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IQ is often cited as a key factor in success, especially in fields such as science, innovation, and technology. Many people are fascinated by the IQ estimates of celebrities. But the truth is that some of our greatest achievements as humans come primarily from qualities such as creativity, imagination, curiosity, and empathy. They wrote about this Barbara Sakyan and Crystal Langley:
Many of these qualities are found in what scientists call “Cognitive flexibility” – A skill that enables us to switch between different concepts or adjust behavior to achieve goals in new or changing circumstances. Essentially, it is about learning how to learn and being flexible in how we learn. This involves changing strategies to make the best decisions. In our ongoing research, we are trying to find out how people can best improve their cognitive flexibility.
Cognitive flexibility allows us to see when what we are doing is not leading to success and make appropriate changes to achieve success. If you usually take the same route to work, but now there is road construction on your usual route, what would you do? Some people stick with their original plan despite the delay. More flexible people are able to adapt to unexpected events and problem-solve to find a solution.
Cognitive flexibility may have influenced the way people coped with pandemic delays, which brought new challenges related to work and school. Some of us were able to adjust our daily routines to accommodate many activities at home more easily than others. These flexible people were also able to change up their routines from time to time, trying to find better and more varied ways to spend their day. Others, however, struggled and ended up becoming more rigid in their thinking. They stuck to the same daily activities without much flexibility or variation.
Huge benefits
Flexibility is key to creativity, the ability to come up with new ideas, make new connections between ideas, and create new inventions. It also helps develop academic and workplace skills, such as problem solving. However, unlike working memory (how much you can remember at a given time), it is largely independent of IQ, or “Crystallized Intelligence. For example, many artists may have average BroadCast Unitedligence but be very creative and produce masterpieces.
Contrary to what many people believe, creativity is also important in science and innovation. For example, we found that entrepreneurs who founded multiple companies had greater cognitive flexibility than managers of similar age and IQ.
So does cognitive flexibility make people smarter in ways that aren’t always reflected in IQ tests? We know that it leads to improvements in “cold cognition,” or non-emotional or “rational” thinking throughout life. For children, for example, it can lead to better reading skills and improved school performance.
It can also help prevent many biases, such as confirmation bias, because people with cognitive flexibility are better able to recognize their potential shortcomings and use strategies to overcome them.
Cognitive flexibility has also been linked to greater resilience to negative life events and better quality of life in older adults. It even has benefits for emotions and social cognition: Research shows that cognitive flexibility is closely linked to the ability to understand other people’s emotions, thoughts, and intentions.
The antonym of cognitive flexibility is cognitive rigidity, which occurs in many psychiatric disorders, including obsessive-compulsive disorder, major depressive disorder, and autism spectrum disorder.
Neuroimaging studies have shown that cognitive flexibility depends on a network of frontal and striatal brain regions. Frontal regions are associated with higher cognitive processes, such as decision-making and problem-solving. Striatal regions are associated with reward and motivation.
There are several ways to objectively assess people’s cognitive flexibility, including the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test and the CANTAB Intradimensional Set Arrangement Task.
Increased flexibility
The good news is that cognitive flexibility appears to be trainable. For example, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is an evidence-based psychotherapy that helps people change their thoughts and behaviors. For example, a depressed person who hasn’t spoken to a friend in a week might explain that they don’t like him anymore. The goal of CBT is to reframe your thinking and consider more flexible options, such as that the friend is busy or unreachable.
Structural learning—the ability to extract information about the structure of a complex environment and decipher initially ambiguous streams of sensory information—is another potential path forward. We know that this type of learning involves the same frontal and striatal brain regions as cognitive flexibility.
We are currently conducting an experiment in collaboration with the University of Cambridge and Nanyang Technological University “real world” To determine whether structured training can actually improve cognitive flexibility.
For example, research has shown that cognitive flexibility training can be beneficial for children with autism. After cognitive flexibility training, the children not only showed improved performance on cognitive tasks, but also improved social interaction and communication. Additionally, cognitive flexibility training has been shown to be beneficial for non-autistic children and older adults.
As we emerge from the pandemic, we need to ensure that people learn to be cognitively flexible in their thinking as they learn and practice new skills. This will provide them with greater stability and well-being in the future.
Cognitive flexibility is essential for a thriving society. It can help maximize people’s potential to generate innovative ideas and creative inventions. Ultimately, these are the qualities we need to tackle the great challenges of our time, including global warming, conservation of the natural world, clean and sustainable energy, and food security.
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