Succeeding Without Brilliance

I recently got a note from a fan of this blog who was depressed because her IQ scores were not much above average. Her sadness magnified when she read a research paper from a group of 16 researchers at several prestigious universities who asserted that education after you are 20 years old doesn´t much improve your intelligence. My reader said, “That is devastating for me, as it makes it clearer that I´m pretty stuck in my "average" position. Do you think that this analysis is clearly conclusive? Or is there still some way to improve myself?”

She continued, “I dream of finishing my degree in Electronical Engineering and then going for Physics, but after seeing that analysis and lots of IQ charts for job positions and careers, I’m pretty disappointed.”

Before addressing her concerns, I need to summarize the paper that dismayed her. The report, published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNSA) was based on what authors called General Cognitive Ability (GCA), which they defined as any IQ-like summary or principal component index of overall cognitive function. They admit and referenced some studies that have found that additional education increases intelligence, but their hypothesis was the opposite.

One thing the researchers did was conduct a basic meta-analysis of seven studies (10 datasets) with pre- and post-comparisons. The basic finding was that each additional year of education accounted for an average of 1.20 additional later-life IQ points.

My blog fan apparently missed the good news. That is easy to do, because the paper was one of the most poorly written and confusing research reports I have read over decades. This is what you might expect from anything written by 16 academics. What I think the report said about the meta-analysis was that each additional year of education accounted for an average of 1.20 additional later-life IQ points. You can see this as a glass half empty or half full. The half full view is that four years of formal post-high school education raises your IQ almost 5 points on average. Don’t bet the farm on this conclusion. These studies had an excessive amount of uncontrolled variables.

The PNAS paper did cite a study reporting that completing a university education led to a midlife gain of gains of 6–22.4 IQ points over adolescent cognitive ability compared with individuals who did not attend university. The students in that study were tested for IQ at age 15. That means that the average IQ of 100 could have jumped to 122, which is definitely adequate for most intellectually challenging careers. And this assumes just four years of ordinary college, without regard to major or rigor of intellectual challenge. Trust me, all college education is not equal.

These authors also conducted their own study and found little effect of education on IQ in an all-male, predominantly white, non-Hispanic sample at age 56-66. For example, averaging data across a large pool of subjects, they report that GCA accounted for 40% of GCA variance in late midlife and approximately 10% of variance in each of seven other cognitive domains. Averaging obscures the detection of individuals who could have had large GCA gains from education and life experience. Moreover, the kind of education and life experience must surely have varied widely and was not accounted for in the study. Even so, 60% of the variance in CGA did NOT depend on the test scores the men had taken when they were 20 years old. Don’t forget that 90% of late-life GCA variance was influenced by something other than formal education.

The IQ-like test they used was a military qualification test (AFQT), known to correlate well with established IQ tests. All their subjects, military veterans, took the test around age 20 and again about three decades later. Their data were interpreted to indicate that education does not make one much smarter. One result seemed especially clear: individuals with higher intellectual capacity tend to attain more education, achieve higher occupational status, and engage more in cognitive-intellectual activities.

There was an association of education, occupational complexity, and cognitive-intellectual activities with better later-life cognitive functioning, but these associations are not the cause of late-life ability. In other words, smart people are smarter when they are older because they were smarter to begin with. They became educated because they were already smart enough to seek it, not that education made them smart. The authors did concede that they were unable to definitively confirm their hypotheses regarding possible sensitive periods for brain development and the age of baseline testing. Such confirmation would require testing at multiple time points before the completion of education all within the same study.

One clear take-home message is that most intellectual gains occur before the age of 20. This is why elementary and secondary school education are crucial for creating optimal intelligence. As a professor for over 50 years, I am convinced that public schools today are not doing as much to make youngsters smarter as was the case in previous decades. That does not mean that further gains cannot be obtained after age 20. Education and intellectually challenging life experience do produce intelligence gains, just not as much as they do in youngsters.

The preference of researchers for averaging data obscures finding out what happens for a particular person. Is a person age 20 with low IQ more or less able to benefit from education than a person with a higher initial IQ? Or is it the other way around? Would the effect of education be different for women or minorities?

The kind of education and intellectual life challenge surely matter. For example, do we really expect the same mental benefit from four years of being a college physics major as an education major? Think also about still more benefit from a rigorous, emphasize rigorous, PhD program. Do we expect the same results from someone with little post-college training compared to a life-long learner?

IQ scores are affected by many things besides education that can affect how we interpret any effects of education. What about the age at which IQ is first tested? Brain development occurs throughout youth and extends past age 20. Obviously, IQ tests in elementary school are less valid than test results obtained after puberty.

