How to improve your IQ

download (2)Method 1 of 4: Making Brainpower Fun

  1. 1

    Take risks with your brain. Have you become a Scrabble master, able toss out 40-point words even when your rack looks like EEIOAUC? Fine, congratulations. Now go become a Sudoku master. When you reach that goal, move on. Become a Go master, or chess expert.

    • Once you become good at a particular skill, your brain stops working as hard. It doesn’t expend the resources, or trigger that dopamine rush that helps make you smarter. Feel free to continue to wallop the competition in Scrabble, but keep finding new “brain games” to explore.
  1. 2

    Play logic/strategy games. In 2008, scientists Susanne Jaeggi and Martin Buschkuehl devised a method that would increase “fluid intelligence”—the ability to draw connections between things, solve problems, and adapt to new situations. By having test subjects pay attention to two different streams of information, they found they exhibited a significant gain in reasoning abilities.[1]

  2. 3

    Play video games. Games can be a great way to stimulate the brain. Try to play a game that is out of your usual range of choices. It will help you think differently. Especially look for games that provide you with problems to solve or force you to think quickly.

    • Scientific studies have shown that playing the popular game Tetris leads to more efficient brain activity; as players become more proficient at the game, their brains show a reduced consumption of glucose (the body’s main fuel).[2] The conclusions of this study point out that glucose consumption is reduced when learning has taken place. This would be expected as when a person becomes more proficient in any activity, the effort required decreases.
    • When playing first person shooter games, try to get into the atmosphere, look at details, think every move as if it were real. This way you don’t mindlessly finish the game, and you stimulate the brain to think more than just using reflexive actions.
  1. 4

    Work on challenging your brain in new ways. Try cryptology, for example. This is when a message is written in codes and you try to figure it out. It’s challenging for some, but after a while may even become enjoyable. All logic puzzles are great.

    • Do logic and lateral thinking puzzles. These help you explore new areas, and solve problems in different ways.
    • Practice crosswords and sudoku. These activities stimulate your mind and thought processes. People may not normally consider word searches thought-provoking, but if practiced in addition to other mind games, they could prove to be easy and stimulating.

Method 2 of 4: Exercise The Body, Exercise The Brain

  1. 1

    Get physical, and exercise your body. Keeping your body fit as well as your mind is a great—and scientifically proven—way to enhance brain power.

  1. 2

    Expand your boundaries. Just like sitting at your desk all day is bad for your physical self, sitting in the same mental seat all the time is bad for your brain. To break out of that, make it a lifelong goal to continually learn new things.

    • Study art and architecture, to see a visual representation of the mind in action.
    • Try a new way to drive to work, or a novelty such as bungee jumping, or devoting some part of your life to becoming an excellent painter. The “what” is not as important as the actual doing.
    • New experiences trigger a release of the neurotransmitter dopamine, which increases neurons and create a sense of pleasure.[3]
    • The more you learn, the more you’ll know, and your intelligence will grow as a result.
  2. 3

    Think of new ways to do old things. If you drive to work every day, and every day you take the same road, it becomes routine—even if it’s an hour-long commute. You get to know every turn, every pothole, every bottleneck, every red light, and every speed trap. It becomes so commonplace that you stop paying attention to it. You stop thinking. Anything you do by rote will curtail your thinking process. Break that habit.

    • For example, find a different way to work each day. Some ways may take a few minutes longer, some may be shorter. Do it on the way home, and you don’t have to worry about being late!
    • If you like to write, try creating a longhand draft first then entering it into the computer when done. Try entering each day’s work as you go. You may discover something about your writing, or about a character, that you didn’t realize as you wrote it out.
    • Anything that shakes up your mechanical approach to something is a potential rut to break away from.
  1. 4

    Perseverance furthers. Ignore limiting stereotypes such as “An old dog cannot learn new tricks.” Imagine the success you will feel when you bump your IQ score up ten points! Like anything else, your brain functions better when used. Actively exercising your brain has even been linked to staving off problems such as Alzheimer’s Disease.[4]

  2. 5

    Write whenever possible. Send a note instead of an email, or write a draft of a paper (or an outline) in longhand versus on your computer. It will increase visual and kinesthetic stimulation.

    • Try writing with your non-dominant hand. Writing with your opposite hand can, in fact, lead to stimulation of the side of the brain that is opposite to that hand. So perhaps a southpaw could go righty and think more logically, or a righty could try going left-handed to be more creative. Keep in mind this is only a hypothesis, but worth exploring.
  3. 6

    Excel in school and have a better career. There is a huge amount of evidence substantiating the correlation between excellent grades and better intelligence. Good grades are the path to better careers and better ways of life.

    • Scientific encephalopathy case studies show that the brains of sophisticated professionals are anatomically larger, healthier and having more prominent convolutions, whereas the labour workers have much thinner neocortex, implicating lower than average intelligence. This is because the labourers do not use their brains often.
    • Intense learning which is required by many challenging, professional careers can certainly trigger neurogenesis and improve brain’s cognitive capacity.

-wikihow

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ABOUT: Nana Kwesi Coomson

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An Entrepreneur, Corporate Social Responsibility, Corporate Communications Executive and Philanthropist. Editor-in-Chief of www.233times.com. A Senior Journalist with Ghanaian Chronicle Newspaper. An alumnus of Adisadel College where he read General Arts. His first degree is in Bachelor of Arts - Political Science (major) and History (minor) from the University of Ghana. He holds MSc in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Energy with Public Relations (PR) from the Robert Gordon University in the United Kingdom. He is a 2018 Mandela Washington Fellow who studied at Clark Atlanta University in USA on the Business and Entrepreneurship track.

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