Medical Can IQ be increased in an adult?

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The discussion centers on the debate over whether adults can increase their IQ, with contrasting views from different authors. One perspective suggests that engaging in complex thinking can create lasting synaptic connections, potentially improving intelligence. In contrast, Charles Murray and Richard Hernstein argue that IQ stabilizes by age 18 and cannot be improved. Psychologists generally agree that while IQ tests measure general intelligence (g), they also reflect test-taking skills, which can be improved through study and practice. Overall, the consensus indicates that while IQ may not be easily altered, performance on IQ tests can be influenced by preparation and anxiety management.
  • #31
PWiz said:
Agreed. They are just a bunch of BS; I've gotten scores in the range of 110-180. They'd have me believe that I magically, and quite arbitrarily, 'trip' between discrete states of intelligence:eek:
But what use is IQ?? I have a friend, which I believe he is in the range of superior. 140? He can calculate chess position, very fast. Can play blindfold chess easily. I know there people out there that can do, too. Can play memory 4 x 13, 52 cards easily. Everything. But his job is really mediocre. They say that EQ too is important. And also SQ (spiritual quotient). But what I like most is BBQ. :oldtongue:
 
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  • #32
PWiz said:
Agreed. They are just a bunch of BS; I've gotten scores in the range of 110-180. They'd have me believe that I magically, and quite arbitrarily, 'trip' between discrete states of intelligence:eek:
Sorry, not that I underestimate someone with high IQ. :smile:. My wife often scolds me. I can calulate special relativity, understand space expansion. But can't fix fan, refrigerator even changing bulb. :eek:
 
  • #33
Stephanus said:
Sorry, not that I underestimate someone with high IQ. :smile:. My wife often scolds me. I can calulate special relativity, understand space expansion. But can't fix fan, refrigerator even changing bulb. :eek:
Just another proof about limitedness of IQ tests. In my case, my mom often scolds me. I too can understand a little bit of undergrad physics and math, but I have trouble finding food in the fridge :-p
 
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  • #34
Stephanus said:
... also SQ (spiritual quotient). ...
That's a new one to me, Have you been visited by Scientologists or Jehova witnesses?
 
  • #35
Jehova witnesses, Yes!. Three times, once by the Chinese branch, and twice by the local branch.
Scientologist, no. :smile:.
It's just that I recalled my friend once told me, that his son's IQ is high (good for him). Now (then) he decreased the milk budget, (his son is smart anyway). And he focused to enhance his son EQ and SQ. When I tought, I just want to have BBQ. And I have had enough with this IQ thing :oldlaugh:.
I remembered once in Stephen Hawking interview, didn't watch the video, but read the script. I wonder if that was true or not. Anyway, when asked, how high is his IQ. Hawking replied, something like. IQ is not important, and the person who relies on IQ usually a loser.
 
  • #36
London cabbies hippocampi grow when doing the knowledge (a herculean task of remembering nearly 30,000 street names, their locations the quickest route between any two locations, and the approximate cost of traveling that route. It takes several years, riding around the city on a moped, ticking off streets to gain the knowledge).

Anybody who has had the privilege to ride a real london cab with a real cabbie with the knowledge will know just how on the ball those guys are - especially when you go abroad and are subjected to cabbies that have NOT done the knowledge. In the congested streets at rush hour they'll beat a sat nav route every time
 
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  • #37
I've heard that about London cabbies, but don't know if it's just one of those urban myths.
It's a while since I drove a car in London, but when I last did it alI I wanted to do was get out of town (heading towards Norfolk).
It was pure gridlock around 5pm, no matter what route I tried, This experience did my brain no good at all.
 
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  • #38
there have been a lot of studies, and it does look like it is a fact rather than a myth.
 
  • #39
William White said:
there have been a lot of studies, and it does look like it is a fact rather than a myth.

I've seen multiple studies claim an increase in certain areas, but then I've seen other studies that claim that those increases are solely in the activity being tested and are not transferable. In other words, if you practice memorizing long strings of numbers, you'll be better at memorizing numbers, but your memory elsewhere will remain the same.

From here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22612437

Is working memory training effective? A meta-analytic review.

