Because of my personal beliefs (one could say biases) I have never accepted the idea that there's a meaningful underlying factor of intelligence g. Cosma Shalizi doesn't buy the existing evidence either.

. . . the case for g rests on a statistical technique, factor analysis, which works solely on correlations between tests. Factor analysis is handy for summarizing data, but can't tell us where the correlations came from; it always says that there is a general factor whenever there are only positive correlations. The appearance of g is a trivial reflection of that correlation structure. A clear example, known since 1916, shows that factor analysis can give the appearance of a general factor when there are actually many thousands of completely independent and equally strong causes at work. Heritability doesn't distinguish these alternatives either. Exploratory factor analysis being no good at discovering causal structure, it provides no support for the reality of g.

. . .

To paraphrase Hume:

When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any paper; of macroeconomics or correlational psychology, for instance; let us ask, Does it draw its causal inferences from observations with consistent methods? No. Does it draw its causal inferences from experiments, controlled or randomized? No. Commit it then to the recycling bin: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose calmness is often recalled in discussing Mr. Obama, may have gotten it from his parents. According to Jonathan Alter’s account in "The Defining Moment," when the family was aboard the ocean liner Germania as it plunged beneath a giant wave, F.D.R.’s father remarked coolly, "We seem to be going down." His mother took her fur and nestled 3-year-old Franklin into it: "Poor little boy, if he must go down, he’s going down warm."

from a so-so Times article on calmness.

Reading about how information architecture work is culturally specific led me to Edward Hall's Beyond Culture. Low-context = your typical Protestant, straight square rigid culture, explicit and rule-based. High-context = relationship-based, rules as guidelines, the connection more important than the part. Half of all travel writing describes the comical mishaps that result from a low-context culture individual visiting a country with a high-context culture.

Anyway, this struck me because I've been working in a large, relatively old bureaucracy for the last couple months, and the high-context culture description fits it well (although in other ways these people have nothing in common with, say, Italians.) The organization acts as a web more than a set of silos, and it's very difficult to pin down responsibility anywhere. People have evolved working styles tied to specific relationships, and as you can imagine the whole mess is very difficult to change.

Some entries on this list to be taken with a grain of salt, and not just because of the source.

• 2005 Butnik article in the Journal of Clinical Psychology
• Wikipedia article, which cites a prominent skeptic, as well as (sigh) "Neurofeedback and past life regression"
• Article on a neurofeedback game console, and the vendor's site
• Great survey article that is sort of equivocal on the efficacy of neurofeedback

Would love to see some other articles confirming the Butnik results.