Fade Out:
Why Most IQ Training Doesn't Last
by Alan Pritt
I strongly disagree. As an example, physical exercise suffers from the same 'fade out' effect. You lift weights and you put on muscle; you stop lifting weights and you lose muscle. You run and you get a stronger heart and lungs; you stop and they get weaker again. Does this mean physical exercise is pointless? Of course it doesn't.
Think of a health retreat. You are feeling unhealthy so you decide to take yourself away for a couple of weeks to a place where you can be sure of receiving optimum health. You are encouraged to exercise; you are encouraged to eat healthily; and you are encouraged to forget about the stresses of your everyday life. By time you emerge, you have a new lease of life. You've lost a few pounds, your skin is glowing, and you feel totally calm.
Then fade out occurs.
As soon as you return home the cakes come out; the pounds pile on; the stress returns; and your face grows pale! It was a nice break, but it couldn't last.
Or could it?
The only reason it didn't last was because it happened in another world; an artificial world where everything goes according to plan. In that retreat the real world cannot interfere. But it waits... until soon enough, your time runs out and you are cast back to reality.
Don't get me wrong; retreats are great. Since they're uninterrupted, they provide the ideal place to learn new skills and improve one self. But they're useless if not followed by some kind of maintenance program. As soon as you re-enter the real world, you need a way of making those improvements stick.
The health retreat is stage one; unfortunately most people forget there is a second stage...
Stage One - Gain the skills
Stage Two - Make the skills a habit
Automatic Maintenance
Just as with our health, if we wish to keep our brains in tip-top condition we need to do a certain amount of maintenance training. This is nowhere near as time consuming as the initial training, nor is it anywhere near as difficult. But it still needs to be done.
The most obvious way to keep the benefits is to keep doing the exercises. While this seems like a reasonable approach for increasing our intelligence, it seems a bit much for maintaining it. In the long term we want intelligence increases to make our lives easier and/or more productive. If we keep piling on more training, we'll soon become over burdened.
Personally I don't feel like I really have time to add too much of a maintenance program to my life. Besides, why should I have to? Naturally intelligent people don't have a maintenance program, so why should I?
Well, actually they do.
Intelligent people naturally live slightly differently to us, and that allows them to naturally maintain what they have. If we wish to emulate their intelligence, we also have to emulate parts of how they live.
There are two ways of doing this: 1) Changing the environment you interact with. 2) Changing the way you interact with your current environment.
Changing your environment
This is the more straight-forward of the two to implement. It involves changing something about your environment so that you are forced to adapt. In other words, you make life a bit more complicated, so your brain has to work a little bit harder to cope.
So how can you change your environment? Here are a few suggestions:
- Take on a more demanding job
- Surround yourself with people who are more intelligent than you.
- Read more stimulating literature.
- Turn off the automatic spell check on your word processor
You can learn more about changing your environment by clicking here.
Changing your interaction with the environment
While many naturally intelligent people have pursued intellectually stimulating careers and surrounded themselves in intellectually stimulating environments, this is not always the case. Often people of different intellects appear in exactly the same environment and perform the same activities, but just do them with greater ease. What is the difference here?
One reason is that while they do not appear to act any differently, their mental processes are different. They have developed strategies that make tasks easier to learn, problems easier to solve and creations easier to manifest. Identifying these strategies and methods of learning them is a vital part of my work and the work of others in this field.
Learning these thinking strategies is usually not that difficult, but making them a natural part of how you react to the world is. If we want to avoid fade out, we need to find ways of habitually responding to the world differently.
This is the best method I know of installing strategies as habits:
Mini Challenges
1. Define a goal. This should be something that you want to get better at, such as memorising more of what you read, arguing more skillfully, coming up with more creative ideas at work, or solving problems with greater ease.
2. Break this goal down into something specific. Identify a cue in the environment that you want to respond to with an intelligent reaction. If you see a date written in a book, do you attempt to memorise it? If you hear a logical fallacy in an argument, how do you respond to it? If you think of an idea for doing something better at work, do you ignore it or do you make a note of it? If you see a problem do you try to work out the solution?
Identifying these real life cues is the vital part. If the problems do not correspond with real life, you won't use the solutions attached to them and will gradually forget how to.
3. Now identify a strategy you want available when that situation comes up. This may be a memory strategy, a specific retort in an argument, a method for capturing creative ideas, or a strategy for working out a specific kind of problem.
4. Practice using the strategy until you can do it with ease. Sometimes you will be able to do it straight away such as learning to make a note of a creative idea. Other times it will take a bit more effort as in learning to solve a specific type of problem.
5. Make it a habit. Every day, for 30 days, make sure you present yourself with the real life situation and then respond to it appropriately. It's best to be really strict with yourself at this stage. If you're trying to memorise dates in books, memorise every date; if you're trying to make note of more creative ideas, make a note of every idea you have. This makes sure you get a thorough understanding of when to use the strategy, and forces you to combat any mediocre excuses you may have for not using it. At the end of the 30 days you can then respond more naturally.
Many situations will not occur every day for 30 days in a row, so you may have to manipulate the situation so you encounter it more frequently than you naturally would. If this is not possible, the habit will probably still stick, but doing it everyday makes it more likely to.
Example
Say your goal was to get better at memorising what you read. You pick up a typical book, read a chapter, and then try to recount everything you can. It soon becomes obvious that one of the things you struggle to remember is dates. Therefore, memorising dates better is your challenge. Whenever you see a date in a book (the cue) you want to respond by memorising it.
Now you define your strategy for memorising dates. You pick a memory technique that seems suitable and you practice using it until it becomes easy.
Then you gather reading material to practice on over the next 30 days, making sure every book has some dates to memorise. Over the course of the next 30 days you make sure to read a little every day, making sure to memorize any dates that appear.
At the end of the 30 day period you should find you automatically remember dates in books every time you read.
In Reverse
You can also do this in reverse, starting with the technique rather than the goal. Say you read a good technique in a book. Ask yourself what real life situation this technique would be useful for and then apply the same method as outlined above. This is often the better way of doing things, because if you begin with the real life problem, you often don't know of any strategy to apply. It also encourages you to stretch yourself in areas you hadn't thought of.
You don't want to do it solely this way round however, because it will take the focus away from your most pressing real life problems.
