I am at myself, the more critical I am of my girlfriend. Why should I care how Carol chews her gum? Ecstasy nudges you to think, very deeply, about one thing at a time. (It wasn't that harsh LSD feeling, where every thought seems like an absurd paradox - like the fact that we're all, deep down, just a bunch of monkeys.)..A government-approved study in Spain has just begun in which Ecstasy is being offered to treat rape victims for whom no treatment has worked, based on the premise that MDMA reduces the fear response to a perceived emotional threat in therapy sessions. A Swiss study in 1993 yielded positive anecdotal evidence on its effect on people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. And a study in California may soon begin in which Ecstasy is administered to end-stage cancer patients suffering from depression, existential crises and chronic pain. The F.D.A. will be reviewing the protocol for Stage 2 of the trial; results are expected in 2002.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
That intelligence () in healthy people is nearly impossible to improve is clear from the failure of psychology to provide any such method. But why intelligence would be so constant is not as clear: many other cognitive abilities are improvable (like working memory), so why not intelligence?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Project Renaissance, Ways to Improve Human Intelligence

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Increase your IQ and unleash your Einstein factor. Increase your score on IQ tests by 20 points. Master creativity and accelerated learning. Learn faster and become smarter than a genius. Learn ImageStreaming and PhotoReading to access the powers of your mind and brain.

# data[].attributes.body
An experiment of an animals intelligence

http://www.livescience.com/32084-anti-iq.html

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The popularity of "smart drugs" that claim to boost intelligence has led experts to warn that the products often contain harmful banned substances that can cause serious side effects. You're only using 10 percent of your brain!" All those people were wrong. If we did use only 10 percent of our brains we'd be close...

# data[].attributes.body
http://operationmeditation.com/discover/15-secrets-and-10-foods-to-boost-your-i-q-in-less-than-30-days/

# data[].attributes.body
https://blog.bulletproof.com/how-to-add-2-75-iq-points-per-hour-of-training/

# data[].attributes.body
https://laboratoryofhiddenalternatives.wordpress.com/2012/04/29/boosting-intelligence-experiments/

http://www.apfn.org/apfn/experiment.htm

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.google.com.pr/amp/amp.livescience.com/37095-humans-smarter-or-dumber.html?client=safari

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
UPDATE: DARPA responded to a request from Fusion that "brain-neural interfaces" have not yet been implanted in soldiers, though test devices have been implanted in the brains of volunteers already undergoing brain surgery. We've changed the headline to reflect that implantation of chips in soldiers' brains has not happened yet.
For decades, DARPA, the secretive research arm of the Department of Defense, has dreamed of turning soldiers into cyborgs. And now it's finally happening. The agency has funded projects that involve implanting chips into soldiers' brains that could one day enhance performance on the battlefield and repair traumatized brains once the fog of war has lifted.

"Of the 2.5 million Americans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, 300,000 of them came home with traumatic brain injury," journalist Annie Jacobsen told NPR. "DARPA initiated a series of programs to help cognitive functioning, to repair some of this damage. And those programs center around putting brain chips inside the tissue of the brain."

In her new book about the history of DARPA, " The Pentagon's Brain," Jacobsen writes about DARPA's "classified brain programs." Scientists, she says, are already testing "implantable wireless 'neuroprosthetics'" to help soldiers with brain injuries. "[S]oldiers allow the tiny machines, or chips, to be implanted in their brain," Jacobsen writes in the book. "Despite multiple appeals through the Office of the Secretary of Defense, DARPA declined to grant me an interview with any of these brain-wounded warriors."

A DARPA spokesperson told Fusion that "brain-neural interfaces" have not been implanted in soldiers, though researchers have already begun testing such devices by temporarily implanting electrical arrays into the brains of volunteers undergoing surgery for other neurological issues. Defense One, an online magazine that covers the military, reported last year on DARPA's work on brain chips to treat PTSD, and said that DARPA was not yet in the testing phase. When DARPA launched its RAM (Restoring Active Memory) program last year, it projected it would be about four years until researchers were implanting permanent chips in humans.

Creating super soldiers isn't the only thing that DARPA is trying to do, Jacobsen says. According to her new book, published by Little, Brown, government scientists hope that implanting chips in soldiers will unlock the secrets of artificial intelligence, and allow us to give machines the kind of higher-level reasoning that humans can do.

"When you see all of these brain mapping programs going on, many scientists wonder whether this will [be what it takes] to break that long-sought barrier of AI," said Jacobsen in a phone interview.

For Jacobsen, who has spent her career chronicling war, weapons and U.S. government secrets, digging through DARPA documents provided a glimpse at the future of war, but also raised questions about whether that future is one we really want.

"Are hunter-killer robots right around the bend?" she writes in the book..

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has poured resources into far-out research, from solving infectious disease to transforming humans for the theater of war. The agency is pioneering Iron Man-like exoskeletons to help protect soldiers from fire and the elements so they can keep fighting for longer. And under initiatives like the Brain-Machine Interface, defense scientists have studied how brain implants could eventually enhance a soldier's cognition.

The brain emits electrical signals and an implanted chip can tap into those signals to read them. Outside of the government, scientists at places like Berkeley's Brain-Machine Interface Systems Laboratory are experimenting with how to use such implants to translate thoughts into action for people with neurological impairments, eventually hoping to, for example, help a paralyzed person move.

At DARPA, programs like RAM and REMIND (Restorative Encoding Memory Integration Neural Device) have explored how brain implants might help soldiers returning from war with traumatic brain injuries impacting memory. Other DARPA programs have envisioned allowing soldiers at battle to communicate by thought alone.

"Imagine a time when the human brain has its own wireless modem so that instead of acting on thoughts, warfighters have thoughts that act," Jacobsen recounts DARPA's Eric Eisenstadt telling a crowd at a technology conference in 2002.

But Jacobsen's warning is that while helping soldiers suffering in the aftermath of war may seem inherently benign, we must not forget that DARPA is in the business of defense. The question that should punctuate everything DARPA does, Jacobsen suggests, is "How can this be weaponized?"

DARPA's spokesperson told Fusion that the main goal of its brain-related work is not offensive military applications, but to develop therapeutic devices for soldiers and veterans.

"Suggesting that we aim to develop 'super soldiers' or that our brain-related research is being conducted to 'unlock the secrets of artificial intelligence' is patently false,'" he said.

Understanding the human brain is as important to achieving artificial intelligence as understanding computers. "The Pentagon is clearly very confident that they're moving toward autonomous weapons," Jacobsen told me. "The question is where is that confidence coming from?"
*We've updated the headline to make it clearer to reflect comments from DARPA. The story is based on an interview with journalist Annie Jacobsen, who wrote a new book on the history of DARPA, but who does not name sources when reporting on chips implanted in soldiers' brains. After publication, we added quotes from DARPA saying that it will be several years before chips are ready to be permanently implanted in soldiers.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
DARPA is testing implanting chips in soldiers' brains

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
UPDATE: DARPA responded to a request from Fusion that "brain-neural interfaces" have not yet been implanted in soldiers, though test devices have been implanted in the brains of volunteers already undergoing brain surgery. We've changed the headline to reflect that implantation of chips in soldiers' brains has not happened yet.

# data[].attributes.body
http://www.livescience.com/17918-humans-intelligent.html

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
That intelligence () in healthy people is nearly impossible to improve is clear from the failure of psychology to provide any such method. But why intelligence would be so constant is not as clear: many other cognitive abilities are improvable (like working memory), so why not intelligence?

Arthur Jensen noted the failure of interventions in the 1960s, and the failure remains complete now, half a century later: if you are a bright healthy young man or woman gifted with an IQ in the 130s, there is nothing you can do to increase your underlying intelligence by a standard deviation. New methods like dual n-back or nootropics are trumpeted in the media, and years later are discovered to increase motivation & not intelligence, or to have been overstated, or work only in damaged or deficient subpopulations, or to be statistical/ methodological artifacts, or to be tantamount to training on IQ tests themselves which destroys their meaning (like memorizing vocabulary), or to be so anomalous as to verge on fraudulent (like the Pygmalion effect). The only question worth asking is which of these explanations is the real explanation this time.

For IQ in particular, people discussing human-enhancement (especially transhumanists) have proposed a pessimistic observation & evolutionary explanation, dubbed the Algernon principle or Algernon's law or my preference, the Algernon Argument.

The famous SF story Flowers for Algernon postulates surgery which triples the IQ score of the retarded protagonist - but which comes with the devastating side-effects of the gain being both temporary and sometimes fatal; fictional evidence aside, it is curious that despite the incredible progress mankind has made in countless areas like building cars or going to the moon or fighting cancer or extincting smallpox or inventing computers or artificial intelligence, we lack any meaningful way to positively affect people's intelligence beyond curing diseases & deficiencies. If we compare the smartest people in the world now like Terence Tao to the smartest people of more than half a century ago like John von Neumann, there seems to be little difference. Eliezer Yudkowsky expands the thought out in his essay Algernon's Law, stating it as:

Any simple major enhancement to human intelligence is a net evolutionary disadvantage.

The lesson is that Mother Nature know best. Or alternately, TANSTAAFL: there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

Trade-offs are endemic in biology. Anything which isn't carrying its own weight will be eliminated - organs which are no longer used will be stunted by evolution and within a lifetime, unused muscles & bones will start weakening or being scavenged for resources, as astronauts may find out the hard way, while shrews cyclically shrink their brains & skulls by 15% to conserve resources in winter ( Lázaro et al 2017). Often, if you use a drug or surgery to optimize something, you will discover penalties elsewhere. If you delay aging & length lifespan as is possible in many species, you might find that you have encouraged cancer or - still worse - decreased reproduction as evidenced by the dramatic deaths of salmon or brown antechinus; if your immune system goes all-out against disease, you either deplete your energetic and chemical reserves or risk autoimmune disorders; similarly, we heal much slower than seems possible despite the clear advantage; if you try to enhance attention with an amphetamine, you destroy creativity, or if the amphetamines reduce sleep, you damage memory consolidation or peripheral awareness; or improving memory (which requires active effort to maintain) also increases sensitivity to pain and interferes with other mental tasks (as increased WM does, slightly); if a mouse invests in anti-aging cellular repairs, it may freeze to death, and so on. (What are we to make of inducing savant-like abilities by brute-force suppression of brain regions, or tDCS improving learning?) From this perspective, it's not too surprising that human medicine may be largely wasted effort or harmful (although most - especially doctors - would strenuously deny this). Hardly any man is clever enough to know all the evil he does.

An analogy to complex systems is a superficial analysis at best. Many complex systems are routinely optimizable on some parameter of interest by orders of magnitudes, or at least factors. Economies grow exponentially, on the back of all sorts of improving performance curves which make us richer than emperors compared with our ancestors; the miracle of economic growth, built on thousands of distinct complex systems being optimized by humans, seems to go unnoticed and be so normal and taken for granted. If we were computers, an ordinary nerd with access to some liquid nitrogen could double our clock speed.

With intelligence, on the other hand, not only do we have no interventions to make one an order of magnitude smarter on some hypothetical measure of absolute intelligence (perhaps such a man would be to us as we are to dogs?) but we have no interventions which make one a few factors smarter (the smartest man to ever live?) nor do we even have any interventions which can move one more than a few percentage points up in the general population! We remain the same. It is as if scientists and doctors, after studying cars for centuries, shamefacedly had to admit that their thousands of experimental cars all still had their speed throttles stuck on 25-30kph - but the good news was that this new oil additive might make a few of the cars run 0.1kph faster!

This is not the usual state of affairs for even extremely complex systems. This raises the question of why all these cars are so uniformly stuck at a certain top speed and how they got to be so optimized; why are we like these fantastical cars, and not computer processors?

Costs

Intelligence is an almost unalloyed good when we look at correlations in the real-world for income, longevity, happiness, contributions to science or medicine, criminality, favoring of free speech etc. Why is it, then, that we can find quotes like the rule that human beings seem to follow is to engage the brain only when all else fails - and usually not even then or In effect, all animals are under stringent selection pressure to be as stupid as they can get away with? Why does so much psychological research, especially heuristics & biases, seem to boil down to a dichotomy of a slow accurate way of thinking and a fast less-accurate way of thinking ( system I vs system II being just one of the innumerable pairs coined by researchers)?

Because thinking is expensive and slow, and while it may be an unalloyed good, it is subject to diminishing returns like anything else (if it is profitable at all in a particular niche: no bacteria needs sophisticated cognitive skills, nor most mammals) and other things become more valuable. Just another tradeoff.

EOC

In The Wisdom of Nature: An Evolutionary Heuristic for Human Enhancement ( Human Enhancement 2008), Nick Bostrom and Anders Sandberg put this principle as a question or challenge, evolutionary optimality challenge (EOC):

If the proposed intervention would result in an enhancement, why have we not already evolved to be that way?

We could take this as a biological version of Chesterton's fence. Evolution is a massively parallel search process which has been running on humans (and predecessor organisms) for billions of years, ruthlessly optimizing for reproductive fitness. It is an immensely stupid and blind idiot god which will accomplish its goal by any available means, and if that means evolutionary mechanisms will cause individuals to drive their own species extinct because this was the fittest thing for each individual to do or if the highly artificial & unlikely conditions for group selection are enforced by an experimenter and evolution causes group norms of mass infanticidal cannibalization to develop, so be it!

It is of course possible for a new mutation to be fitter or for the environment to change and render some alternative more fit. This is sometimes true, but it is overwhelmingly usually false. If you do not believe me, feel free to go try to beat just the stock market, or if you're up for a challenge, be more reproductively fit in a tuna fish's niche than the tuna fish. Every so often you hear of a hedge fund which found alpha, or of an invading alien species that is beating the native flora: but remember that they are just one such fund or species out of thousands and thousands trying. Francis Bacon:

It was a good answer that was made by one who when they showed him hanging in a temple a picture of those who had paid their vows as having escaped shipwreck, and would have him say whether he did not now acknowledge the power of the gods, - Aye, asked he again, but where are they painted that were drowned after their vows? And such is the way of all superstition, whether in astrology, dreams, omens, divine judgments, or the like; wherein men, having a delight in such vanities, mark the events where they are fulfilled, but where they fail, though this happens much oftener, neglect and pass them by.

