I teach a humanities subject in an “outstanding” sixth-form college in an affluent area. My students are bright, engaged and well-behaved, but there is something missing: they cannot think. They treat education like a military exercise. Students think there are set answers to life’s questions; they want a formula for the number of sentences per paragraph and expect information they can rote-learn. How does this prepare them for anything? A book is a decoration, a door-stop, a paperweight. An idea is irrelevant. A thought is a distraction.
~ The Guardian, The Secret Teacher, 7 February 2015
Adrian is a pink-cheeked 10-year-old with half-moon eyes and a mischievous smile that never seems to let up. When we met he was perched on a red beanbag in the library of his British international school surrounded by the week’s space-themed projects. Planets dangled precariously in cardboard universes sporting styrofoam suns as shiny foil-clad spacecraft showed off the students’ vision for space travel of the future. Adrian talks with remarkable confidence, easily telling me about his favourite things and teachers with words so sophisticated, I have to remind myself that I’m talking to a 10-year-old. “I’m rereading 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea,” he says, “because Captain Nemo is such an iconic character. He’s kind, cruel and compelling all at the same time, not a typical Hollywood hero.”
With a mind that insightful at this age, you’d imagine that Adrian was top of his class. When I asked him about the subjects he liked least, his attention turned to the patterns on the carpet beneath him. “Maths, I’d say. Because I am supposed to learn the times tables by heart, actually I should have done that two years ago in Year 3. I’m just not as quick as I should be with mental maths and my handwriting is still not good enough. It’s too big and takes me too long to write stuff down. I have extra classes for maths and English and handwriting. Basically I don’t get to go to the fun stuff like art because I’m always in an extra class – oh, and I do extra spelling too.”
Adrian didn’t really want to talk about math or English or even Mandarin, what he really wanted to chat about was shopping trolleys. He was designing one for his mum. “I have to do groceries with her and she always complains about how hard it is to push the trolley, he says, it sticks and skids and then doesn’t stop when she wants it to. So I’m designing one with a small electric motor, gears on the steering and air brakes.” Two weeks before, Adrian had designed a Pac-Man style game using a game building app on a school iPad during ICT. It was loaded up to a game sharing site and was already enjoying hundreds of downloads by preteens around the world.
His report cards show him to be an under performer on almost all measures (except Mandarin and English Reading for which he was “average” then) but there is no way this boy is unintelligent. We discussed his view on dark matter – because I didn’t have a view on the matter at all – and how the cosmos is expanding. In fact, I found him quicker, more curious and knowledgeable about the world than his “smarter” classmates that I was able to chat to. I couldn’t help but wonder if Adrian’s scenario is behind so many successful college dropouts from Thomas Edison and Abraham Lincoln to Walt Disney, Steve Jobs and so many others.
All these iconic characters that never finished their studies at school or university have what is known as fluid, or raw, intelligence. If Adrian’s school had a test for it, he would been considered gifted. Instead, he lives with the label of “average”. In fifteen year’s time though he’ll blow the socks off some lucky employer or venture capitalist. Hopefully by then he would have been able to prove himself with his own brand of smart or skip the corporate world entirely and make a living on his own terms.
Like crude oil, silica or wheat flour, raw intelligence is unrefined and laced with potential. It’s not intelligence about a specific subject but rather the ability to apply one’s inbuilt thinking tools to both everyday and exceptional challenges. Like molten gold it can be set into a shape, melted down again and remoulded into something new without losing its value. Doesn’t this just sound like intelligence as traditionally measured in IQ tests? Yes, but mostly, no. The field of IQ testing is a vast sea of data fed by hundreds of rivers, each searching for the one defining source of our intelligence. It’s a wonderfully turbulent and controversial ocean-sized field of study.
A question I’m often asked is “Can I really change my child’s intelligence?” It’s a good question centred on a rather old-fashioned debate; are we born with a fixed level of intelligence or can intelligence be nurtured and increased, or decreased, depending on our environment? This is an ongoing debate fuelled by research in neuroscience now rather than subjective testing and this is what we know so far:
Genetics lays down our intellectual circuitry or potential but our environment decides which of these circuits get activated and to what degree. Basic levels of intelligence are increasing with each new generation as educators become more effective at teaching and more children have access to schools and environments that nurture cognitive development. Schooling and other academic interventions increase objective measures of intelligence whilst long summer holidays do the opposite.
