Smarter: The New Science of Building Brain Power - Softcover

Hurley, Dan

 
9780142181652: Smarter: The New Science of Building Brain Power
Softcover
ISBN 10: 014218165X ISBN 13: 9780142181652
Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

“A riveting look at the birth of a new science.” —Daniel H. Pink, author of Drive
 
When he was eight years old, Dan Hurley was labeled a “slow learner” because he still couldn’t read.  Three years later, he had become a straight A student. 

Until the publication of a major study in 2008, psychologists believed that intelligence is fixed at birth, that IQ is like a number tattooed on the soul. The new study showed that people can increase their “fluid” intelligence through training.

Hurley, who grew up to become an award-winning science journalist, first explored the topic in The New York Times Magazine. In Smarter, he digs deeper by meeting with the field’s leading researchers—and becoming a human guinea pig. After just three months of playing computer brain-training games, joining a boot-camp exercise program, learning to play the Renaissance lute, practicing mindfulness meditation and and even getting his brain zapped in the name of science, Hurley improved his fluid intelligence by sixteen percent.

With humor and heart, Smarter chronicles the roiling field of intelligence research and delivers practical findings to sharpen the minds of children, young adults, seniors, and those with cognitive challenges.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dan Hurley is the featured journalist in PBS’s August 2013 Pledge Special, “Smarter Brains.” His articles on intelligence research have been featured in the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, Neurology Today, and Discover magazine. He lectures to corporate and academic audiences across the United States. His fluid intelligence went up 16 percent after his training regimen.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof.***

Copyright © 2013 by Dan Hurley INTRODUCTION

Danny and Julie Vizcaino, brother and sister, were born and raised in a poor neighborhood of Modesto, California, she in 1981, he in 1983. Their parents, immigrants from Mexico without high school diplomas, were typical of the local population: their mother worked in a canning factory, and their father worked in con­struction until he died in an accident when the kids were young. With an older brother who had dropped out of high school and got­ten into trouble with the law, Julie was left back in second grade and took it for granted that she was, in a word, stupid.

“I was never really good at reading and writing,” she told me. “Or at anything.”

Then, in 1991, Julie entered fourth grade and found herself in the class of a new teacher, Kevin Cripe, who had the outlandish idea that his students were capable of great things.

“When I talked to older teachers,” Cripe told me, “they said that Julie was just not very smart. One of her older brothers was in and out of jail. She had been left back. Her younger brother, Danny, had also been left back. And she was not a great reader.”

But Cripe had been a lifelong chess player, and when he decided to start a chess club, he invited Julie to participate.

“I had no idea what it was,” she said. “I called it ‘chest.’ I had never heard of it, but I said sure.”

Cripe kept their training fun, but challenging, and Julie picked it up with a speed that surprised even Cripe. She began spending hours leaning over a chessboard, lost in thought, thinking not just two or three moves ahead, but ten or more. After two years of practice, when Julie was in sixth grade, Cripe decided that she and two other kids were good enough to enter a local tournament in Bakersfield.

“Here’s what I felt as we were going to that first tournament,” Cripe said. “There was this other kid named Jordy. A great kid. Both his parents were psychologists. Jordy was a prodigy. He had gone to private elementary schools and played the piano in concerts. His par­ents had done all the right things. I thought, here’s Jordy, he has all this stuff, he speaks French, and here’s Julie. Cognitively, I have to think that her brain has never been fully activated or whatever you want to call it. Sort of like a kid who’s never really run, never been pushed to do something athletic. I thought, what would happen if we just treat her brain as if it’s going to be like his at some point? So I just decided to treat all the kids in the chess club like they’re going to be as smart as all the other kids in these tournaments, the ones from the elite private schools. If I didn’t believe that, then it’s all hopeless­ness, right? You might as well burn up all the books.”

After the students did well at the Bakersfield tournament and at a number of others in California, Cripe decided he would take Julie and the rest of his team to a national chess championship held in Charlotte, North Carolina.

“Don’t do this,” a fellow teacher begged him. “You will only em­barrass these children.”

But Cripe took them, and out of eighty teams, his scored in the top fifteen. Among the hundreds of students participating, Julie ended up among the tournament’s top ten.

“I didn’t start winning till I was thirteen or fourteen,” she said. “When I was fourteen, I won a lot of money playing in the tourna­ments. That’s how I bought my first car.” Eventually, in her age group, Julie was ranked among the top fifty female players in the United States.

Then her younger brother, Danny, joined the team and soon be­came its best player. At a national championship held in Tucson, Danny reached the last round, his team clinging to the hope of scor­ing in the top ten, when the stress got to him.

“He throws up before the last round because he’s nervous,” Cripe said. “He was the leader. I said, ‘Okay, Danny, if you are truly sick, I’ll call your mom; we’ll withdraw you from the tournament. But if you’re nervous, here’s what I want you to think about. You have earned this. Everybody else is as nervous as you are. And I want you to enjoy this moment, because there are seven hundred other people here today who have no chance to win a trophy. So what do you want me to do?’ And he said, ‘I want to try to play.’ Then I gave him one last piece of advice: ‘If you throw up again, aim for the floor, because if you hit the board, it’s going to be hard to play with the chess pieces.’

“He won his game fairly quickly. Every single other student on our team who came out after him also won. They watched Danny win after he threw up. It almost makes me cry every time I talk about it. He was one of the ‘dumb ones,’ and he finished in the top ten of the national chess championship that year. And our team finished in fifth place. We were ahead of Hunter College Elementary School that year. That’s the school in New York City that’s always among the best. They were in sixth or seventh place.”

Danny went on to graduate from the University of the Pacific with a degree in mechanical engineering. He now works as an engineer for an international manufacturing firm. Julie graduated from the Uni­versity of Mississippi and is now a homemaker living with her hus­band, Calbemar, and a young daughter, Isabel.

“I definitely think chess improved my thinking abilities,” Julie told me. “And it definitely improved the thinking abilities of other kids in the chess club. We all got better in our grades and everything else. It just had to do with how hard you worked. You get pretty good at it. You sit there for so long. You’ve got to picture the moves in your head. At the beginning, you can’t really think that far into it. When I was really practicing, I could think fifteen, even twenty moves ahead. You have to sit there for hours and try to think through all these different scenarios. And you’re just thinking of different conse­quences. You take that and put it into your own life. If I do this, then this can happen. If I do that, then that can happen. And then you just make the best decision from there.”

What, really, is the meaning of intelligence anyway?

“There are some really ignorant people out there,” Julie told me, “the people who are prejudiced and think that just because some kids are from a poor area, and their parents didn’t have an education, they automatically have to be stupid. And we’re not stupid. I’m not stupid. There are lots of smart kids out there. There’s lots of things we could get into. It just has to do with the choices you make. That’s why I said chess definitely helped me make the right choices.”

On the other side of the country, among the most affluent of New York City’s parents, another approach to increasing intelligence is being pursued by those able to pay a couple hundred dollars per hour. Founded in 2009, Bright Kids NYC now has as many as five hundred children enrolled at any time, most of them four-­year-­olds seeking to gain admission to the public schools’ gifted and talented program. Although admission was once decided by each individual school dis­trict in the city, leading some to question its fairness, in 2008 a uni­form, citywide standard was created, based on standardized test scores. (Yes, there are standardized tests for...

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Verlag
Penguin Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2014
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
014218165X
ISBN 13 
9780142181652
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
303
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

Friedensallee 273
Hamburg
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Deutschland

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