The story reports on a growing focus of research into the trait of “grit” and how it relates to success in life.

The story explains how the relationship between IQ and success came to dominate the focus of psychologists, in part because it was easy to test for. Recently, researchers have becom interested in better defining and measuring “grit” in the belief that it may provide a better indicator for success than IQ.

It certainly seems to make a lot of common sense that an intelligent person can fail simply through lack of resolve, and that a less intelligent person can succeed through dint of persistence.

Quite apart from general interest, I have another reason for posting about this story. It also strikes me that dual n-back training can be useful in training both intelligence and persistence or “grit.” It’s certainly not possible to succeed at n-back training without having or developing a fair degree of perseverance!

“The BFP training blog enjoys frequent contributions from those with measured IQ scores at or above the MENSA level. They’ve obtained benefits from the training that have kept them training well beyond 19 days. One BFP customer increased his IQ score by more than 15%, gaining entry to MENSA, after training for two 19 day periods.

“Specifically, as you correctly point out, an increase in fluid intelligence of 40% does not translate into an increase in general IQ of 40%. General IQ has to do with several factors, not just fluid intelligence. To the best of our knowledge, smart people tend to see gains in IQ of 10 to 20%, but we don’t have enough data yet to generalize and define this increase more precisely. But quite apart from raw scores, the BFP working-memory training produces beautiful, noticeable changes in one’s life. It can enhance any experience that places demands on working-memory, fluid intelligence, concentration and multi-tasking, such as playing a musical instrument, writing a paper, or operating smoothly in a complex social situation.”