“Feel the burn!” That was Jane Fonda in 1982, exhorting the viewers of her first-of-its-kind workout video to engage in an exotic pursuit called exercise. In her striped leotard and legwarmers, Fonda led the charge against the generally held opinion that exercise was a weird waste of time. (In those days, lifting weights was for Charles Atlas aspirants, and jogging was for quirky “health nuts.”) The tireless exertions of Fonda — and of tiny-shorted Richard Simmons and toothy Judi Sheppard Missett, the founder of Jazzercise — were ultimately wildly successful, making what was then an eccentric choice into what is now practically an obligation. Today we all exercise, or at least know we should.
We can think of Dan Hurley as the would-be Jane Fonda of cognitive exercise — the mental training that can, some researchers claim, whip our brains into better shape. Hurley is a science journalist who has written for The New York Times Magazine and The Washington Post. In his new book, “Smarter,” he embraces scientists’ assertions that cognitive training can increase working memory — the mental holding space in which we manipulate and combine facts and ideas — and even fluid intelligence, the all-purpose problem-solving capacity that is partner to crystallized intelligence, or knowledge stored in memory. …show more content…
You are asked to press a button every time you hear the same letter repeated twice in a row. That’s 1-back. That’s easy. So if you hear the list n-a-m-m-a-m, you press the button when you hear the second m, right? But now let’s try 2-back: this time, you have to press the button when you hear the last letter in the series, because this last m was preceded two letters earlier (hence ‘2-back’) by another m. If you were being tested on 3-back, however, you would press the button when you heard the second a, because it was preceded three letters earlier by the first a. And so it goes, to 4-back, 5-back and
We can think of Dan Hurley as the would-be Jane Fonda of cognitive exercise — the mental training that can, some researchers claim, whip our brains into better shape. Hurley is a science journalist who has written for The New York Times Magazine and The Washington Post. In his new book, “Smarter,” he embraces scientists’ assertions that cognitive training can increase working memory — the mental holding space in which we manipulate and combine facts and ideas — and even fluid intelligence, the all-purpose problem-solving capacity that is partner to crystallized intelligence, or knowledge stored in memory. …show more content…
You are asked to press a button every time you hear the same letter repeated twice in a row. That’s 1-back. That’s easy. So if you hear the list n-a-m-m-a-m, you press the button when you hear the second m, right? But now let’s try 2-back: this time, you have to press the button when you hear the last letter in the series, because this last m was preceded two letters earlier (hence ‘2-back’) by another m. If you were being tested on 3-back, however, you would press the button when you heard the second a, because it was preceded three letters earlier by the first a. And so it goes, to 4-back, 5-back and