Eating ice cream for breakfast could make you SMARTER

[applePi]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... ARTER.html

[tj1010]

From the same people who have been announcing good-bad-good-bad-good-bad' about milk, eggs, meats, and vegtables and just about everything else at three-year intervals for the last 40 years based on research..

Read about the R&D behind SuperMemo if you want to know what is real and how human information retention works.

[Keya]

i think makes you smarter is one of the claims of Modafinil which half of Silicon Valley is on lol
i dont think i could eat icecream first thing in the morning though haha. too much sugar anyway and cancer loooves sugar!

[Lunasole]

Nothing but your efforts can really make you smarter.
You will no get any advantages if you try to stimulate "empty brain", no matter in which way you try doing this. Thus, experience is crucial. Only if you know and already seen a lot of things and made a lot of your own conclusions and analysis from them, you can go further and modulate your thinking processes by using drugs, trans-cranial stimulation and so on, which being used with care extends your intelligence to a "new horizons".

There of course are more low-level factors (like starting amount of "gray matter" -- this amount is defined right after your birth and several years after it; It depends on heredity and highly depends on food amount and quality in those first years of your life).
But there is nothing you or science might change for now, just if you was not foolish enough to waste this matter "for fun" and useless experience in age under 16-20+ (i.e. following lot of primitive instincts and delights, instead of be guided by your will and "noble qualities" like scientific curiosity, etc), only then you may grow much smarter and be wider-thinking than most people.
Just "may", because those two are just ones of much more other critical factors (I still not even close to build whole picture or single logical sequence of this all, regardless I'm learning neurobiology and lot other such stuff for more than 9 years [finding answers for some old own questions about myself ^^])

[tj1010]

Nothing but your efforts can really make you smarter.
You will no get any advantages if you try to stimulate "empty brain", no matter in which way you try doing this. Thus, experience is crucial. Only if you know and already seen a lot of things and made a lot of your own conclusions and analysis from them, you can go further and modulate your thinking processes by using drugs, trans-cranial stimulation and so on, which being used with care extends your intelligence to a "new horizons".

There of course are more low-level factors (like starting amount of "gray matter" -- this amount is defined right after your birth and several years after it; It depends on heredity and highly depends on food amount and quality in those first years of your life).
But there is nothing you or science might change for now, just if you was not foolish enough to waste this matter "for fun" and useless experience in age under 16-20+ (i.e. following lot of primitive instincts and delights, instead of be guided by your will and "noble qualities" like scientific curiosity, etc), only then you may grow much smarter and be wider-thinking than most people.
Just "may", because those two are just ones of much more other critical factors (I still not even close to build whole picture or single logical sequence of this all, regardless I'm learning neurobiology and lot other such stuff for more than 9 years [finding answers for some old own questions about myself ^^])

One of my favorite fake human intelligence claims: 10,000 hours of practice makes you adept at anything. Math and drawing are the two obvious conflicts with this..

[Lunasole]

One of my favorite fake human intelligence claims: 10,000 hours of practice makes you adept at anything. Math and drawing are the two obvious conflicts with this..

I was not meant that unapproved myth about 10k hours, etc. I never thinking in such terms at all, there is some other mechanism of how brain evolves skills. Time matters, but for example you can waste 10k hours and get almost nothing, if you have no real motivation to learn and evolve in specific direction ("it looks boring for you"). That's why school or college education can often be mostly useless and huge waste of time, if it forces you to learn things that you estimated as "useless shit". Unlike self-education driven by your will, your personality and qualities I mentioned in previous post. Lot of really successful people abandoned college educations because they know or "fell" that.

And you of course are telling wrong about math and drawing, if you think that you can't evolve in them to "expert" level and thinking need to be somehow "gifted" for that. By fact all you need is long-term real motivation/interest to it, time and start it in childhood (or in any not too old age, when you still have enough of ready-to-use gray matter reserves to quickly make huge changes in your brain, and when your current brain structures are not mostly myelinated yet [which greatly raises your current skills performance and efficiency, but makes harder to learn and evolve in something principally new]).

Me for example in childhood had extremely low skills in dry logic and math (up to 14-16 years), I never was interested in those before (because hated my math teachers :3), but had nice skills in writing/languages/imagination/creativity and some art ^^ (even composed lyrics, hah). Then I shifted my interests going to science (and scientific thinking), programming (which greatly evolves logical, analytics skills and some else), and lot of others stuff I tried for all time. If I'd like to become a true math expert able to solve actual math problems, there was no any problem to become him at that point. As well as going to opposite direction (painter or other art-only). But I never liked any "specialization", as It moves you to a cage of artificial limits and thinking patterns, and it always gets you to emotional burnout and degradation, if you sitting day by day on some monotony job for reasons which are not defined by yourself, like need of money (closest example: 90% of typical "professional" codemonkeys).
I rather want to know everything, even if without reaching expert-level in every single stuff (which is theoretically impossible nowadays, when all the stuff are so much complex and so much valuable stuff is born almost every month, unlike what was 100 years ago).

