Long-term use

[Chris]

Most of what I've read about the effects of dual n-back relates to the
first few weeks of use.

Can people comment on what happens after the first month or so?
Presumably there is a limit to the level that can be attained - some
kind of plateau in the value of n. It would be interesting to know how
high the plateau typically is, and how long people take to reach it.

It would also be interesting to know whether people think it's
beneficial to continue training for half an hour a day (or whatever)
after that point has been reached. Is it beneficial to spend time
practising even though n is no longer increasing, or do people just
try to maintain the level by more occasional use?

[sutur]

there may not even be such a thing as a plateau. at least i haven't
discovered mine yet. i typically do 10-20 rounds a day and have been
doing so for about two months now. progress is slow but steady. i too
would be interested if there are people in this forum who approached
the task with a "the sky is the limit" mindset and actually hit rock
bottom at some point, despite of staying motivated to keep on trying
and doing so for several weeks or so. my guess is that if you don't
give up there's alway a tiny bit of improvement you can achieve if you
try hard enough.

[jack nguyen]

sutur,

have you noticed any concrete changes in your thinking? ability to string together intelligent thoughts? I've been on it for roughly one month and I've once hit 4-back but I am lucky to get stay at 3-back. I'm a bit discouraged when I hear of all the guys hitting 12-back and so on...

--
cheers,
jack
----------------------------------------
http://sites.google.com/site/eviljack
http://www.linkedin.com/in/eviljack

[sutur]

i didn't really notice any concrete changes in my thinking process,
which probably, if existent, are rather hard to detect reliably
anyway. one thing i did notice however is an increased sense of
calmness. i used to move my legs around an awful lot while sitting
which i now don't feel the urge to anymore. but of course this could
be placebo or something else entirely. i also seem to be able to read
text (in books or on screen) more fluently now with less danger of
distraction. however, personally i am quite skeptic when people
describe the changes they notice. changes in cognitive capacity are
probably quite subtle, build up slowly and are hard to notice through
introspection.
concerning the n-back levels there are some things i'd like to mention
which pop up in this forum every once in a while. there are obviously
different kinds of people using this software. some reach 12-back in
no time while others struggle with 3-back for several weeks. why this
is the case and why these differences seem to be rather extreme is a
mystery to me. however there is no reason to assume that the n-back
level you reach reflects the increase in fluid intelligence you gain
through training. the original study rather suggests that increase in
Gf is independent from n but depends on the time invested. the goal is
not to reach a high n but to keep concentrated and motivated, continue
training and thus benefit from the exercise.
anyway, even if your learning curve is flat i guarantee you that if
you keep playing 5 days a week for another month, 4-back wont be a
problem for you.

On Feb 13, 9:05 pm, jack nguyen <very...@gmail.com> wrote:
> sutur,
>
> have you noticed any concrete changes in your thinking? ability to string
> together intelligent thoughts? I've been on it for roughly one month and
> I've once hit 4-back but I am lucky to get stay at 3-back. I'm a bit
> discouraged when I hear of all the guys hitting 12-back and so on...
>

[Jarno Virtanen]

On Feb 13, 10:53 pm, sutur <bernhard.oberficht...@gmail.com> wrote:
> however there is no reason to assume that the n-back
> level you reach reflects the increase in fluid intelligence you gain
> through training. the original study rather suggests that increase in
> Gf is independent from n but depends on the time invested. the goal is
> not to reach a high n but to keep concentrated and motivated, continue
> training and thus benefit from the exercise.

Yeah, I agree with this. It seems that the point is that you _have_ to
focus and concentrate because of the nature of the task. So in fact
increasing the "level" might not be relevant at all. Of course,
subjectively it's necessary to have some sort of tangible goal for the
practice and increasing the level is probably a good goal in this
sense. But the benefit probably comes from the difficulty of the task
and the level of concentration it requires.

Jarno

[astriaos]

Also, if there is a plateau, there exists some minimum daily training
interval at which to reach it. If you train for less time than this
interval, then you'll probably never plateau; however, if you train
sufficiently long enough per day, you probably will plateau at some
point. I haven't verified the previous 2 statements, but it seems like
they would hold out, and you can verify that by testing it out
yourself. Anyway, I started doing dual n-back 1hr/day every day since
30 days ago, and already I'm noticing immediate subjective effects.

