A pill proven to make you smarter!
A Pill Proven to make you Smarter
Would you like to be smarter? Would you like to have a better memory? Are there situations in life where that would help you? How about when studying for an exam--or TAKING an exam? How about when you are faced with a difficult problem in life?
If you could take a pill, and it would make you significantly smarter for a period of time, would that be useful to you?
If your answer to any of these questions is yes, we have good news for you. There IS just such a thing, and it will not cost you a cent!
A peer reviewed study published by the University of Chicago Press has demonstrated that any person can instantly boost their own intelligence by a significant amount.
If you like reading through scientific studies, you can do it here:
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/691462
But if you just want the details quickly, the experiment was testing for the effect of a smartphone on cognitive tasks. That's nothing new, but this test was a little differenct: it was testing for the effect of the PRESENCE of a Smartphone that is turned off, face down on your desk.
The study tried 3 different location categories:
- The phone on the desk, facedown and turned off.
- The phone in your pocket or bag. (or wherever you usually keep it)
- The phone in another room.
Oh, and it can't be just any phone. It has to be YOUR smartphone, to get the results.
The improvement in cognitive performance over a variety of tasks was far beyond what could be explained by statistical anomolies. Here is a graph of the findings:
Also interesting is how these results compared to what the participants believed about their performance. They did not know what they were being tested for, but following the test, they were asked a question. Quoting from the paper itself:
“How much / in what way do you think the position of your cellphone affected your performance on today’s tasks?”; “In general, how much do you think your cellphone usually affects your performance and attention span?”), either in the context of the experiment (all F < 1.58, all p > .21) or in general (F(2, 494) = 2.26, p = .11).
Across conditions, a majority of participants indicated that the location of their phones during the experiment did not affect their performance (“not at all”; 75.9%) and “neither helped nor hurt [their] performance” (85.6%).
This contrast between perceived influence and actual performance suggests that participants failed to anticipate or acknowledge the cognitive consequences associated with the mere presence of their phones.""
This is Good news! This means that even if you don't think this would happen to you---you are a happily mistaken! You too could be smarter, even if you don't think your phone is dumbing you down!
Which raises the question: if you could be temporarily smarter during a test, how much smarter could you be ALL THE TIME?--If you moved the device far into the background of your life?