They are exceptions which prove the rule; they are, in fact, the exceptions which cause the rule to be true, by exploiting the niche or opportunity. Suppose we turned out to be harmfully miserly with calories and there is some receptor (such as those acted upon by stimulants like caffeine or nicotine) which triggers a cascade of changes leading to behavior which is a superior tradeoff in caloric consumption vs activity. Evolution would slowly increase the market-share of alleles which affect this receptor, and after a while, the new level of activity would become optimal and now use of a stimulant affecting the receptor would cease to be fit because it cranks it too high. There may be some such opportunities available to humans today, since we know of past opportunities like adult lactose tolerance which have been sweeping through gene pools over the past thousand years, but can we really claim that all the interventions in which we differ from our distant ancestors can be traced to such reproductive fitness justifications? (And people think evolutionary psychology overreaches and speculates without evidence!) Theoretical calculations apparently indicate that in a changing environment, the reproductive fitness gap between the current allele and its alternatives will be small and large gaps exponentially rare; this seems intuitive - to continue the market analogy, the bigger the arbitrage, the faster it will be exploited.

Obviously we humans do intervene all the time, and many of those interventions are worthwhile. Women, for example, are big fans of birth control, and if the female reproductive system isn't controlled by evolution, nothing is. How are we to reconcile the theoretical expectation that we should find it nigh-impossible to beat evolution at its own game with the observed fact that we seem to intervene successfully all the time?

Loopholes

What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful blundering, low and horribly cruel works of nature!

It is a profound truth - realized in the nineteenth century by only a handful of astute biologists and by philosophers hardly at all (indeed, most of those who held and views on the matter held a contrary opinion) - a profound truth that Nature does not know best; that genetical evolution, if we choose to look at it liverishly instead of with fatuous good humor, is a story of waste, makeshift, compromise and blunder.

There may be no free lunches, but might there be some cheap lunches? Yudkowsky's formulation points out several ways to escape the argument:

1. interventions may not be simple
So one might find major enhancements through some very complex surgery or prosthetic; perhaps brain implants which expand memory or enable (controlled) wireheading. Evolution is a search procedure for finding1 local optima, which are not necessarily global optima. Examples like the giraffe's nerves demonstrates such traps, but how would evolution fix them? Even if a mutation sudden made the nerve go the shorter direction, it's not clear what other changes would have to be made to deal with this improvement, and this combination of multiple rare mutations may not happen enough times for the small reproductive fitness improvement (less resources used on nerves) to make it to fixation.

2. the simple interventions may not lead to a major enhancement
Nutritional supplements are examples; it makes perfect sense that fixing a chemical deficiency could be a simple matter and enhance reproductive fitness - but one would expect only minor mental enhancements and this effect would not generalize to very many people. (Similarly, most nootropics do not do very much.)

3. the intervention may be simple, give major enhancements, but result in a net loss of reproductive fitness

The famous Ashkenazi theory of intelligence comes to mind. According to this theory, the Ashkenazi were forced into occupations demanding intelligence, and micro-selected for high intelligence. Except the high IQ genes were not previously prevalent among either Jews or gentiles because - like sickle-cell anemia - when they became too prevalent, they result in horrible diseases like Tay-Sachs. In 2007, a unique mutation in a Scottish family was found to increase verbal IQ in afflicted family members vs non by something like 25 points; this would be great for them - except for how that mutation starts causing blindness in one's 20s or later. (In general, it's much easier to find mutations or other genetic changes breaking intelligence than helping in cases of retardation and autism.)

Bostrom also offers 3 categories of ways in which interventions can escape his EOC:

1. "Changed tradeoffs. Evolution designed the system for operation in one type of environment, but now we wish to deploy it in a very different type of environment. It is not surprising, then, that we might be able to modify the system better to meet the demands imposed on it by the new environment.

2. Value discordance. There is a discrepancy between the standards by which evolution measured the quality of her work, and the standards that we wish to apply. Even if evolution had managed to build the finest reproduction-and-survival machine imaginable, we may still have reason to change it because what we value is not primarily to be maximally effective inclusive-reproductive-fitness optimizers.

3. Evolutionary restrictions. We have access to various tools, materials, and techniques that were unavailable to evolution. Even if our engineering talent is far inferior to evolution's, we may nevertheless be able to achieve certain things that stumped evolution, thanks to these novel aids."

An example of how not to escape the EOC, I believe, is offered in The Likelihood of Cognitive Enhancement (Lynch et al 2012), when the authors attempt to argue that powerful nootropics are possible:

But perhaps the room for improvement issue can be recast in terms of brain evolution by asking whether comparative anatomical evidence points to strong adaptive pressures for designs that are logically related to improved cognitive performance. Anatomists often resort to allometry when dealing with questions of selective pressures on brain regions. Applied to brain proportions, this involves collecting measurements for the region of interest - e.g., frontal cortex - for a series of animals within a given taxonomic group and then relating it to the volume or weight of the brains of those animals. This can establish with a relatively small degree of error whether a brain component in a particular species is larger than would be predicted from that species' brain size. While there is not a great deal of evidence, studies of this type point to the conclusion that cortical subdivisions in humans, including association regions, are about as large as expected for an anthropoid primate with a 1350cc brain. The volume of area 10 of human frontal cortex, for example, fits on the regression line (area 10 vs. whole brain) calculated from published data (Semendeferi et al., 2001) for a series composed of gibbons, apes and humans (Lynch and Granger, 2008). Given that this region is widely assumed to play a central role in executive functions and working memory, these observations do not encourage the idea that selective pressures for cognition have differentially shaped the proportions of human cortex. Importantly, this does not mean that those proportions are in any sense typical. The allometric equations involve different exponents for different regions, meaning that absolute proportions (e.g., primary sensory cortex vs. association cortex) change as brains grow larger. The balance of parts in the cortex of the enormous human brain is dramatically different than found in the much smaller monkey brain: area 10, for instance, occupies a much greater percentage of the cortex in man. But these effects seem to reflect expansion according to rules embedded in a conserved brain plan rather than selection for the specific pattern found in humans (Finlay et al., 2001).

...But our argument here is that these expanded cortical areas are likely to use generic network designs shared by most primates; if so, then it appears unlikely that the designs are in any sense optimized for cognition. We take this as a starting position for the assumption that the designs are far from being maximally effective for specialized human functions, and therefore that it is realistic to expect that cognition-related operations can be significantly enhanced.

I would agree that the human brain's architecture does not seem to be optimal in any universal sense; and that this would constitute an interesting argument if one were arguing that artificial intelligences will not inherently be limited to a level of intelligence comparable to the greatest human geniuses.

However, this does not offer hope for nootropics because the human brain can easily be suboptimal in its gross anatomical architecture but close to optimal in any factor easily tweaked by chemicals! (A suggestion that brain region size is suboptimal is a suggestion only that a large change in brain region size might lead to large gains - but large changes are neither easy, simple, nor possible currently.)

Examples

Teleology is like a mistress to a biologist: he cannot live without her but he's unwilling to be seen with her in public.

Bostrom's criteria are more general, so we'll use them.

Birth control is a clear example of satisfying loophole #2, value discordance. Ovulation is under the body's control and is linked in evolutionary psychology to many changes in behavior; unprocreative sex is common throughout the animal kingdom where it serves other purposes like forming social connections in bonobo troupes. Hunter-gatherer women practice spaced births by letting their child suckle them for years; maternal cannibalism has been observed when mothers are under particular stress (and perhaps also in humans). So, it's clear that there is birth control capability already available to hominids, and not too surprising that it's possible to render a healthy woman entirely infertile without major health consequences. Many women would prefer evolution have done just this! They do not value having a dozen children while young; they would rather have just 2 at a time of their choosing - if any at all. Why is evolution not so obliging? Well, it obviously would not be very reproductively fit...

Pacemakers are an example of #3: evolution couldn't afford to engineer more reliable hearts, in part for lack of electronic microchips and possibly because humans are already at the limits of the performance envelope.

Many traits related to nutrition fall into the category of #1.

How about supplements? Most supplements are just tweaking biochemical processes, and don't obviously fall under 1, 2, or 3; and the few which seem to enhance healthy humans are finicky creatures (see my introduction to Nootropics). Melatonin, for example, may seem particularly questionable as one's body secretes considerable quantities in an intricate cycle (but see later).

1. the Flynn effect is limited in its gains and so will result in not major gains
the Flynn effect has already stopped in 3 of the wealthiest countries and reversed to some degree. The situation in the US is unclear, but given the outright losses in verbal & science skills seen 1981-2010 in the most intelligent of Midwestern students, this is consistent with a Flynn effect operating through eliminating deficiencies & improving the lower end or with a Flynn effect that has ceased to exist

2. the Flynn effect is apparently environmental, and one of the most plausible explanations is that it is due to either nutritional deficits or public health interventions against infectious diseases.
In neither case are interventions easy in any sense, nor are the interventions available to evolution - if one's diet is lacking in an essential element like iodine deficiency, evolution cannot simply conjure it away; nor can it invent any better immune systems than it already has as part of the usual arms race with infectious agents. As we already noted, we could expect nutritional interventions to produce small benefits, and we might expect that implementing a whole battery of possible improvements (iodine deficiency, iron deficiency, a dozen childhood infections etc) to produce much what we see with the Flynn effect. But we would expect the gains to be specific and quickly exhausted once the low-hanging fruit is exhausted. (There cannot be indefinitely many deficiencies and infections!) This too is what we observe with the halting of the Flynn effect.

3. The intelligence gains from the Flynn effect may not be reproductive-fitness-increasing; IQ correlates strongly with many desirable things like income, happiness, knowledge, education, etc. - but not having more than average children. The correlations are found both in the West and worldwide. (It is of course possible that the Flynn effect causes IQ gains and reproductive fitness increases on the lower end of the spectrum and high IQ is intrinsically reproductive-fitness-reducing in the modern environment, but the observation is suggestive.)

4. the Flynn effect does not actually reflect intelligence gains but damage to the validity of the subtest in which the gains appear, and is irrelevant

...one reason to be wary of, say, cholinergic memory enhancers [such as piracetam]: if they have no downsides, why doesn't the brain produce more acetylcholine already? Maybe you're using up a limited memory capacity, or forgetting something else...

Might piracetam escape the EOC with #3?
No. Whatever receptors or buttons piracetam pushes could already be pushed by the brain the usual way. There is nothing novel about piracetam in that sense.

Might piracetam escape the EOC with #2?
Perhaps. Hard to see how piracetam trades off reproductive fitness for something else, though. Since its synthesis in 1964, minimal side-effects or other safety issues have been noted, unlike other drugs such as caffeine or aspirin.

Might piracetam escape the EOC with #1?

Probably. Many tradeoffs are different in contemporary First World countries than in the proverbial Stone Age veldt. We should look more closely at what piracetam does and what tradeoffs it may be changing.

Administering choline supplementation to pregnant rats improved the performance of their pups, apparently as a result of changes in neural development in turn due to changes in gene expression ( Meck et al. 1988; Meck & Williams 2003; Mellott et al. 2004). Given the ready availability of choline supplements, such prenatal enhancement, may already (inadvertently) be taking place in human populations. Supplementation of a mother's diet during late and 3 months postpartum with long-chained fatty acids has also been demonstrated to improve cognitive performance in human children ( Helland et al. 2003).

What heuristic might we use?

Chemically, modafinil does not seem to be so bizarre that evolution could not stumble across it or an equivalent mechanism, so probably we cannot appeal to #3, evolutionary restrictions. Its mechanism is not very clear, but mostly seems to manipulate things like the histamine system (and to a much lesser extent, dopamine), all things Evolution could easily do.

Nor is it clear what value discordance might be involved. We could come up with one, though.
If one theorized that modafinil came with a memory penalty, inasmuch as memory consolidation and the hippocampus seem to intimately involve sleep, then we might have a discordance where we value being able to produce and act more than being able to remember things. This might even be a sensible tradeoff for a modern man: why not sacrifice some ability to learn or remember long-term, since you can immediately gain back that capacity and more by suitable use of efficient memory techniques like spaced repetition?

#1 seems promising. Like piracetam, there is something in short supply that modafinil would use more of: calories! While you are awake, you are burning more calories than while asleep. During the day, synapses build up levels of some proteins, which get wiped out by sleep; is this because synapses and memories are expensive and cannot be allowed to consume ever more resources without some sort of garbage collection, synaptic homeostasis? Fly & rat studies bear out some of the predictions of the model and may lead to interesting new findings (see also Bom & Feld 2012 discussing Chauvette et al 2012).

Previously noted was the metabolic cost of defending against infections; one animal study found the proximate cause of death in sleep deprivation to be bacterial infections. You are also - in the ancient evolutionary environment - perhaps exposing yourself to additional risks in the dark night. (This would be the preservation & protection theory of sleep.)

Resource usage is a real concern for the human brain, along with scaling issues: it uses <20% of energy; 87% in infants. One blogger says:

Although it only accounts for 2% of an adult's body weight, it accounts for 20-25% of an adult's resting oxygen and energy intake ( Attwell & Laughlin 2001: 1143). In early life, the brain even makes up for up 60-70% of the body's total energy requirements. A chimpanzee's brain, in comparison, only consumes about 8-9% of its resting metabolism ( Aiello & Wells 2002: 330). The human brain's energy demands are about 8 to 10 times higher than those of skeletal muscles ( Dunbar & Shultz 2007: 1344), and, in terms of energy consumption, it is equal to the rate of energy consumed by leg muscles of a marathon runner when running (Attwell & Laughlin 2001: 1143). All in all, its consumption rate is only topped by the energy intake of the heart (Dunbar & Shultz 2007: 1344).

There are additional disadvantages to increased intelligence - larger heads would drive maternal & infant mortality rates even higher than they are. And it's worth noting that while the human brain is disproportionately huge, yet the human cerebral cortex is not any bigger than one would predict be extrapolating from gibbon or ape cortex volumes, despite the human lineage splitting off millions of years ago. The human brain seems to be special only in being a scaled-up primate brain, with close to the metabolic limit in its number of neurons (which suggests a resolution to the question why despite convergent evolution of relatively high intelligence, only primates took off). There are other ways in which humans seem to have hit intelligence limits - why did our ancestors' brains grow in volume for millions of years, only to come to a halt with the Neanderthals & Cro-Magnons and actually start shrinking to the modern volume, and why did old age only start increasing 50,000 years ago or later, well after humans began developing technology like controlled fire (>=400,000 years ago); or why are primate guts (also resource-expensive) inversely correlated with brain size & in one fish breeding experiment, or muscles starved of sugars and brains favored; or why do the Ashkenazi seem to pay for their intelligence with endemic genetic disorders; or why does evolution permit human brains to shrink dramatically with age, as much as 15% of volume, besides the huge performance losses, while the brains of our closest relative-species (the chimpanzees), do not shrink at all? For that matter, why are heads, central nervous systems, and primate-level intelligence so extremely rare on the tree of life, with no examples of convergent evolution of intelligence (as opposed to examples like basic eye-spots, which are such a fantastically adaptive tool that they have independently evolved somewhere between 45 and 60 times)?

