More Empirical Verification

Hello, some of the ideas presented in the website regarding intelligence has been given additional empirical verification:

Memory Training Boosts Brainpower

Hopefully this helps researchers develop more effective brain training techniques.

John Gonzalez

Elite Training Techniques

I was perusing the New York Times website when I came across this article:

Elite Korean Schools, Forging Ivy League Skills

It's quite amazing that nearly all of their students go to Ivy League schools, but what is most important to me are the skills they emphasize in the article. Constant studying, motivated students, and more importantly motivated parents. What I would like to see is an analysis of the specific study techniques they employ. For example, "such and such" student reads the paragraph then memorizes it and then goes on to the next paragraph, something like that. Specific time management skills and whatnot.

Overall, I think the article is great it serves as a general plan for any student who wishes to attend and ivy league institution.

Mental Exercises

One method to create or identify effective mental exercises would be to use the fMRI machine. We could view the brain activity under different "loads". "loads" could be mathematics problems, logic problems, physics problems, reading, arguing, etc. Then we could look for patterns in the areas of the brain used in those "loads".

Then we design a set of mental exercises, we may categorize them according to the different areas of the brain we think it may target, OR the different areas of thinking it may target. In fact the fMRI machine may be able to help us identify which areas of the brain may be involved when thinking about a certain category of problems, then we can use these results to design exercises to target those areas of the brain used in thinking about certain problems. This is similar to a thinking map, where a category of thoughts may be associated to a pattern of brain activity.

Some of the problems may be that different people use different brain patterns to process the same thought, also different people may have a slightly different conception of a thought so it uses a different part of the brain. I suppose this may require further thought, but there may be sufficient similarity in brain activity for similar thoughts to elucidate the brain patterns.

This will help us to develop mental exercises that "elucidate" similar or the same type of brain patterns that are used in solving problems.

More Later

John Gonzalez