BigBallinStalin wrote:It doesn't matter if people can bulk up like Ahnold but can't boost their IQs by an equivalent proportion. Sure, muscles are less constrained by genetics than IQ is, but that's beside the point--hence "Sure, someone can nitpick with a 'what about steroids', but that's not that relevant."
Your argument is based on a fallacy. Who says you can't "boost your IQ?" While there is a major difference between a nerve cell and a muscle cell, the basic notions of the chemical environment to encourage growth, the nutrient environment to allow growth, and the proper "stress" on the cells to promote the correct growth applies as much to a muscle cell as it does to a nerve cell.
It works even with old farts ... my subscription to Lumosity has not been wasted.
Mind you, there is no intellectual equivalent to professional sports to raise such issues to the general public. There are no equivalent of "muscle men" who try to promote their own facilities in the intellectual sphere. But that doesn't mean it is not possible or even already out there.
Scientists have historically believed that once a person reaches adulthood, their cognitive abilities are immutable. But beginning in the early twentieth century, that theory has been contested by evidence suggesting that the brain’s abilities are in fact malleable and plastic. According to this principle of neuroplasticity, the brain is constantly changing in response to various experiences. New behaviors, new learnings, and even environmental changes or physical injuries may all stimulate the brain to create new neural pathways or reorganize existing ones, fundamentally altering how information is processed.
One of the most dramatic examples of neuroplasticity at work comes from a 2000 brain scan study on London taxi drivers (Maguire et al., 2000). In order to earn a license, London taxi drivers typically spend about two years learning to navigate the city’s serpentine streets. What mark, the study’s researchers wondered, did this long, rigorous period of training leave on taxi drivers’ brains? Under the scrutiny of fMRI scans, 16 male taxi drivers in this study were revealed to have larger hippocampuses than a control group of 50 healthy males of similar ages. And the longer the time spent as a taxi driver, the larger the hippocampus tended to be. As a brain area involved in memory and navigation, the hippocampus likely changed in response to the taxi drivers’ experiences.
Most instances of neuroplasticity-based changes in the brain are much more subtle. But in recent decades, it’s cases like that of the London taxi drivers that have inspired certain members of the scientific community to pursue the next logical step in research: rather than passively waiting to see how the brain might respond to circumstances, is it possible to direct that capacity for change, targeting improvements in specific key abilities?
The science of cognitive training seeks to answer this question. In 2013 alone, 30 cognitive training studies were registered on the government database ClinicalTrials.gov. Lumosity scientists, with the help of outside collaborators, contribute to this research effort: so far, 7 peer reviewed studies have been published using Lumosity as a cognitive training tool for diverse populations, including healthy adults, cancer survivors, elderly people, and children with a genetic disorder.
Maguire, E. A., Gadian, D. G., Johnsrude, I. S., Good, C. D., Ashburner, J., Frackowiak, R. S. J., & Frith, C. D. (2000). Navigation-related structural change in the hippocampi of taxi drivers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 97(8), 4398-4403.
... and it belongs in other threads) I am saying that to make that assumption and pretend it is a necessary pretext is, at best a straw man argument, at worst, plain insulting and ignorant.
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