Life In 19x19

I started playing go partly in order to exercise my mind (and offset the first signs of senility). Now, 2 1/2 years later, I still forget where I parked my car, and aside from getting steadily better at go, I don't really notice that my brain has gotten any stronger. Do you think go makes you smarter? Do tell!

I am not sure, but when i passed 1d i realized that there is no spoon

i think almost everything you do in life makes you a bit more "experienced"
Go too.
Maybe you develop logical abilities. Maybe Go doesn't to much at all but you develop social abilities while playing/chatting/laughing with other.
i cannot really tell

The answer is surely at least somewhat dependent on how you define "smart". To me it is my intellectual capacity, which I believe peaked when I was around 20 yeards old (I don't remember exact details, but I believe there are several studies on the subject). Since then it has been a downhill slope, and go is one way of preventing it getting steeper, but go doesn't make me any smarter.

daal wrote:(...)I still forget where I parked my car(...)

Hey, a brain has to choose - spend thinking time on the latest advances in joseki or on such trivialities...

tj86430 wrote:The answer is surely at least somewhat dependent on how you define "smart". To me it is my intellectual capacity, which I believe peaked when I was around 20 yeards old (I don't remember exact details, but I believe there are several studies on the subject). Since then it has been a downhill slope, and go is one way of preventing it getting steeper, but go doesn't make me any smarter.

Yeah, same here. It's just an entertaining way of exercising my brain, keep the neurons working and so on.

I voted "No: I just spend less time doing something else that would make me smarter"

this is spot on for me.

I could (and probably should) have spend more time studying and less time playing Go.

As a result, I could have been smarter if I had not played too much Go.
Therefore, in a way Go made me end up more stupid than I would have been if I had mot played the game.

That does not mean that I think I made a bad choice. I did make a lot of new friends, have a lot of fun playing in tournaments and greatly improved my english skils due to the audio lessons I give and all the forum posts I wrote

freegame wrote:"No: I just spend less time doing something else that would make me smarter"

I'm curious: what could I be doing that would make me smarter? (so far I have believed that no such thing can exist)

tj86430 wrote:

freegame wrote:"No: I just spend less time doing something else that would make me smarter"

I'm curious: what could I be doing that would make me smarter? (so far I have believed that no such thing can exist)

You could be playing dual-n-back.

http://brainworkshop.sourceforge.net/

Based strictly on my GPA trend, I'd say it makes me dumber.

Araban wrote:Based strictly on my GPA trend, I'd say it makes me dumber.

The extension of this, however, is that bribing your professor makes you smarter.

It's made me more patient. Whether that qualifies as "smarter" is hard to say.

I have definitely noticed an increased aptitude in other areas of my life, as well as a stronger ability to focus. Correlation for the former, but almost certainly causation as go study has effected a lot more patience and attention to detail in me.

Go destroyed my GPA. I'm lucky to have a job now!

tj86430 wrote:The answer is surely at least somewhat dependent on how you define "smart". ...

This part.