In this video I consider interventions aimed at improving cognitive performance including brain stimulation, off-label drug use, nootropics, and brain training games and apps. While unfortunately there isn’t much evidence that any of these can improve fluid intelligence (as measured by assessments like the Raven Progressive Matrices) that can transfer to other tasks, this doesn’t mean that we can’t make improvements in specific tasks. We can still improve our crystallized intelligence and proper sleep, diet, and exercise can help us to make the most of our potential.

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Video Transcript

Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In the past few videos I’ve talked about some environmental factors that are associated with changes in average IQ score, but you might be wondering about your own individual IQ score. You might be wondering if there are things that you could do that would change your IQ. So in this video we’re going to take a look at some interventions that have been proposed as ways of changing people’s cognitive abilities.

Now the first of these is stimulation of the brain and this is relatively new. There’s two main types of stimulation that have been used; transcranial direct current stimulation and transcranial magnetic stimulation. So what happens in these in tdcs, this direct current stimulation, electrodes are placed on the scalp and these then stimulate brain regions underneath. And in transcranial magnetic stimulation the stimulation comes from a magnetic coil so it looks sort of like a wand that’s held over the skull and this can then stimulate the brain underneath. So what does this stimulation accomplish? Well, what this does is it alters the flow of ions in the brain and so this means that it can make neurons either depolarized or hyperpolarized. In other words, it changes the likelihood that neurons will fire. It can either stimulate them, make them more likely to fire, or it can inhibit them, make it less likely that those neurons will fire.

So by altering the flow of ions in different brain regions it seems that we can influence different cognitive abilities. So there’s some research suggesting that using stimulation can alter people’s abilities and things like their creativity or their artistic talent. Or we can see inhibition of certain abilities; so you can cause somebody to stutter when they try to speak by stimulating certain regions of the brain. So these effects are short-term, they generally only last for about 20 minutes after this stimulation has occurred. So we don’t have a long-lasting intervention here. It’s not the case that you can go in and have your brain stimulated and suddenly be a better artist or something or suddenly become a mathematical genius and the effects are fairly subtle. Again, it’s not the case that we’d see a massive increase in your IQ from this type of stimulation but it’s one area of new research looking at possible ways to influence cognitive abilities.

Now another way that people try to alter their cognitive abilities is through the use of drugs. So this brings us to pharmaceutical intervention as an attempt to alter cognitive ability. There’s two main ways that this occurs. The first is the off-label use of drugs in order to help people to work or study longer or to possibly change their cognitive functioning. So the drugs that are used here are often drugs that are associated with either attention disorders or wakefulness disorders.

So the most popular drugs that are used this way and, an off-label use refers to using a drug for purposes other than what it was designed for, so these are drugs you’ve probably heard of before. One of the popular drugs used as a used off-label to try to help people to study or work longer is methylphenidate but you probably know it by the name Ritalin. This is a drug used for treating attention problems. And similarly another drug used for attention-related disorders is Adderall. And so these drugs are used by some people to supposedly help them to study better.

And we also see the use of drugs like Modafinil. And Modafinil is a drug that was developed for narcolepsy. So it improves wakefulness, it helps to keep people awake. If you recall from the unit on sleep we talked about narcolepsy where people suddenly enter the sleep state so Modafinil is a drug that was designed to prevent that from occurring; to promote wakefulness. But people use it in order to work or study for longer periods of time .Now it’s important remember that these drugs are potentially addictive and they also have potential side effects so I’m certainly not recommending that you use drugs off-label, particularly when they’re used recreationally and there’s not medical supervision over the dosages that people are taking or awareness of side-effects that might be related to the drug use.

Now another way that people use drugs to try to improve their cognitive abilities is the use of nootropics. So these are supplements that are supposedly able to give a cognitive benefit. So there’s a class of drugs called racetams and so there’s a number of different racetam-related drugs that are used as nootropics. These include piracetam, aniracetam, oxyracetam, phenylracetam, there’s a number of these and people claim that these help them to concentrate better. There’s also other supplements like people taking fish oil or B vitamins or ginseng or there’s a whole host of different supplements that people use that they claim help them to concentrate better or improve their studying or improve their cognitive performance in some tasks. But it’s important to remember that in the area of supplements we don’t have the same regulation that we might have for actual drugs that are used to treat disorders and this limited regulation means that often marketing can step in and make claims that aren’t necessarily justified and aren’t backed by research.

And the fact that this can play a role in whether people think they’re getting an effect from these drugs or not brings us to the second point which is it’s hard to know if the reports on some of these supplements are really demonstrations of the placebo effect. So generally people who are taking these types of supplements know that they’re taking the supplement and they have a pre-existing belief that it’s going to help them in some way and so it could simply be the case that any benefits that they’re seeing or resulting from the placebo effect.