Meta-analyses indicated that the programs produced reliable short-term improvements in working memory skills. For verbal working memory, these near-transfer effects were not sustained at follow-up, whereas for visuospatial working memory, limited evidence suggested that such effects might be maintained. More importantly, there was no convincing evidence of the generalization of working memory training to other skills (nonverbal and verbal ability, inhibitory processes in attention, word decoding, and arithmetic). The authors conclude that memory training programs appear to produce short-term, specific training effects that do not generalize.
From here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23587747

The impact of human-computer interaction-based comprehensive training on the cognitive functions of cognitive impairment elderly individuals in a nursing home.

After 24 weeks, neither group showed a significant change compared with baseline cognitive examinations. However, there was a tendency for greater improvement in memory, language, and visuospatial abilities for the intervention group as compared with controls. Patients with mild cognitive impairment showed improvements in language and visuospatial capacity, while patients with dementia showed improvements in attention/orientation, memory, language, and fluency. However, none of these findings were statistically significant. The results for the intervention subgroups showed that visuospatial ability improvement was significantly greater among those with a global cortical atrophy score of ≤15 (p < 0.05).

Those are the quickest references I could find. I don't know how many more are out there.
 
  • #40
I think the issue here is can you temporarily raise your IQ *score* a bit, and can you actually change your IQ. I think the answer is yes to the first, but don't know if the score is even noticeable, the latter no. And who would care about changing their IQ score temporarily by some insignificant amount? Has anyone in this thread aside from Drakkith and I actually been administered IQ tests by a trained psychologist? If yes, why? I was originally tested because my new school teacher didn't think that the local public school could provide teaching at the level I needed, they had no gifted classes. Unfortunately the schools that catered to children with my IQ were across the state and I'd have to leave my family and attend a boarding school for the "Academically able" as their brochures stated, children that needed a minimum IQ of 140 to even be considered, 140 was not high enough to be guaranteed acceptance. I said HELL NO. I'm not going to a boarding school. I was only 11. I don't get some people's obsession with a test score. Motivation and perseverance are more important than an IQ score in succeeding.
 
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  • #41
More to the point: why would anybody care about IQ at all. It's just an arbitrary number which means nothing. I am tested to have an IQ of 97, and it didn't stop me of being a mathematician.
 
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  • #42
micromass said:
More to the point: why would anybody care about IQ at all. It's just an arbitrary number which means nothing. I am tested to have an IQ of 97, and it didn't stop me of being a mathematician.
Good!
Yep I didn't care about IQ. But I read again the first post. What the OP wants to know is that, "can brain develop synaptic".
 
  • #43
micromass said:
More to the point: why would anybody care about IQ at all. It's just an arbitrary number which means nothing. I am tested to have an IQ of 97, and it didn't stop me of being a mathematician.
i think there's a 1 missing in front of the 97, but if you were truly got a score of 97, that just goes to show how meaningless IQ scores are. You're a math genius, I'm nothing. Well, I'm a dog abuser. :oldcry:
 
  • #44
Evo said:
I don't get some people's obsession with a test score. Motivation and perseverance are more important than an IQ score in succeeding.
This should be engraved outside EVERY school.
 
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  • #45
PWiz said:
This should be engraved outside EVERY school.
and it would be most impressive if the engraving was done by people with a high 'Artistic Quotient')
 
  • #46
Evo said:
Motivation and perseverance are more important than an IQ score in succeeding.
Yeah, I heard that you "I Will" is more important than you "IQ". And don't tell me that you're dog abuser. I love dogs.

Chiki, Chiku, Chiko and Chika.jpg
All gone, now. Three were asked by my daughter's friend. One the brown/white, Chiku died. Bitten by other dogs while strolling around without my attendance. :frown:
But, what the OP wants to know is that "Can brain develop something like connection". It's the actual discussion, not about IQ.
 
  • #47
Stephanus said:
Yeah, I heard that you "I Will" is more important than you "IQ". And don't tell me that you're dog abuser. I love dogs.

View attachment 86483 All gone, now. Three were asked by my daughter's friend. One the brown/white, Chiku died. Bitten by other dogs while strolling around without my attendance. :frown:
But, what the OP wants to know is that "Can brain develop something like connection". It's the actual discussion, not about IQ.
I'm not a dog abuser, that's a joke between micro and I due to accidents i had with my senior adopted chihuahua. :oldcry:

Those puppies are adorable, so sad one died. :oldfrown:

Have I seen anything that says that true intelligence can be increased by any significant amount permanently, no. You can become more educated, and that's really all that matters, what you know is all that counts, what you could have known if you weren't a failure doesn't matter, does it? You can't go into a job interview saying "I don't know how to do this, but I have a high IQ score" it won't get you a job, it won't even get you considered. A high IQ score won't get you anything because it doesn't mean anything, it's not a reflection of what you actually know. Just the opposite, if you have a high IQ and you're not that the top of some field, you are just a bigger loser than someone with a lower IQ that is at your level.

