The goal of the study was to see if they could induce synesthesia artificially by forcing people to associate letters with colors. But the interesting part is that after 9 weeks of training, the participants gained 12 IQ points. I have read that increasing IQ is really difficult, and effect sizes this large are unheard of. So I found this really surprising, especially since it doesn’t seem to have gotten a lot of attention.
EDIT: This is a Cattell Culture Fair IQ which uses 24 points as a standard deviation instead of 15. So it’s more like 7.5 IQ points.
They made each participant do 30 minutes of training every day of 9 weeks, which involved a few different tasks to try to form associations between colors and letters. They also assigned colored reading material to read at home.
They took IQ tests before and after and gained 12 IQ points after the training. A control group also took the tests before and after but did not receive training, and did not improve. The sample sizes are small, but the effect sizes might be large enough to justify it. They give a p value of 0.008.
In the paper there are some quotes from subjects, and they describe thinking about words visually. E.g. ‘‘I see the colors like on a monitor in my head and its very automatic’’ or ‘‘The color immediately pops into my head… When I look at a sign the whole word appears colored according to the training colors… it is just as automatic for single letters’’.
I speculate that this might be the cause of the effect, something about using more of the visual system when thinking. That’s just weak speculation though.
I tried to do some more research to see if there was any correlation between synesthesia and IQ. I did not expect there to be, but perhaps it does correlate. This paper suggests it might:
In addition, a neuropsychological test battery was employed, in which all subjects performed superior on tests of general intelligence (mean IQ = 120 ± 17) [out of 9 subjects]
The data from this study shows 10 synesthetes had the same average IQ scores as the controls (but greater standard deviation if that means anything.)
The two subject groups were matched for… IQ, as assessed by the Multiple Choice Vocabulary Test version B… synesthetes = 117 ± 10.2, controls = 116 ± 13.2.
But on second look, it looks like the last two studies intentionally selected the control group to have the same IQs to avoid confounders. If that’s the case then it does support the hypothesis as the reported IQ is greater than average.
Control subjects (n = 14) and synesthesia subjects (n = 14) were matched for age..., gender..., and general intelligence (IQ values for synesthetes: 119 ± 13 and controls: 112 ± 17) as assessed by the MWT-B – “Mehrfach–Wortschatz Test” (Lehrl et al., 1995).
So now I want to try the experiment on myself. I’m considering how to do this. I want to make some kind of tool or browser extension that could color text to match the desired associations. I want to know if it would be better to try letter level associations or word level ones.
I think that word level coloring would be more semantically meaningful and therefore likely to help. But the paper used letter coloring. Most of the subjects in those papers reportedly had grapheme–color synesthesia. They weren’t very specific on the details, or I didn’t look too closely.
Second whether to just use random colors, or try to assign them meaningfully. Like grouping nouns together, or using something like word2vec to find semantically similar words and optimize them to be close in color space if possible. If I do that it’s more complicated and there are a lot of technical decisions to make.
And then how to actually color text in a readable way. Perhaps limiting the color space to what can be read on a white background, or somehow outlining the letters.
The weak influence of heritable factors suggests that there may be a major role for learning in both shaping and engendering synesthesia. Simner and colleagues tested grapheme-color consistency in synesthetic children
between 6 and 7 years of age, and again in the same children a year later. This interim year appeared
critical in transforming chaotic pairings into consistent fixed associations. The same cohort were retested 3
years later, and found to have even more consistent pairings. Therefore, GCS appears to emerge in early
school years, where first major pressures to use graphemes are encountered, and then becomes cemented in
later years. In fact, for certain abstract inducers, such as graphemes, it is implausible that humans are born
with synesthetic associations to these stimuli. Hence, learning must be involved in the development of at least
some forms of synesthesia.
They took IQ tests before and after and gained 12 IQ points after the training. A control group also took the tests before and after but did not receive training, and did not improve. The sample sizes are small, but the effect sizes might be large enough to justify it. They give a p value of 0.008.