The obvious answer is that diminishing returns have kicked in for intelligence in primates and humans in particular. (Indeed, it's apparently been argued that not only are humans not much smarter than primates, but there is little overall intelligence differences in vertebrates. Humans lose embarrassingly on even pure tests of statistical reasoning; we are outperformed on the Monty Hall problem by pigeons and to a lesser extent monkeys!) The last few millennia aside, humans have not done well and has apparently verged on extinction before, and the demographic transition and anthropogenic existential risks suggest that our current success may be short-lived (not that agriculture & civilization were great in the first place). Some psychologists have even tried to make the case that increases in intelligence do not lead to better inferences or choices ( Hertwig & Todd 2003).

Modafinil or modafinil-like traits might be selected against due to increased calorie expenditure, decreased calorie consumption, or risks of night-time activity. Either explanation fails in a modern environment; modern societies have murder and assault rates orders of magnitude lower than that seen among aborigines, and calories are so abundant that they have begun reducing reproductive fitness (we call this poisoning-by-too-many-calories the obesity epidemic).

#1 doesn't seem too plausible - what about modern society would favor opiate consumption outside of medicinal use? If one wishes to deaden the despair and ennui of living in a degenerate atheistic material culture, we have beer for that.

#3 doesn't work either; opioids have been around for ages and work via the standard brain machinery.

#2 might work here as well, but this dumps us straight into the debate about the War on Drugs and what harm drug use does to the user & society.

With Ecstasy, I had simply stepped outside the worn paths in my brain and, in the process, gained some perspective on my life. It was an amazing feeling. Small inconsistencies became obvious. I need money, I have a $500 motorcycle that I'm too scared to ride, so why not sell it? So did big psychological ones: The more angry I am at myself, the more critical I am of my girlfriend. Why should I care how Carol chews her gum? Ecstasy nudges you to think, very deeply, about one thing at a time. (It wasn't that harsh LSD feeling, where every thought seems like an absurd paradox - like the fact that we're all, deep down, just a bunch of monkeys.)..A government-approved study in Spain has just begun in which Ecstasy is being offered to treat rape victims for whom no treatment has worked, based on the premise that MDMA reduces the fear response to a perceived emotional threat in therapy sessions. A Swiss study in 1993 yielded positive anecdotal evidence on its effect on people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. And a study in California may soon begin in which Ecstasy is administered to end-stage cancer patients suffering from depression, existential crises and chronic pain. The F.D.A. will be reviewing the protocol for Stage 2 of the trial; results are expected in 2002.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
That intelligence () in healthy people is nearly impossible to improve is clear from the failure of psychology to provide any such method. But why intelligence would be so constant is not as clear: many other cognitive abilities are improvable (like working memory), so why not intelligence?

# data[].attributes.body
http://www.naturalnews.com/019189.html

# data[].attributes.body
http://www.eiconsortium.org/reports/technical_report.html

# data[].attributes.body
http://guardianlv.com/2013/05/nasa-confirms-super-human-abilities-gained/

# data[].attributes.body
An experiment of making babies super intelligent

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Word is that "scientists in the UK could begin genetically engineering human embryos as early as March." But don't worry. As another report says, "It will be illegal to allow the embryos to live beyond 14 days."

Besides "curing" diseases (by killing embryos that have them) and studying other aspects of human development, one thing scientists hope to discover is how to engineer babies which are of higher intelligence. What are their chances of success?

That aspects of intelligence are correlated (I use this word in its plain English sense) with the brain, and that brain development is correlated most strongly with genes and to some extent to the environment, is nowhere in dispute, except among egalitarian ideologists who feel (not think) that intelligence is a matter of environment alone. What makes it strange is that these same ideologists are "for" killing enwombed humans who test positive for things like Down Syndrome. Never mind that now.

The scientific questions of interest are how well we can identify those genes which are correlated to those areas of the brain which are correlated with intelligence. Notice the different correlations. And once we identify those genes, and understand how those genes interact with neighboring genes in the development of persons, can we manipulate these genes and increase the intelligence of babies while simultaneously suppressing dysgenic side effects of our manipulations?

The answer is probably yes, but with many qualifications. Finding a set of genes that are solely responsible for intelligence is no easy task, and perhaps impossible. The best efforts to date are fraught with statistical over-certainty; only the weakest and most error-prone experiments have so far been done. My reading of this literature suggests we're are miles away from the goal. (Discussing why this is so would take us too far afield, but for those readers who want to know, most evidence for "intelligence genes" is by wee p-value and hypothesis tests; in other words, most evidence is wrong.)

The possibility of side effects is never mentioned and little thought about. The lessons of Icarus and Herr Doktor Frankenstein are always thought to apply to the other guy, which is why the hubris in this field is none too small. Since we have little idea which exact genes control intelligence, and how intelligence "interacts" with the rest of a person, there is no way we can accurately predict the effects of our meddlings. This should, but does not, dampen enthusiasm.

Currently, "laws" are being discussed or written barring lab-constructed humans from being born, which means, of course, that our experiments are killed after they have served their purposes. This itself is a deleterious side effect.

What of laws? Rape, theft, and murder have been illegal for a very long time, yet the mere presence of laws has not stopped these activities. Neither will laws stop experimentation on human beings. Children the result of planned genetics will, therefore, be born, law or no. Can you imagine the celebrity of these kids once their "status" becomes known, as of course it will?

What about limitations: how smart can a human be? Nobody knows. How far can we push the purely material aspects of intelligence? I mean, what precise combination of genes, assuming also no side effects, will produce a man who is smarter than any before? Nobody knows this, either. It could be that our natural "experiments," i.e. having babies the old fashioned way, is the optimal way to go about this, and that, perhaps, our best days as a race are behind us. We may now lack the intelligence to understand how to increase our intelligence in any designed manner!

One thing is clear. There are intelligences vastly superior to humans, but these beings are non-material, i.e. angels (good and bad). On top of this, aspects of our own intelligence are also non-material. And that means juicing the material aspects of intelligence can only help so much. After brain size, to speak loosely, is up to some limit, the rest is not up to us. We, quite literally, cannot play God.

What's that? You don't believe in angels (and demons) and our partly non-material nature? Well, that only proves my point that we have climbed down from the sunny uplands of intelligence and now dwell on the darkened plains, where we live as scidolators. Yet we choose to call ourselves "Enlightened." Skip it.

The thing that's striking about the designer-baby push is what I call the Gonna-Get-Me-Some Fallacy, which is when the promoters of intelligence by genetic manipulation think, in a puzzling sort of way, that they too will be recipients of the smarts largess. This is never stated outright, but it lingers in the air. I don't mean only that supporters think society will be bettered, but that supporters believe they themselves will gain intelligence, which is impossible. In fact, if this all works, supporters will make themselves obsolete.

Wanting to better mankind by orienting ourselves toward the Perfect is not wrong, but thinking that we can attain (or quantify!) perfection is insane. Historically, one way to eugenically improve society was to emasculate or slaughter undesirables after they escaped the womb; but with "advanced" technology, we can now do this before they exit. It's certainly a cleaner method.

Although there are arguments that greater intelligence on average is a net good for mankind, intelligence by itself in the absence of morality is not. Consider that Mao Tse Tung was no fool: he had an immense library with volumes filled with erudite notes. Yet his great intelligence is partly why in the universal Body Count Contest he comes out on top, or very near it (fans of Genghis Khan are always bickering over numbers). It is far from clear that a society with distinct classes divided by intelligence will be morally superior. That there will be distinct classes guaranteed, because the poor will be unable to afford designer services, which means only the rich will partake. That great prophet Aldous Huxley was on to something.

Some of these points are already moot, because we are already at the point of designer babies. Sex selection is not uncommon (despite many laws to prevent it). Genetic testing lets parents kill off undesirables (none recall these tests are imperfect, meaning the "wrong" babies are sometimes killed). In vitro implantations are routine, so what's the difference if the "raw" egg and sperm are first processed a little? Well, no difference at all, most will feel (not think).

Plus, we now have calls for post-birth genetic screening. The co-author of one (poor but standard) genes-intelligence study wants parents to see if their kids have the combination of genes he identified as producing intelligence. This is silly. It would be like selecting Major League pitchers by testing for "curve-ball genes", instead of putting folks on the mound and seeing if they can strike out batters. The danger is that we become slaves of our tests: it said he was intelligent, therefore he must be.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Designer Babies To Be Super Intelligent? | The Stream

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Word is that "scientists in the UK could begin genetically engineering human embryos as early as March." But don't worry. As another report says, "It will be illegal to allow the embryos to live beyond 14 days."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In 1998, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the drug modafinil as a treatment for narcolepsy, a condition in which the brain has trouble regulating its sleep-wake cycle that results in sudden "sleep attacks" where a person falls asleep at unwanted or inappropriate times. In the years since, modafinil has become popular for another, off-label use: to boost a person's cognitive abilities-an effect that hadn't been thoroughly studied by scientists. Now a team of researchers has reviewed the literature to find that modafinil does, in fact, increase a number of important activities in the brain, according to a study published yesterday in the journal European Neuropsychopharmacology. This finding, however, doesn't ensure that your doctor will prescribe it to you to help you cram for an exam.

Scientists still aren't sure exactly how modafinil works, though past studies have found that the drug increases the levels of the neurotransmitters, histamine and orexin, both of which regulate sleep and wake cycles. It also elevates levels of serotonin (which affects mood) and glutamate (which helps to excite brain cells).

These chemical changes make modafinil effective at treating narcolepsy, but it also has some unintended effects on other brain functions. It makes the patient more attentive, a better learner, and more adept at "higher level" tasks that involve executive function and require inputs from several simpler brain functions, according to a press release. This is similar to how some ADHD medications, like Adderall, work, though they increase the activity of other neurotransmitters, norepinephrine and dopamine.

The researchers reviewed 24 studies about modafinil's effects on cognition that were published between 1990 and 2014 and found that modafinil did, indeed, provide a boost in tasks that require, "planning and decision making, flexibility, learning and memory, and creativity," the press release states. It didn't have a significant effect on working memory (how the brain temporarily stores information). Plus, the drug had very few serious side effects, making it a strong candidate to be a bona fide "smart pill."

The researchers were quick to point out that these findings don't mean that modafinil is now approved as a cognitive enhancement-that decision is up to government regulatory bodies like the FDA. But their conclusions may encourage modafinil's manufacturer to apply for the drug to be prescribed for this use. They also note that any cognitive enhancement comes with "ethical considerations" that would be important to explore in future studies.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A Drug Meant For Narcolepsy Can Boost Brain Function

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In 1998, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the drug modafinil as a treatment for narcolepsy, a condition in which the brain has trouble regulating its sleep-wake cycle that results in sudden "sleep attacks" where a person falls asleep at unwanted or inappropriate times.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
LONDON: Age mellows all, says the famous saying. Traditionally it is thought that age leads to a steady deterioration of brain function.
However, a study has for the first time argued that older brains may take longer to process ever increasing amounts of knowledge, and this has often been misidentified as declining capacity.

Experts now say that accumulation of years of wisdom and increased knowledge about the world and surroundings slow down human brain function as they age, much like what happens to the hard drive of a computer which is full.
Older brains slow due to greater experience, rather than cognitive decline, the study now says.

The study, led by Dr Michael Ramscar of the University of Tuebingen takes a critical look at the measures that are usually thought to show that our cognitive abilities decline across adulthood. Instead of finding evidence of decline, the team discovered that most standard cognitive measures are flawed, confusing increased knowledge for declining capacity.

Dr Ramscar's team used computers, programmed to act as though they were humans, to read a certain amount each day, learning new things along the way.

When the researchers let a computer "read" a limited amount, its performance on cognitive tests resembled that of a young adult.

However, if the same computer was exposed data which represented a lifetime of experiences its performance looked like that of an older adult. Often it was slower, not because its processing capacity had declined, but because increased "experience" had caused the computer's database to grow, giving it more data to process, and that processing takes time.

"What does this finding mean for our understanding of our ageing minds, for example older adults' increased difficulties with word recall? These are traditionally thought to reveal how our memory for words deteriorates with age, but Big Data adds a twist to this idea," said Dr Ramscar.

"Technology now allows researchers to make quantitative estimates about the number of words an adult can be expected to learn across a lifetime, enabling the team to separate the challenge that increasing knowledge poses to memory from the actual performance of memory itself".

"Imagine someone who knows two people's birthdays and can recall them almost perfectly. Would you really want to say that person has a better memory than a person who knows the birthdays of 2000 people, but can only match the right person to the right birthday nine times out of ten?" asks Ramscar.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Increasing knowledge decreases human brain's capacity, scientists say - Times of India

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
LONDON: Age mellows all, says the famous saying. Traditionally it is thought that age leads to a steady deterioration of brain function. However, a study has for the first time argued that older brains may take longer to process ever increasing amounts of knowledge, and this has often been misidentified as declining capacity.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Can chickens REALLY be cleverer than a toddler? Studies suggest animals can master numeracy and basic engineering

Chicken's exhibit intelligent behaviour within just a few hours of hatching

It takes children until the age of four to accomplish similar feats

Study says we should realise that the birds have 'many hidden depths'

It is easy to dismiss them as bird brains but chickens may be cleverer than toddlers.

Studies show hens to be masters of a number of complex skills, including numeracy, self-control, and it is claimed, basic structural engineering.

Typically, it takes children until the age of four to accomplish some of these feats.

Christine Nicol, the Bristol University professor of animal welfare who reviewed 20 years of research on the topic, said it is wrong to think of chickens as being stupid.

Instead, we should realise that the birds have 'many hidden depths'.

Chicken's exhibit intelligent behaviour within just a few hours of hatching.

Newly born chicks are able to keep track of numbers up to five.

When given a choice between two groups of plastic eggs would almost invariable choose the bigger one, even when the decision was between two eggs or three.

They even pick out the larger number after the researchers tried to trick them by moving eggs from one group to another.

And their mathematical ability does not end there.
In her review paper The Intelligent Hen, Professor Nicol said the birds also seem to be born with an understanding of physics - and particularly structural engineering.

This is demonstrated by experiments in which they showed more interest in a diagram of an object that could actually be built than one that defied the laws of physics.

Experiments also show that very young chicks understand that an object that moves out of sight still exists.

In contrast, it takes babies until around a year old to grasp the key concept that out of sight does not mean out of mind.