I love what Stephen Hawking said when asked what his IQ was.

"I have no idea. People who boast about their I.Q. are losers."
 
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  • #48
Evo said:
Has anyone in this thread aside from Drakkith and I actually been administered IQ tests by a trained psychologist? If yes, why?
I failed calc 101 and questioned whether I was cut out for university so did some online IQ tests and found them to be worthless. I then took the Mensa entry test and scored in the top 1%, which I think is around 135-145 depending on the scale used. I do think the online tests prepared me for the psychologist administered test and probably increased my score.
Motivation and perseverance are more important than an IQ score in succeeding.
Couldn't agree more.

This sums up my experience with mensa:
215.jpg

They also use comic sans in their letter head...
 
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  • #49
Evo said:
I'm not a dog abuser, that's a joke between micro and I due to accidents i had with my senior adopted chihuahua. :oldcry:

Those puppies are adorable, so sad one died. :oldfrown:
No, of course not. I know that that's a joke.
Evo said:
I love what Stephen Hawking said when asked what his IQ was.

"I have no idea. People who boast about their I.Q. are losers."
Is that his exact world? So it's true. I wrote that at Post 35
 
  • #50
Stephanus said:
Is that his exact world? So it's true. I wrote that at Post 35
Yes, it's true.
 
  • #51
billy_joule said:
Math and word puzzle
:oldlaugh::oldlaugh::oldlaugh:
 
  • #52
Just look at all of the geniuses on this forum, I'll bet the majority never had their IQ tested and they know it doesn't matter.

I lived most of my life near NASA and was told never to join groups like Mensa or Mega (Mega has higher IQ requirements than Mensa). Well, I never wanted to be around intellectual snobs, which is why I refused to go to those special schools. Truth was, aside from not wanting to leave home and my freedom, I preferred to be a big fish in a small pond, I had no desire to be up against other children on my level. Just call me "bored slacker".

Founded in 1982 by Ronald K. Hoeflin to facilitate psychometric research,[1]the Mega Society is a high IQ society open to people who have scored at the one-in-a-million level on a test of general intelligence claimed to be able to discriminate at that level.[2] The Guinness Book of World Records once stated that the most elite ultra High IQ Society is the Mega Society with percentiles of 99.9999 or 1 in a million required for admission.[3][verification needed]

The public profile of the Mega Society increased with the publication of the Mega Test in 1985 by Hoeflin.[4] In his article, Omni reporter Scot Morris noted the claim that Mega Society is the most selective high-IQ society:

Mensa, the most famous [IQ] group, is open to one person in 50 ... TheTriple Nine Society has a 1-in-1,000 cutoff (the 99.9th percentile, hence the name). And the Prometheus Society shoots for 1 in 30,000. But the most restrictive group is the Mega Society, which is theoretically limited to one person in a million (the 99.9999th percentile).


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mega_Society
 
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  • #53
It depends on what you mean.

You can easily make your score on an administered IQ test higher, even one given by a trained professional. If you know which test you're going to be given, you can prepare yourself to make any number come out of it that you like. Case in point, when I was in high school I had to have testing done every semester as part of my IEP. They used the same test protocol every time, so I looked it up online and read about it, and decided that as a joke I would try to make a test come out as an obnoxiously high number. In the end, I was able to practice and prepare for the test without too much effort in order to "game" it, and I was able to get a score of 196. I like to think of myself as clever, but that's not even remotely realistic (there may be a dozen or so people in the world with IQ that high).

So yes, even as an adult it is possible to increase your on-paper IQ score (or strategically decrease it, if you're looking for a prescription to whatever the hot new study drug is these days) quite dramatically and without great difficulty. It should be pointed out that 1.) people who brag about their IQ are losers, so you don't really have much to gain from doing this, 2.) skills in the tasks measured by IQ tests aren't known conclusively to generalize (while mental visualization ability is a general skill that will lead to better performance on a shape rotation task, practicing shape rotation isn't on its own known to improve general ability to mentally visualize) so "practicing" for one probably won't actually lead to any significant gains in ability and 3.) you may be cheating yourself out of a diagnosis of an underlying learning or cognitive problem, if one exists (I already knew more or less exactly what was wrong with me anyway).