Their sample size is 14 people for the intervention group and 9 people for the control group. The effect size has to be gigantic and I don’t believe it. Their p value stands for a pile of manure.
Lessee...
Oh, dear. Take a look at plot 2 in figure s2 in the supplementary information. They are saying that at the start their intervention group was 15 IQ points below the control group! And post-training the intervention group mostly closed the gap with the control group (but still did not quite get there).
Yeah, I’ll stick with my “pile of manure” interpretation.
I don’t see what’s wrong with a low sample size. That seems pretty standard and it’s enough to rule out noise in this case. Almost all of the participants improved and by a statistically significant amount.
They are saying that at the start their intervention group was 15 IQ points below the control group! And post-training the intervention group mostly closed the gap with the control group (but still did not quite get there).
They actually selected the test group for having the lowest score on the synesthesia test. So this fits with my theory of synesthesia being correlated with IQ, but it’s also interesting that synesthesia training improves IQ.
The usual things—the results are at best brittle and worst just a figment of someone’s imagination.
Almost all of the participants improved and by a statistically significant amount.
Yeah, well, that’s a problem :-/
I eyeballed the IQ improvement graph for the intervention group and converted it into numbers. By the way, there are only 13 lines there, so either someone’s results exactly matched some other person on both tests or they just forgot one.
The starting values are (91
96
99
102
105
109
109
113
122
133
139
139
145)
and the ending values are (122
113
109
118
133
99
118
123
151
133
145
151
151)
The deltas (change in IQ) are (31
17
10
16
28
−10
9
10
29
0
6
12
6)
So what do we see? One person got dumber by 10 points, one stayed exactly the same, and 11 got their scores up. Notably three people increased their scores by more than one standard deviation—by 28, 29, and 31 points.
Y’know, I am not going to believe that a bit of association training between letters and colors will produce a greater than 1 sd increase in IQ for about a quarter (23%) of people.
I don’t see what’s wrong with a low sample size. That seems pretty standard and it’s enough to rule out noise in this case.
The replication project in psychology just found that only a third of the findings they investigated replicated.
In general studies with low sample size often don’t replicate.
They took IQ tests before and after and gained 12 IQ points after the training. A control group also took the tests before and after but did not receive training, and did not improve. The sample sizes are small, but the effect sizes might be large enough to justify it. They give a p value of 0.008.
The second sentence surprises me a little—there should be training effects increasing the tested IQ of the control group if only 9 weeks passed. That’s some evidence for this being luck—if your control group gets unlucky and your experimental group gets lucky, then you see a huge effect.
I want to know if it would be better to try letter level associations or word level ones.
I found this paper: Adults Can Be Trained to Acquire Synesthetic Experiences.
The goal of the study was to see if they could induce synesthesia artificially by forcing people to associate letters with colors. But the interesting part is that after 9 weeks of training, the participants gained 12 IQ points. I have read that increasing IQ is really difficult, and effect sizes this large are unheard of. So I found this really surprising, especially since it doesn’t seem to have gotten a lot of attention.
EDIT: This is a Cattell Culture Fair IQ which uses 24 points as a standard deviation instead of 15. So it’s more like 7.5 IQ points.
They made each participant do 30 minutes of training every day of 9 weeks, which involved a few different tasks to try to form associations between colors and letters. They also assigned colored reading material to read at home.
They took IQ tests before and after and gained 12 IQ points after the training. A control group also took the tests before and after but did not receive training, and did not improve. The sample sizes are small, but the effect sizes might be large enough to justify it. They give a p value of 0.008.
In the paper there are some quotes from subjects, and they describe thinking about words visually. E.g. ‘‘I see the colors like on a monitor in my head and its very automatic’’ or ‘‘The color immediately pops into my head… When I look at a sign the whole word appears colored according to the training colors… it is just as automatic for single letters’’.
