An anonymous reader writes: An article at the NY Times summarizes the state of research on cognitive improvement. There are multiple industries mdash; from big pharma to the makers of "brain-training" games mdash; trying to convince you there are ways to become more intelligent. Unfortunately, scientific research doesn't really bear that out. There is, however, evidence you can provide short-term boosts, slow aging-related cognitive decline, and trick yourself into achieving better outcomes. Experiments show that simply telling a group of low-performing students that intelligence is malleable led to higher test scores. Researchers also found a use for mental exercises, but only in adults over the age of 60, a time at which some level of cognitive decline is common. Physical exercise seems to help fight that cognitive shrinkage as well. Oddly, different exercises fight it in different ways. As for drugs, there is some evidence that stimulants help with long-term memory, but that's about it. That's not to say they have no effect, just that their effect is more to make you feel smarter instead of actually being smarter. The article does point out one of the best ways to combat cognitive decline: maintain social engagement as you get older. "[P]eople with the highest level of social integration had less than half the decline in their cognitive function of the least socially active subjects."pdiv class="share_submission" style="position:relative;"
a class="slashpop" href="http://twitter.com/home?status=You+Can't+Get+Smarter%2C+But+You+Can+Slow+How+Fast+You+Get+Dumber%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F1R4oHEg"img src="http://slashcdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a
a class="slashpop" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fscience.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F15%2F10%2F24%2F1724243%2Fyou-cant-get-smarter-but-you-can-slow-how-fast-you-get-dumber%3Futm_source%3Dslashdot%26utm_medium%3Dfacebook"img src="http://slashcdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a
a class="nobg" href="http://plus.google.com/share?url=http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/10/24/1724243/you-cant-get-smarter-but-you-can-slow-how-fast-you-get-dumber?utm_source=slashdotamp;utm_medium=googleplus" onclick="javascript:window.open(this.href,'', 'menubar=no,toolbar=no,resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes,height=600,width=600');return false;"img src="http://www.gstatic.com/images/icons/gplus-16.png" alt="Share on Google+"//a
/div/ppa href="http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/10/24/1724243/you-cant-get-smarter-but-you-can-slow-how-fast-you-get-dumber?utm_source=rss1.0moreanonamp;utm_medium=feed"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~4/d2VOm_DiBqI" height="1" width="1" alt=""/
