Suspended Judgement

The Next Men..?

A long time ago I read a 1960s science fiction short story by Howard Fast called “The First Men”, in which a government project, under pressure of war, assembles gifted children from around the world and creates a radical learning environment isolated from their parents and native culture, in which they gradually develop super-human abilities and ultimately transcend our understanding of ‘human’. The core idea of the story - that our cognitive development is constrained by our cultural environments - has always stayed with me. Over the years I’ve come to hold the view that people’s inability to deal with and understand greater levels of complexity is more constrained by nurture than by nature (Dunbar’s number aside), but I’ve never really had a whole lot of evidence to support that view (and it never used to be relevant to my work).

Recently though I’ve seen some things that lend some extra weight to the idea: Research on cognitive ability and social factors in New Scientist;  Robert Kegan’s book “Imunity to Change” in which he presents a bunch of research that shows that our cognitive development doesn’t need to stop at adulthood; and today I discovered an article by Andrea Kuszewski in Scientific American in which she presents research from cognitive therapy with autistic-spectrum kids that supports the same idea.

As well as her own research, Kuszewski refers to a 2008 research paper by Jaeggi, Buschkuehl, Jonides, and Perrig called “Improving Fluid Intelligence with Training on Working Memory”, which showed that:

1. Fluid intelligence is trainable.
2. The training and subsequent gains are dose-dependent—meaning, the more you train, the more you gain.
3. Anyone can increase their cognitive ability, no matter what your starting point is.
4. The effect can be gained by training on tasks that don’t resemble the test questions.

(I especially love the last finding - that’s education gold in my book!)

So, I’m starting to think maybe it’s not all just liberal-minded wishful thinking on my part… :-)