For a long time humans have been devising ways to make themselves bigger, faster, stronger, and yes, even smarter. I think it’s fair to say we’ve gotten pretty good at the first three. In this high-tech world we live in pretty much anybody can wake up New Year’s Day and in six months be able to give Mariusz Pudzianowskia a run for his money. Can that same person wake up with a slightly different resolution and six months later be eating quantum physics for breakfast? Probably not. Unfortunately, the brain doesn’t seem to be as straight forward as a bicep and a curling bar.
So let’s try and break this thing down in order for everybody to wrap their head around why these programs could potentially be so cool. Let’s start with what do we use are brains for? Most of us utilize the three pounds upstairs to solve problems, both big and small. The people that can solve the problems others can’t get a special title; we call them smart or intelligent. Of course there is a lot more to it than that. People can be smart in one subject and dumb in another. People can have more experience with a certain type of problem. Some people just work harder at a problem for a longer period of time, “It’s not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer”, Einstein.
Interestingly enough, a man named Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin, wanted to see what would happen if you stripped all of these factors from the equation. Galton is controversially accredited with the first IQ test. Now, here comes the cool part. As it turned out, some people could still solve problems others couldn't. So of course the question to ask is what are the differences between the so called smart people and the not so smart people? What is it that allows some people to solve what most people would consider really hard problems? These are the really cool questions that scientists from a variety of backgrounds have been working on for a while now.
So where do these programs fit in? These programs (the good ones anyway) are the result of the research being done to try and find the answers to these questions. They are fun, and sometimes silly, exercises that have been shown to work out the parts of the brain believed to be responsible for being smart. This is not to say that all of these programs promise to raise your IQ a hundred points (some do). Science is dirty, especially when experiments have people involved, but the results are in, conclusions have been made, and a market for brain training programs has been established.
Okay, so now that you’re hooked and want to know more I feel it is my duty to provide it. To be fair, this post is a rather simplified and generalized representation of what these brain training programs are all about. There is tons of science out there on the subject of intelligence and businesses are working furiously on trying to turn it all into a profitable technology. Hopefully, each future post will reveal more about this brave new dynamic.
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