Intra-individual neuroplasticity and IQ - Something we can do for ourselves (and those we care about) right now
Sorry to get this one in at the last minute, but better late than..., and some of you will see this.
Many will be familiar with the Harvard psychiatrist, neuroscience researcher, and professor of medicine, John Ratey, MD., from seeing his NYT bestselling books in recent years. He excels at writing for the intelligent lay audience, yet not dumbing down his books to the point where they are useless to those of us who read above the laymans' level in much of our personal work.
I recommend his book, Spark, which is just a couple of years old. I always promise to come back and add to my posts, sometimes I even find time to do so, and will make this one a priority, because I also have a book review that I wanted to post on Amazon, 90 percent done so I have two promises to keep.
What distinguishes the book are a couple key ideas I can put down without committing 2 thousand words to it. He presents results -- which in the last couple years I have seen coming in at an accelerating pace in research papers in neurology, neurosci, cogsci, and so on -- that show the human brain's medulla -- yep, that humble, fine motor control lobe, sitting at the far back and bottom of the brain, right on top of the spinal column -- a very ancient structure, is extremely important to cognition, "consciousness", learning and information processing of the sort we usualy ascribe overwhelmingly to the top and front of the brain.
That is, if Portland were frontal cortex, Ratey (and now, countless others) has shown that Florida Keys are intimately involved in cognition, even "non-motor", semantic cognition.
He goes through the neurology, mentions some studies, reviews informally the areas of the brain involved, then goes on to show how it led him to try an experiment with high school students.
He separated the students into two groups, and carefully designed a certain kind of exercise program for one group, and left the control group out of the exercise protocols.
Not only did their grades go up, substance abuse and mood disorders etc go down, but they had in some cases up to a 10 point IQ boost, over the course of the experiment.
He talks about BDNF, of course, and several others, along with enhanced neurogenesis and so on.
Many of you might know of the studies that have been around for years about neurogenesis and exercise. One big take-home point is that neurogenesis occurs also in non-exercisers, often at nearly the same rate. But what is different in exercisers is what percent of the newly spawned neurons *survive, and are kept, and migrated into the brain's useful areas."
Couch potatoes and rats in cages without running wheels have neurogenesis too, but far fewer of them are kept by the brain.
What continues to be interesting is that neurons that are used in thinking areas of the brain, are effected in this way. (For, it would obviously be considerably less surprising to find that neuronal remodeling is accelerated in motor areas, by motor activity of the organism.)
I recomment grabbing the book for your kindle app or whatever cheap way you can read things. By the second chapter you will want to be lacing up your running shoes, dusting off that old mountain bike, or just taking your daily walking regime seriously. (I could hardly wait to get out the door and start moving physically.)
But you don't have to be a marathoner or triathlete. Some of the best exercises are complex motor skills that challange balance, dexterity, etc. Just running some drone beat through a pair of headphones and zoning out on a treadmill, is less effective than things that make you focus on motor skills.
If you teach yourself to juggle, or are young enough to learn to ride a unicycle, or just practice sitting on a big exercise ball but making it challenging by holding full glasses of water in each hand and lifting one leg at a time, and trying not to spill the water, it will do the trick. It's worth reading.
And you can read more about it on PubMed. This phenomenon of the medulla and motor areas being more important to thought, is starting to look, like not an incremental discovery, but the overturning of a significant dogma, almost like the overturning of the dogma about "no adult neurogenesis" that occurred about 1990 by the scientist at Princeton.
Spark, by John Ratey MD. It's worth a look. Single adult, of if you have kids (or intend to someday), or are caring for aging parents, it will be worth checking out.
This is part of a weekly reading group on Nick Bostrom's book, Superintelligence. For more information about the group, and an index of posts so far see the announcement post. For the schedule of future topics, see MIRI's reading guide.
Welcome. This week we finish chapter 2 with three more routes to superintelligence: enhancement of biological cognition, brain-computer interfaces, and well-organized networks of intelligent agents. This corresponds to the fourth section in the reading guide, Biological Cognition, BCIs, Organizations.
