Working memory more important that IQ for grades

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Tollorin
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08 May 2010, 10:56 pm

A lot of us got problems with working memory, so I was thinking it could be of interest.

http://www.sharpbrains.com/blog/2010/01/10/working-memory-a-better-predictor-of-academic-success-than-iq/#more-2750


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ilivinamushroom
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08 May 2010, 11:02 pm

I know its insane I scored high in all aspects other than memory this brought my overall score to average! I have extreme problems with college.



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08 May 2010, 11:03 pm

Well I'm f****d. Good to know, at least now I know why I'm failing college. (Besides procrastination.)


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08 May 2010, 11:47 pm

Tollorin wrote:
A lot of us got problems with working memory, so I was thinking it could be of interest.

http://www.sharpbrains.com/blog/2010/01/10/working-memory-a-better-predictor-of-academic-success-than-iq/#more-2750


I don't have a working memory problem. I have a "WTF is he saying?" problem.

Once the initial communication barrier is overcome and the information is in my head, I'm usually fine.



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08 May 2010, 11:49 pm

My working memory is horrible, but I drill the concepts so much that they basically get stuffed into my head.


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09 May 2010, 12:13 am

i once knew a nurse-anaesthetist who scored genius-level in her IQ tests and ASVAB, who had an eidetic memory for everything, never had to study but still excelled in everything academic she did. she told me her only secret was a superior memory, that in her own opinion of herself she was [otherwise] "not that intelligent" in terms of high-level conceptualizing. i disagreed with her self-assessment then and now. her fast and deep memory surely allowed her to be super-intelligent [i.e., fast thinking, fast attention-shifting and with a global capacity for functional situational details], and she always quickly "got" very subtle points of discussion and humor that sailed over others' heads. having a superior [facile, deep] memory enables one to rapidly lay out all the elements of information on a huge "surface" so everything can be clearly seen and properly arranged in sensible order, so one can literally "see" the big picture and all its details in their full orderly reality. i like the analogy of a computer with a vast and quick RAM large enough to dump a whole hard drive/database' contents into it and able to parse it all in hyper quick time, whereas a tiny-RAM'd computer would choke on all that info.
i knew another genius who was capable of true functional multitasking in that she could be discussing a complex topic with full attention to all parties, while also playing "tetris" well enough to score 100,000 and make the rocket take off at the end. this person also had a photographic memory and never had to study.
every person i've known in the past who had this facility was widely perceived to be a genius. i believe that with every other part of the brain working well, a eidetic memory is the clincher of exceptionally high cognitive functioning.
i wish i could be one of those people. :?



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09 May 2010, 12:18 am

None of the neuropsych evals i've had suggest I have a problem with working memory. While i'm not certain, I believe the standard neuropsych memory tests do a pretty good job of assessing short-term/working memory. There is reason to believe they are quite limited in their ability to measure one's long-term memory. As i've stated many times before on WP, I believe I have severe impairments in long-term memory in terms of semantic, procedural, (which would be the most debilitating problems insofar as academics, vocational skills and many other things are concerned) and episodic memory.

None of these problems have been indicated on my neuropsych evals, but again, the conventional memory tests may be very inadequate at assessing long-term memory. This is why i'm trying get some neuroimaging done. I can't be sure an MRI (or other forms of neuroimaging) will tell me anything either. It's worth a shot though since I don't think there's any other neuropsychological or neurological tests which are better at determining long-term memory capacity than the standard ones like WMS. An MRI won't tell you much about the qualitative nature of memory problems of course. But it may be able to suggest a likely etiology for them.



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09 May 2010, 1:04 am

auntblabby wrote:



Quote:
every person i've known in the past who had this facility was widely perceived to be a genius. i believe that with every other part of the brain working well, a eidetic memory is the clincher of exceptionally high cognitive functioning.
i wish i could be one of those people.



I believe this is very likely too. Ironically I know a person studying to be an RN who is somewhat like the nurse-anaesthetist you described. She claims her IQ tested at 132 and while i'm somewhat hestitant to call her an NT, (for unimportant reasons I need not share) I seriously doubt she's on the spec either. I wouldn't say her memory and overall cognitive ability is quite as high-powered as the person you described, she's sharp enough. She knows more about medical science than any person i've ever encountered
(including some doctors). She's had a passion for it her entire life. Her mother was an RN and she spent alot of time reading her mother's nursing books. She claims she did this because she had no friends and was bullied at school. This is PART of the reason i'm not so sure she's a "pure" NT, if that makes any sense. Anyway....she probably doesn't have a defacto eidectic memory, but i'd say she comes darn close to having one. She does great in most of her classes, but she's fairly weak in alegebraic-type math. She's much better at visual-spatial math like geometry and trig and she's a top speller. Gets straight A's in all her classes (including ones many nursing students find rough like A & P) and like the other person you described, she's a great multi-tasker.

