We don’t know about football players, but English Premier League soccer players, NHL hockey players, France’s Top 14 club rugby players, and even elite amateur athletes have better developed cognitive functions than the average university student.
read more
Is the human race getting dumber? geneticist Gerald Crabtree thinks that human intelligence peaked several thousand years ago and from then on, has been on a slow decline.
His argument is based on the fact that for more than 99% of human evolutionary history, we lived as hunter-gatherer communities surviving on our wits, which led to the big brains we have today. Since the invention of agriculture and cities, however, natural selection on our intellect has stopped and mutations have accumulated in our critical "intelligence" genes. A comparison of the genomes of parents and children reveals that there are between 25 and 65 new mutations in the DNA of each new generation.
read more
Social factors can have a powerful effect on our intelligence. Most of us feel intelligent and amusing when talking to a particular person and feel dumb and inarticulate when talking to someone else.
In the October 7th edition of the New York Times, Annie Murphy Paul quotes psychologist Joshua Aronson as saying that we shouldn’t think of our intelligence as just a "lump of something that’s in our heads," but as "a transaction among people."
read more
The idea of a simple, cheap and widely available device that could boost brain function (no more late nights studying for exams?) sounds too good to be true, but it may be a reality. Neurologists are coming up with brain stimulation techniques that may make us all smarter in the future.
Recent research shows that one type of brain stimulation in particular, called transcranial direct current stimulation or TDCS, can be used to improve language and math skills, memory, problem solving, attention, and even movement.
read more