Can You Get Smarter With Your Smartphone? - Self-development

Real avalanches of completely useless and sometimes harmful goods and services fall on us. Is it worth downloading applications to your smartphone that supposedly make us smarter?

Downloading, pumping

The answer to the question of whether it is possible to become smarter is useless to search until we have decided what the mind is.

And there are two options:

• focus on everyday understanding of the mind;
• focus on its scientific definition.

At the everyday level, the mind is understood as something indefinite in a wide range from everyday ingenuity to worldly wisdom. We will consider smart as a person who found the right words and convinced the interlocutor, and a person who found a way out of a difficult situation, and a well-read, versatile person, and a person who can solve mathematical and physical problems, and a person who recognized the real cause of our problem. At the everyday level, we will distinguish a truly smart person from a simply clever person, and certainly we will not consider an abstruse person to be smart.

Accordingly, if we try to become smarter in the everyday sense, then we run the risk of finding ourselves in a situation "who does not know where he is going, will come to the wrong place."

The scientific approach is associated with greater precision and clarity. In science, they do not talk about the mind, but about the intellect.

Moreover, from the point of view of science, intelligence is not at all something that can be accurately assessed in a conversation or on the basis of introspection. Intelligence is measured using special tests. On the one hand, this is good, because it means that intelligence can be assessed accurately and objectively, in contrast to a number of other psychological parameters. On the other hand, there should be no false sense of confidence: intelligence testing should not be done with a book or magazine; IQ should be measured by a professional under standardized conditions.

As a first approximation, intelligence tests measure different aspects or types of intelligence, such as:

• General awareness:

  • Who is the author of The Odyssey?
  • What is the name of the capital of Italy?

• Verbal Intelligence:

  • Insert a word that would mean the same as the words outside the brackets:

    FABRIC (…) STATE OF MATTER

    (correct answer is gas)

  • Find a common ending for all the words listed:

    

    (the correct answer is spruce)

• Numerical intelligence:

  • Continue the series of numbers: 19, 16, 22, 19, 25, 22, 28, …

    (correct answer is 25)

  In general, many types of intelligence can be distinguished, but, as research shows, all these types ultimately boil down to two:

  • agile intelligence;
  • crystallized intelligence.

  Agile intelligence works when we are looking for a solution to a problem that we have never worked on. The better a person has developed mobile intelligence, the faster he finds solutions to new, unfamiliar problems.

  But crystallized intelligence manifests itself when we work on tasks that we are already familiar with, which we were taught to solve, and comes down to the use of thinking skills, as well as the ability to remember the necessary information.

  Agile intelligence reaches its climax by the age of 30–40, and then begins to weaken. Crystallized intelligence, on the other hand, develops throughout life. Indeed, no one prevents us from accumulating knowledge and ways of solving problems throughout our lives.

  Crystallized intelligence can be developed. You can learn new, more effective ways of solving already familiar problems, you can acquire more and more new knowledge.

  Some studies show that mobile intelligence develops in the process of solving so-called "n-back problems." Today there are several applications for smartphones and tablets that allow you to solve such problems.

  On January 5, 2016, Lumos Lab, which sells Lumosity's online game systems that allegedly enhance intelligence, was fined $ 2 million by the US Federal Trade Commission for fraudulent advertising: there is no evidence that Lumosity enhances intelligence. However, Lumosity is still available both on the website and as a smartphone app. About 900 rubles a month - and you can enjoy an exciting game of increasing your own intelligence … However, Lumosity has a lot of analogues. And although they are not fined, there is no more evidence of the effectiveness of such "means of increasing intelligence" than that of the more usual miraculous drugs for all diseases.

  Woe from Wit

  Even at the everyday level, we understand that an intelligent person does not necessarily become happy. We know that the mind often brings only trouble to its owner. And from a scientific point of view, high intelligence does not guarantee success. But what exactly does intelligence affect is academic performance.

  By the way, intelligence tests also emerged as a predictor of academic performance. Then the school just became mass, and, accordingly, there was a need to drop out children who clearly would not be able to study well.

  You need to develop your intelligence only if you are going to be tested when applying for a job. In life, we have to solve very different problems than those of which intelligence tests consist

  For example, the skill of matching the same ending to different sequences of letters is unlikely to be useful to you, so that in the end all these sequences are words. A rich vocabulary alone will not allow you to write a persuasive letter or successfully speak to an audience.

  There is a real danger in intelligence tests. They do not include tasks for comparing several options for action and choosing the most optimal one. But in real life we need not so much to look for a solution as to compare several paths and choose the best one. For example, we are unlikely to have a problem finding a hotel in any tourist country. But here's how to choose a hotel in which you really relax?

  Tests often contain tasks to identify patterns. But in life, on the contrary, we suffer from the fact that we see a pattern instead of realizing that we are dealing with an accident. This problem, however, could be solved if there were tasks in intelligence tests in which it was directly proposed to identify a pattern or establish that it does not exist. However, there are no such tests yet.

  The tendency of our mind to see patterns where they do not exist is certainly a serious vulnerability in our mind. In science, such vulnerabilities are called "heuristics" and "cognitive distortions." At the same time, hardly anyone will argue with the fact that if you know the shortcomings of the instrument and make adjustments to them, then the instrument can be used more effectively. The more you learn about mind games and the more carefully you correct them, the smarter you will become