HOWEVER....much of her "intelligence" strikes me as very shallow. She is not what i'd call a creative or original thinker at all. Unlike the people you described, she does study and she studies alot. There's alot about the world she just doesn't seem to get and she's awful at understanding sarcasm. She's quite naive in many ways, overly-trusting and she constantly states the obvious. Put it this way....aside from her vast amount of medical knowledge, her conversations are rarely more complex than those you'd expect from a fairly bright 13 y/o. So in spite of her alleged IQ score of 132....I believe her "intelligence" has alot more to do with a fantastic "rote" memory than any Einstein-like conceptual genius.

That's not to say she isn't bright....but I just don't view her as extraordinarily so. An excellent memory, especially long-term memory, can be one reason for scoring high on certain IQ subtests (especially the verbal ones) like information and vocabulary. So this may partially explain her self-proclaimed score of 132....idk. All I can say is that if I was forced to play a walking intelligence test, i'd say her overall "G" intelligence (assuming there is such a thing and I have alot of mixed feelings about that) isn't too far above average. I firmly believe her powerhouse (though likely somewhat less-than eidectic) of a memory is really the crux of the matter. Without it....I think she'd be getting by in college with C's, B's and a few A's here and there. And I don't think she'd know nearly as much about medical science even AFTER she managed to complete nursing school.

No comments on the uberlemon of a long-term memory I seem to have. :(



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09 May 2010, 1:25 am

I would suggest that anyone who is interested should read about Bloom's ladder. At the bottom is simple recall, I would say that many teaching events in schools are related to examinations which test simple recall. Sadly it is possible to pass many exams without understanding anything as long as you can vomit up the exact words of the teacher / textbook in the correct order.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_Taxonomy


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09 May 2010, 2:33 am

Woodpecker wrote:
I would suggest that anyone who is interested should read about Bloom's ladder. At the bottom is simple recall, I would say that many teaching events in schools are related to examinations which test simple recall. Sadly it is possible to pass many exams without understanding anything as long as you can vomit up the exact words of the teacher / textbook in the correct order.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_Taxonomy



Thanks for the link, i'll check this out momentarily. I would agree that many "teaching events" are based on simple recall. I virtually have no ability
at higher math, so I sucked at math exams. I was able to pass alot of other exams with flying colors though. My study habits were awful too. I would often read the relevant chapters for the first time the night before the exam.

But to my eternal dismay, my long-term memory only seems to work decently when "triggered" by exam questions or exam-like questions in the non-academic world.

Beyond that....I only seem to recall a few isolated details about EVERYTHING I studied in school or read/heard elsewhere.


To this day...I can beat most people at Jeopardy. Once again....Jeopardy questions seem to act as a "trigger". But ask me to have a detailed conversation about something i've read, or ask me to write about it strictly from memory and i'm lost. It doesn't matter how many times i've read the same thing, how well I comprehend the material, or how much a given subject interests me. My memory just seems like a sieve...almost everything falls out of it unless and until it's "prompted", "cued", or "triggered".


I think anyone can easily understand why this has been a profound handicap for me. For example, it might be easy enough for me to pass a certain class with flying colors. But i'm screwed if I need to take another class which depends on a solid recollection of much of what I learned in the first one. Anatomy and Physiology is one of the best examples I can think of. Though i've never taken A & P and I don't even know I if I could handle it in the first place, let's assume that I could. I might be able to mop the floor in A&P I....but i'm pretty sure i'd epic fail at A&P II because I wouldn't remember squat from A&P I. :(

So with the kind of memory problems i'm referring to....i'm sure anyone could understand how it would be impossible for me to have a CAREER which depends upon a cumulative retention of everything I learned in school (and what career doesn't?) I mean....you certainly don't have to remember much about your undergrad/pre-req courses if you're a lawyer for example. But you better be able to remember much of what you learned (if not everything) in law school. As i've said countless times before....NONE of my neuropsychological memory tests indicate any significant problems with ANY
aspect of my memory. Everything i'm saying about it is based on self-observation and experience alone. But there are strong reasons to believe that the conventional neuropsych memory tests leave much to be desired in terms of their ability to
assess one's LONG-TERM memory capacity. Thus....I think it's entirely possible to have
a very severe long-term memory impairment/s which simply flies under the "radar"
of all the psychometric memory tests. Though i've posted this link on WP a thousand times, i'll do so again in case anyone reading my post here hasn't seen it.


http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/con ... /123/3/472



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09 May 2010, 9:17 am

I was told when I got a dyslexia diagnosis that the higher your IQ the more working memory you need hence I have a 30% working memory deficit although I would not if I had a normal IQ.
Although I had very few problems with exams my lack of ability in planning coursework and essays let me down.


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09 May 2010, 11:35 am

But isn't that the nature of "tests" in general? Tests [of knowledge]?

Even in the hard sciences something like "find the derivative of 3X^2" is more a test of remembering the rule. IQ comes into play marginally more on hard science tests because you have to judge which rule to apply. But it still comes down to memory, doesn't it?


