What is SMART good for?

No! SMART brain training involves learning to solve brief logical problems that are foundational to ALL intellectual acvtivity.  What SMART does is teach you how to learn and how to think clearly and logically by teaching the foundations of reasoning itself. We don’t actually teach you any information about maths or anything else!. But SMART makes learning and understanding everything much easier.

Brain training is about giving you the skills to learn better whether for school, business or professionally. Nothing in SMART training from RaiseYourIQ looks anything like a question on an IQ test, and we focus on training our users in the relational skills they will need in order to think more intelligently. However, our users experience very real IQ rises after completing our SMART brain training, because they are better able to understand and answer complex logical questions of any type whether in education, business or daily life.

RaiseYourIQ has developed a specific program for Dyslexia, which you will find when you log in.  However our general SMART training has been proven in several published scientific studies to improve verbal ability and enhance vocabulary. SMART is also designed to improve letter and word sequencing and attention to detail.  Several of our users have had their diagnoses of dyslexia professionally revised in follow-up assessments after completing SMART. Specifically, users experience imrpvements in vocabulary and reading ability because SMART hones attention to letter and word sequencing and visual processing.

Intelligence is defined at the ability to learn, understand and make judgments or have opinions that are based on reason. Being intelligent means having the ability to acquire and use knowledge for solving problems and adapting to the world. IQ is simply the unit of measure for expressing the results of intelligence tests. Specifically, IQ is the ratio of a subject’s mental age (as determined by their performance on an intelligence scale) and chronological age. There are many types of intelligence, but only standard IQ predicts your success at school and in work. In fact people with higher IQ scores complete more years in school and have higher status jobs. Recent research has also found that people with higher IQs are also happier and healthier. While you do not need to have a high IQ for its own sake, improving your intellectual ability will help you deal more effectively with school and work challenges, as well as make decisions and solve everyday problems more easily.

It was once thought that intelligence or IQ was fixed for life. However, years of research by doctors and psychologists has lead to the discovery of the importance of relational skills to intelligence and it took several more years for scientists to figure out how best to teach these skills. Today we know that IQ can in fact be increased by quite a degree. There have also been considerable advances in neuroscience in recent years, that have led psychologists to conclude that the brain itself can be made “fitter” with training and can respond and adapt to improved learning opportunities. Even leading authorities, such as Professor Robert Sternberg, now agree that IQ can be raised.

No psychological research has ever FOUND that intelligence is fixed for life.  Instead, tests for general and specific intellectual ability are developed in such a way that your score from one test take to another (say a year apart) will not change much.  The simplest way in which this is achieved, is by masking the gain in your improvement over time by NOT calculating your real raw score on the test, but instead calculating your score in terms of how it compares relatively to people of your age.  Because everyone of your age is improving intellectually at roughly the same rate, this way of scoring the IQ test creates the false impression that you are not getting any smarter.  Indeed, the whole population is getting smarter (an effect known as the Flynn effect), but tests are regularly revised to make sure that this effect is disguised.  The tests are designed in advance so that someone in the bottom 20 percent of the population, for example, will continue to score well below the average score as teh years go by.  As the population becomes smarter, the gap closes between the raw score of someone on the 20th percentile and the average score of someone on the 50th percentile (always defined as a score of 100). 

Newer revised tests serve the purpose of opening up the gap again to keep the low scorers scores down and away from the average score. This is intended to disguise the fact that the lowest scorers in the population are in fact doing much better than they were just a few years ago.  Read an article on this here entitled... You can improve IQ

Gifted children often present with as many difficulties as children with lower than average IQ's because typical education systems are targeted at the average range individual. So while a gifted child may already have a very high level of intellectual skills, they may not be expert at organizing their knowledge, at sequencing information or at sustaining attention for long periods of time. Thus they may be able to provide accurate answers, but they may not always be able to provide these answers quickly and succinctly. SMART trains the user in a range of key intellectual skills to a very high level of precision and speed, thus making even a gifted child more fluent at responding to the challenges in their environment.

It is very important that we ask our users to provide certain information that will help us to provide the best possible training service. Remember, SMART Brain Training is tailored to each user, so without your profile information we cannot select the best training difficulty level for you as defiualt or provide accurate IQ information following your assessments.  You can alter your profile at any stage under your account settings.