I speculate that this might be the cause of the effect, something about using more of the visual system when thinking. That’s just weak speculation though.
I tried to do some more research to see if there was any correlation between synesthesia and IQ. I did not expect there to be, but perhaps it does correlate. This paper suggests it might:
The data from this study shows 10 synesthetes had the same average IQ scores as the controls (but greater standard deviation if that means anything.)
Same story with this study of 10 female synesthetes:
But on second look, it looks like the last two studies intentionally selected the control group to have the same IQs to avoid confounders. If that’s the case then it does support the hypothesis as the reported IQ is greater than average.
Here is another study with more of the same:
So now I want to try the experiment on myself. I’m considering how to do this. I want to make some kind of tool or browser extension that could color text to match the desired associations. I want to know if it would be better to try letter level associations or word level ones.
I think that word level coloring would be more semantically meaningful and therefore likely to help. But the paper used letter coloring. Most of the subjects in those papers reportedly had grapheme–color synesthesia. They weren’t very specific on the details, or I didn’t look too closely.
Second whether to just use random colors, or try to assign them meaningfully. Like grouping nouns together, or using something like word2vec to find semantically similar words and optimize them to be close in color space if possible. If I do that it’s more complicated and there are a lot of technical decisions to make.
And then how to actually color text in a readable way. Perhaps limiting the color space to what can be read on a white background, or somehow outlining the letters.
EDIT: I found a chrome extension that has some of these features. Only does letter level associations. And the source is available!
It would not surprise me if synesthesia is learnable. Isn’t written language basically learned synesthesia?
That’s the theory of the paper:
My earlier comment on that study: https://www.reddit.com/r/psychology/comments/2mryte/surprising_iq_boost_12_in_average_by_a_training/cm760v8 I don’t believe it either.
Their sample size is 14 people for the intervention group and 9 people for the control group. The effect size has to be gigantic and I don’t believe it. Their p value stands for a pile of manure.
Lessee...
Oh, dear. Take a look at plot 2 in figure s2 in the supplementary information. They are saying that at the start their intervention group was 15 IQ points below the control group! And post-training the intervention group mostly closed the gap with the control group (but still did not quite get there).
Yeah, I’ll stick with my “pile of manure” interpretation.
I don’t see what’s wrong with a low sample size. That seems pretty standard and it’s enough to rule out noise in this case. Almost all of the participants improved and by a statistically significant amount.
They actually selected the test group for having the lowest score on the synesthesia test. So this fits with my theory of synesthesia being correlated with IQ, but it’s also interesting that synesthesia training improves IQ.
The usual things—the results are at best brittle and worst just a figment of someone’s imagination.
Yeah, well, that’s a problem :-/
I eyeballed the IQ improvement graph for the intervention group and converted it into numbers. By the way, there are only 13 lines there, so either someone’s results exactly matched some other person on both tests or they just forgot one.
The starting values are (91 96 99 102 105 109 109 113 122 133 139 139 145)
and the ending values are (122 113 109 118 133 99 118 123 151 133 145 151 151)
The deltas (change in IQ) are (31 17 10 16 28 −10 9 10 29 0 6 12 6)
So what do we see? One person got dumber by 10 points, one stayed exactly the same, and 11 got their scores up. Notably three people increased their scores by more than one standard deviation—by 28, 29, and 31 points.
Y’know, I am not going to believe that a bit of association training between letters and colors will produce a greater than 1 sd increase in IQ for about a quarter (23%) of people.
The replication project in psychology just found that only a third of the findings they investigated replicated. In general studies with low sample size often don’t replicate.
The second sentence surprises me a little—there should be training effects increasing the tested IQ of the control group if only 9 weeks passed. That’s some evidence for this being luck—if your control group gets unlucky and your experimental group gets lucky, then you see a huge effect.
There are 26 letters, but… lots of words.
Dozens!