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Ways to maximize your cognitive potential

blogs.scientificamerican.com

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Re: Ways to maximize your cognitive potential

#141

Post by grandalf »

klinskyc wrote: post #114
grandalf wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most professional athletes are highly intelligent, but some never learned to apply it to anything other than sport. Watch Kobe or LeBron on the court. There is an incredible awareness of the shifting context of the game and the available moves. In the greatest athletes it is faster and more fluid than in most athletes. It's a constantly shifting analytical mode that leans heavily on training and instinct, but…

While I completely agree about awareness being a form of intelligence, professional athletes (for the most part) are really on a different plane when it comes to physical metrics. An average person will never be able to attain a 4.4 40 for instance.

> An average person will never be able to attain a 4.4 40 for instance

Totally, true, but the number of people who are good at professional football is a very tiny subset of the people who can run a 4.4 40.

Re: Ways to maximize your cognitive potential

#142

Post by mattmanser »

savanaly wrote: post #51
singham wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't know that all these new Javascript frameworks were making me smart.

You joke, but honestly all the web devs that learn a new framework annually will be pretty good at picking up new frameworks after five or ten years. Of course, most of the people who fret about the state of the javascript ecosystem are doing it needlessly from the sidelines and don't themselves ever learn any of the new stuff.

Do your clients all have projects that shut down after a year then?

One of my clients has 2 projects in durandal that I've picked up. No-one uses it any more, the documentation sucks ass, there's sod all on SO, the original devs had only done data access pages, super easy, not the data editing pages, absolute nightmare, so you can't even copy what they did before.

It's a bloody nightmare to work in. Pages which would take me an hour or two in an older tech are taking me days in this half-baked SPA.

I'm not on the sidelines because I'm fretting mate, I'm on the sidelines because the messes left behind are a fucking nightmare for those afterwards and an absolute disgrace to the profession.

It feels like the framework switchers rip off their clients by giving them code in an untested tech, the code is almost instantly obsolete while claiming to be cutting edge, and then run away when the flaws in the new framework they've chosen becomes obvious and they can't handle it and the complexity is too much to deal with and they run off and start a new project in the latest koolaid tech, pretending it's not history repeating itself, ad nauseum.

Or perhaps, not everyone on the sideline is a Luddite and not everyone jumping from js framework to js framework each year has chronic ADHD that can't see a project through.

Re: Ways to maximize your cognitive potential

#143

Post by vitd »

dmalvarado wrote: post #117
jasonellis wrote: post #36

Here is my Cliff's Notes version of the article's list: 5 Ways to Increase Your Cognitive Potential: 1) Seek Novelty. Openness to new activities correlates with IQ, because those individuals are constantly seeking new information, new activities to engage in, new things to learn, and new experiences. 2) Challenge Yourself. Brain games like Sudoku don't work to increase cognitive potential if you keep playing them. Yo…

So, I like to learn new programming stuff, but most of that is mostly in front of a Pluralsight course, following along in Visual Studio or a text editor. Any suggestions on how to make this novel or creative? I think I can find ways to activate the other 3

Write your own programs to solve your own problems! They can either be real problems, or just stuff you're interested in. Over the last few years I've written a program to help me cheat at Scrabble (great for creatively thinking around a problem, especially trying to optimize it), and wrote a very basic 2D game engine, just to see how it was done. Sometimes my SO complains about something and I write a little app to solve that problem.

Re: Ways to maximize your cognitive potential

#144

Post by jomamaxx »

patwalls wrote: post #125
alexvr wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remind me how the correlation between openness to experience and IQ test scores suggests that seeking novelty might possibly increase your cognitive potential. I think I missed that part. With the same kind of "reasoning" I might have to write an article claiming that you should take lots of psychoactive drugs and have more sex to increase your cognitive potential, because there are positive correlations between thes…

From the article 'Excellent learning condition = Novel Activity—>triggers dopamine—>creates a higher motivational state—>which fuels engagement and primes neurons—>neurogenesis can take place + increase in synaptic plasticity (increase in new neural connections, or learning).' Not sure if it's scientifically correct, though.