PS. Also if you analyze unordinary people (in any discipline), you will see that no one of them was specialized in single direction only. You can't be great mathematic if you don't look at patterns in real world, which requires from you to learn that world in lot of different ways, including those which are opposite to math. And so on.
But well, that's not directly what we talking about :)

PS2. Answering to your post shortly - saying "efforts" I meant not only "practice in specific skill".

[#NULL]

there was a french guy who was doing fine with only 10% of his brain.
http://www.sciencealert.com/a-man-who-l ... sciousness
he might not have been a genius but i think its quite astonishing. they don't tell if he liked icecream.

[applePi]

Thanks #NULL for the interesting link,
from the Link:

Despite decades of research, our understanding of consciousness - being aware of one's existence - is still pretty thin. We know that it's somehow based in the brain, but then how can someone lose the majority of their neurons and still be aware of themselves and their surroundings?

this almost empty skull and still have conscousness is an indirect proof that bees, ants, spiders, bugs, ... have also self awareness like the human, some people think they are only an automated robot while they are not.
it seems impossible to solve the problem of consciousness:
World's Smartest Physicist Thinks Science Can't Crack Consciousness
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cr ... ciousness/
on the other hand the Poet Dante Alighieri (1265 – 1321) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dante_Alighieri have the smallest brain, albeit that he makes a famous contributions such as The Divine Comedy, it is still a subject for art:
http://www.florenceinferno.com/the-map-of-hell/
it is as if the consciousness resides in another cosmos, and the brain matter only trigger it like the key and Lock, every key open only the correct Lock. the speed of light does not work here.

[Lunasole]

there was a french guy who was doing fine with only 10% of his brain.
http://www.sciencealert.com/a-man-who-l ... sciousness
he might not have been a genius but i think its quite astonishing. they don't tell if he liked icecream.

Interesting. As for me there are two noticeable things:

- brain plasticity explains "why". When some part is dying or seriously damaged, for example after insult, required areas "migrating" to other brain areas [may even replace them], if only they were not ones of basic life-support functions, else it is death. if something is dying very quickly, it is death too. but if it moves slowly, brain can adapt. In this case it seems that process moved slowly for 30+ years.

- 10% it is not too strange, brain structures can extend in different ways, not only growing in size/volume. Neurons can get more connections with other neurons than having normally, which probably allows to allocate several different functions within the same area/structures set, or at least greatly decreases volume required for those functions. Such more complex "brain wiring" is not a normal behavior as I remember, but it seems to occur as reparation process (for example, it happens with orbifrontal cortex when smoking marijuana for a long time, also it happens with age 20-30+ anyway, as soon as neurogenesis is slowing down).
Maybe because of this 10% of regular brain volume is enough to store identity and some simple skills.

For example also, birds brain (regardless it has different "architecture", it's like ARM comparing to x86) has lot of functions placed at very low volume, and some birds like ravens having very high IQ and learning abilities, as for such a small brain. So that's generally not a limit of "optimization".

Anyway I wonder how it all made ^^ Such a complicated analogue self-modifying machine, created from primitive life forms after millions years of evolution

[tj1010]

Everything is logical. You can make a computer do everything a human can except emulate the complexities of random emotion(maybe using copied back-data but the algorithm needs written). You could probably do it on an ARM chip if you can figure out an algorithm to input sensor data and have the network develop motives based on typical human-responses.

With the emotions a A.I. can then do complex paintings, relate to human conditions etc..

To date though, at least for humans, memory elasticity is the only science. It's actually exhaustively been proven over the millenniums since we've developed science. The magical key to everything seems to be in how long it takes you to forget something and timing reminders to counter that. Read the R&D papers from the people who developed SuperMemo.

[Lunasole]

Everything is logical. You can make a computer do everything a human can except emulate the complexities of random emotion(maybe using copied back-data but the algorithm needs written). You could probably do it on an ARM chip if you can figure out an algorithm to input sensor data and have the network develop motives based on typical human-responses.

With the emotions a A.I. can then do complex paintings, relate to human conditions etc..

You're right generally, but emotions are only 1 of many key things.

I don't think it is possible to recreate such brain functions using current methods (like Google does, IBM and lot others). It is knowingly way of failure, according of what I realized from "neurobiology".

The brain itself is not like "cpu", it is like a whole computer. It also has "modules" (like RAM, FSB, some BIOS doing self-checks and providing instincts, logical blocks and of course lot of other specialized stuff like FPU) each from them responsive for single relatively simple function.
Most of those areas are exposed and learned already, but no one has built principal scheme of all connections between them.

Thus I think logical connections between those brain areas (or "modules") are crucial to make AI doing things like you described.
Those connections are very complex btw, there is negative correlation between "depression area" activity and area responsive for attention focus activity (for example). And lot of such and much more complex "callbacks".

Without understanding all those connections between areas it is impossible to reproduce how brain works, regardless of how powerful artificial network will be (any algorithm used with it will be insusceptible simplified and highly specialized, so only possible to do some single task, but not have own thinking/creativity/emotions).

