How to Increase IQ with the N-back Exercise

Today I am looking at the N-back exercises, one of the cognitive training exercises from Think Fast: How to Increase IQ. The complete guide to increasing your IQ is available at How to Increase IQ

The N-back Research

In a key research paper published in 2008 by Jaeggi, Buschkuehl, Jonides and Perrig the N-back cognitive training exercises was shown to improve fluid intelligence by increasing the capacity of participants working memory.

Two important features of these improvements were:

1.) They imporvements were transferrable 

This means that not only did the exercise improve the particpants capabilities to perform the N-back training exercise but that these improvements transfered to other unrelated tests of working memory and fluid intelligence. This is one of the key aspects for real world improvements in IQ that most 'Brain Training Games' are missing.

2.) The improvements were 'dose dependent'

Simply put this means the more the participants trained with the N-back exercise the more their working memory capacity and fluid intelligence increased.

How does the N-back exercise work?

In the simplest version of the N-back exercise you are presented with a series of letters one after another, and you must identify when the current letter is identical to one that was already presented a certain number of items ago in the series. This number is the ‘N’ in N-back So let’s say you were presented with this series below, and were looking for matches that were 2-back:

Now this might not look too tricky, so to make the exercise more challenging the researchers used the 'Dual' version of the technique. This involves keeping track of two different series simultaneously (usually one series of letters and another series of locations in a 3x3 grid).

If you manage to succesfully identify the correct letters and locations that appear '2-back' at least 80% of the time, then you move up to the next level '3-back'. By continually adjusting the difficulty of the exercise you make sure you are always working at the limit of your ability.

And thats the N-back exrecise in a nutshell!