My rather unscientific observation is that 'seeking novelty' enables you to think about things in different ways, to consider new approaches. I think 'expanding one's consciousness' could be aptly said in this regard.

Playing a sport, on a team involves so many dynamics that just don't exist when thinking in a classical intellectual sense whilst writing code, for example.

Living in a country for an extended period wherein the prevailing language and culture is not your own ... this can be really quite mind altering.

I think that the above correlation, pulled from the article maybe doesn't quite capture it. They basically state basically that 'novelty keeps you interested and motivated', I suspect there might be more than that.

Though obviously it's hard to discern since we don't really have a true model for brain functions and cognition.

Re: Ways to maximize your cognitive potential

#145

Post by jomamaxx »

cylinder wrote: post #56
jasonellis wrote: post #36

Here is my Cliff's Notes version of the article's list: 5 Ways to Increase Your Cognitive Potential: 1) Seek Novelty. Openness to new activities correlates with IQ, because those individuals are constantly seeking new information, new activities to engage in, new things to learn, and new experiences. 2) Challenge Yourself. Brain games like Sudoku don't work to increase cognitive potential if you keep playing them. Yo…

I already do all these things and can report that none of them are compatible with most corporate jobs. Creative critical thinking and novelty seeking especially disturb management.

"Creative critical thinking and novelty seeking especially disturb management."

Not always.

If you can use your social intelligence to get your bosses peers to respect him more, I can assure you he/she will approve of that.

A large corporate body is a political entity, the product is only 30% of it. Call on your EI Jedi Powers. Sadly, most of them are kind of from the dark, or maybe 'grey' side, but hey.

But yes, large corporations usually have some kind of leverage or de-facto monopoly, and any significant change can risk the goose that lays the golden egg. So, they can be systematically averse to change, for good reason.

Disruptors value change because from a position of little power in a static system, it's the only way to gain power. But at some point, disruption becomes more of a risk than an opportunity.

Large consumer and retail banks are probably the best example of this.

Re: Ways to maximize your cognitive potential

#146

Post by hipjiveguy »

louprado wrote: post #99
FuNe wrote: post #29

" Efficiency is not your friend when it comes to cognitive growth. In order to keep your brain making new connections and keeping them active, you need to keep moving on to another challenging activity as soon as you reach the point of mastery in the one you are engaging in. You want to be in a constant state of slight discomfort, struggling to barely achieve whatever it is you are trying to do " Then working in IT (…

I'm skeptical that learning new things in the same domain will achieve meaningful cognitive growth. It feels like the Sudoku analogy in the OP except your are continuously tweaking the rules and symbols of the game. It's challenging, but it is sufficiently challenging ?

Spot on!

Re: Ways to maximize your cognitive potential

#148

Post by dang »

mcguire wrote: post #60

Hmm. Well, you are a special snowflake, aren't you? Hey, guys, can we change the way the world works for zump here? They've got problems that no one else has ever had, ever.

Personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News. Please don't be nasty here.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12008350 and marked it off-topic.

Re: Ways to maximize your cognitive potential

#149

Post by lackbeard »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #9

One of the most consistent ways research has demonstrated to increase connectivity in the brain is to learn new physical skills. Controlling the body in space appears to be particularly good at stimulating the growth of new synapses (and possibly new neurons as well, though the research is not conclusive here outside the hippocampus). Yoga is a good start. Modern dance, breakdancing, capoeira and gymnastics are all e…

What's a good example of a 3D puzzle?

Re: Ways to maximize your cognitive potential

#150

Post by yoha »

lackbeard wrote: post #149
CuriouslyC wrote: post #9

One of the most consistent ways research has demonstrated to increase connectivity in the brain is to learn new physical skills. Controlling the body in space appears to be particularly good at stimulating the growth of new synapses (and possibly new neurons as well, though the research is not conclusive here outside the hippocampus). Yoga is a good start. Modern dance, breakdancing, capoeira and gymnastics are all e…

What's a good example of a 3D puzzle?

Rubik's Cube. Try solving it yourself for a while (a few months/years). You will probably not completely solve it, but even solving one face, trying to solve a second one, trying to complete rings instead, etc, should get you to experiment and use new thinking models.
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