Here's some of my (admittedly subjective) observations originally sent
in an email to a friend:

This past month, I've been doing dual n-back (the working memory task)
roughly 60 min/day. Already, the results are robust. By "robust," I
mean practically everything I do is qualitatively different from how I
did things 30 days previous to the dual n-back training. For instance,
in physics class I went from vaguely understanding most of the
concepts covered in class to a mastery thorough enough that now my
questions usually transcend the scope of the in-class and textbook
material, routinely stupefying my physics teacher into longer-than-
average pauses. It's the same experience for all of my classes.
Somehow, I've learned more-than-I usually learn of physics/government/
etc. (all of my classes, and any topic in general) information from
sources outside of class, and without what I consider significant
effort. I feel like my learning speed has gone up by some factor
greater than 1; I can follow longer arguments with greater precision;
my vocabulary has improved; I can pay attention longer; my problem
solving skills are significantly better... Really, it's amazing how
much cognition depends on attention!

I'm considering doing meditation as well, since I've read multiple
experiments demonstrating its effectiveness on multiple cognitive
functions, including fluid intelligence.

Attempting to make myself smarter is giving me a "window" so to speak,
of how people smarter than me think. I find this experience difficult
to describe yet fascinating! It's like, all of the experiences I was
accustomed to observing at a certain rate, and then I have this sudden
feeling that the entire universe has slowed down, or alternatively,
that the speed at which I process new thoughts and experience reality
is greater than it was before. I think being able to hold more
thoughts in working memory than before has improved even the quality
of my thoughts (ie. perhaps my thoughts are now more complex?).

All of this I write to attempt to convey to you some sense of the
experience side of the results of the experiment on working memory
that I have shown you. Despite how awesome I think science is, there's
an upper-bound to how much information people can convey with mere raw
scientific data. Perhaps anecdotal information of my experience is
helpful to convey more information in greater depth about making how
I've attempted to make myself smarter (and, by extension, how other
people can make themselves smarter) than would be otherwise presented
to you.

I find it very difficult to describe how different my life feels now
within just 30 consecutive days of 1hr/day training. At some point,
perhaps you're considering the notion that my entire training hasn't
really done anything, that the results of my efforts with dual n-back
are simply placebo effects. I don't rule out that possibility;
however, I have already seen the results of the working memory
training experiment (Jaeggi et. al) that has demonstrated that the
working memory task, dual n-back, increased the experimental group's
fluid intelligence by a statistically significant degree (P<.001). The
dual n-back program that I train with has the same protocol as the one
mentioned in the study (to my knowledge, in no way am I training
differently than the experimental group). Therefore, if the
experimental group did indeed show a statistically significant gain in
fluid intelligence, then it stands to reason that I should as well.
(Moreover, even if my entire training has been a placebo, it would be
a damn good one! In practice if this was a placebo, and the effects
were no different from the dual n-back training mentioned in Jaeggi
et. al, then it doesn't much matter to me, since I care more about the
practical results than the theoretical results).

[MR]

Jacob, you've been on here since September - did you only notice the
difference in the past month? Were you using the program regularly
before then?

I like hearing about people's subjective experiences, but just to play
devil's advocate, the stupefied look can also occur when a question
sounds so ridiculous, a teacher does not know how to even begin
addressing it -- people can think their question are a lot more clever
than they really are.

I'm not saying this is necessarily the case with you, but have you
noticed any more objective evidence of your new abilities? Have you
been getting better grades while studying less? Can you now solve
difficult sudoku puzzles in a shorter amount of time without much
effort? Are you getting all of the questions on difficult IQ tests
right and then wondering what the big deal was?

Just wondering.

[astriaos]

While it's true that I've been subscribed to this group since
September, that does not necessarily mean that I have been doing dual
n-back since then. In fact, I've only started doing it consistently
this past month.

"people can think their question are a lot more clever

than they really are" - That's true, and perhaps my questions were
"dumber" than I expected. In any case, I only explained my feelings of
how they were; whether they actually were or not isn't easily
verifiable - how would someone verify that? Indeed, it's difficult
even to describe how "smart" a question is!

The only objective evidence I have is getting better grades with less
effort and time spent studying. I haven't taken any IQ tests or done
sudoku puzzles yet. Why would I take an IQ test if I don't know how to
control for re-test effects? Btw, anyone know how I could do that
(control for re-test effects)? I don't know how that could be done
since it seems like it would require a control and experimental group,
not just an experimental as in my case.

In any case, all of those observations of mine are subjective, so I
don't expect anyone to believe any of it, only that is how I *felt*
after doing dual n-back, not necessarily what it *did*. If I feel a
certain way about the effects of something, that is a fact about my
own state of mind, not necessarily about reality itself. In any case,
I don't believe anecdotal evidence should ever take priority over
scientific evidence, but sometimes I think anecdotal evidence is
useful in conveying information that scientific data can't convey. An
experiment will tell you a lot of things, but it won't tell you about
how the participants feel during the experiment. Since anecdotal
information tends to be unreliable, that may make sense. On the other
hand, not everything that is subjective is also meaningless. A lot of
different things, such as "reality" "perception," "life" are all
subjective concepts, but more people consider them meaningful concepts
than not. If nothing else, maybe anecdotal information is useful for
its entertainment value.

