Does meditation make IQ brain training LESS effective? by @jeroseland on 3Speak
"I’ve had a few queries about the status of mindfulness meditation practice in the recent... Intelligence study showing gains in fluid intelligence from multi-modal brain cross-training. In this me...
Tags: #podcast #braintraining #iq
Hey, this is Jonathan with Limitless Mindset, and this video, I wanted to read you one of the great newsletter emails that Dr. Mark Ashton Smith of IQ Mindware puts out. And this was on the status of meditation in a 2018 study showing fluid intelligence gains from cognitive training. I've had a few queries about the status of mindfulness meditation practices in the recent February 2018 intelligence study showing gains in fluid intelligence from multimodal brain cross-training. In this message, I'd like to clarify some of what we know about mindfulness meditation from this study. First, here's a summary of the... findings. The study was a comprehensive four-month placebo -controlled trial with 424 healthy adults. That's a pretty good sample size. They were in between 18 and 43 years old and 50% were Caucasian. The conclusions are shown in the screenshot. from the journal article here. And if you are curious about this sort of thing, I'd encourage you to check out the article where, with Mark's permission, I reproduced, all of this. So, yeah, it's called Multimodal Fitness and Cognitive Training to Enhance Fluid Intelligence. And the highlights were fitness, cognitive mindfulness interventions were designed to bolster intelligence. Fitness Cognitive Training showed control-adjusted gains in visuospatial reasoning. That means it's going to make you better at fitting together all the dishes in the dishwasher. You know how some people are just really great at that, and some people are terrible at that. Fitness-only training did not bolster fluid intelligence performance. in benefits to fluid intelligence from mindfulness training. The research team concludes because fluid intelligence test scores predict real-world outcomes across the lifespan, boosting intelligence ability via multimodal intervention that is effective even in young, healthy adults, is a promising avenue to improve reasoning and decision-making in daily. Life. Unlike other brain training apps showing null results in the lab after training, this kind of training method also implemented in the IQ Mindware apps takes a multimodal approach, combining both dual inback, that's working memory training, with executive control, that's attention training. These results are in line with previous results and help make sense of studies showing no IQ gains from working memory training when clearly the right type of brain training helps considerably. Here is what we now know, combining attention. Training with working memory training, that's dual in back, training is more effective than either alone. Visiospacial intelligence benefits from training while verbal reasoning does not. Combining the cognitive training with exercise improves the intelligence gains. Does meditation help or hinder? What was puzzling about this study was that while the pattern of results for the most part made perfect sense, the condition where participants did meditation apparently did not. The researchers compared the effects of four types of training on both visiospacial and verbal fluid intelligence. And there was, firstly, there was a fitness training group. Second, there was fitness training and cognitive training. That was called the FitMF group. And thirdly, there was a fitness, cognitive training, and mindfulness meditation group. And then, fourthly, there was a perceptual training. That was the control group. The cognitive training involved specifically working memory training, that's the dual end back, executive control attention training, and thirdly, visual spatial logic. training. This is precisely the kind of training implemented in the I3 and high IQ Pro apps. The computerized perceptual training done by the control group did not involve any working memory or executive control attention training, but note that is still a type of brain training. The results of the four groups are shown in the figure. here and there's a chart which would seem to show here that the biggest improvement is in the fit mf group and so and they got a p equals 0.02 improvement all training groups got a statistically significant visual spatial IQ increase after training, ranging from 4 to over 9 IQ points. Significance is indicated by the asterix and is a strict statistical criteria that reassures us that the gains were real, not due to chance. The training gains were visual spatial. No groups improved in the verbal... IQ test, that's the LSAT, which showed no significant change from pre-training scores. This is an important finding, helping to explain some of the null results in previous studies. Only one group doing both cognitive and exercise did significantly better than the control group with an absolute gain of over nine IQ points. But you can see the pattern of results is clear. The cognitive training and exercise group did better than the fitness training group alone. And both groups did better than the control group. So that's pretty encouraging. They're saying that people that were doing, these people that were combining, that were doing a holistic approach to their brain training and doing, you know, doing the physical fitness along with it, that they were getting, they were getting like nine, an increase of nine IQ points. That's, that's pretty significant. A, um, uh, Those of you who know much about IQ know that it's what's considered a standard variation is 15 IQ points. And if we're looking at, if we're looking at the world in general, if we're looking at countries in general, 15 IQ points is pretty significant. That's the difference between, I would say, like, the United States and Nicaragua, for example. Okay, training gains in multiple fluid reasoning tests. The fit MF group, again, that's the cognitive training and exercise, also scored better than the control