Science Fictions Episode 84: Brain training
28 snips
Sep 16, 2025 The hosts dive into the whimsical saga of brain training games and their claim to calculate your "brain age." They examine studies and meta-analyses that raise eyebrows over the effectiveness of these cognitive drills. Discussions lightheartedly navigate the complexities of intelligence and memory, questioning whether specific training truly boosts overall smarts. Amid this chatter, there's exciting news about a rebranding and a new podcast network, ensuring future connections and deep dives into science and language.
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Practice Improves Tasks; Transfer Is Unknown
- Practice reliably improves performance on the trained working memory tasks, but that alone doesn't prove broader benefits.
- The real question is whether such practice yields durable, generalized gains beyond similar tasks.
Why Far Transfer Would Be Revolutionary
- Fluid intelligence is relatively stable across life and rank-order persists, so large systematic boosts would be surprising.
- Finding durable far-transfer would reshape theories about intelligence mechanisms (e.g., working memory as 'CPU').
William James' Self-Experiment
- William James experimented on himself memorising long poems to test 'formal discipline' theories.
- His self-experiment and small-sample replication with students produced weak, inconsistent evidence for generalisable memory gains.