This post summarizes the section, and offers a few relevant notes, and ideas for further investigation. My own thoughts and questions for discussion are in the comments.
There is no need to proceed in order through this post, or to look at everything. Feel free to jump straight to the discussion. Where applicable and I remember, page numbers indicate the rough part of the chapter that is most related (not necessarily that the chapter is being cited for the specific claim).
Reading: “Biological Cognition” and the rest of Chapter 2 (p36-51)
Summary
Biological intelligence
Brain-computer interfaces
Networks and organizations
Summary
The book so far
Here's a recap of what we have seen so far, now at the end of Chapter 2:
Do you disagree with any of these points? Tell us about it in the comments.
Notes
Snake Oil Supplements? is a nice illustration of scientific evidence for different supplements, here filtered for those with purported mental effects, many of which relate to intelligence. I don't know how accurate it is, or where to find a summary of apparent effect sizes rather than evidence, which I think would be more interesting.
Ryan Carey and I talked to Gwern Branwen - an independent researcher with an interest in nootropics - about prospects for substantial intelligence amplification. I was most surprised that Gwern would not be surprised if creatine gave normal people an extra 3 IQ points.
And some more health-specific ones.
People have apparently been getting smarter by about 3 points per decade for much of the twentieth century, though this trend may be ending. Several explanations have been proposed. Namesake James Flynn has a TED talk on the phenomenon. It is strangely hard to find a good summary picture of these changes, but here's a table from Flynn's classic 1978 paper of measured increases at that point:
Here are changes in IQ test scores over time in a set of Polish teenagers, and a set of Norwegian military conscripts respectively:
This study uses 'Genome-wide Complex Trait Analysis' (GCTA) to estimate that about half of variation in fluid intelligence in adults is explained by common genetic variation (childhood intelligence may be less heritable). These studies use genetic data to predict 1% of variation in intelligence. This genome-wide association study (GWAS) allowed prediction of 2% of education and IQ. This study finds several common genetic variants associated with cognitive performance. Stephen Hsu very roughly estimates that you would need a million samples in order to characterize the relationship between intelligence and genetics. According to Robertson et al, even among students in the top 1% of quantitative ability, cognitive performance predicts differences in occupational outcomes later in life. The Social Science Genetics Association Consortium (SSGAC) lead research efforts on genetics of education and intelligence, and are also investigating the genetics of other 'social science traits' such as self-employment, happiness and fertility. Carl Shulman and Nick Bostrom provide some estimates for the feasibility and impact of genetic selection for intelligence, along with a discussion of reproductive technologies that might facilitate more extreme selection. Robert Sparrow writes about 'in vitro eugenics'. Stephen Hsu also had an interesting interview with Luke Muehlhauser about several of these topics, and summarizes research on genetics and intelligence in a Google Tech Talk.
For Parkinson's disease relief, allowing locked in patients to communicate, handwriting, and controlling robot arms.
Big ones I can think of include innovations in using text (writing, printing, digital text editing), communicating better in other ways (faster, further, more reliably), increasing population size (population growth, or connection between disjoint populations), systems for trade (e.g. currency, finance, different kinds of marketplace), innovations in business organization, improvements in governance, and forces leading to reduced conflict.
In-depth investigations
If you are particularly interested in these topics, and want to do further research, these are a few plausible directions, some inspired by Luke Muehlhauser's list, which contains many suggestions related to parts of Superintelligence. These projects could be attempted at various levels of depth.
How to proceed
This has been a collection of notes on the chapter. The most important part of the reading group though is discussion, which is in the comments section. I pose some questions for you there, and I invite you to add your own. Please remember that this group contains a variety of levels of expertise: if a line of discussion seems too basic or too incomprehensible, look around for one that suits you better!
Next week, we will talk about 'forms of superintelligence', in the sense of different dimensions in which general intelligence might be scaled up. To prepare, read Chapter 3, Forms of Superintelligence (p52-61). The discussion will go live at 6pm Pacific time next Monday 13 October. Sign up to be notified here.