Gains in IQ were found in several areas of cognitive training. When mothers in low- income homes were given the means to provide their children with educational tools, books, and puzzles and trained how to help their children learn to speak and identify objects in the home, the children showed IQ

gains. When mothers of three- year- olds in low- income families were trained to talk to their children frequently and at length and to draw out the children with many open- ended questions, the children’s IQs rose. Reading to a child age four or younger raises the child’s IQ, especially if the child is an active participant in the reading, encouraged by the parent to elaborate. After age four, reading to the child does not raise

Make It Stick ê 176

IQ but continues to accelerate the child’s language development. Preschool boosts a child’s IQ by more than four points, and if the school includes language training, by more than seven points. Again, there is no body of evidence supporting the conclusion that early education, preschool, or language training would show IQ gains in children from better- off families, where they already benefi t from the advantages of a richer environment.13

Brain Training?

What about “brain training” games? We’ve seen a new kind of business emerge, pitching online games and videos promis-ing to exercise your brain like a muscle, building your cognitive ability. These products are largely founded on the fi ndings of one Swiss study, reported in 2008, which was very limited in scope and has not been replicated.14 The study focused on improving “fl uid intelligence”: the facility for abstract reasoning, grasping unfamiliar relationships, and solving new kinds of problems. Fluid intelligence is one of two kinds of intelligence that make up IQ. The other is crystallized intelligence, the store house of knowledge we have accumulated through the years. It’s clear that we can increase our crystallized intelligence through effective learning and memory strategies, but what about our fl uid intelligence?

A key determiner of fl uid intelligence is the capacity of a person’s working memory— the number of new ideas and relationships that a person can hold in mind while working through a problem (especially with some amount of distraction). The focus of the Swiss study was to give participants tasks requiring increasingly diffi cult working memory challenges, holding two different stimuli in mind for progressively longer periods of distraction. One stimulus was a sequence of

Increase Your Abilities ê 177

numerals. The other was a small square of light that appeared in varying locations on a screen. Both the numerals and the locations of the square changed every three seconds. The task was to decide— while viewing a sequence of changed numerals and repositioned squares— for each combination of numeral and square, whether it matched a combination that had been presented n items back in the series. The number n increased during the trials, making the challenge to working memory progressively more arduous.

All the participants were tested on fl uid intelligence tasks at the outset of the study. Then they were given these increasingly diffi cult exercises of their working memory over periods ranging up to nineteen days. At the end of the training, they were retested for fl uid intelligence. They all performed better than they had before the training, and those who had engaged in the training for the longest period showed the greatest improvement. These results showed for the fi rst time that fl uid intelligence can be increased through training.

What’s the criticism?

The participants were few (only thirty- fi ve) and were all recruited from a similar, highly intelligent population. Moreover, the study focused on only one training task, so it is un-clear to what extent it might apply to other working- memory training tasks, or whether the results are really about working memory rather than some peculiarity of the par tic u lar training. Finally, the durability of the improved per for mance is unknown, and the results, as noted, have not been replicated by other studies. The ability to replicate empirical results is the bedrock of scientifi c theory. The website PsychFileDrawer

.org keeps a list of the top twenty psychological research studies that the site’s users would like to see replicated, and the Swiss study is the fi rst on the list. A recent attempt whose results were published in 2013 failed to fi nd any improvements

Make It Stick ê 178

to fl uid intelligence as a result of replicating the exercises in the Swiss study. Interestingly, participants in the study believed that their mental capacities had been enhanced, a phenomenon the authors describe as illusory. However, the authors also acknowledge that an increased sense of self- effi cacy can lead to greater per sis tence in solving diffi cult problems, encouraged by the belief that training has improved one’s abilities.15

The brain is not a muscle, so strengthening one skill does not automatically strengthen others. Learning and memory strategies such as retrieval practice and the building of mental models are effective for enhancing intellectual abilities in the material or skills practiced, but the benefi ts don’t extend to mastery of other material or skills. Studies of the brains of experts show enhanced myelination of the axons related to the area of expertise but not elsewhere in the brain. Observed myelination changes in piano virtuosos are specifi c to piano virtuosity. But the ability to make practice a habit is generalizable. To the extent that “brain training” improves one’s ef-fi cacy and self- confi dence, as the purveyors claim, the benefi ts are more likely the fruits of better habits, such as learning how to focus attention and persist at practice.

