How to increase your IQ level ?

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Don't blame the gun, blame the gunner.

 

[alfaniner]

Thinking about this, consider the following:

So IQ, as academically presented, follows the Normal Distribution and as represented by the Gaussian bell-curve, as follows for ease of reference:

<elaborate post snipped>

Set up a lab of experimental design with subjects and that way we could test (a) the OP's hypothesis and (b) mine.

I wonder if MENSA would accept that post as qualification in lieu of the IQ test.

 

[JayUtah]

Wire up a gadget to be placed around the head with widgets attached measuring brainwave activity. Perhaps whilst being stimulated with music, white noise or may even something visual.

Electroencephalography is a pretty mature science. You can change your alpha waves just by closing your eyes, which is exactly the problem in trying to use it to measure higher-order phenomena such as intelligence: it's too susceptible to noise and highly ephemeral neural phenomena. It's like trying to use a seismograph to distinguish Beethoven from Berlioz with your kids playing in the same room. Even in the ideal case you still wouldn't have a measurement that says one kind of music is smarter than the other, even if you did have a better mathematical model for scoring it.

MRI stands a better chance. You get a more holistic picture of what's going on inside the brain. But you still have the hard problem of correlating insanely complex multidimensional patterns with outward activity or aptitude, and then trying to distill it down to a single score. In either case you need the capacity to digest immense amounts of highly structured data with some inkling of what patterns you might be looking for. Still, it's a lot more promising than measuring braincase volume or brain mass.

I question the whole strategy of trying to express a measurement of intelligence as a one-dimensional entity, even if there's a sound mathematical basis for the metric. As I said before, I'm more interested in scores along certain dimensions of interest because I don't believe in a single dimension of intelligence.

 

[catsmate]

I might be able to tie shoelaces? No more velcro??!!!1! Awesome!

Try tying them with one functional arm

 

[Vixen]

Electroencephalography is a pretty mature science. You can change your alpha waves just by closing your eyes, which is exactly the problem in trying to use it to measure higher-order phenomena such as intelligence: it's too susceptible to noise and highly ephemeral neural phenomena. It's like trying to use a seismograph to distinguish Beethoven from Berlioz with your kids playing in the same room. Even in the ideal case you still wouldn't have a measurement that says one kind of music is smarter than the other, even if you did have a better mathematical model for scoring it.

MRI stands a better chance. You get a more holistic picture of what's going on inside the brain. But you still have the hard problem of correlating insanely complex multidimensional patterns with outward activity or aptitude, and then trying to distill it down to a single score. In either case you need the capacity to digest immense amounts of highly structured data with some inkling of what patterns you might be looking for. Still, it's a lot more promising than measuring braincase volume or brain mass.

I question the whole strategy of trying to express a measurement of intelligence as a one-dimensional entity, even if there's a sound mathematical basis for the metric. As I said before, I'm more interested in scores along certain dimensions of interest because I don't believe in a single dimension of intelligence.

MRI is taking it a bit far. I think doctors only use it when really necessary. Someone did develop a method of IQ testing by brain impulses. The problem would be converting it into 'scores' as you say but it claimed to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. I think they need the initial baseline from more conventional tests to check validity. Anyhoo, it doesn't seem to have caught on.

What about using light bulbs? The brighter the bulb the higher the IQ.

 

[Helen]

Try tying them with one functional arm

When my iq reaches double digits, you ccan have my velcro

 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

And starting centuries of sectarian violence!

WTF?

 

[theprestige]

@wise47 , why increase my IQ level? What are the practical benefits?

 

[I Am The Scum]

I listened really closely to Allan Sherman's rendition of Camp Granada, tripled my IQ, transcended to a higher plane of existence, and now my sergeant has declared me AWOL! Thanks a lot, jerks!

 

[JayUtah]

MRI is taking it a bit far. I think doctors only use it when really necessary.

As a diagnostic tool yes. It gets more use in the research area. Electroencephalography is dirt cheap compared to MRI and works well to diagnose brain or nervous system impairment. Ditto electromyography.

What about using light bulbs? The brighter the bulb the higher the IQ.

I can get behind that.

@wise47 , why increase my IQ level? What are the practical benefits?

You can thumb your nose at people who got into graduate school where you couldn't.

 

[W.D.Clinger]

When my iq reaches double digits, you ccan have my velcro

It looks to me as though the OP has been telling folks how to triple their IQ so it will reach double digits.

Problem is, tripling a negative number gives you an even more negative number.

 

[novaphile]

Hmm...

I can remember being taught how to use a slide rule, and had my own, including a nifty pocket version for quite a while.