Chickens also show basic empathy and can plan ahead and exhibit self-control until the time is right.
For instance, birds quickly learnt that if they waited longer to start eating food, they would be allowed access to it for longer.

In one study, 93 per cent of the hens tested showed self-control in this way.

Other studies have shown that children typically can't do this kind of mental manipulation until the age of four.

Further evidence of hens' intelligence comes from tests showing that at just two weeks' old, they can navigate using the sun, something that requires the creatures to take account of the height and position of the sun during the day.

The final example of their intelligence is research showing that, in common with commuters on the London Underground, chickens do not invest effort in making friends with strangers.

The professor, whose review was commissioned by free range egg firm the happy egg co, said: 'Chickens may not be about to make a significant mathematical, scientific or literary contribution to the world, but chickens have the capacity to master skills and develop abilities that a human child can take months and years to accomplish.

'It takes a chick just a few hours to develop its representational and numerical abilities in comparison to the months and years it takes a human child to do anything comparable.

'On the other hand, we shouldn't go too far. No chicken has yet written a review of human intelligence.'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Can chickens REALLY be cleverer than a toddler? Studies suggest animals can master numeracy and basic engineering

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Chicken's exhibit intelligent behaviour within just a few hours of hatching It takes children until the age of four to accomplish similar feats Study says we should realise that the birds have 'many hidden depths' It is easy to dismiss them as bird brains but chickens may be cleverer than toddlers.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
What if you could pop a pill that made you smarter? It sounds like a Hollywood movie plot, but a new systematic review suggests that the decades-long search for a safe and effective "smart drug" [ see box below] might have notched its first success. Researchers have found that modafinil boosts higher-order cognitive function without causing serious side effects. Modafinil, which has been prescribed in the U.S. since 1998 to treat sleep-related conditions such as narcolepsy and sleep apnea, heightens alertness much as caffeine does.

A number of studies have suggested that it could provide other cognitive benefits, but results were uneven. To clear up the confusion, researchers then at the University of Oxford analyzed 24 studies published between 1990 and 2014 that specifically looked at how modafinil affects cognition. In their review, which was published in 2015 in European Neuropsychopharmacology, they found that the methods used to evaluate modafinil strongly affected the outcomes. Research that looked at the drug's effects on the performance of simple tasks-such as pressing a particular button after seeing a certain color-did not detect many benefits.

Yet studies that asked participants to do complex and difficult tasks after taking modafinil or a placebo found that those who took the drug were more accurate, which suggests that it may affect "higher cognitive functions-mainly executive functions but also attention and learning," explains study co-author Ruairidh Battleday, now a medical doctor and Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley.

But don't run to the pharmacy just yet. Although many doctors very likely prescribe the drug off-label to help people concentrate-indeed, a 2018 study found that 22 percent of Americans had taken prescription brain-boosting drugs in the past year and that 4.1 percent had used modafinil-trials have not yet been done on modafinil's long-term effectiveness or safety. Studies of the drug have been "carried out in a controlled scientific environment and usually only looked at the effects of a single dose," explains neuropsychologist and review co-author Anna-Katharine Brem, then at Oxford-so no one yet knows whether it is safe for long-term use in healthy people. Nor is it known whether modafinil might lose its edge with repeated use, a phenomenon familiar to many coffee drinkers.

Side effects are another important consideration. Modafinil has been shown to cause insomnia, headache and stomachache in select users, and some research suggests it could be addictive. Although these kinds of problems may be worth enduring for a drug that treats an illness, "if you don't have a medical condition, the risks versus benefits change dramatically," says Sharon Morein-Zamir, a psychologist at the University of Cambridge, who studies ethical considerations associated with the use of cognition-enhancing drugs. "For some the benefits will likely outweigh risks, at least some of the time," she says, whereas "for others this may not be the case." A pill you take to ace an exam, for instance, won't do you much good if it also causes a grueling stomachache.

Should Everyone Take Cognition-Enhancing Drugs?

As is the case with all medications, cognition-enhancing drugs affect different people in various ways. Setting aside the ethical questions about brain boosters, here is a look at groups who may deserve special consideration.

CHILDREN AND TEENS: Cognition-enhancing drugs could present unique risks to the developing brain. Several clinical trials found modafinil to be safe when given to children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), but the trials lasted only a few months, making it difficult to ascertain the potential effects of long-term use. In a 2014 review article examining the biochemical effects of modafinil and other common "smart drugs," researchers at the University of Delaware and Drexel University raised concerns that the use of these drugs could affect the developing brain's ability to adapt to new situations and might increase the risk for addictive behaviors.

PEOPLE WITH LOWER IQs: Research suggests that cognition-enhancing drugs offer the greatest performance boost among individuals with low-to-average intelligence. These findings led University of Oxford researchers to propose in a 2014 paper that if such drugs were selectively given to people who need them most, many ethical concerns about the drugs' use would be alleviated, and they might even reduce opportunity inequality.

SENIORS: Some studies suggest that older adults may not derive much benefit from cognition-enhancing drugs. One study found that methylphenidate (Ritalin), which boosts working memory and attention in young adults, had no effect on performance among healthy elderly volunteers who were asked to perform various cognitive tasks. - M.W.M.

The Search for an Intelligence Drug

People have been searching for ways to boost their brainpower perhaps for all of history. In the past century scientific efforts have revealed a few promising chemicals, but only modafinil has passed rigorous tests of cognitive enhancement.

CAFFEINE: One of the oldest and most popular stimulants. People recognized caffeine's stimulant properties hundreds (perhaps thousands) of years ago. It can enhance alertness and attention; however, effects are short-lived, and tolerance builds up quickly.

NICOTINE: Also a stimulant, used for hundreds of years for a range of medicinal purposes. It is very addictive and has many dangerous side effects.

AMPHETAMINE (BENZEDRINE, ADDERALL): First synthesized in 1887. Benzedrine was the first drug to treat hyperactivity in children. Amphetamine can enhance attention and memory by increasing levels of norepinephrine and dopamine in the brain, but the compound can be addictive and comes with a range of side effects, including hyperactivity, loss of appetite, disturbed sleep, even psychosis.

METHYLPHENIDATE (RITALIN): First marketed in 1954 and prescribed in the 1960s for treating hyperactivity. It became popular for ADHD in the 1990s. As with amphetamine, it can improve memory and focus for those with ADHD, but it is also used off-label as a study and work aid. Some individuals build up a tolerance to Ritalin over time.

ACETYLCHOLINESTERASE INHIBITOR (ARICEPT): Approved to treat Alzheimer's disease in the 1990s. It has been shown in some studies to enhance memory and attention in healthy individuals.

MODAFINIL: Originally used to treat narcolepsy. It can also enhance cognitive function, especially when completing difficult tasks. Experts are not quite sure how it works or what long-term effects would look like.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
What if you could pop a pill that made you smarter? It sounds like a Hollywood movie plot, but a new systematic review suggests that the decades-long search for a safe and effective "smart drug" [ see box below] might have notched its first success.

# data[].attributes.body
http://www.success.com/blog/5-smart-ways-to-increase-your-iq-because-its-not-set-in-genetic-stone

# data[].attributes.headline
scientists implant human brain cells in mice to create "super mouse"

# data[].attributes.subject
scientists implant human brain cells in mice to create "super mouse"

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.entities[].name
Human Cognition | PSYCHOLOGY & BRAIN SCIENCE VIDEO

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.entities[].name
University of Utah Neuroscience Initiative

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.entities[].name
Jaclyn Glenn @JaclynGlenn Cara Santa Maria

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Scientists Implant Human Brain Cells In Mice To Create ‘Supermouse’

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Scientists from the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York have created a "supermouse." The new creation was designed by implanting human brain cells in a normal mouse. Researchers are hoping to better understand human brain diseases by studying them in living mouse brains. What are your thoughts on this story?

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.mnsu.edu/comdis/kuster/journal/hallen/monster.htmlhttps://www.mnsu.edu/comdis/kuster/journal/hallen/monster.html

# data[].attributes.body
http://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/this-how-you-can-raise-your-and-improve-your-memory.htmlhttp://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/this-how-you-can-raise-your-and-improve-your-memory.html

# data[].attributes.body
http://www.menshealth.co.uk/healthy/brain-training/seven-ways-to-improve-your-iqhttp://www.menshealth.co.uk/healthy/brain-training/seven-ways-to-improve-your-iq

# data[].attributes.body
http://www.cognitiveenhancementtherapy.com/http://www.cognitiveenhancementtherapy.com/

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dVv5RMwzuo

# data[].attributes.body
An experiment of how the teen brain is affected by drugs.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
Partnership for Drug-Free Kids - Where Families Find Answers

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
There's a reason that teenagers act the way they do. Understanding the brain science behind teenage behavior can help parents better prepare their kids to avoid drugs and alcohol.

Have you ever looked at your teenager child and wondered: "Why do you do that?"

From mood swings to risk taking, "normal teenage behavior" can appear to be anything but normal to parents and other adults. However, research reveals that patterns of brain development during these formative years play a significant role in shaping your teen's personality and actions. In other words, there's a biological reason teens act the way they do.

Scientists have learned that it takes a brain about 25 years to fully develop. To some degree, you can consider the teen brain still on "training wheels" - it's not yet able to perform at optimal adult levels. A huge burst of development happens during adolescence, and that burst can explain a lot of unpredictable - and sometimes risky - teen behavior.

The Adolescent Brain and the Behavior it Causes

From early adolescence through the mid-20s, the brain develops somewhat unevenly, from back to front. This may help explain teens' endearingly quirky behavior, but it also makes them prone to risk-taking.

You may have noticed some of these effects:

Difficulty holding back or controlling emotions

A preference for physical activity

A preference for high-excitement and low-effort activities (video games, sex, drugs, rock'n'roll)

Poor planning and judgement; rarely thinking of negative consequences

More risky, impulsive behaviors, including experimenting with drugs and alcohol

These parts are shouting but...

...this part is not quite ready to referee.

Slide marker to see MRI images showing brain maturation from ages 5 to 20¹

Memory

The memory center of the brain (the hippocampus) in teens who have already abused alcohol is 10% smaller than normal, and they have lower memory scores. ¹

Pleasure

Under the influence, the brain's reward circuits (the dopamine system) get thrown out of whack. This causes a teen to feel in a funk when not under the infuence -- and going back for more only makes things worse.

Coping and life-skills

While teens are undergoing a massive growth spurt, using drugs and alcohol may disrupt their brain development in unhealthy ways, making it harder for them to cope with social situations and the normal pressures of life.

The parts of the adolescent brain that develop first are those that control physical activity, emotion and motivation, in the back of the brain in the cerebellum, amygdala, and nucleus accumbens respectively.

However, the part of the brain that controls reasoning and impulses - known as the prefrontal cortex - is near the front of the brain and, therefore, develops last. This part of the brain does not fully mature until the age of 25.

The staggered development of certain parts of the brain can have noticeable effects on adolescent behavior. You may have noticed some of these in your teen:

Difficulty holding back or controlling emotions

A preference for high-excitement and low-effort activities (this is where the classic mantra of "sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll" comes from)

Poor planning and judgment (such as rarely thinking of negative consequences)

More risky, impulsive behaviors (including experimenting with drugs and alcohol)

The development of the adolescent brain and behavior are closely linked. The prefrontal cortex, which could be called the 'voice of reason' in the teen brain, isn't as influential as those parts that place a higher emphasis on emotion, excitement and short-term reward. In an instant, hormones can shift your teen's emotions into overdrive, leading to unpredictable - and sometimes risky - actions. Unfortunately, developing brains are generally more prone to damage. This means that experimentation with drugs and alcohol can have lasting, harmful effects on your teen's health.

The Effects of Drugs on the Teen Brain

Finding ways to satisfy needs and desires is part of life. It's one of the many skills being fine-tuned during the teen years. When a teen takes drugs in order to feel good, it interferes with the body's natural ability to do so. Here's how drugs affect the brain:

The brain is made up of billions of nerve cells. Nerves control everything from when the heart beats to what your teen feels, thinks and does. They do this by sending electrical signals throughout the body. The signals get passed from nerve to nerve by chemical messengers called neurotransmitters.

For example, some of the signals that neurotransmitters send cause a feeling of satisfaction or pleasure. These natural rewards are the body's way of making sure we look for more of what makes us feel good. (For instance, when we eat something tasty, neurotransmitters tell us we feel good. Seeking more of this pleasure helps to ensure we don't starve.) The main neurotransmitter of the "feel-good" message is called dopamine.

Drugs overload the body with dopamine - in other words, they cause the reward system to send too many "feel-good" signals. In response, the body's brain systems try to right the balance by letting fewer of the "feel-good" signals through. As time goes on, the body needs more of the drug to feel the same high as before. This effect is known as tolerance, and it can be especially dangerous in the cases of drugs like heroin and cocaine.

The effects of drugs on the brain don't just end when the drug wears off. When a person stops taking a drug, dopamine levels remain low for some time. He or she may feel down, or flat, and unable to feel regular pleasures in life. The brain will eventually restore the dopamine balance by itself, but it takes time - anywhere from hours, to days, or even months, depending on the drug, the length and amount of use, and the person.

Because teenagers have an over-active impulse to seek pleasure and less ability to consider the consequences, they are especially vulnerable when it comes to the temptations of drugs and alcohol. And because the internal reward systems are still being developed, a teen's ability to bounce back to normal after using drugs may be compromised due to how drugs affect the brain.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Brain Development, Teen Behavior and Preventing Drug Use

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
There's a reason that teenagers act the way they do. Understanding the brain science behind teenage behavior can help parents better prepare their kids to avoid drugs and alcohol. Have you ever looked at your teenager child and wondered: "Why do you do that?"

# data[].attributes.headline
5 ways technology is reducing your overall intelligence

# data[].attributes.subject
5 ways technology is reducing your overall intelligence

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
You'd be the first to say technology has enhanced your life. How many days did you work from home last year? What about all that formerly wasted time waiting for friends to arrive at the bar; now, you happily check your email. Too bad the many smart gadgets in your life also cast a dark shadow. They are hurting your brain. Seriously. Physically.

Let's begin with the fact that using a GPS device most probably is affecting development in your hippocampus. Researchers at McGill University explained how there are two major ways of navigating through the world. A spatial navigation method uses landmarks and visual cues to essentially create mental maps that help you understand both where you are now and how you can get to where you want to go. A stimulus-response navigation method is traveling by memorized or provided directions, like the kind given you by a GPS.

