We have long been attracted by quick solutions that could increase our intelligence. Today, people’s hopes lie in brain training apps, some of which claim to result in smarter minds”. But is this quick solutions all that it is said to be?
There are plenty of brain training apps, but they all share the same characteristics: they turn mental exercises like simple arithmetic, memory tests and logic and pattern-matching problems into quick games. The more you play these mini-games, the smarter you will get — or so some apps tell us. It is really a big promise.
Many of the apps say they are backed by “science”, a claim I found surprising as a former neuroscientist. The concept that increasing intelligence would be as simple as practicing a few mini-games every day goes against what we have discovered about how humans think and learn.
After surveying a diverse spread of thousands of users across wide variety of apps, researchers at Western University in Canada discovered that “brain training has no appreciable effect on cognitive functioning in the ‘real world’, even after extensive training periods”. The positive effects that have been found are limited to the very specific mini-games and tasks that users are trained on, such as the ability to memorize lists of words or numbers, or perform mental arithmetic, with little benefit to other skills.
If you are expecting them to improve your ability to write novel or construct a complex spreadsheet, I am afraid you will want to look elsewhere.
Puzzle video games such as “Baba Is You” and “Returno the Obra Dinn” see players apply their skill at logic, memory and concentration in a far more complex way than any brain training mini-game.
【小题1】What does the author say about brain training apps?A.They have scientific support. | B.They work in the form of games. |
C.They require problem-solving skills. | D.They are based on complex arithmetic. |
A.Supporting evidence for some brain training apps. |
B.A detailed description of some brain training apps. |
C.A further explanation of the use of some brain training apps. |
D.Questioning the exaggerated effects of some brain training apps. |
A.Limited. | B.Tremendous. | C.Damaging. | D.Far-reaching. |
A.A storybook. | B.A diary. | C.A magazine. | D.A biography. |
You have probably heard of the Mozart effect. It's the idea that if children or even babies listen to music composed by Mozart, they will become more intelligent. A quick Internet search reveals plenty of products to assist you in the task. Whatever your age is, there are CDs and books to help you taste the power of Mozart's music, but when it comes to scientific evidence that it can make you more clever, the picture is more mixed.
The phrase "the Mozart effect" was made up in 1991, but it was a study described two years later in the journal Nature that sparked real media and public interest about the idea that listening to classical music somehow improves the brain. It is one of those ideas that sound reasonable. Mozart was undoubtedly a genius himself; his music is complex and there is a hope that if we listen to enough of it, we'll become more intelligent.
The idea took off, with thousands of parents playing Mozart to their children, and in 1998 Zell Miller, the Governor of the state of Georgia in the US, even asked for money to be set aside in the state budget so that every newborn baby could be sent a CD of classical music. It was not just babies and children who were exposed to Mozart's music on purpose, even an Italian farmer proudly explained that the cows were played Mozart three times a day to help them produce better milk.
I'll leave the debate on the impact on milk yield (产量) to farmers, but what about the evidence that listening to Mozart makes people more intelligent? More research was carried out but an analysis of sixteen different studies confirmed that listening to music does lead to a temporary improvement in the ability to handle shapes mentally, but the benefits are short-lived and it doesn't make us more intelligent.
【小题1】What can we learn from Paragraph 1?A.Mozart composed many musical pieces for children. |
B.There is little scientific evidence to support the Mozart effect. |
C.There are few products on the Internet about Mozart's music. |
D.Children listening to Mozart will be more intelligent. |
A.people were strongly against the idea |
B.Mozart played an important part in people's life |
C.the idea was accepted by many people |
D.the US government helped promote the idea |
A.Favorable. | B.Objective. | C.Doubtful. | D.Positive. |
A.What Music Is Beneficial? |
B.Listening to Mozart, Necessary? |
C.What Is the Mozart Effect? |
D.To Be or Not to Be? |
Chimps(黑猩猩) will cooperate in certain ways, like gathering in war parties to protect their territory. But beyond the minimum requirements as social beings, they have little instinct (本能) to help one another. Chimps in the wild seek food for themselves. Even chimp mothers regularly decline to share food with their children. Who are able from a young age to gather their own food.
In the laboratory, chimps don’t naturally share food either. If a chimp is put in a cage where he can pull in one plate of food for himself or, with no great effort, a plate that also provides food for a neighbor to the next cage, he will pull at random ---he just doesn’t care whether his neighbor gets fed or not. Chimps are truly selfish.
Human children, on the other hand are extremely corporative. From the earliest ages, they decide to help others, to share information and to participate a achieving common goals. The psychologist Michael Tomasello has studied this cooperativeness in a series of experiments with very young children. He finds that if babies aged 18 months see an worried adult with hands full trying to open a door, almost all will immediately try to help.
There are several reasons to believe that the urges to help, inform and share are not taught .but naturally possessed in young children. One is that these instincts appear at a very young age before most parents have started to train children to behave socially. Another is that the helping behaviors are not improved if the children are rewarded. A third reason is that social intelligence. Develops in children before their general cognitive(认知的)skills,at least when compared with chimps..In tests conducted by Tomtasell, the children did no better than the chimps on the physical world tests, but were considerably better at understanding the social world
The cure of what children’s minds have and chimps’ don’t in what Tomasello calls what. Part of this ability is that they can infer what others know or are thinking. But that, even very young children want to be part of a shared purpose. They actively seek to be part of a “we”, a group that intends to work toward a shared goal.
【小题1】What can we learn from the experiment with chimps?A.Chimps seldom care about others’ interests. |
B.Chimps tend to provide food for their children. |
C.Chimps like to take in their neighbors’ food. |
D.Chimps naturally share food with each other. |
A.have the instinct to help others |
B.know how to offer help to adults |
C.know the world better than chimps |
D.trust adults with their hands full |
A.the helping behaviors of young children |
B.ways to train children’s shared intentionality |
C.cooperation as a distinctive human nature |
D.the development of intelligence in children |
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