Other variables affect IQ scores as well, particularly the mental state of the individual when the test was taken. Factors that will surely decrease scores, independently of actual cognitive ability, include sleep deficiency, emotional stress, and persistent mental distraction.

Consider especially stress. The persistent release of cortisol in chronic stress shrinks neuronal synapses and surely diminishes cognitive ability. The pool of veterans in this study must surely have varied widely in the amount of stress the men experienced during their military years. Some surely had combat-related PTSD, while others had non-stressful jobs.

One other thing: IQ tests not only measure how well you can figure things out, but only certain kinds of things, especially analogies. They also measure how fast you can solve a problem. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how long it takes to solve a problem. Einstein worked on special relativity for at least 10 years, despite claims of some others that it was a lightning-flash eureka moment.

What is my advice to my blog follower, and all those others, including me, with unimpressive IQs? First, do what you love that is helpful to you and others. But do not allow your reach to exceed your grasp. As the Army says, “Be all you can be.” The turtle sometimes beats the hare. But accept that the hare usually wins. Do not obsess or become stressed over your limitations, for that is counterproductive.

You should be happy and bring happiness to others. That should suffice. You don’t need the ability to invent relativity to be happy or make a meaningful contribution to others.

Source:

Kremen, William S. et al. (2019). Influence of young adult cognitive ability and additional education on later-life cognition. PNAS. 116(6), 2021-2026.

Aerobic Exercise Makes You Smarter

On several occasions, I have written about the anti-aging beneficial effects of exercise. New studies, confirm earlier findings of exercise benefit. Now, a new study shows that exercise reduces levels of the major inflammatory chemical, interleukin-6, and an associated enhancement of neural activity in the brain circuitry used to encode information and form memories.

In response to earlier studies by others showing that exercise improves mental function, a team from mostly German universities studied the effects of exercise on 32 subjects aged 52 to 71 years old. They were particularly interested in memory because prior studies by others made it clear that age usually impairs memories of names and faces, situations and events, which are categorized as episodic memory. Tests of recall of episodic memory show marked age decrements in many subjects, even if they are given reminder cues.

Other researchers had shown that exercise, particularly aerobic exercise, reduces decline of episodic memory. This group of researchers wanted to explore why this benefit occurs. They examined two possibilities for the benefit of exercise:

1. Reduction of inflammatory chemicals (interleukin-6), which is known to occur with aerobic exercise in younger people, and

2. Strengthened connection among neurons that encode and form episodic memories (in the hippocampus, thalamus, and medial prefrontal cortex).

In the experiment on day one, subjects completed a survey that revealed each person's level of physical activity over the past week and gave a blood sample for measuring the baseline level of interleukin-6. Each subject then took several standardized tests of episodic memory. Then each subject had their brains scanned with fMRI while they were asked to memorize a series of faces and their association with a profession (pilot, electrician, bus driver, etc.). After the scan, they were tested for recall. The purpose of the scan was to assess functional connectivity, that is, how strongly the activation correlated in the brain areas that participate in encoding and memory formation.

The exercise survey allowed subjects to be grouped on the basis of aerobic and non-aerobic exercise during the prior week. The aerobic group remembered more items on the episodic memory task. The aerobic group also revealed stronger functional connectivity among several areas in the memory network. Additionally, there was a correlation with levels of the inflammatory chemical: subjects showing strong functional connectivity had the lowest levels of interleukin-6.

Limitations of the study include a failure to distinguish the intensity of exercise. For example, one can jog three hours a week at high speed or rather leisurely. Also, actual fitness of each subject was not measured, just a log of their exercise activities during the prior week. Another factor is that only one inflammatory chemical was studied. Interleukin-6 is one of a large family of such chemicals known as cytokines, and there are other inflammatory chemicals as well. Moreover, the significance of interleukin was not evaluated. When brain is damaged (by stress, metabolic production of free radicals, or whatever), interleukin-6 is released as a defense mechanism.

Nonetheless, a strong correlation, consistent with prior studies, was demonstrated between aerobic exercise, inflammation, and mental function. The authors did not speculate on why these effects occurred. I will.

Two contributing factors are obvious. One obvious factor is that aerobic exercise improves cardiovascular function and likely improves blood flow through the brain. The other obvious factor is that aerobic exercise releases the "feel-good" endorphins. Endorphins alleviate stress. Stress, more specifically the cortisol released during stress, shrinks the synaptic connections between neurons, which of course can be expected to diminish functional connectivity and information processing efficiency. Stress increases the level of inflammatory chemicals like interleukin-6. The low level of interleukin-6 in the aerobic group indicates that these brains were somewhat protected from the ravages of stress and free radicals.