After taking functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of two groups of older adults - GPS-users and non-GPS users - the researchers found those who navigated spatially had higher activity and a higher volume of gray matter in the hippocampus when compared to the GPS-users. Plus, they performed better on a test used to diagnose mild cognitive impairment. The study did not prove the lower gray matter directly resulted from overuse of a GPS; however, taken together with the famous study of London cab drivers, it makes sense to turn off the GPS.

Another way you're being made dumb? Searching for answers on the Internet or by any other technological device is just too easy. The " generation effect " refers to the discovery that we better understand and remember answers we have generated for ourselves in comparison to those answers we have simply read. If you solve a math problem, for example, you will have better recall of that answer later than if it is merely provided for you (on your iPad screen or by way of a calculator). Although scientists don't understand the underlying reasons entirely, many believe that reading an answer requires less cognitive work than generating one, and this accounts for the effect. No pain, no gain, essentially. Well, isn't the Internet just one big pre-prepared answer to all of your (auto-corrected) questions? Bingo.

Playing video games, staring at a TV, updating your Facebook page, ordering food - technology is helping you become much less active, which in turn harms your body and your precious brain. Exercise has been shown to make it easier for the brain to grow new neuronal connections. The Internet may boost interconnectivity in some areas of your brain, but your generally static lifestyle is, at the same time, upping the difficulty factor for your brain to create these connections. Because you generally move around less than you would if you weren't so entranced by tech, you are more rarely boosting your heart rate and so you also have less oxygen pumping to your brain. Exercise has been shown to protect against Alzheimer's disease. Are you exercising while checking out YouTube?

Technology does not give without taking. As old and boring as that sounds, it's the simple truth. After reviewing the literature, Patricia Greenfield, a developmental psychologist, found that any screen-based technology we use, including video games, will certainly enhance our visual-spatial skills - in beneficial and highly sophisticated ways - but only at the expense of developing other mental abilities, including critical thinking, knowledge acquisition, and imagination. Her article published in Science concluded that generally our contemporary technologies have weakened our capacity for deep processing, which can be developed through reading an extended text. Note to self: Pick up a freakin' book!

Your online behavior has shaped your brain in ways you cannot easily escape. Because neurons and synapses adapt to circumstances, your time spent interacting with a computer means you are remodeling your brain. What do you do most of the time online? You skim and hop from link to link, check your email while waiting for a page to load - you multitask. Unfortunately, all this multitasking means you've created an easily distracted brain. As Nicholas Carr recounts, researchers at Stanford gave a series of cognitive tests to one group of heavy media multitaskers and another group of light media multitaskers. The heavy multitaskers were found to be more easily distracted, less able to control their working memory, and less able to concentrate on a task when compared to the light multitaskers. Finding it hard to read a whole book, sit through a whole movie? Join the parade; it's happening to everyone.

None of this damage is permanent, if you want your brain to be another kind of brain, you simply have to spend more time doing something other than jabbing the tech needle directly into the vein. Yet, in all likelihood, as time passes there will only be more technologies and entertainments on which you will be able to spend your time. The one thing you need to remember is this: Along with the new games, you do not get more time. Spend what you've got wisely.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
5 Ways Technology Is Ruining Your Intelligence

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
You'd be the first to say technology has enhanced your life. How many days did you work from home last year? What about all that formerly wasted time waiting for friends to arrive at the bar; now, you happily check your email. Too bad the many smart gadgets in your life also cast a dark shadow.

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dVv5RMwzuo

# data[].attributes.body
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/02/why-cognitive-enhancement-is-in-your-future-and-your-past/252566/http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/02/why-cognitive-enhancement-is-in-your-future-and-your-past/252566/

# data[].attributes.body
http://www.sophimania.pe/tecnologia/robotica-e-inteligencia-artificial/hito-en-inteligencia-artificial-una-computadora-logra-hacerse-pasar-por-humano-y-pasar-el-test-de-turing-video/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.entities[].name
HQ Binaural Beats & Isochronic Tones for Self Growth & Mind Expansion

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.entities[].name
HQ Binaural Beats & Isochronic Tones for Self Growth & Mind Expansion This

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.authors[].name
Brainwave Hub ● HQ Binaural Beats & Isochronic Tones for Self Growth & Mind Expansion

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
IQ Increase - Improve Cognitive Processing With Brainwave Entrainment - Intelligence Booster

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
IQ Increase - Improve Cognitive Processing With Brainwave Entrainment (Binaural Beats & Isochronic Tones) - Intelligence Booster Subscribe and stay up to date on all the latest state-of-the-art brainwave audios: https://www.youtube.com/user/BINAURALBRAINWAVE?sub_confirmation=1 This meditation music features embedded isochronic tones / binaural beats, and has been carefully formulated to help provide a solid foundation to your meditation practice.

# data[].attributes.headline
Can Physical Activities Improve Fluid Intelligence.

# data[].attributes.subject
Can Physical Activities Improve Fluid Intelligence.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Researchers at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) have found more evidence that physical activity is beneficial for brain health and cognition. The findings were published December 2, 2013 online in Behavioural Brain Research. The new study suggests that certain hormones, which are increased during exercise, may help improve memory.

For this study, the researchers recruited healthy young adults and measured blood hormone levels. Then they tested each individual's performance on a recognition memory task along with his or her level of aerobic fitness. The researchers were able to correlate blood hormone levels with aerobic fitness, and identify positive effects on memory function.

Hormones called "growth factors" are released when we exercise and have been directly linked to improved brain health. The hippocampus, a region of the brain crucial for learning and memory, is thought to benefit directly from these hormones.

In another study released in October 2013, Dr. Bruce Spiegelman of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School reported that a molecule called FNDC5 and its byproduct, irisin, become elevated in the brain through endurance exercise.

Spiegelman and his team also found that raising levels of irisin in the circulation caused the molecule to cross the blood brain barrier, which then increased the expression of BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor) and activated genes involved in cognition. I wrote a Psychology Today blog post about this study titled, " Scientists Discover Why Exercise Makes You Smarter."

Increasing BDNF has long been known to stimulate neurogenesis (the growth of new neurons) in anyone who does regular aerobic exercise. On pages 97-98 of The Athlete's Way I write: "According to Ronald Duman, Ph.D. at Yale University, chronic stress, anxiety, and depression have been linked to atrophy or loss of neurons, and exercise has been linked to the growth of new neurons. The primary hormone triggered during the degeneration of neurons seems to be cortisol, which appears to shrink the hippocampus."

The new BUSM study honed in on three specific growth factors: brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), and insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1), which have been implicated in the link between exercise and improved hippocampal function.

According to the researchers, BDNF and aerobic fitness predicted improved memory. A low level of fitness was reflected in lower BDNF levels and was linked to lower memory accuracy. Those with a high level of fitness had increased resting BDNF levels had better recognition memory.

"We will be continuing this line of research by testing if memory improves following an exercise training program in both young and geriatric adults, and by adding brain imaging techniques," explained Karin Schon, PhD, assistant professor of anatomy and neurobiology at BUSM, who served as the study's principal investigator.
The Link Between Non-Academic Activities and Fluid Intelligence
Although, there is some controversy and debate on the best ways to improve fluid intelligence, common sense would suggest that non-academic pursuits-including aerobic exercise-are key to improving not only cognition but someone's long-term success in life. I have written a wide range of Psychology Today blog posts that link-physical activity, playing a musical instrument, making art, improving motor skills, and getting a good night's sleep -with optimizing brain function and improving cognitive abilities.

In another new study released on December 11, 2013, Massachusetts Institute of Technology neuroscientists working with education researchers at Harvard University and Brown University found that students at academically high-performing schools did not necessarily have improved fluid intelligence.

Fluid intelligence is the capacity to think logically and solve problems in novel situations, independent of acquired knowledge. Fluid intelligence involves the ability to identify patterns and relationships that underpin novel problems and to extrapolate these findings using logic.

On the other hand, crystallized intelligence is the ability to utilize skills, knowledge, and experience. Crystallized intelligence represents your lifetime of intellectual achievement, as demonstrated largely through one's vocabulary and general explicit knowledge that could be measured on a standardized test.

Interestingly, schools where students have had the highest gains on test scores do not show similar gains in fluid intelligence, according to the new study. In fact, those schools with high scores on crystallized intelligence tests had almost no effect on students' performance on tests of fluid intelligence skills, such as working memory capacity, speed of information processing, and ability to solve abstract problems.

The researchers found that educational practices designed to raise knowledge and boost test scores do not improve fluid intelligence. "It doesn't seem like you get these skills for free in the way that you might hope, just by doing a lot of studying and being a good student," says John Gabrieli, who is a neuroscientist and professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT.

Gabrieli and his team are curious to discover how the healthy brain supports human capacities, such as hippocampal support for explicit memory, amygdala support for emotional memory, and prefrontal cortical support for working memory. They also study how life experience alters functional brain organization via brain plasticity. Their goal is to understand principles of brain organization that are consistent across individuals, and those that vary across people due to age, personality, and other dimensions of individuality.

This December 2013 study, which was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and National Institutes of Health, grew out of a larger effort to look beyond standardized tests to discover other factors that can predict long-term success for students. "As we started that study, it struck us that there's been surprisingly little evaluation of different kinds of cognitive abilities and how they relate to educational outcomes," Gabrieli says.

To evaluate school quality, states require students to take standardized tests; in many cases, passing those tests is necessary to receive a high-school diploma. These high-stakes tests have also been shown to predict students' future educational attainment and adult employment and income. Such tests are designed to measure the crystallized intelligence, knowledge, and skills that students have acquired in school.

"Our original question was this: If you have a school that's effectively helping kids from lower socioeconomic environments by moving up their scores and improving their chances to go to college, then are those changes accompanied by gains in additional cognitive skills?" says Gabrieli.

The researchers calculated how much of the variation in MCAS scores was due to the school that students attended. For MCAS scores in English, schools accounted for 24 percent of the variation, and they accounted for 34 percent of the math MCAS variation. However, the schools accounted for very little of the variation in fluid cognitive skills-less than 3 percent for all three skills combined.

In one example of a test of fluid reasoning, students were asked to choose which of six pictures completed the missing pieces of a puzzle-a task requiring integration of information such as shape, pattern, and orientation. "It's not always clear what dimensions you have to pay attention to get the problem correct. That's why we call it fluid, because it's the application of reasoning skills in novel contexts," says Amy Finn, an MIT postdoc and lead author of the paper.
Conclusion: Focus on Boosting Both Crystallized and Fluid Intelligence
"What's nice about this study is it seems to narrow down the possibilities of what educational interventions are achieving," says Daniel Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia who was not part of the research team. "We're usually primarily concerned with outcomes in schools, but the underlying mechanisms are also important."

Gabrieli concludes, "Schools can improve crystallized abilities, and now it might be a priority to see if there are some methods for enhancing the fluid ones as well." He hopes these findings will encourage educators and policymakers to consider adding practices that enhance a broad range of cognitive skills. Although many studies have shown that students' fluid cognitive skills influence overall academic performance and life success, these skills are seldom explicitly taught.

The researchers plan to continue tracking these students, who are now in 10th grade, to see how their academic performance and other life outcomes evolve. The researchers have also begun a new study of high school seniors to track how their standardized test scores and cognitive abilities influence their rates of college attendance and graduation.

Researchers around the world are trying to put the puzzle pieces together on the best ways to maintain and improve cognitive function throughout an individual's lifespan. Some studies have found that educational programs that focus on improving memory, attention, executive function, and inductive reasoning can boost fluid intelligence, but there is heated debate over what programs are consistently effective.

Please stay tuned for future studies which will most likely confirm more specifics on non-academic pursuits that can improve fluid intelligence throughout a lifespan.

If you'd like to read more on this topic, check out my Psychology Today blog posts:
Follow me on Twitter @ckbergland for updates on The Athlete's Way blog posts.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Can Physical Activities Improve Fluid Intelligence?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Researchers at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) have found more evidence that physical activity is beneficial for brain health and cognition. The findings were published December 2, 2013 online in Behavioural Brain Research. The new study suggests that certain hormones, which are increased during exercise, may help improve memory.

# data[].attributes.body
https://medium.com/@bryan_johnson/kernels-quest-to-enhance-human-intelligence-7da5e16fa16c#.cphxwfqtthttps://medium.com/@bryan_johnson/kernels-quest-to-enhance-human-intelligence-7da5e16fa16c#.cphxwfqtt

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Chimp vs Human! | Memory Test | BBC Earth

# data[].attributes.body
https://actualidad.rt.com/actualidad/view/97911-experimentos-psicologicos-sorprendentes-seres-humanos

# data[].attributes.headline
how to increase your intelligence in five days. Experimented in college students

# data[].attributes.subject
how to increase your intelligence in five days. Experimented in college students

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.entities[].name
Increase Your Intelligence & Improve Your Brain Power

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How To Easily Increase Your IQ In Only Five Minutes A Day

# data[].attributes.body
Improving Intelligence Analisys

http://fas.org/irp/offdocs/int012.html

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In the first months after her surgery, shopping for groceries was infuriating. Standing in the supermarket aisle, Vicki would look at an item on the shelf and know that she wanted to place it in her trolley - but she couldn't. "I'd reach with my right for the thing I wanted, but the left would come in and they'd kind of fight," she says. "Almost like repelling magnets." Picking out food for the week was a two-, sometimes three-hour ordeal. Getting dressed posed a similar challenge: Vicki couldn't reconcile what she wanted to put on with what her hands were doing. Sometimes she ended up wearing three outfits at once. "I'd have to dump all the clothes on the bed, catch my breath and start again."

In one crucial way, however, Vicki was better than her pre-surgery self. She was no longer racked by epileptic seizures that were so severe they had made her life close to unbearable. She once collapsed onto the bar of an old-fashioned oven, burning and scarring her back. "I really just couldn't function," she says. When, in 1978, her neurologist told her about a radical but dangerous surgery that might help, she barely hesitated. If the worst were to happen, she knew that her parents would take care of her young daughter. "But of course I worried," she says. "When you get your brain split, it doesn't grow back together."

In June 1979, in a procedure that lasted nearly 10 hours, doctors created a firebreak to contain Vicki's seizures by slicing through her corpus callosum, the bundle of neuronal fibres connecting the two sides of her brain. This drastic procedure, called a corpus callosotomy, disconnects the two sides of the neocortex, the home of language, conscious thought and movement control. Vicki's supermarket predicament was the consequence of a brain that behaved in some ways as if it were two separate minds.

After about a year, Vicki's difficulties abated. "I could get things together," she says. For the most part she was herself: slicing vegetables, tying her shoe laces, playing cards, even waterskiing.