And this brings me to a related point which is that when people talk about these types of drugs they often refer to doing you know n=1 “experiments”, right? Meaning that, you know, they’re they’re treating it as an “experiment” and they’re testing the effects of this supplement and they have a sample size of one, meaning they’re just doing it on themselves. But I put “experiment” in quotation marks there because the truth is you can’t have an n=1 experiment because you have no control group. You don’t have anything to compare this to. You need to have a larger group of people. You have some people who think they’re taking taking the drug that actually aren’t, right? These are not the double-blind placebo studies that we’d really need to assess the effectiveness of these supplements and those types of studies are pretty hard to come by when it comes to finding real research, finding you know actual solid evidence for the effects of these supplements.

Ok, so a third way that people try to influence their cognitive abilities is through training. Now, we know that we can improve our abilities in particular skills by practicing so training does work. We know that we can increase our crystallized intelligence but the question is, can we improve our fluid intelligence? So one way to think about your fluid intelligence is to imagine that, you know, you have let’s say all your verbal abilities here and you have your mathematical abilities and maybe you have some spatial abilities and you know whatever sort of different abilities we want to include in the concept of intelligence which, as we’ve seen, can be difficult to determine. There’s something, our fluid intelligence, you might think of as being this overlapping point here. It’s something that influences all of these other abilities but it’s not subject to the aspects of crystallized intelligence that also influence those.

So let’s say your verbal ability, you know, improving your vocabulary is something that is going to improve your verbal ability. But you know that’s sort of something that we know you can do by training and it’s sort of a crystallized form of intelligence. And the same for your math reasoning, you know, if you practice lots of types of math problems you’ll probably get better at certain types simply from practice and the same might apply for your spatial abilities and things like this. So we know all that’s true but can we improve this sort of core? This thing that is going to then transfer to all sorts of other tasks, right? Where you work on this one thing that improves your verbal abilities and it simultaneously improves your math abilities and your spatial abilities etc., right? That would be sort of the ideal situation that we’d want to find, where we’d show we were improving fluid intelligence.

Now, how do we go about testing this fluid intelligence here? Well, one of the best tests for fluid intelligence is considered to be the Raven Progressive Matrices test. So this is an assessment of fluid intelligence and here’s an example of a Raven Progressive Matrix. So the idea here is that you look at this pattern and you have to determine what goes in the last space here. So this is a quite simple one and you can see that, okay we have this squared divided into four parts and the darkened part is moving clockwise around, and then we have the same thing with a circle and, you know, so now what we have would have multiple choice answers here. And in this last box we want to have a diamond shape here divided into four parts and with the darkened part being over on the right here.

Alright, now it’s a progressive test, as I said Raven Progressive Matrices, and so they get increasingly difficult as you go through the tests. That would be a fairly easy one and then as you go on they get harder and harder. They get more and more complex in terms of what the rules are that determine what would be in the last frame. Ok, so that’s sort of a standard test of fluid intelligence that doesn’t involve, you know, vocabulary, doesn’t involve like mathematical equations or things that. You could practice and get better at and generally people don’t practice and get better at the Progressive Matrices Test; it’s not something you can really prepare for.

Ok, so this brings us to attempts to show that training has an effect on fluid intelligence and in 2008 Suzanne Jaeggi and colleagues published a study in which they claimed that they had a task that improved fluid intelligence and that that then transferred to other areas. And this was called the dual n-back task. So the idea of the dual n-back task is you have a grid, right? You know, for some visual information and then you’re also listening. So the dual refers to two parts; there’s a visual part and an auditory component. And n refers to the number of iterations going back and I’ll explain that in a second. And then back is, of course, how many iterations going back. So what you do is you watch this and one of these squares would light up and at the same time you’d hear a letter like you know P. And then if it was one back then on the next round a square would light up and you’d hear a letter. and if it was the same square then you press a button and if it was the same letter then you press a different button, right? Or if it was both, you know, you’d press both buttons.

So what you’re doing is you’re remembering the visual stimulus from one turn ago and you’re remembering the auditory stimulus from one turn ago. And then once you can do that, going one back is fairly easy, I mean you just heard the letter and you just saw the the box there, so it’s not too hard. But then you do 2 back, where you have to remember that this occurred and then another one occurred and then I’m asking you what what happened two times ago, two iterations ago. Which box was lit up in which letter did you hear? And you also have to remember the one that you’re hearing now, that is the test, because in two more iterations that’s the one you’re being tested on. So you have to keep track of all of this visual and auditory information throughout this sequence. And then once you can do that with two then you try three back and four back and five back.