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09 May 2010, 1:44 pm

That makes a lot of sense because there are a lot of people with high IQ's who get bad grades. A high IQ doesn't automatically mean good grades.


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09 May 2010, 2:21 pm

"having a superior [facile, deep] memory enables one to rapidly lay out all the elements of information on a huge "surface" so everything can be clearly seen and properly arranged in sensible order, so one can literally "see" the big picture and all its details in their full orderly reality. i like the analogy of a computer with a vast and quick RAM large enough to dump a whole hard drive/database' contents into it and able to parse it all in hyper quick time, whereas a tiny-RAM'd computer would choke on all that info."
:idea: Wow, I totally agree and that is an AMAZING explanation of how working memory can make someone smarter. And why someone can function as if they had poor working memory when their working memory is actually average.

You also just explained why it takes me a week to write an essay...I'm trying to fit a multi-gigabyte hard drive into a computer with only so-so RAM. And then I can't edit it, since I have trouble fitting the whole structure of the argument into my head and rearranging it at the same time. :-/



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09 May 2010, 2:45 pm

Mosaicofminds wrote:
"having a superior [facile, deep] memory enables one to rapidly lay out all the elements of information on a huge "surface" so everything can be clearly seen and properly arranged in sensible order, so one can literally "see" the big picture and all its details in their full orderly reality. i like the analogy of a computer with a vast and quick RAM large enough to dump a whole hard drive/database' contents into it and able to parse it all in hyper quick time, whereas a tiny-RAM'd computer would choke on all that info."
:idea: Wow, I totally agree and that is an AMAZING explanation of how working memory can make someone smarter. And why someone can function as if they had poor working memory when their working memory is actually average.

You also just explained why it takes me a week to write an essay...I'm trying to fit a multi-gigabyte hard drive into a computer with only so-so RAM. And then I can't edit it, since I have trouble fitting the whole structure of the argument into my head and rearranging it at the same time. :-/


Exactly the same here. I seem to choke on information too.


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09 May 2010, 4:17 pm

auntblabby wrote:
i once knew a nurse-anaesthetist who scored genius-level in her IQ tests and ASVAB, who had an eidetic memory for everything, never had to study but still excelled in everything academic she did. she told me her only secret was a superior memory, that in her own opinion of herself she was [otherwise] "not that intelligent" in terms of high-level conceptualizing. i disagreed with her self-assessment then and now. her fast and deep memory surely allowed her to be super-intelligent [i.e., fast thinking, fast attention-shifting and with a global capacity for functional situational details], and she always quickly "got" very subtle points of discussion and humor that sailed over others' heads. having a superior [facile, deep] memory enables one to rapidly lay out all the elements of information on a huge "surface" so everything can be clearly seen and properly arranged in sensible order, so one can literally "see" the big picture and all its details in their full orderly reality. i like the analogy of a computer with a vast and quick RAM large enough to dump a whole hard drive/database' contents into it and able to parse it all in hyper quick time, whereas a tiny-RAM'd computer would choke on all that info.
i knew another genius who was capable of true functional multitasking in that she could be discussing a complex topic with full attention to all parties, while also playing "tetris" well enough to score 100,000 and make the rocket take off at the end. this person also had a photographic memory and never had to study.
every person i've known in the past who had this facility was widely perceived to be a genius. i believe that with every other part of the brain working well, a eidetic memory is the clincher of exceptionally high cognitive functioning.
i wish i could be one of those people. :?

You know, it's funny that you mention that. I never have to study. For Instance, I've gone through most of the high school AP physics course this year. I have the highest grade in the class and almost always get the highest test score, yet I haven't spent a second studying other than doing the regular homework assignments. I'm like this in all my other classes too, and only learned this upon entering public school in 10th grade. (went to private 6-9 grade. School was unstructured and I didn't really learn anything there.) In fact, I only learned that people study when someone asked me before we took the finals in the first semester of 10th grade "so, did you study for the finals?" Naturally, I was confused by this. Up until then I thought studying meant reading an assigned book or sheet when no written work was given. But back to the main point, even though I always have the highest grades in all my classes (after exiting the private school), I got 99th percentile on the ACT test, and I never even have to study or take notes for that matter, my IQ score is low considering my grades and ability to learn. I don't know if I remember them correctly, but my global was in the lower 130s or upper 120s, verbal was about 134 or 136, and nonverbal was 142 or something. The IQ test really isn't an accurate predictor of intellect, in my opinion. After all, I believe that the test was originally designed to be culturally biased, so that only people who've experience certain lives will score high. I think it was used to prove that the southern rural blacks were inferior to the northern city-dwelling whites. It asked things that only people living in the cities would know. One would see a picture of a teddy bear and would have to say what it was. If you lived in the southern country, you probably would have never seen one before, or a bear for that matter. The tests have changed since then, but even still today, there's no absolute way to prove someone's intellect or ability to succeed with a test.