Increase IQ: New Study Shows Long Term Gains

The brain fitness researchers Suzanne Jaeggi and Martin Buschkuehl who first demonstrated cognitive gains from n-back training back in 2008 have now published follow up research showing that the gains hold long term.

Using n-back brain training software for a group of school children, the researchers tested the children’s IQs before and after training and then again after three months.

In a recent interview, the senior brain fitness researcher, Dr. Jonides, who supervised the study made the following observations:

“These new studies demonstrate that the more training people have on the dual n-back task, the greater the improvement in fluid intelligence,” Jonides said. “It’s actually a dose-response effect. And we also demonstrate that the much simpler single n-back training using spatial cues has the same positive effect.”

In addition to a gain in IQ the researchers found that the training made children less likely to be distracted by invalid or irrelevant information.

“Psychologically, training made them more conservative,” Jonides said.

They also studied how the training affected brain activity.

“We found two effects of our training regimen,” he said. “After training, people had reduced amounts of blood flow in active brain regions when they were doing training tasks. And they had increased amounts of blood flow in those regions when they were not doing training tasks.

“In some ways, this is much like training a muscle in the body, and in some ways, it is different. When new muscle fibers have been grown as a result of training, they require greater blood flow when they are not being used. However, by contrast, when the new muscles are in use, they require more blood, unlike the trained regions of the brain.”

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