Training can lead to synesthetic experiences: Does learning the 'color of' specific letters boost IQ?

[Mercel]

A new study has shown for the first time how people can be trained to 'see' letters of the alphabet as colors in a way that simulates how those with synesthesia experience their world.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/11/141118105522.htm

[hothappy...@gmail.com]

I am deeply keen in this brain training programing which trains synesthesia abilities in associating colours with texts and actually improves IQ. Can anyone easily provide a program somewhere on the internet or create a brain training program relating to synesthesia training that is similar to the study which claims to raise IQ up to 12 points. I want to benefit and train my intellectual functioning from this type of synesthesia braining training alongside with Dual N Back. Link and quoted texts to show the IQ and intellectual benefits from this study

http://www.spring.org.uk/2014/11/how-to-increase-iq-by-10-using-the-weirdest-method-ever.php

"A new study which trained people to associate colours with letters has also found that their IQ was boosted by an average of 12 points"
"

Psychologists at the University of Sussex wanted to see if they could train people to have a similar experience to synesthetes (Bor et al., 2014).

They devised a 9-week training course in which 14 participants learned connections between letters and colours."

"

IQ boosted

The average 12-point boost to IQ compared with a control group was unexpected, especially as IQ is notoriously difficult to train.

Significant IQ gains from training are normally limited to people who start with a relatively low score.

But in this study participants IQ’s were already high: their average IQs increased from 116 to 128 (100 is the average).

It is not known if the IQ boost is specific to the synesthesia training or was a general effect of people training their working memory."

[Gwern Branwen]

On Fri, Nov 21, 2014 at 8:49 PM, <hothappy...@gmail.com> wrote:
> But in this study participants IQ’s were already high: their average IQs
> increased from 116 to 128 (100 is the average).

Correction: the experimental group only had low IQs, because
randomization failed to balance groups with so few participants. On
top of that, it was a passive control group, which at this point
should be a phrase which strikes fear into readers' hearts. (To repeat
my earlier criticisms.)

--
gwern
http://www.gwern.net

[Mercel]

The results probably exaggerate -- but this kind of research is on the other hand intuitively meaningful if you think that what is responsible for most of the individual differences in IQ is the degree of neural integration - and thus efficiency (the less time you need to hold something in your mind, the more you can hold in your mind, such that efficiency is what enables the sophistication of imagination, of thinking, itself -- it enables longer and richer 'chains of thought' -- and this is why I think imagination itself is almost synonymous with intelligence). 

Ultimately I think that the processes which leads one to become an excellent violin player, is also responsible for an individual coming to be considered intelligent. 

[Brandon Woodson]

I agree the results probably exaggerate, but interesting subject nevertheless. I've had a long-standing fascination with synesthesia, and have always wondered if my own weak color-grapheme synesthesia was something inborn or I developed inadvertently at some point or another. 

Rounding out my short list of unusual things to investigate which might yield interesting effects on cognition - along with rough ideas for formulating a purely kinesthetic personal language - is an idea to exhaustively link all personally-derived spontaneous associations between different colors, musical intervals and chords, psychological affects, Jungian archetypes, and logical relationships, just to see if I can find a shared analogical basis.

If I understand correctly, some ancient schools of thought already have a head start into this area, using schemes developed on their findings as a mere foot in the door to much more advanced and elegant systems for reconstructing the psyche, systems whose theoretical foundations would make our current understanding of the related subjects look abecedarian. It'll be fun to see what we eventually make of color and its role in the human mind. I suspect, anyway, it's a much larger role than is now understood.


--Brandon

On Sat, Nov 22, 2014 at 1:02 PM, Mercel <st.gj...@gmail.com> wrote:

The results probably exaggerate -- but this kind of research is on the other hand intuitively meaningful if you think that what is responsible for most of the individual differences in IQ is the degree of neural integration - and thus efficiency (the less time you need to hold something in your mind, the more you can hold in your mind, such that efficiency is what enables the sophistication of imagination, of thinking, itself -- it enables longer and richer 'chains of thought' -- and this is why I think imagination itself is almost synonymous with intelligence). 

--
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