The following finding also continues to be interesting: “More remarkably, we found that playing an action video game can virtually eliminate this gender difference in spatial attention and simultaneously decrease the gender disparity in mental rotation ability, a higher-level process in spatial cognition.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/17894600/
Now, if those problems being solved in games or otherwise are limited in scope, well so are the gains achievable.
So, the question then is, how to APPLY that to a general set of problems. Not how it affects the brain doing a particular task. For instance, teach a man to fish salmon then ask him to take that knowledge and figure out how to catch whales or even plastic pellets in the ocean?
Or how about if one study math how can it increase ones art ability or vice-versa? It changes perceptions etc. Seems common sense to me I dunno.
Not sure how one can be science-minded and make statements like that. The entire point of scientific studies are to either verify the reasons for things that we may think are intuitive and also explore when that ends up falling apart (which is obviously when things get more interesting). Pretty sure it was "common sense" that the Earth was flat and that the Sun revolved around Earth not too long ago.
That's the tricky thing. As far as we know, IQ is the best proxy for general problem solving ability. From what I've read/heard from intelligence researcher; however, is that while you can train folks to excel at certain types of problems, it doesn't really improve one's general problem solving ability.
Think of an IQ test as a random sampling of problem solving exercises of various types from the domain of all possible problem solving exercises. Now imagine generating a whole bunch of such tests, and then using those tests on a bunch of people to setup your distribution (i.e. set the IQ scoring for each test). While it is true that in general the scores are going to be highly correlated across tests, each test is going to have a different composition in terms of the kinds of problems it presents. From what I understand, training may help on certain classes of problems (and thus on particular tests) but there isn't any training that will meaningfully improve the average of all your scores across all of the tests.
I don't want something that's addictive and fun, heck, I'd never get anything else done.