Prepping For Law School Exam Makes You Smarter
This one’s for all you future lawyers:
“Intensive preparation for the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) actually changes the microscopic structure of the brain, physically bolstering the connections between areas of the brain important for reasoning, according to neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley.
The brain’s white matter contains the connections between neurons. The white matter regions highlighted in green or blue showed changes after intense preparation for the LSAT, suggesting improved interconnections among reasoning areas of the brain.
The results suggest that training people in reasoning skills —the main focus of LSAT prep courses—can reinforce the brain’s circuits involved in thinking and reasoning and could even up people’s IQ scores.
‘The fact that performance on the LSAT can be improved with practice is not new. People know that they can do better on the LSAT, which is why preparation courses exist,’ said Allyson Mackey, a graduate student in UC Berkeley’s Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute who led the study. ‘What we were interested in is whether and how the brain changes as a result of LSAT preparation, which we think is, fundamentally, reasoning training. We wanted to show that the ability to reason is malleable in adults.’
The new study shows that reasoning training does alter brain connections, which is good news for the test prep industry, but also for people who have poor reasoning skills and would like to improve them. The findings were reported on Wednesday, Aug. 22, in the open access journal Frontiers in Neuroanatomy.
‘A lot of people still believe that you are either smart or you are not, and sure, you can practice for a test, but you are not fundamentally changing your brain,’ said senior author Silvia Bunge, associate professor in the UC Berkeley Department of Psychology and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute. ‘Our research provides a more positive message. How you perform on one of these tests is not necessarily predictive of your future success, it merely reflects your prior history of cognitive engagement, and potentially how prepared you are at this time to enter a graduate program or a law school, as opposed to how prepared you could ever be.’” Read more here.
I love this: your score on a test “merely reflects your prior history of cognitive engagement”—a history that you can build on and enhance. What a refreshing and inspiring way of thinking about intelligence!