Is the intelligence as measured by traditional IQ tests the same as the raw intelligence that companies are looking for? Wouldn’t it make every recruiter’s job super easy if it were the same? Forget your CV, just send in your IQ score sheet. Those with the highest IQ would be well bid for and offered starting salaries many times the average starting salary for graduates today. Everyone would know exactly what they’re worth. We could even have a global pay scale based on IQ. Completely fair and transparent. How about that?
That wouldn’t work for Adrian nor would it work for every company shaping the future. Do you remember the list of qualities that these employers are looking for in future leaders from Chapter 2? Adaptability, resilience, social, emotional and raw intelligence.
Raw intelligence fits squarely in the domain of the critical thinker. It represents our capacity to think logically and systematically in ways that allow us to solve problems independent of acquired knowledge. It encompasses the innate processes we use to find patterns or relationships in novel situations and create new solutions. It allows us to think bravely but cautiously and rally all our thinking tools, including working memory, around tricky problems or creative endeavours. Psychologists call this fluid intelligence.
On the other hand, acquired or learned knowledge is known as crystallised intelligence. It represents the stuff we know about through knowledge, skills and experience. What we need to know to pass our maths or history exams. The Confucian heritage education model currently focuses on crystallised intelligence. The same is true of most aspects of the US and UK education curricula. As you can imagine, the relationship between these two types of smarts is a new, interesting and potentially controversial area of research.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the US National Institute of Health were interested to know if students who improved their scores on standard school tests were also able to improve their fluid intelligence. Their well-credentialed research1 show ed that public (government-funded) schools in the US that were able to raise their student’s test scores on standardised tests of crystallised intelligence were not able to replicate this improvement on tests of fluid intelligence. In short, doing well at school didn’t lead to gains in cognitive skills. It would seem that fluid intelligence is not a bonus by-product of studying hard and being a good student. You suspected that already, right?
Make no mistake, the combination of declarative knowledge (crystallised intelligence) and fluid intelligence is very powerful. Having lego blocks plus the ability to put them together in new and innovative ways is much more useful than owning an acre of lego blocks but only being able to build something by following the step-by-step instruction booklet. Before we can help our little loved ones develop this seemingly precious skill we should probably look at exactly what fluid intelligence is.
You will find its definition as fluid as its substance with scientists and researchers continuing a century-old argument of what exactly makes us intelligent beyond knowledge. So far we have:
1. Working memory and processing speed
2. Adaptability, resilience and curiosity
3. Problem-solving skills
As we’ve already seen, these are also the skills most needed to supplement many school and higher education curricula around the world with 2 and 3 also being high on recruiters’ hit lists. Over the next few chapters, I’ll chat about each one in turn and give you ideas to help your child foster these talents as they grow. After that we’ll jump straight into good decision making and nourishing creativity and innovation. Of course, this is all aimed squarely at helping your children be better thinkers, but if it also helps you rekindle your skills in these areas then that’s useful too.
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1 Anne Trafton, “Even When Test Scores Go Up, Some Cognitive Abilities Don’t,” mit.edu, Dec. 11, 2013 This study was a collaboration with the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University, Transforming Education, and Brown University, and was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. MIT neuroscience professor John Gabrieli was the lead author.
Working memory is the unsung hero of intelligence, the part of our short-term memory that we call on for immediate perception, information and language processing. It can be compared to your computer’s high-speed memory that stores data or bits of the programs that you are currently working on so that it can access them more quickly.
The size and processing speed of our working memory is closely tied to our ability to reason and solve problems. This nifty piece of kit processes and records verbal and visuospatial1 info rmation with the help of an executive system that controls how attention is allocated between these two information sources. As impressive as it sounds, scientists and users alike report two rather fundamental flaws in our working memory: it has very limited capacity and leaks like a colander.
