Boosting the Intelligence of Your Employees

Formal training has taken some hard knocks in recent years. I and many others have been writing about social media, informal learning, Web 3.0, etc.

It’s all dandy, as long as we don’t become one-trick ponies and forget that formalized learning techniques can, at times, be responsible for virtual miracles of education.

Take the holy grail of all education: improving basic intelligence. For most of my lifetime, it’s been assumed that intelligence is stable and that training events can’t really touch it. The conventional wisdom was that we’re born with certain intelligence levels, just like we are eye color or shoe size. Be happy with it because it’s all you’re gonna get.

As it turns out, that may all be baloney. One study of intelligence – Improving fluid intelligence with training on working memory – notes:

[T]here is a long history of research into cognitive training showing that, although performance on trained tasks can increase dramatically, transfer of this learning to other tasks remains poor. Here, we present evidence for transfer from training on a demanding working memory task to measures of Gf [that is, fluid intelligence]. This transfer results even though the trained task is entirely different from the intelligence test itself. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the extent of gain in intelligence critically depends on the amount of training: the more training, the more improvement in Gf.

The researchers had 70 healthy volunteers engage in a training exercise called “dual n-back” task, according to the article “Simple brain exercise can boost IQ.” The participants did this exercise for around 20 minutes a day for up to 19 days. New Scientist reports,  “The researchers found that the IQ of trained individuals increased significantly more than controls – and that the more training people got, the higher the score.”

Okay, so if this technique can bump up intelligence via formal learning, are there more generalized lessons that we can take away – something that individuals or employers can apply? Researcher Andrea Kuszewski, writing in Scientific American in 2011, makes five recommendations based on the intelligence research:

  1. Learn about and engage in new activities. She writes, “Novelty also triggers dopamine, which not only kicks motivation into high gear, but it stimulates neurogenesis—the creation of new neurons—and prepares your brain for learning.”
  2. Constantly challenge yourself with new types of learning exercises.
  3. Engage in creative cognition and divergent thinking.
  4. Don’t rely on all your gizmos to do cognitive work for you. Do some things the hard way in order to exercise your brain.
  5. Network – talk and read plenty of others to advance ideas.

One of the lessons that I’m learning from this and other research is that individual human cognition – from basic intelligence to emotional states such as happiness – can evolve even when we’re well into adulthood. We can adapt and grow in measurable ways not only via our increasingly powerful technologies but through a wide variety of exercises and activities. That is, we can become not just smarter people but, by some standards, better ones.


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