Jacob

[Gwern Branwen]

I certainly agree that there's no real way to get scientific rigor
without full-blown scientific techniques such as large double-blind
trials, but if you're just interested in whether you personally should
continue to devote time to n-back, I don't think it would be all that
hard to do (by which I mean, get better than coin-flipping results).

The point of n-back is to get 'transfer' to g. g is supposed to give
you general performance on all sorts of puzzles, while training on
specific puzzles does not 'transfer' to other puzzles.

So what you could do, if you don't have a couple dozen IQ tests handy,
is assemble a battery of puzzles and periodically go through them and
track your performance.

If you're just training on one puzzle, then you'll see just that one
rise. But if n-back is giving you real improvements in working memory
& thence to g, then you could hope to observe a rise in all the puzzle
scores.

(The obvious counterpoint here is that if you play all the puzzles in
a session and repeat sessions periodically, aren't you training on
those puzzles and so will observe an increase anyway? Yes, but often
the increase is short. For example, the puzzle software I would use
here is Gbrainy - Free, packaged for Ubuntu, and not too shabby - and
back when I was playing with polyphasic sleep and using Gbrainy to
test my general mental state, I noticed that even when I was back to
normal sleep, my scores plateaued pretty quickly and hardly budged
after that. So if I were to start playing gbrainy, I would expect to
see low gbrainy scores, over a week increase to the usual plateau, and
then any further improvements I could tentatively attribute to
n-back.)

--
gwern

[MR]

Thanks Jacob. Again, I hope you didn't take my comments as meaning
that your questions were dumb. I was just wondering if you had any
more objective measures of your progress. Regardless, I rather people
tell us about their subjective experiences if that's all they have,
otherwise there wouldn't be much to talk about. Thank you for sharing.

As for test-retest. It *is* a difficult problem. The website at
http://www.highiqsociety.org/ says that their tests are made up of a
different combination of items taken from a large bank of questions.
This is supposed to make each test unique and therefore more resistant
to test-retest effects, but I'm not sure how true that is. I've taken
them a few times and noticed a fair bit of overlap.

The other problem I see with the site is that it seems to be
engineered to make money. They require an IQ of 124 for admission
which costs $79 USD, so they are maximizing the amount of eligible
people who will pay for membership, while still making them feel that
they're special. Only there's no real point in joining such a group
since most people on the internet would be close to that level anyway.
Make a society where the cut-off is 180, and you won't be quitting
your day-job any time soon, but you may end-up with a more interesting
group of characters, whether they be complete oddballs or brilliant.

All this to say that the test may inflate scores as it would be in
their best interest to maximize the number of people from whom they
can collect a membership fee. I have no evidence of this, just a word
of warning about interpreting their scores.

On Feb 14, 2:10 pm, MR <rouss...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Confuzedd]

lol I've been stuck at 2 and 3 back for 2.5 months...

On Feb 13, 3:05 pm, jack nguyen <very...@gmail.com> wrote:
> sutur,
>
> have you noticed any concrete changes in your thinking? ability to string
> together intelligent thoughts? I've been on it for roughly one month and
> I've once hit 4-back but I am lucky to get stay at 3-back. I'm a bit
> discouraged when I hear of all the guys hitting 12-back and so on...
>

[jack nguyen]

nice to know I'm not the only one that sucks at this...lol.

[Ron Williams]

I've been wondering how the different imaging preferences of people
interact with this sort of thing. For example, I'm a fairly strongly
visual sort of person, but I've heard of others, even math Ph.Ds who
claim not to see images explicitly in their minds at all.

They're much more linguistic in method and rely on a kind of (as I
understand it) symbolic grammar manipulation to deal with the
relationships between patterns. Math is after all the science of
patterns. Why this doesn't make them really really slow, I don't
understand, since the ability to form images is a much higher volume,
faster faculty than the verbal (isn't it?).

Anyhow, you'd expect the two styles in two people who are polarised
each towards one of them would give a markedly different qualitative
experience respectively.

Are there any here who claim not to see mental images? I suspect that
some activities like this self-select in that one of the groups will
find it unpleasant or not make much progress and drop out or just not
take it up.

Perhaps the 5 to 12-backers could say whether they are primarily
visual, or auditory-kinesthetically orientated?