Or saying other words, it might be possible already to recreate human brain (and create AI), if we know those connections schemes. That should be the main and hardest problem, as separated brain areas are relatively simple and not requiring extra powerful networks or something like quantum computers logic to reproduce them in simplest, but working form. What really matters is order of interactions between whole areas/"modules".

[Lunasole]

Also what about that "SuperMemo" and similar bullshitty techniques I've seen before (especially commercial), I never trust them.
The reason is simple -- all of them looking like a cheap tricks (what is the point to remember lot of info quickly with 100% success, if you overrun current hippocampus memories encoding abilities? That will be a bottleneck, as at some point it will drop any new info until old [or 'most important'/emotive] info not processed. Or if you remember info quickly, but without adding lot of meaningful associations to it, that should make impossible further effective usage of that info in your thinking processes, applied to a random subject you thinking about). So I rather call such tricks nothing but brain trashing, even if they "really working" for someone (pf, which I never seen).

As for me, what really makes your memory extra cool by most params, is reading of books. Lot of books.

Mainly fiction books to be exact, as when you reading such books, you have to keep in mind many moments of whole book and scenario (else what is the interest of reading, if can't remember various previous moments, to which author makes a reference?).
And it's not like 90-min movie or [sic] 30-minutes sitcom episode. You can read book for 1 month or even longer depending of how much time you have and if it is sequence of 1 or 3+ or 7+ books [once I've found story with 47+ books, but it was boring as was made for housewifes, hah], and still have to remember everything to not get lost at the end of the storyline.
Thus, looks like nothing trains memory better than reading of regular nice fiction, but of course it goes slowly and also better to start in childhood.

Partially I'm approving this theory about reading when communicating with lot of younger mans -- they didn't read lot of books in childhood ("who needs books if there are smartphones and other toys to play with"). And what I see -- they have extremely bad long-term memory. It is quite ridiculous when 18-years old man has memory much worst than me ^^ (counting that my is not perfect already because of smoking + age, comparing to what I had in 16).

But I can't of course talk about this surely (I even didn't searched any research on this topic yet), just a theory. Also it obviously improves memory mainly in text info remembering, for visuals need some else kind of training.

Nevertheless, books reading is precious not only to train memory ^^ At least they also growing your imagination, word vocabulary, grammar, reading speed, attention span, improving text info understanding, and generally making emotional part of your identity to grow up as any art [which grant you more wider and abstract thinking]. So nothing bad anyway.

[tj1010]

Also what about that "SuperMemo" and similar bullshitty techniques I've seen before (especially commercial), I never trust them.
The reason is simple -- all of them looking like a cheap tricks (what is the point to remember lot of info quickly with 100% success, if you overrun current hippocampus memories encoding abilities? That will be a bottleneck, as at some point it will drop any new info until old [or 'most important'/emotive] info not processed. Or if you remember info quickly, but without adding lot of meaningful associations to it, that should make impossible further effective usage of that info in your thinking processes, applied to a random subject you thinking about). So I rather call such tricks nothing but brain trashing, even if they "really working" for someone (pf, which I never seen).

As for me, what really makes your memory extra cool by most params, is reading of books. Lot of books.

Mainly fiction books to be exact, as when you reading such books, you have to keep in mind many moments of whole book and scenario (else what is the interest of reading, if can't remember various previous moments, to which author makes a reference?).
And it's not like 90-min movie or [sic] 30-minutes sitcom episode. You can read book for 1 month or even longer depending of how much time you have and if it is sequence of 1 or 3+ or 7+ books [once I've found story with 47+ books, but it was boring as was made for housewifes, hah], and still have to remember everything to not get lost at the end of the storyline.
Thus, looks like nothing trains memory better than reading of regular nice fiction, but of course it goes slowly and also better to start in childhood.

Partially I'm approving this theory about reading when communicating with lot of younger mans -- they didn't read lot of books in childhood ("who needs books if there are smartphones and other toys to play with"). And what I see -- they have extremely bad long-term memory. It is quite ridiculous when 18-years old man has memory much worst than me ^^ (counting that my is not perfect already because of smoking + age, comparing to what I had in 16).

But I can't of course talk about this surely (I even didn't searched any research on this topic yet), just a theory. Also it obviously improves memory mainly in text info remembering, for visuals need some else kind of training.

Nevertheless, books reading is precious not only to train memory ^^ At least they also growing your imagination, word vocabulary, grammar, reading speed, attention span, improving text info understanding, and generally making emotional part of your identity to grow up as any art [which grant you more wider and abstract thinking]. So nothing bad anyway.

Actually.. SuperMemo method is about the only science you're going to find related to what we're talking about. It's just metering how long it takes you to forget things and reminds at avg. intervals; nothing there to really be BS. Their software is horrid though.. I could write their method in PB in about 20 minutes but I don't have time to use it for something like mastering differential equations or abstract algebra which would still take years..

[applePi]

apart from ice cream i am completely sure that tuna fish with vegetable oil makes the brain better, i can read more when eating tuna fish in the evening before sleep by 3 hours. the omega oil does not make me better, so there is something more in the tuna fish more than different versions of omega oil.
the only problems with eating more of tuna fish is the amount of mercury in the fish body from the sea pollutions.