But what Vicki could never have known was that her surgery would turn her into an accidental superstar of neuroscience. She is one of fewer than a dozen 'split-brain' patients, whose brains and behaviours have been subject to countless hours of experiments, hundreds of scientific papers, and references in just about every psychology textbook of the past generation. And now their numbers are dwindling.

Through studies of this group, neuroscientists now know that the healthy brain can look like two markedly different machines, cabled together and exchanging a torrent of data. But when the primary cable is severed, information - a word, an object, a picture - presented to one hemisphere goes unnoticed in the other. Michael Gazzaniga, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the godfather of modern split-brain science, says that even after working with these patients for five decades, he still finds it thrilling to observe the disconnection effects first-hand. "You see a split-brain patient just doing a standard thing - you show him an image and he can't say what it is. But he can pull that same object out of a grab-bag," Gazzaniga says. "Your heart just races!"

Work with the patients has teased out differences between the two hemispheres, revealing, for instance, that the left side usually leads the way for speech and language computation, and the right specializes in visual-spatial processing and facial recognition. "The split work really showed that the two hemispheres are both very competent at most things, but provide us with two different snapshots of the world," says Richard Ivry, director of the Institute of Cognitive and Brain Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. The idea of dichotomous consciousness captivated the public, and was greatly exaggerated in the notion of the 'creative right brain'. But further testing with split-brain patients gave a more-nuanced picture. The brain isn't like a computer, with specific sections of hardware charged with specific tasks. It's more like a network of computers connected by very big, busy broadband cables. The connectivity between active brain regions is turning out to be just as important, if not more so, than the operation of the distinct parts. "With split-brain patients, you can see the impact of disconnecting a huge portion of that network, but without damage to any particular modules," says Michael Miller, a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

David Roberts, head of neurosurgery at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire, sees an important lesson in split-brain research. He operated on some of the cohort members, and has worked closely with Gazzaniga. "In medical school, and science in general, there is so much emphasis on large numbers, labs, diagnostics and statistical significance," Roberts says - all crucial when, say, evaluating a new drug. But the split-brain cohort brought home to him how much can be gleaned from a single case. "I came to learn that one individual, studied well, and thoughtfully, might enable you to draw conclusions that apply to the entire human species," he says.

Today, the split-brain patients are getting on in years; a few have died, one has had a stroke and age in general has made them all less fit for what can be taxing research sessions of sitting, staring and concentrating. The surgery, already quite rare, has been replaced by drug treatments and less drastic surgical procedures. Meanwhile, imaging technologies have become the preferred way to look at brain function, as scientists can simply watch which areas of the brain are active during a task.

But to Miller, Ivry, Gazzaniga and others, split-brain patients remain an invaluable resource. Imaging tools can confirm, for example, that the left hemisphere is more active than the right when processing language. But this is dramatically embodied in a split-brain patient, who may not be able to read aloud a word such as 'pan' when it's presented to the right hemisphere, but can point to the appropriate drawing. "That gives you a sense of the right hemisphere's ability to read, even if it can't access the motor system to produce speech," Ivry says. "Imaging is very good for telling you where something happens," he adds, "whereas patient work can tell you how something happens."

A cable, cut

Severing the corpus callosum was first used as a treatment for severe epilepsy in the 1940s, on a group of 26 people in Rochester, New York. The aim was to limit the electrical storm of the seizure to one side of the brain. At first, it didn't seem to work. But in 1962, one patient showed significant improvement. Although the procedure never became a favoured treatment strategy - it's invasive, risky, and drugs can ease symptoms in many people - in the decades since it nevertheless became a technique of last resort for treating intractable epilepsy.

To Roger Sperry, then a neurobiologist and neuropsychologist at the California Institute of Technology, and Gazzaniga, a graduate student in Sperry's lab, split-brain patients presented a unique opportunity to explore the lateralized nature of the human brain. At the time, opinion on the matter was itself divided. Researchers who studied the first split-brain patients in the 1940s had concluded that the separation didn't noticeably affect thought or behaviour. (Gazzaniga and others suspect that these early sections were incomplete, which might also explain why they didn't help the seizures.) Conversely, studies conducted by Sperry and colleagues in the 1950s revealed greatly altered brain function in animals that had undergone callosal sections. Sperry and Gazzaniga became obsessed with this inconsistency, and saw in the split-brain patients a way to find answers.

The duo's first patient was a man known as W. J., a former Second World War paratrooper who had started having seizures after a German soldier clocked him in the head with the butt of a rifle. In 1962, after W.J.'s operation, Gazzaniga ran an experiment in which he asked W.J. to press a button whenever he saw an image. Researchers would then flash images of letters, light bursts and other stimuli to his left or right field of view. Because the left field of view is processed by the right hemisphere and vice versa, flashing images quickly to one side or the other delivers the information solely to the intended hemisphere (see 'Of two minds').

For stimuli delivered to the left hemisphere, W.J. showed no hang-ups; he simply pressed the button and told the scientists what he saw. With the right hemisphere, W.J. said he saw nothing, yet his left hand kept pressing the button every time an image appeared. "The left and right didn't know what the other was doing," says Gazzaniga. It was a paradigm-blasting discovery showing that the brain is more divided than anyone had predicted.

Suddenly, the race was on to delve into the world of lateralized function. But finding more patients to study proved difficult. Gazzaniga estimates that at least 100 patients, and possibly many more, received a corpus callosotomy. But individuals considered for the operation tend to have other significant developmental or cognitive problems; only a few have super-clean cuts and are neurologically healthy enough to be useful to researchers. For a while, Sperry, Gazzaniga and their colleagues didn't know if there was ever going to be anyone else like W.J..

But after contacting neurosurgeons, partnering with epilepsy centres and assessing many potential patients, they were able to identify a few suitable people in California, then a cluster from the eastern part of the United States, including Vicki. Through the 1970s and the early 1980s, split-brain research expanded, and neuroscientists became particularly interested in the capabilities of the right hemisphere - the one conventionally believed to be incapable of processing language and producing speech.

Gazzaniga can tick through the names of his "endlessly patient patients" with the ease of a proud grandparent doing a roll call of grandchildren - W.J., A.A., R.Y., L.B., N.G.. For medical confidentiality, they are known in the literature by initials only. (Vicki agreed to be identified in this article, provided that her last name and hometown were not published.)

On stage last May, delivering a keynote address at the Society of Neurological Surgeons' annual meeting in Portland, Oregon, Gazzaniga showed a few grainy film clips from a 1976 experiment with patient P.S., who was only 13 or 14 at the time. The scientists wanted to see his response if only his right hemisphere saw written words.

In Gazzaniga's video, the boy is asked: who is your favourite girlfriend, with the word girlfriend flashed only to the right hemisphere. As predicted, the boy can't respond verbally. He shrugs and shakes his head, indicating that he doesn't see any word, as had been the case with W.J.. But then he giggles. It's one of those tell-tale teen giggles - a soundtrack to a blush. His right hemisphere has seen the message, but the verbal left-hemisphere remains unaware. Then, using his left hand, the boy slowly selects three Scrabble tiles from the assortment in front of him. He lines them up to spell L-I-Z: the name, we can safely assume, of the cute girl in his class. "That told us that he was capable of language comprehension in the right hemisphere," Gazzaniga later told me. "He was one of the first confirmation cases that you could get bilateral language - he could answer queries using language from either side."

The implications of these early observations were "huge", says Miller. They showed that "the right hemisphere is experiencing its own aspect of the world that it can no longer express, except through gestures and control of the left hand". A few years later, the researchers found that Vicki also had a right-hemisphere capacity for speech. Full callosotomy, it turned out, resulted in some universal disconnections, but also affected individuals very differently.

In 1981, Sperry was awarded a share of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the split-brain discoveries. ("He deserved it," Gazzaniga says.) Sperry died in 1994, but by that point, Gazzaniga was leading the charge. By the turn of the century, he and other split-brain investigators had turned their attention to another mystery: despite the dramatic effects of callosotomy, W.J. and later patients never reported feeling anything less than whole. As Gazzaniga wrote many times: the hemispheres didn't miss each other.

M. GAZZANIGA

Gazzaniga developed what he calls the interpreter theory to explain why people - including split-brain patients - have a unified sense of self and mental life. It grew out of tasks in which he asked a split-brain person to explain in words, which uses the left hemisphere, an action that had been directed to and carried out only by the right one. "The left hemisphere made up a post hoc answer that fit the situation." In one of Gazzaniga's favourite examples, he flashed the word 'smile' to a patient's right hemisphere and the word 'face' to the left hemisphere, and asked the patient to draw what he'd seen. "His right hand drew a smiling face," Gazzaniga recalled. "'Why did you do that?' I asked. He said, 'What do you want, a sad face? Who wants a sad face around?'." The left-brain interpreter, Gazzaniga says, is what everyone uses to seek explanations for events, triage the barrage of incoming information and construct narratives that help to make sense of the world.

The split-brain studies constitute "an incredible body of work", said Robert Breeze, a neurosurgeon at the University of Colorado Hospital in Aurora, after listening to Gazzaniga's lecture last year. But Breeze, like many other neuroscientists, sees split-brain research as outdated. "Now we have technologies that enable us to see these things" - tools such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) that show the whereabouts of brain function in great detail.

Miller, however, disagrees. "These kinds of patients can tell us things that fMRI can never tell us," he says.

Subject of interest

Seated at a small, oval dining-room table, Vicki faces a laptop propped up on a stand, and a console with a few large red and green buttons. David Turk, a psychologist at the University of Aberdeen, UK, has flown in for the week to run a series of experiments.

Vicki's grey-white hair is pulled back in a ponytail. She wears simple white sneakers and, despite the autumn chill, shorts. She doesn't want to get too warm: when that happens she can get drowsy and lose focus, which can wreck a whole day of research.

During a break, Vicki fetches an old photo album. In one picture, taken soon after her surgery, she is sitting up in the hospital bed. Her hair is starting to grow back as black stubble and she and her daughter have wide smiles. Another page of the album has a slightly faded printout of a 1981 paper from The Journal of Neuroscience glued into it: the first published report involving data gleaned from Vicki, in which researchers describe how she, like P.S., had some capacity for language in her right hemisphere.

"I have a hard time saying it's all over."

When pressed to share the most difficult aspect of her life in science, the perpetually upbeat Vicki says that it would have to be an apparatus called the dual Purkinje eye tracker. This medieval-looking device requires the wearer to bite down on a bar to help keep the head still so that researchers can present an image to just the left or right field of view. It is quite possible that Vicki has spent more of her waking hours biting down on one of those bars than anyone else on the planet.

Soon, it is time to get back to work. Turk uses some two-sided tape to affix a pair of three-dimensional glasses onto the front of Vicki's thin, gold-rimmed bifocals. The experiment he is running aims to separate the role of the corpus callosum in visual processing from that of deeper, 'subcortical' connections unaffected by the callosotomy. Focusing on the centre of the screen, Vicki is told to watch as the picture slowly switches between a house and different faces - and to press the button every time she sees the image change. Adjusting her seat, she looks down the bridge of her nose at the screen and tells Turk that she's ready to begin.

Deep connections

Other researchers are studying the role of subcortical communication in the coordinated movements of the hands. Split-brain patients have little difficulty with 'bimanual' tasks, and Vicki and at least one other patient are able to drive a car. In 2000, a team led by Liz Franz at the University of Otago in New Zealand asked split-brain patients to carry out both familiar and new bimanual tasks. A patient who was an experienced fisherman, they found, could pantomime tying a fishing line, but not the unfamiliar task of threading a needle. Franz concluded that well-practised bimanual skills are coordinated at the subcortical level, so split-brain people are able to smoothly choreograph both hands.

Miller and Gazzaniga have also started to study the right hemisphere's role in moral reasoning. It is the kind of higher-level function for which the left hemisphere was assumed to be king. But in the past few years, imaging studies have shown that the right hemisphere is heavily involved in the processing of others' emotions, intentions and beliefs - what many scientists have come to understand as the 'theory of mind'. To Miller, the field of enquiry perfectly illustrates the value of split-brain studies because answers can't be found by way of imaging tools alone.

In work that began in 2009, the researchers presented two split-brain patients with a series of stories, each of which involved either accidental or intentional harm. The aim was to find out whether the patients felt that someone who intends to poison his boss but fails because he mistakes sugar for rat poison, is on equal moral ground with someone who accidentally kills his boss by mistaking rat poison for sugar. (Most people conclude that the former is more morally reprehensible.) The researchers read the stories aloud, which meant that the input was directed to the left hemisphere, and asked for verbal responses, so that the left hemisphere, guided by the interpreter mechanism, would also create and deliver the response. So could the split-brain patients make a conventional moral judgement using just that side of the brain?

No. The patients reasoned that both scenarios were morally equal. The results suggest that both sides of the cortex are necessary for this type of reasoning task.

But this finding presents an additional puzzle, because relatives and friends of split-brain patients do not notice unusual reasoning or theory-of-mind deficits. Miller's team speculates that, in everyday life, other reasoning mechanisms may compensate for disconnection effects that are exposed in the lab. It's an idea that he plans to test in the future.

As the opportunities for split-brain research dwindle, Gazzaniga is busy trying to digitize the archive of recordings of tests with cohort members, some of which date back more than 50 years. "Each scene is so easy to remember for me, and so moving," he says. "We were observing so many astonishing things, and others should have the same opportunity through these videos." Perhaps, he says, other researchers will even uncover something new.

Other split-brain patients may become available - there is a small cluster in Italy, for instance. But with competition from imaging research and many of the biggest discoveries about the split brain behind him, Gazzaniga admits that the glory days of this field of science are probably gone. "It is winding down in terms of patients commonly tested." Still, he adds: "I have a hard time saying it's all over."

And maybe it's not - as long as there are scientists pushing to tackle new questions about lateralized brain function, connectivity and communication, and as long as Vicki and her fellow cohort members are still around and still willing participants in science. Her involvement over the years, Vicki says, was never really about her. "It was always about getting information from me that might help others."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In the first months after her surgery, shopping for groceries was infuriating. Standing in the supermarket aisle, Vicki would look at an item on the shelf and know that she wanted to place it in her trolley - but she couldn't.

# data[].attributes.body
Ways to improve intelligence

http://www.winwenger.com/intellig.htm

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Mpk7ngKCOE

# data[].attributes.headline
10 ways to increase your intelligence and improving brain power

# data[].attributes.subject
10 ways to increase your intelligence and improving brain power

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.entities[].name
Increase Your Intelligence & Improve Your Brain Power

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
✔ 10 Ways to Increase Your Intelligence & Improve Your Brain Power

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
10 Ways to Increase Your Intelligence & Improve Your Brain Power. Here are 10 simple ways you can increase your brain power and improve your intelligence! The amazing fact about the brain is that no matter how smart or how old you are, you can always increase your intelligence.