Richard Nisbett writes of environmental “multipliers” that can deliver a disproportionate effect from a small ge ne tic predisposition— the kid who is ge ne tically just a little bit more curious becomes signifi cantly smarter if she’s in an environment that feeds curiosity. Now stand that notion on its head.

Since it’s unlikely I’ll be raising my IQ anytime soon, are there strategies or behaviors that can serve as cognitive “multipliers” to amp up the per for mance of the intelligence I’ve already

Increase Your Abilities ê 179

got? Yes. Here are three: embracing a growth mindset, practicing like an expert, and constructing memory cues.

Growth Mindset

Let’s return to the old saw “If you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right.” If turns out there is more truth here than wit. Attitude counts for a lot. The studies of the psychologist Carol Dweck have gotten huge attention for showing just how big an impact one simple conviction can have on learning and per for mance: the belief that your level of intellectual ability is not fi xed but rests to a large degree in your own hands.16

Dweck and her colleagues have replicated and expanded on their results in many studies. In one of the early experiments, she ran a workshop for low- performing seventh graders at a New York City ju nior high school, teaching them about the brain and about effective study techniques. Half the group also received a pre sen ta tion on memory, but the other half were given an explanation of how the brain changes as a result of effortful learning: that when you try hard and learn something new, the brain forms new connections, and these new connections, over time, make you smarter. This group was told that intellectual development is not the natural unfolding of intelligence but results from the new connections that are formed through effort and learning. After the workshop, both groups of kids fi ltered back into their classwork. Their teachers were unaware that some had been taught that effortful learning changes the brain, but as the school year unfolded, those students adopted what Dweck calls a “growth mindset,”

a belief that their intelligence was largely within their own control, and they went on to become much more aggressive

Make It Stick ê 180

learners and higher achievers than students from the fi rst group, who continued to hold the conventional view, what Dweck calls a “fi xed mindset,” that their intellectual ability was set at birth by the natural talents they were born with.

Dweck’s research had been triggered by her curiosity over why some people become helpless when they encounter challenges and fail at them, whereas others respond to failure by trying new strategies and redoubling their effort. She found that a fundamental difference between the two responses lies in how a person attributes failure: those who attribute failure to their own inability—“I’m not intelligent”— become helpless.

Those who interpret failure as the result of insuffi cient effort or an in effec tive strategy dig deeper and try different approaches.

Dweck came to see that some students aim at per for mance goals, while others strive toward learning goals. In the fi rst case, you’re working to validate your ability. In the second, you’re working to acquire new knowledge or skills. People with per for mance goals unconsciously limit their potential. If your focus is on validating or showing off your ability, you pick challenges you are confi dent you can meet. You want to look smart, so you do the same stunt over and over again. But if your goal is to increase your ability, you pick ever- increasing challenges, and you interpret setbacks as useful information that helps you to sharpen your focus, get more creative, and work harder. “If you want to demonstrate something over and over, ‘ability’ feels like something static that lies inside of you, whereas if you want to increase your ability, it feels dynamic and malleable,” Dweck says. Learning goals trigger entirely different chains of thought and action from per formance goals.17

Increase Your Abilities ê 181

Paradoxically, a focus on per for mance trips up some star athletes. Praised for being “naturals,” they believe their perfor mance is a result of innate gifts. If they’re naturals, the idea goes, they shouldn’t have to work hard to excel, and in fact many simply avoid practicing, because a need to practice is public evidence that their natural gifts are not good enough to cut the mustard after all. A focus on per for mance instead of on learning and growing causes people to hold back from risk taking or exposing their self- image to ridicule by putting themselves into situations where they have to break a sweat to deliver the critical outcome.

