Beyond IQ by Garth Sundem

Author:Garth Sundem [Sundem, Garth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-7704-3597-4
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2014-07-21T16:00:00+00:00

EXERCISE 30

ACTIVE

A study known as ACTIVE, which stands for Advanced Cognitive Training for Independent and Vital Elderly, shows the effects of brain training in later life. The study split 2,832 people into three groups and offered ten one-hour training sessions in either memory, processing speed, or reasoning. Five years later, some exciting results were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association: while training in memory and processing speed didn’t seem to have much effect, reasoning training not only improved the participants’ cognitive skills but helped them continue to live independently. This is a big deal: this cognitive training improved not only subjects’ brains but their lives.

There were two major pieces of the ACTIVE reasoning training: learning to reason about everyday information and training pattern recognition skills. You can approximate the training in everyday reasoning simply by making sure you understand the information you happen to run across in your everyday life—for example, nutrition panels on cereal boxes, recipe directions, dosage instructions on over-the-counter medicines, medical insurance information, taxi rates, and so on. When you’re hit with information, you have a choice: you can struggle to understand it, or you can let it slide past while groking just enough to get by. ACTIVE shows that working to fully understand the information that comes your way helps you keep the ability to understand it.

The second major section of the ACTIVE reasoning training was learning to work with patterns—the old recognize-and-predict-the-next thing. It seems like a trivial skill, but according to Thelma and Louis Thurstone, who pioneered pattern-recognition research in the 1940s (and apparently provided the names for a popular movie), seeing patterns tests our ability to “solve problems, foresee consequences, analyze a situation on the basis of past experience, and make and carry out plans according to recognized facts.” The skill is anything but trivial.

The ACTIVE trial tested participants’ pattern recognition, trained them, and then tested them again to check for improvement. We’ll do the same. Start by testing your pattern-recognition skills by writing the next letter in each pattern of the pretest below. Then flip to the back of this book for answers and training before returning here to take the test. Afterward, more training is only an Internet search away—just Google the phrase “pattern-recognition test” and you’ll find plenty of options including picture and number patterns. For brain health in late life, the more pattern practice the merrier.

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