Sometimes, when you ask your computer to process very demanding tasks, such as rendering an enormous image in Photoshop, or labouring away at a mammoth spreadsheet, it slows down and can even grind to a halt. At this point it may complain about having insufficient memory to complete the task. If you can’t upgrade your computer’s memory then there’s nothing to do but sit and wait, and wait, for it to finish grinding away. Sometimes the process times out and you have to start again. In much the same way, if our brain’s working memory is too small and too slow, similar problems will plague our thinking, without the ability to reboot and start again.
We can’t simply add more storage space to our mental motherboard. You may have heard that we can only hold 5 to 9 pieces of information in working memory. I used to dismiss this as an urban legend and insult to human intelligence, but I was wrong on all fronts. It would seem that us grown ups can indeed only hold a limited amount of independent chunks of information in our working memory. Neither 5 nor 9 is a big number but the difference between being able to work with 5 or with 9 bits of data is like shopping in the UK property market with £500,000 or £900,000. The difference in what you can buy with these two amounts is vast – £500k would get you a two-bed flat in London whereas £900k might get you a four-bed semi-detached house. Larger working memory capacity means that more variables can be considered at the same time.
If you’re curious to find out the size of your working memory, then try this;
Read through these numbers with the intention of remembering them: 39728456
(Bear with me, you’ll see why in a bit.)
For children, working memory is used in almost all areas of cognition from answering questions in reading comprehension to contemplating different objects, words or numbers in order to group them or perform calculations. When working through a problem, especially word problems, assumptions and facts must be held in mind and considered together until conclusions can be deduced from them. In reading comprehension, new or ambivalent words must be retained in memory until their meaning can be gleaned from the remainder of the sentence or paragraph. You’ll have noticed that these are not activities where your child is learning new knowledge such as the periodic table or the properties of isosceles triangles. Learning facts requires repetition to add the information to our long-term memory stores and top up our crystalline intelligence.
Given its size limitation, information stored in working memory must leak or decay to make way for new data. Ever walk to the fridge, get distracted en route and then forget what you came for as you peer at the starkly lit milk and marg? Yup, that’s working memory in action and it brings me to the next important aspect of fluid intelligence, namely, processing speed. I can continue the analogy of a computer here but I think you probably get it already.
Faster processing speed means that we can complete our reasoning before the stored information decays. Processing speed is a global indicator and does not change between different tasks. The speed attained is proportional to age – for example a 12-year-old will process information at about half the speed of a young adult. This means that your 10-year-old will take longer to come up with a solution to a maths problem than you simply because they are processing at more than half the speed that you are. A child that is able to consider stored facts faster will have a better chance of using the information before it is pushed out by new facts than a child with the same sized working memory but much slower processing speed.
Remember those numbers from earlier? Can you recall them?
Only a few?
That’s not too bad.
Now try and remember them as chunks of larger numbers. Say them out loud if you can.
39 |
72 |
84 |
56 |
Thirty-nine |
seventy-two |
eighty-four |
fifty-six |
We’ll check on them again in a little while and see if your score improves.
So if working memory and processing speed are foundational in fluid intelligence, how can we help our children develop confidently in this area? Let’s look at some fun things to do to with your little and not so little ones.
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1 Relating to or denoting the visual perception of the spatial relationships of objects.
The strength of working memory depends on neuronal excitability in a distributed network of cortical regions1 as assessed by transcranial magnetic stimulation. I can’t pretend to love wading through endless academic research like this in my quest to help us all raise thinkers. If I were to translate this into human, I would say: the strength of our working memory depends on how strong and fast neurons fire across different areas of the brain. We already know that neurons get better and stronger through use. So here are some exercises that specifically improve the speed and capacity of working memory. For me, one of the most interesting discoveries about working memory is that physical activity of all kinds boosts its capacity and hence our fluid intelligence.
From working with executives, I know that the quality of new ideas and decision making around a boardroom table decreases significantly when participants have been on the road for a few days and unable to get their zumba, yogilates or soul cycle fix. Apart from all the other well publicised benefits of exercise, growth2 hormones are also released during sustained physical activity. They won’t make you taller but will benefit an area of the brain (the hippocampus) crucial for learning and memory, so aerobic fitness has been linked directly to improved brain health and memory capacity. We know how important exercise is for our body so why shouldn’t it be just as important for our brain? I’m sure I don’t need to give you a list of exercises to do with your kids here. Just get them moving and grooving everyday. Swap 20 minutes of Minecraft for boogie music and a spot of Wii Fit hula dancing before dinner or an old fashioned speed walk around the block, or even better, suite them up with a dust buster and furniture polish and let them help with the housework – it’s all for a good cause.