I can also remember memorising the first few pages of logarithm tables, but happily, cannot remember a single detail now.

Do you remember using log table books at school?

 

[Dave Rogers]

I remember the book of four figure tables, yes. Logs, ten-to-the-power-of, sines, cosines, tangents, cotangents, secants, cosecants and hyperbolic functions covering page after page, rivalling pi to one million places as the least engrossing book in existence. Slide rules were obsolete and the first Sinclair calculators were on the horizon, the ones that always failed the 29 test. The world was about to become almost unrecognisable.

Dave

 

[Ron Obvious]

I had a primary school teacher who complained that "kids today" would just whip out their slide rule and get an answer without really understanding the question or the answer....

Plus ça change, eh?

 

[Norman Alexander]

Q) How do you get an IQ of 180 in a room?

A) Invite 6 Trumps.

ETA. You may substitute the names of any local morons of your choice as desired.

 

[JayUtah]

I can remember my teachers saying, "You need to know how to do this because you won't always have a calculator available." (Reaches for mobile device...) As part of our community outreach, our engineers teach classes for students hoping to pass the basic math qualifying test for such journeyman occupations as electricians, carpenters, and pipe fitters. This is basic fractions, basic decimals, percentages, etc. The test does not allow calculators or any other computing aids. It's really funny to watch my engineers try to remember how to do long division in writing.

The cheap slide rule I had to buy is now in a glass frame in one of our equipment rooms with a label that says, "In case of power failure, break glass."

 

[alfaniner]

I remember the book of four figure tables, yes. Logs, ten-to-the-power-of, sines, cosines, tangents, cotangents, secants, cosecants and hyperbolic functions covering page after page

, rivalling pi to one million places as the least engrossing book in existence. Slide rules were obsolete and the first Sinclair calculators were on the horizon, the ones that always failed
the 29 test. The world was about to become almost unrecognisable.

Dave

What is that? Google (yes I did a perfunctory Search first) doesn't tell me anything that seems related.
In my first simple calculator (surprisingly, about $15 in 1975) I tried the divide by zero. It started a little counter which I don't even know what it was. (It was not mentioned in the manual.) But I never let it get too high...

 

[Dave Rogers]

What is that? Google (yes I did a perfunctory Search first) doesn't tell me anything that seems related.
In my first simple calculator (surprisingly, about $15 in 1975) I tried the divide by zero. It started a little counter which I don't even know what it was. (It was not mentioned in the manual.) But I never let it get too high...

The 29 test was to estimate the precision of a calculator. Enter 29, take the sine (set to degrees not radians), the cosine of the result, the tangent of the result, then back through inverse tangent, inverse cosine, inverse sine. How close to 29 is your result? Truncation errors give a result close but not equal to 29. My first calculator, a Sinclair Cambridge, had such a low precision that it returned an error at the fifth step, because the tangent - inverse tangent steps produced a number greater than 1. For reference, my current smartphone gives 29.0009396872.

Dave

 

[P.J. Denyer]

Hmm...

I can remember being taught how to use a slide rule, and had my own, including a nifty pocket version for quite a while.

I can also remember memorising the first few pages of logarithm tables, but happily, cannot remember a single detail now.

Do you remember using log table books at school?

Yes, although again it was a relatively short introduction, a few lessons, and then they stopped being a thing for most students.

 

[Vixen]

As an accountant, you get to learn all kinds of tricks and short-cuts. So, say you keep adding things up and you still get a difference. Ask yourself, does the difference divide by nine? If so, you have almost certainly reversed a figure along the way (often something that is hard to see). One of my accountancy tutors didn't quite believe me, and being a maths boff, doing stuff with the number 47 (or something) and a few other clever steps as mathematical proof, he announced I was absolutely right. So my turn to be impressed with his proof on the hoof [hey, it rhymes].

As an aside, the only time I can recall needing log tables in the real world was in having to calculate learning curves. (How fast a worker can learn a new skill.)

Back in the day you had to show your workings, and log tables et al came with every exam paper. You got marks for workings so even if the answer was wrong you scored if your workings were on the right track. This might even be worth more marks than an answer without the workings. I never liked multiple-choice as it takes the fun out of it.

One of the best advice for my accountancy exams was, if time was short (and they are very much time-limited) or you couldn't quite get to the figure/s you have to find first before you can even begin the calculations, was 'just make up a number' and show your workings on your made up number/s stating your assumption behind it. One chap used to just round everything up to the nearest thousand (or similar easy figure) and just about got away with it.

I also noticed that when I left notes for the marker, such as 'sorry about the mess', I tended to get better marks - so they do give you sympathy points.