group on a number of other tests of fluid intelligence, not just the figure series test. So there was the figure series. Okay, so they've got some more. Some more specifics there. And the pattern of results for these post -training test scores was the same with the fit MF group showing the greatest gains greater than just the fitness group. The puzzle. But you wouldn't, but wouldn't you expect that by adding meditation to the cognitive training and exercise mix would help with the IQ gains even more. the data says otherwise. Performance in this group was more similar to the control group than all the fluid intelligence tests. Why is that? That's a little counterintuitive. A closer look. First point. The actual IQ gain. The first thing to note is that the fit... MF mind group did improve significantly in a fluid intelligence by five IQ points, but it did a little better, although not significantly compared to the control group who did perceptual training. Second is lack of mindfulness training. All groups trained on and off for four months. So if you want that 9 point IQ... gang, you want to devote like four months to this. So a little bit more of a medium term type commitment. But what exactly did the fit MF mind group do? When we look closer, we see that it was a rather strange training sequence, to quote the paper, the fit MF... Mind condition began in one month with one to two sessions of fitness training and 10 sessions of mindfulness meditation in month two with 12 sessions of fitness training in month three with 10 sessions of fitness training and two sessions of cognitive training and in month four with four sessions of fitness training and eight sessions of cognitive training in the three months of training leading up to the intelligence retesting the FitMF group doing exercise and cognitive training always combined these two types of training in a given week. During the same period, the FitMF group did no meditation training whatsoever. The only time this group did any meditation was in the first month. There's good reason to believe that... any effects of mindfulness would not transfer over this long time gap, particularly given the nature of meditation sessions. And the FitMF group did 20 sessions of cognitive training in total, while the FitMF Mind Group did... a total of 10 sessions of cognitive training, half the training, half the cognitive training, and no meditation for 12 weeks before testing. Once we know this, the graph results now look more as expected. Rather than interpreting the data as mindfulness training, taking away benefits from the combined fitness and cognitive training, it looks more like the smaller IQ gain. was due to the reduced time spent on cognitive training in that group. And then, thirdly, the mixed effects in the fit MF mind group. The post-training fluid intelligence data from the fit MF mind group was actually divided. There were interesting IQ benefits that many individuals in this group, even though the average effects washed out of the results, quote. Within the fit MF mind group, individuals varied in their responsiveness to the intervention, and those who showed relatively greater gains in figure series also performed better on novel tests of fluid intelligence at post-intervention. Mindfulness is expected to require cognitive and attentional resources that are also demanded during task performance, and it appears that individuals differ in their ability. to adapt to these demands and benefit from exercise. Is it still recording? Yes, it is. So it turns out that even with half the cognitive training and the fact that the meditation training occurred months before the post-training testing, some individuals in a fit MF mind group nonetheless showed broad transfer effects on fluid intelligence. And that's what's really important. That's what we really want, is broad transfer effects, because we want for these brain training things to benefit us outside of the laboratory environment or outside of using the little brain training device. They want us to make us more robust gangsters in life, right? At least that's what I'm after. In summary, a closer look at the data helps explain the results from the cognitive training plus exercise plus meditation group. Meditation almost always does not work against the clear fluid intelligence gains from cognitive training and exercise combined. In fact, all the data from a statistical significance point of view could be explained in terms of the amount of cognitive training alone, although the pattern of data tells us that Exercise is also a benefit and works synergistically with cognitive training. What is needed for a follow-up study is a better cross-training intervention where the mindfulness meditation is combined with the cognitive training and exercise not done separately months before. Then you might see the gains you expect in the data. even with half the cognitive training. So please don't stop meditating if you are combining it with I3 Mindware or High IQ Pro Training. And again, this was written by Dr. Mark Ashton Smith, and it was originally published in his excellent newsletter for IQ Mindware that I would recommend to anyone who is really interested in this nerdy, scientific stuff. Everyone else, what you would really want to do is just download either the, you could download the high IQ software, although personally, I like the Dual and Back Pro software a whole lot more, which you can actually try for free on your Android or iOS device, and I will include a link below this video to do that. I look forward to a continued conversation with you about whatever it is that you are doing to improve your IQ and all these other different measures of intelligence that increasingly we're seeing translate into real-world benefit. Thanks again. perfectly ordinary score searching through three continents for something much more I hunted for the real life nzity 48 to find a mental edge then i discovered dr smith that made a cognitive pledge with software as the chisel cultivated edify yourself at limitless mindset