# data[].attributes.body
Can we genetically improve intelligence?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vr5n_ZOZ6E8

# data[].attributes.headline
Different ways to improve your  I.Q. score

# data[].attributes.subject
Different ways to improve your  I.Q. score

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.bustle.com/articles/140765-6-proven-ways-to-enhance-your-intelligence

# data[].attributes.body
Artificial Intelligence

http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html

# data[].attributes.body
Genetic Enhancement

https://www.genome.gov/10004767/genetic-enhancement/

# data[].attributes.body
Augmenting Human Intellect

http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Many traditional theorists on intelligence hold that there are limits set by biology on IQ and memory. However, modern psychologists have shown with published research that IQ can be raised (see Cassidy, Roche & Hayes, 2011) and that these IQ rises are permanent (Roche, Cassidy &Stewart, 2013). We also know that memory is an essential component of intellectual functioning and that this too can be improved (see Jaeggi et al., 2008). These studies show that IQ score no longer has to refer to a number that limits us. Rather, it can be seen simply as a starting point for us to continuously increase our intellectual skill sets for meaningful gains in all avenues of life. Below are 7 ways to raise your IQ and 5 ways to improve your memory.

7 Ways to Raise Your IQ

1. Improve your relational skills

Psychologists have also discovered that there is a strong correlation between relational skills and IQ scores (O'Hora, Pelaez & Barnes-Holmes; 2005, O'Toole & Barnes-Holmes;2009, Cassidy, Roche & Hayes; 2011, Roche, Cassidy & Stewart; 2013). Importantly, we also know that relational skills can be taught. So improving your relational skills will in turn increase your IQ score. Relational skills are simply the understanding of a handful of mathematical relationships between concepts or objects such as things are the same as other things, more or less than other things, opposite to other things, and so on. They also include relationships like before and after or that one thing is contained by another. Moreover, having a strong handle on the relationships between and among other things has been shown to enhance thinking and problem solving skills. In fact, these relational skills are now being called the building blocks of intelligence by psychologists in the field of Relational Frame Theory.

2. Enrich your language

It is commonly accepted that coming from a language rich environment will increase a person's intellectual acumen. But I'll bet you didn't know that for those that do not come from such an environment, you can read widely to increase your vocabulary and make up for that "deficit" in your natural environment. Research indicates that having a strong understanding of language will help you with many cognitive tasks and indeed with everyday life. Increasing your vocabulary by reading will increase your understanding of language in a more general sense. Also, keep a good dictionary. When you come across words that you do not know or are not familiar with, don't be afraid to "look it up".

3. Eat healthy food and get regular vigorous exercise

It might seem like every self help guru today is telling us to exercise and eat right. But did you know that this advice is now widely supported by scientific research? Indeed there is an ever growing body of evidence suggesting that people who have healthy diets and those that engage in regular vigorous exercise have higher IQ scores and better memories. Researchers at Boston University School of Medicine have recently published that physical activity is highly beneficial for brain health and cognition (2013). There are also many specific foods that play a role in having a healthy diet and will in turn raise IQ. For example, scientists know that vegetables, such as broccoli, spinach, tomatoes, some berries and the omega 3 oils found in oily fish improve memory and overall brain functioning (Roche, 2014) as do green teas and protein in general. Protein contains high levels of amino acids, such as tyrosine, which in turn causes neurons to produce the very important neurotransmitters norepinephrine and dopamine, which are associated with mental alertness. (see, Roche, 2014 for more). Diet and exercise are not just important for the health of your body. They are also vital for the health of your brain.

4. Appeal to the experts

Sometimes you cannot find the answers to the questions in your mind on the Internet or from reference books, When that happens, it's time to ask the experts. Just make sure that the experts you are asking are actually informed and knowledgeable sources. There is a great deal of information out there that is simply incorrect, so always look for scientific evidence backing up any "facts".

5. Have a growth mindset

It is a relatively recent discovery that your mindset matters not just on an emotional level, but also on a physiological level. Believing that you can learn more will enhance your performance in any learning environment. Persisting with tasks even when they are difficult will help you to get to the finish line.

6. Do brain training

While I always caution people to avoid pseudoscientists and charlatans, there are brain training programs and techniques on the market that have been shown in published scientific research to improve your memory (e.g., the n-back procedure) and to raise your IQ (e.g., relational skills training).

7. Step outside your comfort zone

Research shows that we can increase our brain's functioning by pushing ourselves to learn things that are outside of our current skill set. So learn to play music, to dance or try out a new language. The important thing is that you are exercising your brain in a new way and thus expanding your brain's neural networks. Keeping your brain fit and active is especially important as you enter older adulthood.

5 Ways to Improve Your Memory

1. Practice

Once you have basic understanding of a topic in place, you will need to rehearse the information to "make it stick". The old adage "practice makes perfect" still applies when you are trying to remember new things. If you want to make information come to mind automatically, you need to rehearse it regularly. Then you will be able to produce it quickly when you need to, whether that be for school, for your career or even for social reasons.

2. Engage meaningfully with important content matter

In 1972, Psychologists Craik and Lockhart found that the more attention we pay to the meaning of what we see and hear, the better we will remember it. In other words, memory is a function of how effortful and meaningful initial encoding was. So if you process novel information at a deeper level, you will be better able to later recall that information. Understanding aids memory and it will be harder to remember things if you are merely rote learning without fully comprehending the material.

3. Use visual imagery

There are many different ways that you can use visual imagery as a memory aid. We've all heard of using mind maps where we imagine a map of the information or a tree with the branches that stem out each holding an important and relevant fact. People might also find it useful to imagine a cloakroom with all of the pegs holding a piece of information. So whichever method you prefer, the key point is that you visualize the information as you study it so that you can later recall it with greater ease.

4. Use acronyms

Back when we were all youngsters, a teacher or parent likely taught us to use acronyms and my guess is that most of us still remember some version of this, "My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas" (Mercury Venus Earth Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune Pluto). See?? It still works. You can also use this if you are trying to remember names at a conference (e.g., Black boots Brenda or Bushy eyebrows Earl).

5. Pay attention to beginnings and endings

Research indicates that we remember more at the beginning and end of learning periods. This does not mean we zone out in the middle of a lecture, seminar or continuing professional development day, but be aware of your own optimal memory times. Listen up for the introductions and conclusions and don't be afraid to ask a teacher or a boss to summarize the main points again at the end of a lesson.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
This Is How You Can Raise Your IQ And Improve Your Memory

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Many traditional theorists on intelligence hold that there are limits set by biology on IQ and memory. However, modern psychologists have shown with published research that IQ can be raised (see Cassidy, Roche & Hayes, 2011) and that these IQ rises are permanent (Roche, Cassidy &Stewart, 2013).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Experiment
In the early 1950's on the island Koshima just off the coast of Japan scientists took part in an experiment to help shed light on how intelligence is comprehended and spread. The experiment was conducted on a specific type of monkey, the Macaca Fuscata monkey, which only inhabited the island of Koshima. The isolation of this breed of monkey was extremely important as to ascertain specific results from the experiment.

During the experiment sweet potatoes, a favorite among the Macaca Fuscata monkeys, were dropped into the sand deliberately and observed by the scientists to discover how the monkeys would react. Naturally many of the monkeys tried to eat the potatoes but could not due to the sand. However, a few of the younger monkeys realized that they could wash the potatoes in large bodies of water and then eat the potatoes free of hassle. Once learned, they spread this to the other monkeys. Within the time the entire island of monkeys had learned to wash their potatoes.

However, the most exciting part of the experiment was when the scientists left the island of Koshima to prepare another experiment on another isolated group of monkeys. The monkeys occupying the nearby island of Takasakiyama had too already learned this new feat. Astounded the Japanese scientists made an ultimate conclusion. The intelligence increases among species from just more than the five basic senses. That once a critical mass of a species has learned a new evolutionary trait the entire species, even if isolated from contact, rapidly learns too. By 1958 this discovery would become to be known as the "100th Monkey Effect."

Intelligence Rethought
During this study a realization occurred. That the experiment proves human intelligence is increasing worldwide as well. Although just one species was examined and only a minor experiment was conducted the experiment nevertheless sheds light on how intelligence is spread throughout every species on the planet. For example, the monkeys learned the new feat of washing their sweet potatoes by seeing, feeling, hearing, etc. but the monkeys isolated on another island did not. Yet they too learned this feat through a sense that is intertwined beyond just our five senses.

The "100th Monkey Effect" can be thought to work among humans too especially as we examine our long history and see the advancements that took place and how these evolutionary feats spread rapidly throughout the globe.

Critical Mass among Societies
As technology evolves ever faster a critical mass or tipping point that was witnessed during the experiment on the monkeys can be seen among our own societies. As well as a spiritual revolution is taking place among human societies that is being spread rapidly with the help of technology especially as communications become even faster.

Call it the 'Age of Aquarius', call it enlightenment, a revolution not just on an intellectual level is being made but a spiritual one as well.

Sources:

"The 100th Monkey." By Ken Keyes Jr.
http://www.wowzone.com/monkey.htm

"The 100th Monkey Revisited." By Elaine Myers
http://www.context.org/iclib/ic09/myers/

"The 100th Monkey Effect: Critical Mass." By selfconcious
http://iamselfconscious.wordpress.com/2012/11/09/the-100th-monkey-effect-a-critical-mass/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Experiment Proves Human Intelligence is Increasing Worldwide

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Experiment In the early 1950's on the island Koshima just off the coast of Japan scientists took part in an experiment to help shed light on how intelligence is comprehended and spread. The experiment was conducted on a specific type of monkey, the Macaca Fuscata monkey, which only inhabited the island of Koshima.

# data[].attributes.body
This article talks about how can your iq test score can change over time.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Each week, MyHealthNewsDaily asks the experts to answer questions about your health. This week, we asked psychologists: Can your IQ ever change?

Jack Naglieri, research professor at University of Virginia:

The answer to this question, like many others, depends on a number of factors. If you look at the research where they've made people smarter (i.e. improved their IQs), what they're really doing is to make people function better.

I've been able to teach children to be better in mathematics without teaching them mathematics. You can teach a child to better utilize their ability to plan, and that improves their academic performance not only in math, but in reading comprehension. So, what I would say, is we didn't make the children smarter, but we taught them how to use what they have more efficiently, and better.

Understanding changes in IQ also requires carefully considering how intelligence is being measured. People confuse ability with knowledge. We all can study and improve our vocabulary. But I would argue that doesn't make us any smarter.

The best way to measure intelligence is to measure those abilities that underlie the acquisition of knowledge, separately from the knowledge we have.

***

Richard Nisbett, professor of psychology at the University of Michigan:

Yes, your IQ can change over time. But [IQ] tests give you the same answer to a very substantial extent, even over a period of year. The older you are, the more stable your test score will be.

The most volatility in IQ scores is in childhood, mostly in adolescence. Offhand I can't think of a reason why it would be, it just seems to be the case.

Also, the average IQ of people is changing over time. Basically, people are gaining in modern industrialized societies. IQs are increasing three points per decade. In fact, there was an 18-point increase between 1947 and 2002. So the average IQ of a 20-year-old in 1947 was lower than the average IQ of a 20-year-old in 2002.

Now, validity of IQ as a measurement of all that we consider "intelligence" is another question.

***

Stephen Ceci, professor of developmental psychology at Cornell University:

Absolutely. And there's plenty of evidence documenting this.

An article in November in the journal Nature by Price and her colleagues is one example. It had 33 adolescents, who were 12- to 16-years-old when the study started. Price and her team gave them IQ tests, tracked them for four years, and then gave them IQ tests again.

The fluctuations in IQ were enormous. I'm not talking about a couple points, but 20-plus IQ points, one way or another. These changes in IQ scores were not random - they tracked very nicely with structural and functional brain imaging. Suppose the adolescent's verbal IQ really went up during that time; it was verbal areas of the brain that changed.

There are quite a large number of other studies showing IQ can change. Many of the changes in IQ are correlated to changes in schooling. One way that school increases IQ is to teach children to "taxonimize," or group things systematically instead of thematically. This kind of thinking is rewarded on many IQ tests.

There's also a number of studies showing that the brain changes after several kinds of regimen. London Taxi drivers whose brains are scanned before and after they start driving, and learning to navigate London's maze of streets, show changes in the brain as they use more navigational skills. Even young adults who take a juggling course show brain changes.

If you put it all together, and the evidence is quite compelling, that life experiences and school-related experiences change both the brain and IQ. This is true of adults and children.

***

Alan S. Kaufman, clinical professor of psychology at the Yale University School of Medicine:

There's no such thing as "an" IQ. You have an IQ at a given point in time. That IQ has built-in error. It's not like stepping on a scale to determine how much you weigh.

The reasonable error around any reliable IQ is going to be plus or minus 5 or 6 points, to give you a 95 percent confidence interval. So, for example, if a person scores 126, then you can say with 95 percent confidence that the person's true IQ is somewhere between 120 and 132; within our science we don't get any more accurate than that.

But as soon as you go to a different IQ test, then the range is even wider, because different IQ tests measure slightly different things.

But while there is no single IQ - it's a range of IQs - you can still pretty much determine whether a person is going to score roughly at a low level, or an average level, or a high level.

However, IQ is a relative concept. IQ is how well you do on an IQ test compared to other people your age, and that is true whether you are 4 or in your 40s.

***

Kevin McGrew, director of the Institute for Applied Psychometrics, visiting professor in Educational Psychology at the University of Minnesota

It depends. First I think it is important to distinguish between at least three different meanings of the word intelligence. There is biological intelligence, or what is typically defined as neural efficiency. Then there's psychometric intelligence - your measured IQ score - which is an indirect and imperfect method of estimating biological intelligence.

Can you increase biological intelligence? Research during the past decade using various neurotechnologies (aka, brain fitness programs) has suggested that it is possible to fine-tune your neural efficiency, or mental horsepower. Your cognitive functions can be made to work more efficiently. and in a more synchronized manner.

So can you change your IQ score? Individuals can change IQ scores. Your score may change not because of any real change in general intelligence, but that different tests may be used which measure different mixtures of abilities.

Also, some abilities (e.g., fluid reasoning and crystallized intelligence, or verbal abilities) are more stable over time, while others are less stable (e.g., short-term memory and cognitive processing speed).

