Comments on: Anything is possible!

By: Shaun Luttin

Shaun Luttin — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:00:47 +0000

Thanks for posting Travelingwilbury. I found reading your stuff interesting.

By: Travelingwilbury

Travelingwilbury — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 16:22:07 +0000

A belated many thanks for your comments …

I Have felt a clarity of mind and an ease with my work and my ability to handle day to day stress to be greatly improved. I believe that the training (in combination with other components of learning and experience) has enabled me to achieve some breakthroughs, both personally and professionally, that have been extremely challenging for me.

I have finally posted on achieving the ave n-back of 5.5 that i referred to back in June! It took 100 sessions to get from 5 to 5.5. I expect to hit 6 sometime in the spring.

By: Will

Will — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 04:43:36 +0000

Great persistence; it seems you have much improvement ahead of you. Hitting 5 is a turning a big corner so you should start to see some new territory soon. My suggestion — don’t limit yourself or worry about time it took for you versus others. The key is to get there.

I agree with what you write in your post, especially the part about other aspects of cognitive ability that go working intelligence. Most research indicates that working memory accounts for roughly 50% (some go as high as 70%) of the variance in fluid intelligence. But then, there is crystallized ability and, particularly among gifted people in academic settings, this sort of intelligence based on long term memory becomes heavily weighted, often far more than WM or fluid intelligence. WM does play a role in crystallized abilities (as WM plays some role in storage for long term recall) but learned skills and abilities can do a lot for people, even if WM is relatively weak. However, improvement in WM will improve speed at which one can solve problems or even remember the solution to a problem already solved in the past (crystallized ability). Gc is actually a very important aspect of cognitive ability, just as important as Gf and WM and they all go into what we call intelligence. But one thing about WM is it
is pretty central to other abilities, even, as Martin pointed out a while ago,
special abilities like music, language, numerical, visualization, etc.

By: Bill

Bill — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 19:46:45 +0000

I discovered that the key to remembering was simply to relax and sink into your mind rather than try to force a memory, the memory kind of surfaces itself. Instead of the memory getting darker and darker the more you try, it becomes clearer and clearer. However there is a limit (I call it the “fade out”), and thats what gets extended by playing the n-back.

By: martin

martin — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 22:59:11 +0000

Hello Will.

Thank you for this lucid description of your experience and feelings regarding dual n-back training.

“My expectation given my education (PhD), experience and success in solving difficult problems would be that i would be good at the n-back training from the start but i was not (at least based on the other posts here).”
– I absolutely agree. I was startled at first by how hard the training is.

“This has been fun and rewarding. I can feel the difference!”
– I’m curious to know more about what you feel from the training.

Martin