[Ashirgo]

Gladly! :)

I thought myself to be primarily visual oriented, but I must have got
balanced to be satisfied with my performance in n-back now. I listen
to lots of English audiobooks (I am stressing that for English is my
third language), which is a very demanding task, requires lots of
concentration and may support the development in audio part of n-
back.

As to these effects of long-term use: now it is trivially easy to
concentrate on sth, I believe that everyone expects that. I have also
experienced better dream recalling, with all these reveries and other
hallucinations included ;)

I am more happier now than ever. I did doubt it would be ever
possible! I am also more prone to get excited. A strange thing, I
would say. Well, sadly but truly, I would prescribe n-back to some
depressed people I know but it is not easy to put that idea across to
them.

Now people in my motherland are just boring to listen to. They speak
too slow and seem as though it took them pains to express anything. I
did not notice that after I had done my first ninety days of n-back,
but now (after 2.5 months) it is just conspicuous.

Some people around mentioned latent inhibition. I.. think it may be
lower now in my case, but it feels like I had a control over it (I do
not know if it is a proper expression, I am just trying to express my
uncertainty).

I am eighteen years old and my brain is likely to be still flexible,
that is why I hope I am yet to reach my maximum level of n-back. For
some days now it has been 13-back and will not probably change, for I
switched to manual mode several days ago and follow a specific pattern
of doing n-back (I change the n all the time).

Mental images? These are not effective. It takes ages to make any
sense of them - in the creative work. And as to working with
problems... verbal-oriented ways are still my choice.

You may know that chess are said to employ and exercise visual
thinking. Psychologists disagree and assert that it uses mainly some
verbal circuities I scarcely remember of.

Fare thee well!

Ash

[MR]

Jacob, out of curiosity, are you performing the 1 hour sessions in one
sitting, or are you breaking th 60 minutes down into shorter sessions
throughout the day?

M

> > > > Jarno- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

[AshDog]

After about 22 days, I did hit a plateau when I peaked at 9-back,
averaging 7-back, and so I switched to triple n-back. It's been about
eight months, and I have noticed a big difference in my thinking
ability. Math is much easier, I have more creative ideas (solutions)
for my paper assignments, and my professors think that I have
"improved" in my quality of work. Everything else in my life has
stayed the same (so all other factors have been controlled for as far
as I can see).

[jack nguyen]

I'm not sure if I've already thanked you, but I'll do it again just in case.

Very motivating words and as I am struggling quite a bit (I've only
hit 4-back once after a month of hard hard work). I am wondering what
is causing this huge difference, 12-back just seems unreal/super-human
to me and it seems like everyone has gotten to at least double digits
with their working memory except me.

[Jarno Virtanen]

On Feb 18, 3:59 am, jack nguyen <very...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Very motivating words and as I am struggling quite a bit (I've only
> hit 4-back once after a month of hard hard work). I am wondering what
> is causing this huge difference, 12-back just seems unreal/super-human
> to me and it seems like everyone has gotten to at least double digits
> with their working memory except me.

Stop worrying about it. The original study mentions explicitly that
it's not the level of n that predicts the increase in Gf but the
amount of practice. So the benefits should come even if you went back
and forth with level 2 and 3. (If you genuinely try your best and
focus all you can, that is.)

Jarno

[Curtis Warren]

I'm still at 4/5-back after about 6 months of training.

[Chris]

Many thanks for all the replies. I'm sorry that some of the questions
could have been answered by a proper reading of the paper by Jaeggi et
al.

There is a lot of food for thought there, and I shall try to digest it
and post further then.

[Gwern Branwen]

So I went looking for a quote about that. Here's what I found in Jaeggi 2008:

"The finding that the transfer to Gf remained even after taking
the specific training effect into account seems to be counterin-
tuitive, especially because the specific training effect is also
related to training time. The reason for this capacity might be
that participants with a very high level of n at the end of the
training period may have developed very task specific strategies,
which obviously boosts n-back performance, but may prevent
transfer because these strategies remain too task-specific (5, 20).
The averaged n-back level in the last session is therefore not
critical to predicting a gain in Gf; rather, it seems that working
at the capacity limit promotes transfer to Gf."

That's certainly encouraging - 'it's not how well you do but how hard
you're trying!'.

--
gwern

[silva579]

Like Jarno said, the "n" you achieve is not indicative of your
improvements, so don't look at it from that standpoint.

At the same time, I too wonder what is the cause of such a wide range
of results.