You may have a certain level of general intelligence but it is important how you use it. When you approach a task, how well do you plan? How well do you adjust your response if it's not going well? These non-cognitive traits can be improved more easily than cognitive abilities.

Read more 5 Experts Answer columns:

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Each week, MyHealthNewsDaily asks the experts to answer questions about your health. This week, we asked psychologists: Can your IQ ever change? Jack Naglieri, research professor at University of Virginia: The answer to this question, like many others, depends on a number of factors. If you look at the research where they've made people smarter (i.e.

# data[].attributes.body
Though not definitive, new research points to short- and long-term real-world benefits of playing brain-training games.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
New Studies Show Promise for Brain Training in Improving Fluid Intelligence

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Though not definitive, new research points to short- and long-term real-world benefits of playing brain-training games.

# data[].attributes.body
Since the notion that intelligence can be calibrated Psychological scientists have opened new avenues into figuring out how our intelligence can be Increased.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Improving intelligence has preoccupied society since French psychologist Alfred Binet devised the first IQ test. Since then, the notion that intelligence can be calibrated has opened new avenues into figuring out how it can also be increased.
Psychological scientists have been on the front lines of modifying intelligence. So much intelligence is genetically determined, it is, to a large extent, hereditary. But there are still some areas in which it can be malleable.
Intelligence is generally divided into two categories: fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence. Fluid intelligence is the ability to reason in an abstract way and solve problems. Someone who can come up with dozens of new uses for, say, a toothbrush would demonstrate superior fluid intelligence. And this is exactly the kind of intelligence that tends to diminish as we grow older. The acquisition of intellectual skills, or the ability to read and comprehend, is known as crystallized intelligence, and this form tends to improve as we age.
Researchers discussed two approaches to improving intelligence: one that involved cognitive training and another that focused on pharmacological interventions. In a review of the attempts to improve intelligence, researchers found that 40 to 60 percent of those attempts were not successful.
What this meant, however, was that there were still 40 to 60 percent of approaches that actually worked. Most recently, computerized cognitive training designed to improve attention, working memory, and executive control has shown enormous promise in improving performance, especially in fluid intelligence.
Intelligence cannot be increased by taking a pill, but potentially it can be improved. The question from a pharmacological perspective is what biological systems need to be targeted to improve intelligence at different ages. Some stimulant medications enhance basic reaction time and processing time, but not memory or higher order tasks. On the other hand, the herbs ginko biloba, ginseng, and an Indian herb known as brhami have demonstrated some capacity to improve working memory.
In the end, the next great advance in measuring intelligence will be to measure it outside of the laboratory. Life is an intelligence test, and the challenge is how it can be scored.
Angela Duckworth, University of Pennslyvania
Earl Hunt, University of Washington
Susanne Jaeggi, University of Maryland, College Park
Con Stough, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia
Wendy Johnson, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Improving intelligence has preoccupied society since French psychologist Alfred Binet devised the first IQ test. Since then, the notion that intelligence can be calibrated has opened new avenues into figuring out how it can also be increased. Psychological scientists have been on the front lines of modifying intelligence.

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.google.com/amp/www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/health/Premature-Babies-Blood-Boosters-Brain-368813481.html%3Famp%3Dy?client=safari

http://www.medicaldaily.com/can-you-improve-your-intelligence-how-smart-drugs-brain-training-affect-395171

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/you-can-increase-your-intelligence-5-ways-to-maximize-your-cognitive-potential/

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.google.com/amp/www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/health/Premature-Babies-Blood-Boosters-Brain-368813481.html%3Famp%3Dy?client=safari

http://www.medicaldaily.com/can-you-improve-your-intelligence-how-smart-drugs-brain-training-affect-395171

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/you-can-increase-your-intelligence-5-ways-to-maximize-your-cognitive-potential/

# data[].attributes.headline
Intelligence Analysis in Theater Joint Intelligence Centers: An Experiment in Applying Structured Methods

# data[].attributes.subject
Intelligence Analysis in Theater Joint Intelligence Centers: An Experiment in Applying Structured Methods

# data[].attributes.body
http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA476722

# data[].attributes.headline
Transcendental meditation and improved performance on intelligence-related measures: A longitudinal study

# data[].attributes.subject
Transcendental meditation and improved performance on intelligence-related measures: A longitudinal study

# data[].attributes.body
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/019188699190040I

# data[].attributes.headline
Improving fluid intelligence with training on working memory 

# data[].attributes.subject
Improving fluid intelligence with training on working memory 

# data[].attributes.body
http://www.pnas.org/content/105/19/6829.short

# data[].attributes.body
http://www.businessinsider.com/superintelligent-humans-with-iq-of-1000-2014-10

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/04/new-studies-show-promise-for-brain-training-in-improving-fluid-intelligence/360290/

http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2015/11/us-military-developing-brain-implants-boost-memory-and-heal-ptsd/123784/

# data[].attributes.body
Though not definitive, new research points to short- and long-term real-world benefits of playing brain-training games.
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/04/new-studies-show-promise-for-brain-training-in-improving-fluid-intelligence/360290/

# data[].attributes.body
How psychedelics enhance cognition, boost intelligence, and expand cognition

http://realitysandwich.com/170866/expanding_cognitive_studies/

# data[].attributes.body
http://edr.sagepub.com/content/20/3/2.short

# data[].attributes.body
Projects renaissance, Ways to improve human intelligence
http://www.winwenger.com/intellig.htm

# data[].attributes.headline
Humans with amplified intelligence could be more powerful than artificial intelligence

# data[].attributes.subject
Humans with amplified intelligence could be more powerful than artificial intelligence

# data[].attributes.body
http://earth-chronicles.com/science/humans-with-amplified-intelligence-could-be-more-powerful-than-ai.html

# data[].attributes.headline
Can You Raise Your IQ? How Smart Drugs, Brain Training Affect Intelligence and Cognition

# data[].attributes.subject
Can You Raise Your IQ? How Smart Drugs, Brain Training Affect Intelligence and Cognition

# data[].attributes.body
http://www.medicaldaily.com/can-you-improve-your-intelligence-how-smart-drugs-brain-training-affect-395171

# data[].attributes.headline
New Studies Show Promise for Brain Training in Improving Fluid Intelligence

# data[].attributes.subject
New Studies Show Promise for Brain Training in Improving Fluid Intelligence

# data[].attributes.body
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/04/new-studies-show-promise-for-brain-training-in-improving-fluid-intelligence/360290/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Through the past few decades of summer blockbuster movies and Silicon Valley products, artificial intelligence (AI) has become increasingly familiar and sexy, and imbued with a perversely dystopian allure.

What's talked about less, and has also been dwarfed in attention and resources, is human intelligence (HI).

In its varied forms - from the mysterious brains of octopuses and the swarm-minds of ants to Go-playing deep learning machines and driverless-car autopilots - intelligence is the most powerful and precious resource in existence. Our own minds are the most familiar examples of a phenomenon characterized by a great deal of diversity.

Yet, HI is unique among this variety of intelligence because of its unparalleled ability to design, modify and build new forms of intelligence. HI is what defines us as humans and our relationship with everything on earth. Now, through the combination of HI and AI, we are at the brink of intelligence enhancement, which could be the most consequential technological development of our time, and in history.

The master tool

Intelligence, in its varied forms, powers every opportunity we pursue and every problem we seek to solve. It sits upstream from everything else. It is at once the master tool and the master of all tools. It is not only the most general means to do things, it is also the meaning-making force that decides what is worth doing.

Intelligence is what allows us to create forms of governance, cure disease, create art and music, discover, dream and love. Intelligence is also what decides that these things, rather than other things, are worth doing, by translating discoveries into meanings, experiences into values and values into decisions.

The evolution of human tools, from rocks to AI, can be seen as a trajectory of increasingly powerful effort arbitrage, where we exploit our comparative advantage relative to our tools to do things better, and do more new things. Along this trajectory, tools that embody significant levels of intelligence are our most powerful yet.

In this pursuit of effort arbitrage, the smallest of intelligence advancements has the power to yield enormous gains for humans, individual and collective. A seemingly simple change 2.5 million years ago - using stone tools to butcher animals - led early hominids down the path to becoming modern humans.

From that modest starting point, throughout human history, we created tools that increased our individual and collective intelligence and became extensions of our natural selves. We started with crude functional tools such as hammers and axes. Over just a few tens of thousands of years, we progressed to more intelligent tools, such as thermostats, and governance technologies based on rule-of-law rather than despotism.

With each advance, we happily relinquished a small part of our agency for known pre-programmed outcomes. Our tools could begin doing bigger and bigger things on our behalf, freeing us up for other, more desired tasks.

This progression has continued. As we've become more familiar and comfortable with our tools doing things for us, we've eagerly traded more of our agency for the anticipated gains, even when we're unfamiliar with the choices and assumptions built into a particular instance of that trade-off. In general, our risk-taking has paid off, and the resulting real gains have generally far outstripped losses.

For example, Amazon's recommendation algorithm is one of the most powerful forces in the world, determining which books are read, what ideas are listened to and what we learn - yet how those recommendation decisions are being made is unknown to most of us.

The gains of discovering countless new reading choices are clear. The anticipated losses, including reduced human connection and loss of privacy, either didn't play out as expected (for example, through various online media, we can now connect with far more people through books, beyond the local indie bookstore owner) or are ones we readily make (giving up some privacy around our reading habits in return for better recommendations).

A new partnership for humanity

We're at an interesting transition point where we are moving from using our tools as passive extensions of ourselves, to working with them as active partners. An axe or a hammer is a passive extension of a hand, but a drone forms a distributed intelligence along with its operator, and is closer to a dog or horse than a device. Such tools can interact with us in ways never before possible, such as working with us in a choreographed dance for a talent competition or helping us script a novel or new sci-fi movie.

Our tools are now actors unto themselves, and their future is in our hands. Think about the evolution of the car: from horse and carriage to Model-T, from cruise control to adaptive cruise control, and now to driverless cars.

Engineers are now programming cars using subtle ethics models to determine, in situations where an accident is unavoidable, whether to hit pedestrians or veer off the road and jeopardize the driver's life.

The conclusions such cars reach in real situations might well be very different from the decisions you or I might make if we were in the driver's seat, but with hindsight we might judge them to be much better, even if they initially seem alien to us. Ideally, such technologically evolved decision-making abilities can flourish alongside evolving HI, to rethink assumptions, reframe possibilities and explore new territories.

We've already seen chess evolve to a new kind of game where young champions like Magnus Carlsen have adopted styles of play that take advantage of AI chess engines. With early examples of unenhanced humans and drones dancing together, it is already obvious that humans and AIs will be able to form a dizzying variety of combinations to create new kinds of art, science, wealth and meaning. What could we do if the humans in the picture were enhanced in powerful ways? What might happen if every human had perfect memory, for instance?

In short, we are poised for an explosive, generative epoch of massively increased human capability through a Cambrian explosion of possibilities represented by the simple equation: HI+AI. When HI combines with AI, we will have the most significant advancement to our capabilities of thought, creativity and intelligence that we will have ever had in history.

While we're starting with HI+AI in health diagnosis, transportation coordination, art and music, our partnership is rapidly extending into co-creation of technology, governance and relationships, and everywhere else our HI+AI imagination takes us.

The biggest bottleneck in opening up this powerful new future is that we humans are currently highly limited in how we can participate in these possibilities. Our connection with our new creations of intelligence is limited by screens, keyboards, gestural interfaces and voice commands - constrained input/output modalities. We have very little access to our own brains, limiting our ability to co-evolve with silicon-based machines in powerful ways.

Relative to the ease and speed with which we can make progress on the development of AI, HI, speaking solely of our native biological abilities, is currently a landlocked island of intelligence potential. Unlocking the untapped capabilities of the human brain, and connecting them to these new capabilities, is the greatest challenge and opportunity today.

The single most powerful avenue for achieving this unlocking today is neuroprosthetics. In recent years, research labs around the world have made enormous strides in understanding how the brain works, how to connect it to outside sources and how we might tap more deeply into its potential. The most immediate need for these devices is apparent in the growing number of people living longer lives while suffering from neurodegenerative disorders. These devices - by directly extending HI, including our memory and other cognitive capabilities - could lead to unprecedented longevity of the mind and body. (Full disclosure: I've started a company in this arena.)

There are other paths to improved HI including genomics and pharmacological interventions. But these have one severe limitation, their inability to extend the brain's ability to communicate with our tools of intelligence (AI).

To truly realize the potential of HI+AI, we need to increase the capacity of people to take in, process and use information, by orders of magnitude. For this, neuroprosthetics are the most promising avenue to meet this challenge.

A new narrative

From the writings of Isaac Asimov to Terminator and Doctor Who, we have seen visions of future intelligence that have influenced how we all imagine our machine-filled future. These visions have sensitized society to the downsides and risks of potential future machine intelligence. As with all new technologies, losses are much easier to imagine than gains.

It is certainly true that with every new technology we create, new risks emerge that need thoughtful consideration and wise action. Medical advances that saved lives also made germ warfare possible; chemical engineering led to fertilizers and increased food production but also to chemical warfare. Nuclear fission created a new source of energy but also led to nuclear bombs.

As we embark on the greatest human expedition yet, now is the time for a discussion about HI+AI. But rather than letting risk-anchored scaremongering drive the discussion, let's start with the promise of HI+AI; the pictures we paint depend upon the brushes we use.

The narratives we create for the future of HI+AI matter because they create blueprints of action that contend for our decision-making, consciously and subconsciously. Adopting a fear-based narrative as our primary frame of reference is starting to limit the imagination, curiosity and exploratory instincts that have always been at the core of being human.

An epic adventure

We are all alive at a time when we are gaining access to unprecedented powers of creation. Using our natural intelligence and the external extensions of intelligence we've progressively built over the last millennium, we have now developed tools of creation such as genomics, synthetic biology and robotics that literally allow us to program our existence in any way we can imagine. We have progressed from players to makers of the game.

It's something that I feel immensely grateful for and which has me jumping out of bed in the mornings. We're living a story of epic proportions and the future is ours to seize.

This is precisely why HI is the most important thing we could possibly be working on right now. At a time when the greatest opportunities in history are before us, we shouldn't become the biggest limiting factor in our own stories.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The combination of human and artificial intelligence will define humanity's future

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Through the past few decades of summer blockbuster movies and Silicon Valley products, artificial intelligence (AI) has become increasingly familiar and sexy, and imbued with a perversely dystopian allure. What's talked about less, and has also been dwarfed in attention and resources, is human intelligence (HI).