If your child is still young enough for bedtime stories then try this little mental exercise at your child’s bedtime tonight and tomorrow night. Tonight read a bedtime story or chapters as usual and then have a little Q&A afterwards. Start with big open questions such as “What did we learn about our main character tonight?” or “Why did the mean girls not want to play with Anna?” Then get more specific such as “How many children did Anna invite to her party?” Notice how fast and accurately your child is able to deliver answers. Of course you’ll need to pay full attention as well. The following night, repeat the exercise with a different story. This time, before you start, tell your child to listen well because you’ll ask her a few questions again at the end.
Unless your child is already a whizz at listening comprehension, you’ll be surprised at how much better she will do on the second night. (Of course you’ll be expecting it but try acting surprised and pleased anyway.)
What leads to such an improvement in your child’s processing speed and accuracy? Well, it’s not because you “practiced” it the night before as the information is completely new and different. What you did differently this time is prime her working memory. You turned it on by telling her she will need to remember facts from the text before you read it to her. The brand new science3 behind this shows us that memory has to be activated in order to remember even the simplest details after we’ve been exposed to them. Of course this is done either consciously (by telling ourselves to pay attention) or unconsciously (because we want to remember this info for later use).
Eyewitness testimony uses long-term memory and the ability to reconstruct fragments of information. Information that would have had to pass through working memory on the way in to long-term memory. For some time now, scientists have questioned the reliance on eyewitness testimony in criminal convictions. Their scepticism is duly supported with the results of DNA testing, which expose our inability to accurately record and recall information when we’re not expecting to have to do so. In fact a staggering 73% of the 239 criminal convictions overturned in the US through DNA testing since it was introduced in the 1990s, were based on eyewitness testimony.4 That’s 174 innocent lives ruined by someone’s perfectly normal memory.
Educators already know through experience that “curiosity” is the foundation of retention. What does this mean to us as parents? Well, if a child is curious about the subject they are learning, learning and retention will be much higher. We’ll talk a lot more about curiosity in innovation but right now it’s important to know that a state of curiosity not only turns memory on but runs it at full capacity. My son can tell me exactly what date the Titanic sank and when several other man-made disasters occurred. Not because he’s learnt them but because he’s fascinated by this topic. He takes out library books and reads up on it simply because he wants to. He’s curious and his general knowledge in this area is startling. If I were to ask him for the properties of a scalene triangle he probably wouldn’t be able to tell me because maths doesn’t arouse his curiosity.
How can we make our kids curious about mundane, everyday topics like homework? Challenge them. If they’re doing a project, challenge them to find some new and interesting fact, on their own, that will blow their classmates away. When learning for a test, challenge them to see how many mnemonics they can invent to help them remember the details. Be curious and ask them what their limits are and how they can exceed those.
Remember that memory capacity is built through use – like all pathways in the brain. If you still have a toddler, why not take the “What’s in the box?” game further and pull a toy from under the cloth or in the shoebox and ask your toddler what it is and then let her describe it and give it a name. Perhaps she’ll say, “It’s a puppy dog bear and I’ll call it Fuzzy Wuzzy Big Eyes.” Do encourage crazy names just for fun and because they are easier to remember. Then, ask her to help you remember the name by reminding you just before bedtime. Again, reward with praise when you can see that she has held on to that piece of information for hours just so that she could help daddy or mommy remember Fuzzy Wuzzy Big Eyes.
Going to the grocery store? Get your toddler to remember one item from the list. Then a few months later, ask them to remember two items and so on. Pretend that you forgot what those items are and together you can try to remember if it was diapers or dummies that you were out of. Honesty, this is a good exercise to do all your life, as continuously forcing new connections in the brain will slow down cognitive ageing significantly.