But if you actually want to make yourself smarter, that's a trickier beast. It's certainly possible. Like every other organ and structure in your body, SAID (selective adaptation to imposed demands) applies to your brain, and neuroplasticity is a well-documented phenomenon. Practicing of skills can lead to changes in the structure of the brain and gains in ability that cannot be attributed to mastery of those skills alone. Improving on one's physical health for better prevention of fatigue or better energy leads to better motivation, which enhances one's ability to solve problems. Better cognitive and learning skills will effectively make one more intelligent while not altering the brain's raw processing power. And obviously all the processing power in the world can't beat out experience and rote memory when it comes to solving problems. So yes, you can become more intelligent. But what isn't known is where the line between mastery of skill and change in processing power lies. If you become really good at mental arithmetic, for instance, is that merely the result of mastery of mental arithmetic or has there been a change in the structure of your brain to facilitate mental arithmetic? It seems likely that the correct answer is "both", to a varying extent.

Intelligence is not strictly "fixed" as a personality trait when you enter adulthood, but in general it is a safe assumption that people do not change frequently over the course of a lifetime. For instance, if you know someone who is consistently crabby and temperamental now, how much reason do you have to expect that his personality will be significantly different 6 months in the future? And to return to the analogy to improving one's physical strength, if you meet a person who is of average build tomorrow and has been his entire life, how likely is it that he'll develop an athletic level of tone within the next year? It's not that it's impossible by any stretch or even especially difficult to increase your intelligence, just that it's rare since most people will not be interested in making directed efforts towards doing so anyway.
 
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  • #54
Evo said:
Just look at all of the geniuses on this forum, I'll bet the majority never had their IQ tested and they know it doesn't matter.

I lived most of my life near NASA and was told never to join groups like Mensa or Mega (Mega has higher IQ requirements than Mensa). Well, I never wanted to be around intellectual snobs, which is why I refused to go to those special schools. Truth was, aside from not wanting to leave home and my freedom, I preferred to be a big fish in a small pond, I had no desire to be up against other children on my level. Just call me "bored slacker".



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mega_Society
I tought you lived in England. You work at NASA?
 
  • #55
Stephanus said:
I tought you lived in England. You work at NASA?
No, I grew up next to NASA.
 
  • #56
Evo said:
No, I grew up next to NASA.
Ok. Today I learned the difference between MEGA, MENSA and NASA. All are high IQ!
 
  • #57
Stephanus said:
Ok. Today I learned the difference between MEGA, MENSA and NASA. All are high IQ!

But only NASA actually does anything useful :P
 
  • #58
jack476 said:
But only NASA actually does anything useful :P
Anything useful, Yes!. Only NASA, perhaps no. Some member in Mensa/Mega could have contributed something. Perhaps we just don't know. And I'm also a member of PULSA.
But it's a cellphone magazine.
 
  • #59
Stephanus said:
Ok. Today I learned the difference between MEGA, MENSA and NASA. All are high IQ!
Mensa is rather normal IQ, 1 in only 50 people qualify, not special at all. And I have been told by former members to avoid it, it's nonsense. Both my first husband and his father worked for NASA, his dad has a plaque from the president of the US for being one of the engineers responsible for saving the Apollo 13 mission. They were of average intelligence, I dated mostly people from NASA and they were all of average intelligence, if I had to guess, not one of them had ever taken an IQ test. But they did valuable work. I have a genius IQ and I have done diddly squat.
 
  • #60
Evo said:
Mensa is rather normal IQ, 1 in only 50 people qualify, not special at all. And I have been told by former members to avoid it, it's nonsense. Both my first husband and his father worked for NASA, his dad has a plaque from the president of the US for being one of the engineers responsible for saving the Apollo 13 mission. They were of average intelligence, I dated mostly people from NASA and they were all of average intelligence, if I had to guess, not one of them had ever taken an IQ test. But they did valuable work. I have a genius IQ and I have done diddly squat.
Apollo 13?? Jim Lovell, Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon and Bill Paxton? And your father in law? Is he the character portrayed by Ed Harris?
 

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