Bottom line: aerobic exercise is good for older people. In addition to the well-known cardiovascular benefits, aerobic exercise makes people more sharp mentally. How one gets the needed aerobic exercise probably doesn't matter, as long as the exercise is sufficiently intense and sustained. Jogging, bike riding, swimming, and fast-moving sports should all prove beneficial.

Readers of this column will be interested in "Memory Medic's" e-book, Improve Your Memory for a Healthy Brain. Memory Is the Canary in Your Brain's Coal Mine (available in all formats from Smashwords.com). The book, devoted exclusively to memory issues in seniors, includes review of many of the ideas in these columns over the last five years.

Sources:

Thielen, Jan-Willem et al. (2016. Aerobic activity in the healthy elderly is associated with larger plasticity in memory related brain structures and lower system inflammation. Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience. 26 December. doi.: 10.3389/fnagi.2016.00319

Erta, M., Quintana, A., and Hidalgo, J. (2012) Interleukin-6, a Major Cytokine in the Central Nervous System. Int. J. Biol. Sci. 8(9):1254-1266. doi:10.7150/ijbs.4679. Available from http://www.ijbs.com/v08p1254.htm

Your Kid May Be Smart. Just Don’t Tell Him So Too Often

Some people say that we learn best from our mistakes. But all of us know about people who never seem to learn from their mistakes. This failure to learn is most obvious with people who keep making poor decisions and lifestyle choices. The psychological explanations are many and complex.

For simplicity, let us restrict explanation to the world of education. Educational philosophy has changed a great deal in the 50 years since I was in school. Back then, for example, I had the highest grades in school, but many of my teachers went out of their way to cut me down a notch or two so I wouldn’t get conceited. Aside from the debatable question of whether that worked, the point is that today, the educational establishment has the opposite philosophy. They tend to tell all kids they are smart. I have seen elementary schools where most students are selected as “Honors Students.” I know college education professors who won’t give anything less than an A.  Why is praise so liberally applied? In part, the idea is to bolster student self-esteem. Also motivating teachers is the reluctance to admit that some kids are smarter than others. Equal outcome is the politically correct expectation. That’s why we have the No Child Left Behind law. Everybody is supposed to succeed because all are presumed equal. Of course the reality is that this is a lie, and the only way everybody achieves the same is to lower the standards to the least common denominator.

Research clearly shows that whether students learn best from their mistakes depends on a student’s self-perception. Research by Carol Dweck and colleagues at Stanford demonstrated that the students who are most likely to learn from their mistakes are those who don’t think of themselves as smart as such but smart enough to get smarter. They have a “growth mindset,” a belief system that they can get better if they will just invest the time and effort. In one of the group’s experiments, half of the students were repeatedly praised for “being smart,” and these students were not good at learning from mistakes. It is not clear why. Maybe they thought the problem was in the learning material, not in them. The other half of students were praised for effort and improvement and these students got better and made fewer mistakes. Several months later, all students repeated a standardized test, and the “smart” students’ scores dropped 20%, while the “growth mindset” students scored 30% higher.

Jason Moser followed up this idea with an experiment in which subjects performed a tedious task in which some mistakes were inevitable. Those who did best at learning from the mistakes were those who believed most strongly that they could get better at this task and make fewer mistakes. Brain electrical recordings during the task revealed two electrical signatures of the mindset, the first being an error-related negative voltage about 50 milliseconds after an error occurred, and a second positive voltage up to about a half a second later. The size of this second signal correlated with how intensely the subject paid conscious attention and was distressed by the mistake. This second signal was larger in those subjects that were the best learners, and they made even fewer mistakes as the task was repeated.

Ego is probably a factor. The “smart” students may seem to have plenty of self-esteem, but apparently failure is too painful a challenge to their ego and they find ways to rationalize or dismiss the mistakes. Students with a growth mindset may have better self-esteem, because they accept the challenge to their ego, and believe they can get better, which usually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

A little humility is a good thing. Most of us, even the smartest, have a lot to be humble about. There is even a book on the subject, “Why Do Smart People Make Such Stupid Mistakes.”

Sources:

1. http://www.brainology.us/default.aspx?gclid=CNn04-q_oq0CFbEDtgodQj4iuQ

2. Mangels, J. A. (2006) Why do beliefs about intelligence influence learning success? A social cognitive neuroscience model. SCAN, 1, 75–86. doi:10.1093/scan/nsl013

3. Merrington, C. (2011). Why Do Smart People Make Such Stupid Mistakes, St Albans, Herts, United Kingdom: Ecademy Press.