Our core cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties, such as atten­tion, work­ing mem­o­ry and IQ, are shaped part­ly by genet­ics and part­ly by envi­ron­men­tal influ­ences–which include cog­ni­tive­ly demand­ing activ­i­ties as well as delib­er­ate, cog­ni­tive training. The plas­tic­i­ty of these cog­ni­tive func­tions is evi­dent, for exam­ple, in the impact of edu­ca­tion: as my research group and oth­ers have shown, each…