On Feb 17, 8:59 pm, jack nguyen <very...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm not sure if I've already thanked you, but I'll do it again just in case.
>
> Very motivating words and as I am struggling quite a bit (I've only
> hit 4-back once after a month of hard hard work). I am wondering what
> is causing this huge difference, 12-back just seems unreal/super-human
> to me and it seems like everyone has gotten to at least double digits
> with their working memory except me.
>

[silva579]

Like Jarno said, the "n" you achieve is not indicative of your
improvements, so don't look at it from that standpoint.

At the same time, I too wonder what is the cause of such a wide range
of results.

On Feb 17, 8:59 pm, jack nguyen <very...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm not sure if I've already thanked you, but I'll do it again just in case.
>
> Very motivating words and as I am struggling quite a bit (I've only
> hit 4-back once after a month of hard hard work). I am wondering what
> is causing this huge difference, 12-back just seems unreal/super-human
> to me and it seems like everyone has gotten to at least double digits
> with their working memory except me.
>

[silva579]

Like Jarno said, the "n" you achieve is not indicative of your
improvements, so don't look at it from that standpoint.

At the same time, I too wonder what is the cause of such a wide range
of results.

On Feb 17, 8:59 pm, jack nguyen <very...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm not sure if I've already thanked you, but I'll do it again just in case.
>
> Very motivating words and as I am struggling quite a bit (I've only
> hit 4-back once after a month of hard hard work). I am wondering what
> is causing this huge difference, 12-back just seems unreal/super-human
> to me and it seems like everyone has gotten to at least double digits
> with their working memory except me.
>

[silva579]

Like Jarno said, the "n" you achieve is not indicative of your
improvements, so don't look at it from that standpoint.

At the same time, I too wonder what is the cause of such a wide range
of results.

On Feb 17, 8:59 pm, jack nguyen <very...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm not sure if I've already thanked you, but I'll do it again just in case.
>
> Very motivating words and as I am struggling quite a bit (I've only
> hit 4-back once after a month of hard hard work). I am wondering what
> is causing this huge difference, 12-back just seems unreal/super-human
> to me and it seems like everyone has gotten to at least double digits
> with their working memory except me.
>

[astriaos]

M,

I'm doing dual n-back in 1-hr intervals... but if the total time is
the same in any combination of n-back sessions (ie. 2 30-minute
intervals of dual n-back, as opposed to 1-hr intervals ), then I don't
think there would be a noticeable difference. In any case, the point
made about the effects of dual n-back being proportional to the amount
of time spent training with it - is significant, and bears repeating.

Jacob

[Gwern Branwen]

On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 10:49 PM, astriaos <Jacob...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> M,
>
> I'm doing dual n-back in 1-hr intervals... but if the total time is
> the same in any combination of n-back sessions (ie. 2 30-minute
> intervals of dual n-back, as opposed to 1-hr intervals ), then I don't
> think there would be a noticeable difference. In any case, the point
> made about the effects of dual n-back being proportional to the amount
> of time spent training with it - is significant, and bears repeating.
>
> Jacob

True enough. We have the research papers handy; I wonder if anyone is
feeling energetic enough to draw up an FAQ?

Usage & effect questions would be a good place to start - 'how much
should I practice? as much as you want, but the more the better' 'my
n-back is small, am I wasting my time? no, the benefits come from
exercising/stressing your mind, not simply playing at a high level'
'does this *really* improve my intelligence? sure looks like it,
jaeggi reports transfer to other tests correlated with g' 'what sorts
of effects have people reported? increased curiosity, vivid dreams,
greater ease of learning' etc.

--
gwern

[MR]

Sutur,

Interesting hearing about how you no longer feel the urge to move your
legs around while sitting. There's a condition called restless leg
syndrome which seems to be mediated at least in part by the
dopaminergic system (the condition is often treated with
antiparkinsonian medication). In light of the recent paper by McNab on
the changes in dopamine receptors following working memory training
(http://www.klingberglab.se/pub.html), I wonder if what you're
experiencing is related to changes in your dopaminergic system.

Here's the full reference; you can find a free copy at the website
above.
McNab F, Varrone A, Farde L, Jucaite A, Bystritsky P, Forssberg H,
Klingberg T (2009) Changes in cortical dopamine D1 receptor binding
associated with cognitive training. Science, 323: 800-802.

M

[sutur]

interessting connection MR! although the McNab paper is talking about
cortical D1 receptor binding whereas morbus parkinson partially is
caused by a lack of dopamine in the substantia nigra. im not sure if
the same receptor types that are present in cortical regions are
involved in the disease. this could be an entirely different
mechanism; more info anyone? anyway i don't think that i suffered from
restless legs sysndrome, my condition has not been quite as severe ;)
i just seem to be able to calm down a little better.