Mnemonics are helpful to old and young memories, too. Did you park your car in Lot 27, Basement 2? The parking lots in Singapore are so large that I usually just note the location of my parking spot in my reminders app on my iPhone. That’s just lazy thinking, isn’t it? In order to test the usefulness of mnemonics for working memory, my son and I have started using them to help us remember our parking spaces and taxi numbers when we book a cab. So, Lot 27, Basement 2 would become 27 baboons in a B2 bomber, and we never forget where we parked anymore. Being able to visualise numbers is very important for mental math and later, for systems thinking. Cab numbers here are four digits long, and two days ago I took a cab with the number 9034. Breaking these numbers up into 90 and 34 and then asking your child to see them in his head in big black, pink, blue or purple with yellow spotted letters will help them “see” and remember numbers.
Remember those numbers you looked at earlier? The ones I asked you to remember? Can you?
No, I’m not going to list them here, that wouldn’t help you. I’m guessing that you remember more this time round than you did the first time? You probably know why, too. The second round of numbers was the same as the first but I chunked them into smaller chunks so you only had four instead eight numbers to remember (39 instead of 3 and 9, etc.). That’s a little easier on working memory, isn’t it?
As part of my undergraduate degree, I learnt to program large relational CRM databases. Many years later and despite passing all my exams, I don’t remember any aspect of the actual coding languages I used. I do remember many late, frustrating nights working on pieces of code with the mantra GIGO running through my head as I wrestled with boolean statements and unruly syntax. GIGO – garbage in, garbage out – a piece of code can only do what is programed to do and if it is programed badly, it will do it badly. Our working memory is no different.
Even if our working memory is primed and ready to retain info for us, it can only remember what we pay attention to. It sounds kind of obvious, doesn’t it? If our children can’t settle down and pay attention to what’s important then no amount of critical thinking training will change their outcomes. Learning to focus from a young age is so important that a baby can do it naturally. He focuses on your face when you speak, on an object when you show it to him or on the dog’s tale the first time he sees it wag excitedly, to the exclusion of all else. Being short-sighted is actually very useful for concentration when you’re just a little tot. But later your child’s world explodes into a cornucopia of sights, sounds and fun stuff to do and be distracted by.
The popularity of practicing mindfulness is no doubt partly driven by a need to shut out the busyness around us. With its growing popularity and proven benefits it was bound to find its way into the classroom. A very welcome trend indeed. It is being packaged as the WD40 of education. “Helping students find the focus needed to achieve their academic goals,” says Katherine Weare, emeritus professor at the universities of Exeter and Southampton’s mood disorder centre, “The evidence is that kids’ tests improve as a result and children who can sit and breathe for a few minutes before they start an exam will do better compared with those who don’t.” If it’s going to help Johnny get the grade he wants then that’s great, but what’s really important here is that he’s creating a habit of sustained concentration.
Playing with Lego blocks without a TV on for distraction, reading a book without the latest hip hop funk rock blaring in the background will do much the same for concentration levels. It’s really about paying attention to how your child pays attention and the spaces where your child is expected to work on important tasks.
Speed and size of working memory are the hardware in our fluid intelligence system. Hardware does the physical processing work but software is what tells it what and how to process. The software of fluid intelligence is what we’ll look at next.
TIPS AND TAKEAWAYS FROM CHAPTER 6
1. The size and processing speed of your child’s working memory is closely tied to their ability to reason and solve problems.
2. Working memory gets sharper and stronger through priming, use and physical exercise.
3. From an early age, try building your child’s working memory by stealth. Involve your children in daily activities such as remembering items on a shopping list, where you parked the car, etc.
4. Create areas where your child can learn, work or play that are distraction free. If they are building Lego, turn off the TV.
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1 Motor threshold predicts working memory performance in healthy humans by Nathalie Schicktanz et al. University of Basel and University of Bern and the Center of Neurology and Neurorehabilitation, Luzerner Kantonsspital Nov 2013
2 Aerobic fitness and hormones predict recognition memory in young adults by Andrew S. Whiteman et al. Boston University Medical Centre, Dec 2013
3 Amnesia for object attributes: failure to report attended information that had just reached conscious awareness by Hui Chen, Brad Wyble. The Pennsylvania State University published in Psychological Science February 2015
4 Why science tells us not to rely on eyewitness accounts by Hal Arkowitz and Scott O. Lilienfeld. Published in Scientific American, 08/01/2009 from a report by the Innocence Project