Boost your IQ score by 10 points in 6 months by learning how to play music?

What do you think about this video? :slight_smile:

How Playing Music Changes Your Brain

Related:

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How much do you guys think directly controlling computer input with our brains will advance in our lifetimes?

How commonplace will it become?

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I’m not sure. There is friction with putting on a headset or wires, but if the technology shrinks, people could find uses for it in daily life. There are some interesting articles about related technology here:

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Too early to say whether it’s utter nonsense or perhaps possibly onto something neurological that points to something we don’t understand yet- but whatever the truth is - it’s worthwhile for this work to be done.

To be honest I didn’t understand much of this guy’s video because he’s speaking in quantatative terms about feedback in qualitative abstract concepts and that’s not at all scientific it’s witch doctor territory.
You’d need to have a large study but just one guy’s experience…

I’m very skeptical because he’s not a beginner at music, and (normally) new activities have a enormously bigger effect on a newcomer than the same activity on someone familiar with the activity. Seems back to front this claim he’s making.

Someone or something inducing a thought into your head isn’t going to be the same the first time as the five thousandth time…

Beginners get more out of an hour’s mindfulness than life long practitioners - just as non drinkers get drunker than drinkers do from the same amount of alcohol, this guy’s a musician - would have thought that playing splashy jazz chords and harmoic exercises he’s not even thinking about (I mean he doesn’t need to think about this music consciously to play this stuff) would not have had any effect on him at all, or at least a lot less of an effect than someone not yet at his level.

Victor Borg once played a piano concerto with an orchestra, consciously he was concentrating on the music or the piano at all - he was thinking only about a fly he saw that was walking back and forth along the top of the piano, unconsciously - of course he was deeply involved with the music, but he wasn’t thinking about it at all. And played fine.

What do you think Josh?

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I found the video interesting as performance art.
My initial gut reaction is that Benn Jordan is very smart… and possibly very troubled.
I felt like he was trying to impress me with his smartness, which suggests insecurity.

Some questions:
Is it only music that makes one smarter?
Would other forms of art do?
Would being in a state of flow be just as beneficial to health, happiness, and cognitive function?
Wouldn’t a smart brain figure out how to not be stressed or unhappy? (I don’t know.)

The video made me think of the joke:
Person A: If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?
Person B: If you’re so rich, why aren’t you smart?

What are smartness and IQ anyway?

I saw an IQ vocabulary test that had the word ā€˜testator’.
You had a high IQ if you were a 5th grader and you knew this word.
Or, if you were the child of lawyers and you heard Mom and Dad talking about last wills and testaments at the dinner table.

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Your questions about smart / rich reminded me of this old story:

Irving Berlin learned that the famous Russian composer Igor Stravinsky had moved into a nearby apartment in New York. Irving went across and said, ā€œHonoured to meet you, I write songs for the theatre and films but I don’t read music and can only play piano in F Sharp, could you give me some lessons?ā€
ā€œHow much did you earn last year Mister Berlinā€ Said Stravinsky.
ā€œAbout two and a half million dollars.ā€
ā€œI think I am the one who should be asking for lessons.ā€ Said Stravinsky.

Edit: seemingly it was Gershwin, not Berlin, it was at a party not in New York, and 100k not 2.5 million and Stravinsky denied it ever happened. Memory? L.

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I think it’s still interesting to self-test and report on what happened. I’m a chronic self-experimenter and like hearing about what people are working on.

I like the biofeedback and would try it if I had the equipment.

I’m a fan of his videos, especially when they combine some programming/tech and music, because those are a couple of my main interests in life. :slight_smile:

He has a lot of creative ideas:

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IQ boost videos are very misleading because they don’t actually show any significant improvement.

Significant improvement is life changing and noticable intelligence difference. These ā€œboostā€ videos never make an average person suddenly a genius and never make a low functioning person into average intelligence. All they show is that you can increase your IQ points perhaps with a few points but it is not your intelligence that increases. IQ and intelligence are not the same thing. There are some correlations but they are not entirely related because there are still enough exceptions where IQ can’t seem to pinpoint to intelligence.

IQ tries to measure your general intelligence, the G factor. The most important word in that sentence is the word ā€œtriesā€. There are many outliers and exceptions where IQ doesn’t work yet people still say it is a solid metric. People with disorders being often outliers.

Learning to play music itself is not the improvement of IQ points either, it’s the act of engaging in intellectual activities. It’s a tool to increase problem solving skills. I call learning to play music a semi-tool; it makes you more efficient and more invested when faced with other problems but not directly. A final tool would be mathematics and physics because solving problems is at the core of those subjects. That’s why the highest IQ’s in universities and colleges aren’t musicians but engineers, mathematicians, physicists, computer-scientists, etc. None of the art majors are at the top unless you consider some science art like mathematics.

I’m going to give an unpopular opinion right now. I think, the reason why most people and by most people I mean people who aren’t into heavily intellectual demanding activities, find Leonardo Da Vinci the most well-rounded genius of all the time is because he was interested in art and music which is something most people can more easily relate to and they can use him as an argument for arts being at the same level of intellectual engagement as something as complicated as physics. Yet, when you ask people who are into actual heavily intellectual engagement activities like physics and mathematics, computer-scientists, economists etc, who they think is the most well rounded genius of all time, Leonardo is not the only name that pops up. Another name is John von Neumann and there are probably a lot more names out there.

And the only reason why Leonardo is more popular and therefor regarded as the most well-rounded genius of all time by most people is because they like the idea of arts and music in the same intellectual category as mathematics, physics, biology and chemistry.

Nobody would suggest Leonardo as the most well-rounded genius of all time if he was besides mathematics and physics, into bakery and gardening instead of art and music. NOBODY. This is the uncomfortable truth.

This guy in the video, stating things like ā€œmusicians are smarter than non-musiciansā€ falls into the same category of people who like the idea of music being something intellectually demanding and valuable. That’s not how that works. I can make the same statement about physics by saying physicists are smarter than non-physicists and show the studies to back up my claim but my claim would be baseless because the word smart does not mean intelligence and IQ doesn’t mean intelligence.

I like music and art but it just isn’t the same as physics and mathematics. It isn’t better or worse, it’s just different. But people treat arts and music like it is something special, even though bakery and gardening have their moments too.

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This small section here is something one can dive further into. There are many aspects of our human experience that get viewed more or less important based on essentially nothing. You could ask yourself the question why an electrician who makes 150k a year with his own business is still viewed as lesser by a lot of people than an accountant or lawyer who makes 100k a year. The cherry on top would be a follow up question asking which one of them is smarter then grab your popcorn and enjoy the show revealing how ridiculous people can be.

People don’t make sense often.

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As I said above but will repeat, it is in my opinion important that ā€˜work’ (I use the term very loosely) like this is done and reported, self experimenting or not, and I am led to believe that many great ideas taken up by mainstream medical practitioners did in fact start as self-experimenting (now universal cure for once very common ā€œstomach ulcersā€ being an extreme case where the guy who was studying a new treatment downed a flask of bacteria…).

The difference here, I think is that this guy has crossed a line from interesting worth investigating to out and out quakery as he claims (he actually says) what makes him ā€˜feel’ better or improved will make others feel better or improved. Long experience shows that never works.

It is interesting, and he is an interesting guy - just like Derren Brown is an interesting guy with creative ideas.