Can you make yourself smarter?

Can you make yourself smarter?
nytimes.com

update:

You need a speaker to play

should say "Press A when the box appears in the same location _since the start of the game_"

Lately I've been thinking about the limitations that being human puts on a programmer. We work very hard (and should) to reduce cognitive load on ourselves through good development tools that act as crutches for memory---REPL's and good debuggers allow us to try something and see what happens, as opposed to simulating a multivariate operation in our heads. Intellisense and easily-available docs allow us to cheat a bit on learning(and what I really mean is memorizing) API's.

But what if we could do these things without relying on JIT computer aids? What if I could simulate more levels of abstraction in my head? The private dream of many a Lisper(this one, anyway)---writing programs that write programs that write programs---would be a bit more attainable.

I've been using Anki with great success to learn API's and keyboard shortcuts (Anki+emacs is a match made in heaven), but I despaired at my inability to hold the whole stack, from top to bottom, in my head at once. So I posted a badly phrased question on Stack Exchange, ("How can I increase the number of levels of abstraction I can reason about at once?), and kept Googling. Eventually I came across Jaeggi's research. It looks promising, but hasn't passed the wide-replication test yet. I'm glad this came up on HN, because I'm eager to see more research in the area and get come confirmation or refutation of the findings.

In the meantime, the premise of Jaeggi's conclusion raises two questions---if working memory can be trained, can it decay with disuse? In that case, are with our fancy debugging tools mere shadows of Real Programmers that used to walk the earth? The other question is this---if the brain is likened to a computer, working memory corresponds to RAM. If we are successful at training working memory and making people "smarter," will we in the future face a bottleneck of processing speed rather than space?