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| quote: | Originally posted by Domesticated
a) My ears themselves have improved.
b) My brain/my interpretation of the signals my ears send has improved.
c) Combination of a and b.
Okay, as I can see many of you are going to deny those facts anyway, take them as a hypothetical and continue the discussion as laid out in the original post. |
Ok, lets clear some things up. First of all there is no knowledge (or knowledge that i'm aware of) that the cochlea of the ear in which the sensory-receptors are situated(organ of corti)changes in more efficient ways in response to sound. The only change that occurs is a proportional loss of receptors (hair-cells) with age, the one that smellyblack talked about (by the way, is smellyblack another ElFreak alt lol?).
The synaptic plasticity-stuff occur in the place that hearing occurs, that is, the temporal lobe of the brain (the ears don't "hear" anything at all in the same way that eyes don't "see" anything at all. They just receive and amplify the signals). Now i have stated in my first post that the experience of a specific form of music enhances the auditory perception and aesthetics and i also presented some neurobehavioural evidence with monkeys which probably nobody (except for some few) red about (lol). It was a bit surprising that Domesticated responded with a "so you guys-including PETRAN- don't you support that experience enhances the auditory experience" question because the majority of what is written in my first post is ideas/thoughts/a bit of evidence towards the concept that experience actually enhances the auditory experience (yes i agree with Domesticated in that). But i blame Vincent for that misunderstanding (Vincent's music is like acoustic XTC to the brain! It also makes your brain larger! Vincent says it!).
There is another poster who sited the famous hippocampus-taxi study, a now famous study in the cognitive neuroscience literature, thank you. Yes experience, enhances the auditory experience which all happens in the auditory lobe, that is, parts of the temporal lobe. The question is. Does experience actually makes one better in distinquishing and recognising the frequencies or rather trains his/her cognition (attention) in more efficient ways of analysing or interpreting the signal? There was a recent psychological experiment on that issue, and the answer was the second one. So, my first post was a bit of wrong in stating that experience "enhances" the sensory experience (the 3rd of my points). It actually seems to direct and alocate attentional resources in more efficient ways (towards the stimulus). So SMC was actually correct in responding that i over-done it with the "sensory improvement". IMO, sensory improvement could also occur, but maybe in the early years of development when the brain still changes rapidly (truth is that synaptic plasticity stuff is a bit over-hyped and over-exaggerated. But they still occur. Despite that, evidence has it that the majority of learning occurs after changes of neuronal activations without any changes on the cells themeselves. Can you say "themselves" for "cells"? Anyway...)
So, anyway the answer is yes. Experience makes one more efficient in "understanding" and interpreting stuff. The point that i disagree with Domesticated is in equating musical experience with musical maturity. Musical experience is something more objective (becoming better in listening, analyzing, playing various forms of music) in comparison to Musical maturity (my "Taste" has "progressed") which can be subjective and relative (and related to culture, personality etc.). The two of them are not directly related.
| quote: | Originally posted by SYSTEM-J
The synaptic explanation makes a lot of sense to me. It's also one of the reasons why I think the idea of inherent intelligence as put forth by the IQ test is ridiculous. If I sat solving logical problems all day I'd be better at IQ tests than if I hadn't. The same goes with music. If you spend years listening closely to music you will develop the ability to hear it better.
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This is just wrong. First of all you probably confuse the IQ tests available in the internet with the professional IQ tests such as the WAIS (Weschler Adult Intelligence Scale) which applied psychologists use. The WAIS is so statistically reliable, it is usually the first step in assesing and screening (the cognitive status) of patients with brain damage and dementia (performed by clinical neuropsychologists). What you also probably confuse is the difference between "fluid intelligence" and "crystallized intelligence". I'll leave wikipedia for that though
In psychology, fluid and crystallized intelligence (abbreviated gF and gC, respectively) are factors of general intelligence originally identified by Raymond Cattell.[1] Fluid intelligence is the ability to find meaning in confusion and solve new problems. It is the ability to draw inferences and understand the relationships of various concepts, independent of acquired knowledge. Crystallized intelligence is the ability to use skills, knowledge, and experience. It should not be equated with memory or knowledge, but it does rely on accessing information from long-term memory. The terms are somewhat misleading because one is not a "crystallized" form of the other. Rather, they are believed to be separate neural and mental systems.
Fluid and crystallized intelligence are correlated with each other, and most IQ tests attempt to measure both varieties. For example, the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) measures fluid intelligence on the performance scale and crystallized intelligence on the verbal scale. The overall IQ score is based on a combination of these two scales
According to Cattell, "...it is apparent that one of these powers… has the 'fluid' quality of being directable to almost any problem. By contrast, the other is invested in particular areas of crystallized skills which can be upset individually without affecting the others."[3] Thus, his claim was that each type, or factor, was independent of the other, though many authors have noted an apparent interdependence of the two
Fluid intelligence, like reaction time, peaks in young adulthood and then steadily declines. This decline may be related to local atrophy of the brain in the right cerebellum.[7] Other researchers have suggested that a lack of practice, along with age-related changes in the brain may contribute to the decline.[8] Crystallized intelligence increases gradually, stays relatively stable across most of adulthood, and then begins to decline after age 65.[9]
There is also some evidence that training such as the one you said-solving IQ tests all the time- can improve both factors including the more stable "fluid" one which is supposed to remain stable after adolescence. The result can be interpreted that this training seems to actually enhance intelligence (!) at least up to a certain point. Although research has not decided yet if those changes are durable. The improvements are always not substantial.
Working memory capacity is closely related to fluid intelligence, and has been proposed to account for individual differences in gF.[10] Furthermore, recent research suggests that cognitive exercise can increase working memory and also improve gF. Preliminary experiments found that healthy young adults who practiced a demanding working memory task (dual n-back) approximately 25 minutes per day for between 8 and 19 days had statistically significant increases in their scores on a matrix test of fluid intelligence taken before and after the training than a control group who did no not do any training at all.[11] As of now, it remains to be seen whether the results extend to other kinds of fluid intelligence tests, and if so, whether, after training, fluid intelligence measures retain their correlation with educational and occupational achievement or if the value of fluid intelligence for predicting performance on other tasks changes; it is also unclear whether the training is durable of extended periods of time.[12]
According to David Geary, gF and gC can be traced to two separate brain systems. Fluid intelligence involves the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the anterior cingulate cortex, and other systems related to attention and short-term memory. Crystallized intelligence appears to be a function of brain regions that involve the storage and usage of long-term memories, such as the hippocampus.[13]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_...ed_intelligence
Excellent article by Wikipedia 
Last edited by PETRAN on Mar-31-2009 at 20:28
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