Dweck’s work has extended into the realm of praise and the power it has in shaping the way people respond to challenges.

Here’s an example. A group of fi fth grade students are individually given a puzzle to solve. Some of the students who solve the puzzle are praised for being smart; other students who solve it are praised for having worked hard. The students are then invited to choose another puzzle: either one of similar diffi culty or one that’s harder but that they would learn from by making the effort to try solving. A majority of the students who are praised for their smarts pick the easier puzzle; 90

percent of the kids praised for effort pick the harder one.

In a twist on this study, students get puzzles from two people, Tom and Bill. The puzzles Tom gives the students can be solved with effort, but the ones Bill gives them cannot be solved. Every student gets puzzles from both Tom and Bill.

After working to solve the puzzles, some of the kids are praised for being smart, and some for their effort. In a second round, the kids get more puzzles from both Tom and Bill, and this time all the puzzles are solvable. Here’s the surprise: of the

Make It Stick ê 182

students who were praised for being smart, few solved the puzzles they got from Bill, even though they were the same puzzles these students had solved earlier when they got them from Tom. For those who saw being considered smart as para-mount, their failure to solve Bill’s puzzles in the fi rst round instilled a sense of defeat and helplessness.

When you praise for intelligence, kids get the message that being seen as smart is the name of the game. “Emphasizing effort gives a child a rare variable they can control,” Dweck says. But “emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of a child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”18

Paul Tough, in his recent book How Children Succeed, draws on Dweck’s work and others’ to make the case that our success is less dependent on IQ than on grit, curiosity, and persis tence. The essential ingredient is encountering adversity in childhood and learning to overcome it. Tough writes that children in the lowest strata of society are so beset by challenges and starved of resources that they don’t stand a chance of experiencing success. But, and here’s another paradox, kids at the top of the heap, who are raised in cosseted settings, praised for being smart, bailed out of predicaments by he li-cop ter parents, and never allowed to fail or overcome adversity on their own initiative, are also denied the character-building experiences essential for success later in life.19 A kid who’s born on third base and grows up thinking she hit a tri-ple is unlikely to embrace the challenges that will enable her to discover her full potential. A focus on looking smart keeps a person from taking risks in life, the small ones that help people rise toward their aspirations, as well as the bold, vi-sionary moves that lead to greatness. Failure, as Carol Dweck

Increase Your Abilities ê 183

tells us, gives you useful information, and the opportunity to discover what you’re capable of doing when you really set your mind to it.

The takeaway from Dweck, Tough, and their colleagues working in this fi eld is that more than IQ, it’s discipline, grit, and a growth mindset that imbue a person with the sense of possibility and the creativity and per sis tence needed for higher learning and success. “Study skills and learning skills are inert until they’re powered by an active ingredient,” Dweck says.

The active ingredient is the simple but nonetheless profound realization that the power to increase your abilities lies largely within your own control.

Deliberate Practice

When you see stellar per for mances by an expert in any fi eld— a pianist, chess player, golfer— perhaps you marvel at what natural talent must underlie their abilities, but expert per for mance does not usually rise out of some ge ne tic predisposition or IQ advantage. It rises from thousands of hours of what Anders Ericsson calls sustained deliberate practice. If doing something repeatedly might be considered practice, deliberate practice is a different animal: it’s goal directed, often solitary, and consists of repeated striving to reach beyond your current level of per for mance. What ever the fi eld, expert per for mance is thought to be garnered through the slow acquisition of a larger number of increasingly complex patterns, patterns that are used to store knowledge about which actions to take in a vast vocabulary of different situations. Witness a champion chess player. In studying the positions on a board, he can contemplate many alternative moves and the countless different directions each might precipitate. The striving, failure, problem solving, and renewed attempts that characterize

Make It Stick ê 184

deliberate practice build the new knowledge, physiological adaptations, and complex mental models required to attain ever higher levels.

When Michelangelo fi nally completed painting over 400

life size fi gures on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, he is reported to have written, “If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful after all.” What appeared to his admirers to have fl owed from sheer genius had required four torturous years of work and dedication.20