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Get Smarter in 20 Days

N-back exercises improve 'fluid intelligence': Study

By Sarah Whitmire,  Newser Staff

Posted Jun 4, 2011 1:58 PM CDT

(Newser) – Some of this week's news was enough to turn your brain to mush, but a university psychologist has a way to get it back in under three weeks. His technique involves something called "n-back exercises," a type of mental training that tests your short-term memory of symbols or noises. Doing them 20 minutes a day for 20 days improves "fluid intelligence"—the ability to reason and solve problems—for up to three months, says his University of Michigan study. (Here’s an app we found free for Android, or this one is a desktop app.) More on the medical specifics here.

'N-back exercises' might get this in shape.
'N-back exercises' might get this in shape.   (Shutterstock)
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COMMENTS
Showing 3 of 7 comments
Even-Steven
Jun 5, 2011 8:55 AM CDT
You know the timing on this article is really funny. I was just thinking the other day about.... damn, sorry forgot where i was going with this......umm, what?
HappyHabenero
Jun 4, 2011 9:24 PM CDT
neat..I wonder if it would be of help to those with traumatic brain injury issues, and the concommitant short term memory loss
SC23
Jun 4, 2011 2:46 PM CDT
From the article.. The new studies also include tests with children, showing the same sort of training effect using a video-game version of n-back training. Again, Jonides and colleagues found that mental training on the n-back task resulted in improvements on tests of fluid intelligence. They also found that training made children less likely to be fooled by tempting, but incorrect, information. "Psychologically, training made them more conservative," Jonides said. Puts on Flame Suit. ::edit:: Try this..for like a couple months.. Its the web version of the training listed in the article, *from* the article. http://dual-n-back.com/nback.html

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