If you cannot find an answer to your brain training questions the quickest way to get a response is the form on the contact us page. Please note that we cannot answer questions regarding individual psychological conditions or learning profiles or offer any kind of psychological advice on line. Please consult your local psychological services if you need guidance on learning disabilities, require psychological assessments and to understand how RaiseYourIQ could benefit. Contact RaiseYourIQ

You should target to complete the classic brain training in a three to six month time-frame depending on your schedule and progress. Think of our brain training program as you would any education or skills improvement course. The RaiseYourIQ SMART brain training course has been designed by our psychologists as an educational skills program. The RaiseYourIQ platform will deliver IQ assessments, and monitor your progress from start to finish.  Research shows that even mid-way through teh training (8 weeks apporox) users will experience real levels of IQ gain.  This is why we now offer an additional IQ approximation assessment to users that they can take at any time before completing training.  

 

Our brain training exercises are designed to improve your ability to learn. They consist of logical problem solving tasks presented in a carefully worked out sequence.  We use made up "nonsense words" to teach you how to reason logically with greater accuracy and speed.  We teach those specific reasonin taks that have been shown to underlie just about every everyday intellectual activity.   Each task must be solved within 30 seconds and feedback is provided after every effort.  the system works by providing you with a avery large number of related logical problem solving skills of a type that we have established in our published research to impact intelligence.

While most of our research has focused on children and young adults, we have conducted several studies on the effects of SMART On the cognitive functioning of older adults with onset Alzheimer's.  Our studies have found that our training can significantly reduce the progression of the of the symptoms of disease.  These data have been presented at several international conferences, and one preliminary study has been published.   why did his early days in the development of evidence for the benefits of smart in older adults as a means to stave off cognitive decline, the theoretical position of relational frame theory is that this should be possible, and the preliminary evidence we have gathered so far is that the results are promising.

Conference presentations:

  • Presti, G., Torregrossa, S., Stornaiuolo, D., Oppo, A., Roche, B., Cumbo, E.  (2020). SMART training for Alzheimer patients: preliminary results from a four-year longitudinal study.  Paper presented at the annual convention of the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science, New Orleans, July 14-19, 2020.
  • G., Torregrosa, S., Cumbo, E., Stornaiuolo, D., Oppo, A., & Roche, B. (2019).  SMART aging: Improving cognitive skills in Alzheimer’s patient undergoing AChI treatment.  Paper presented at the annual Association for Contextual Behavioral Science conference, Dublin, Ireland, June 25th-30th, 2019.
  • Presti, G., Torregrossa, S., Cumbo, E., & Oppo, A. (2018).  Does SMART training improve cognitive skills in Alzheimer’s patients undergoing AChI treatment? A 9-month follow-up clinical trial as an add-on intervention.  Paper presented at the 16th World Conference of the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science, Montreal, Canada, July 24th-26th, 2018. 
  • Presti, G., Torregrossa, S., Cumbo, E., & Roche, B. (2017).  An RFT-based intervention for cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s patients: Three month follow-up.  Paper presented at the World Congress of the Association for Contextual Behavioral science, Seville, Spain, June 22-25th
  • Presti, G., Torregrossa, S., Cumbo, E., & Roche, B. (2017).  SMART training as an add-on intervention to counteract cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s patient: preliminary results of a clinical trial.  Paper presented at the Experimental Analysis of Behavior Group conference, University College London,England, 10t–12 th April,  
  • Presti, G., Torregrossa, S., Migliore, D., Cumbo, E., & Roche, B. (2016).  Preliminary investigation of the effects of a relational training intervention on cognition in patients with mild-to-moderate Alzheimer’s disease treated with a cholinesterase inhibitor therapy.  Paper presented at the European Association for Behavior Analysis convention, Enna, Italy, September 14-18th, 2016.

Peer Reviewed Publications:

  • Presti, G., Torregrosssa, S., Migliore, D., Roche, B., Cumbo, E. (2018).  Relational Training Intervention as add-on therapy to current specific treatments in patients with mild-to-moderate Alzheimer’s disease. International Journal of Psychology and Neuroscience, 3, 88-97.