And so what Jaeggi and colleagues found was that first people got better at the dual n-back task, you know, they started off struggling to do two back or three back and then they were able to do four or five back with enough training. But they also claimed that the people improved on the Raven Progressive Matrices. Now this was pretty exciting news at the time because improving fluid intelligence is something that we’ve really never been able to demonstrate. But unfortunately the enthusiasm sort of dwindled as future applications weren’t able to get this same effect. And people also criticized some of the methodology because they only used parts of the Raven Progressive Matrices. It’s generally a 45-minute test and they only used a ten-minute segment of it, so they were criticized for that as well. But it turned out, it didn’t seem to be the case that you could improve fluid intelligence by practicing a particular task. In other words it didn’t transfer to other abilities.

Ok, so this brings us to other brain training games. This, you know, around 2008 with the publication of this study, there was a great deal of interest in brain training that came out of this and lots of companies sprang up with Lumosity and CogMed and BrainHQ and they all claimed that their brain training games would improve your intelligence. And in other words the question is, do these games, while they might be fun to play and they might be challenging, they might really have a cognitive challenge to them, which is probably a good thing, but the question is do those improvements that you make on the tasks transfer to other real-life tasks? And the evidence seems to be no.

And in fact one of these companies Lumosity was fined several million dollars by the FTC for making claims that their games could stave off cognitive decline, right? That it could prevent elderly people from having cognitive deficits and they were making this claim when there wasn’t really solid evidence to back it up. So they were fined very heavily for this and this brings us to the question of, certainly these games aren’t bad for you, but if they don’t transfer to other tasks. maybe they’re not the best way to spend your time. And maybe the cognitive challenge that they offer to you could be found elsewhere in something a little more useful. So there’s not really any evidence that these types of training games, while they might be useful and they might have some sort of challenge to them, they might not be any better than trying to learn a new language or doing crossword puzzles or learning a new musical instrument. Those are cognitive challenges that, again, might not transfer to other abilities but they sort of have a purpose on their own. Which these training games, you could say, generally don’t. You get better at the game but that doesn’t necessarily help you with other things that you might want to accomplish.

So this brings us to the last part which is, what are my recommendations? So the bad news is that we can’t seem to improve fluid intelligence. There’s not really any solid evidence for an intervention that improves fluid intelligence over the long term. But in another way, it’s kind of freeing because what it means is you can’t improve your fluid intelligence but neither can anybody else. And so what you can do is focus on the tasks that you want to get better at and those might be different tasks than somebody else is focused on. In other words, if you want to get better at calculus, you don’t have to worry about doing the dual n-back task 30 minutes a day for months to try to improve your IQ to then help you do calculus. The idea is, well, you should just focus on calculus problems because we know that you can improve your crystallized intelligence and we know that practicing tasks allows you to get better at them. So if you need to improve your grades in calculus class then you just need to spend more time on calculus. And in some ways that’s kind of freeing because it tells you exactly what you need to do. You don’t need to search around for the magic brain training game or app that’s going to help you. You say “this is what I want to get better at, this is what I need to spend time on”.

Ok, so what are my other recommendations in order to make the most of that time that you’re spending on the tasks that you want to improve on? Well, the first is sleep. So we already know and we saw in the unit on sleep that sleep deprivation causes deficits in cognitive performance. So if you want to improve and you want to perform at your best, the first thing you should do is make sure that you’re getting enough sleep.

And the second thing you should do is focus on having a healthy diet. Now this opens up a whole can of worms of people arguing over what exactly is a healthy diet but, you know, you don’t have to get too deep into this. Because you probably know what an unhealthy diet consists of. You probably know that pizza and ice cream every day is probably a bad idea. That’s not going to help you reach your fullest potential so you want to make sure you’re getting adequate nutrition. For me personally, I’ve found that a paleo diet has has been very beneficial for me but generally, you know, eating lots of vegetables is generally going to be a good thing regardless of your views on eating meat or how much protein or fat you should be getting. But in general you have probably a good idea of what an unhealthy diet is and the foods that you should at least avoid.

Alright, third is exercise. So exercise has been demonstrated to stave off cognitive decline and it can help to improve your cognitive performance. And part of this is that your brain needs oxygen and exercising basically improves the efficiency of your body’s ability to deliver nutrients where they need to be, including in your brain. So exercise helps with that and it also can help you to get better quality of sleep, so that sort of relates back. So these are things that you can do. They don’t really involve any special equipment or, you know, apps that you need to download in order to practice using them. These are all things that you can start implementing right away and that are associated with improved cognitive performance.

And lastly, as I said, you want to do all these things and then you just want to spend as much time as you can on the tasks you want to get better at. And this relates again to having a growth mindset; believing that you can make improvements on tasks if you practice them. And then just spending the time, putting in the effort to, you know, if you want to learn Spanish you’re going to have to spend a lot of time listening, reading, you know, attempting to speak Spanish with other people. If you do that you’ll get better and you don’t need some magic brain training website to help you improve your IQ in order to then help you to learn Spanish. And the same goes for any other cognitive goal that you have. I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!