Is it possible to raise your iq

Now, they do serve a purpose, but it is short-lived. The key to getting something out of those types of cognitive activities sort of relates to the first principle of seeking novelty. Once you master one of those cognitive activities in the brain-training game, you need to move on to the next challenging activity. Figure out how to play Sudoku? Now move along to the next type of challenging game. There is research that supports this logic. A few years ago, scientist Richard Haier wanted to see if you could increase your cognitive ability by intensely training on novel mental activities for a period of several weeks.

They used the video game Tetris as the novel activity, and used people who had never played the game before as subjects I know—can you believe they exist?!

What they found, was that after training for several weeks on the game Tetris, the subjects experienced an increase in cortical thickness, as well as an increase in cortical activity, as evidenced by the increase in how much glucose was used in that area of the brain.

Basically, the brain used more energy during those training times, and bulked up in thickness—which means more neural connections, or new learned expertise—after this intense training. And they became experts at Tetris.

Cool, right? However, they remained just as good at Tetris; their skill did not decrease. The brain scans showed less brain activity during the game-playing, instead of more, as in the previous days. Why the drop? Their brains got more efficient.

Once their brain figured out how to play Tetris, and got really good at it, it got lazy. Efficiency is not your friend when it comes to cognitive growth. In order to keep your brain making new connections and keeping them active, you need to keep moving on to another challenging activity as soon as you reach the point of mastery in the one you are engaging in. You want to be in a constant state of slight discomfort, struggling to barely achieve whatever it is you are trying to do, as Einstein alluded to in his quote.

This keeps your brain on its toes, so to speak. When I say thinking creatively will help you achieve neural growth, I am not talking about painting a picture, or doing something artsy, like we discussed in the first principle, Seeking Novelty. When I speak of creative thinking, I am talking about creative cognition itself, and what that means as far as the process going on in your brain.

Contrary to popular belief, creative thinking does not equal "thinking with the right side of your brain". It involves recruitment from both halves of your brain, not just the right. In order to do this well, you need both right and left hemispheres working in conjunction with each other. Sternberg has been on a quest to not only understand the fundamental concept of intelligence, but also to find ways in which any one person can maximize his or her intelligence through training, and especially, through teaching in schools.

As part of a research study, The Rainbow Project [pdf], he created not only innovative methods of creative teaching in the classroom, but generated assessment procedures that tested the students in ways that got them to think about the problems in creative and practical ways, as well as analytical, instead of just memorizing facts.

He wanted to find out if by teaching students to think creatively and practically about a problem, as well as for memory, he could get them to i Learn more about the topic, ii Have more fun learning, and iii Transfer that knowledge gained to other areas of academic performance.

He wanted to see if by varying the teaching and assessment methods, he could prevent "teaching to the test" and get the students to actually learn more in general. He collected data on this, and boy, did he get great results. In a nutshell? On average, the students in the test group the ones taught using creative methods received higher final grades in the college course than the control group taught with traditional methods and assessments.

But—just to make things fair— he also gave the test group the very same analytical-type exam that the regular students got a multiple choice test , and they scored higher on that test as well. That means they were able to transfer the knowledge they gained using creative, multimodal teaching methods, and score higher on a completely different cognitive test of achievement on that same material.

Sound familiar? I mentioned earlier that efficiency is not your friend if you are trying to increase your intelligence. Unfortunately, many things in life are centered on trying to make everything more efficient.

This is so we can do more things, in a shorter amount of time, expending the least amount of physical and mental energy possible. Take one object of modern convenience, GPS. GPS is an amazing invention. I am one of those people GPS was invented for. My sense of direction is terrible. I get lost all the time. So when GPS came along, I was thanking my lucky stars. But you know what? After using GPS for a short time, I found that my sense of direction was worse.

If I failed to have it with me, I was even more lost than before. So when I moved to Boston—the city that horror movies and nightmares about getting lost are modeled after—I stopped using GPS. I had a new job which involved traveling all over the burbs of Boston, and I got lost every single day for at least 4 weeks.

I got lost so much, I thought I was going to lose my job due to chronic lateness I even got written up for it. But—in time, I started learning my way around, due to the sheer amount of practice I was getting at navigation using only my brain and a map. I began to actually get a sense of where things in Boston were, using logic and memory, not GPS. I can still remember how proud I was the day a friend was in town visiting, and I was able to effectively find his hotel downtown with only a name and a location description to go on—not even an address.

It was like I had graduated from navigational awareness school. Technology does a lot to make things in life easier, faster, more efficient, but sometimes our cognitive skills can suffer as a result of these shortcuts, and hurt us in the long run. Not a big deal. Your overall health will probably decline as a result. Your brain needs exercise as well. If you stop using your problem-solving skills, your spatial skills, your logical skills, your cognitive skills—how do you expect your brain to stay in top shape—never mind improve?

Think about modern conveniences that are helpful, but when relied on too much, can hurt your skill in that domain. Translation software: amazing, but my multilingual skills have declined since I started using it more.

Same goes for spell-check and autocorrect. In fact, I think autocorrect was one of the worst things ever invented for the advancement of cognition. You know the computer will catch your mistakes, so you plug along, not even thinking about how to spell any more.

As a result of years of relying on autocorrect and spell-check, as a nation, are we worse spellers? I would love someone to do a study on this. There are times when using technology is warranted and necessary. Walking to work every so often or taking the stairs instead of the elevator a few times a week is recommended to stay in good physical shape.

Lay off the GPS once in a while, and do your spatial and problem-solving skills a favor. Keep it handy, but try navigating naked first. Your brain will thank you. And that brings us to the last element to maximize your cognitive potential: Networking.

If not, start. By networking with other people—either through social media such as Facebook or Twitter, or in face-to-face interactions—you are exposing yourself to the kinds of situations that are going to make objectives much easier to achieve. By exposing yourself to new people, ideas, and environments, you are opening yourself up to new opportunities for cognitive growth. Said Maria Aberg, who led the study, "Increased cardiovascular fitness was associated with better cognitive scores.

In contrast, muscular strength was only weakly associated with intelligence. Research out of the University of Sydney showed that if you take 5g of creatine daily, you can lift your IQ by a full 15 points over a six-week period.

Said study leader Caroline Rae, "Creatine gave a significant boost to brain power. In part because it lifts the energy levels available for computation in your brain.

Countless studies find that meditating for as little as 20 minutes a day not only boosts your mood and lowers your stress levels, but also improves efficiency when it comes to deep cognitive processing. This is core to fluid intelligence, and part of what helps you become truly innovative. If you replaced 20 minutes of surfing Facebook with 20 minutes of meditating using an app like Calm or HeadSpace , you'd get smarter and lose absolutely no value in your life. According to science out of Loughborough University's Sleep Research Centre, every hour less than the recommended eight hours of sleep a night can knock off a full point from your IQ.

In fact, their report concluded that regularly losing two hours of sleep a night can cause someone with an average IQ to become "borderline retarded.

According to neuroscience, learning a foreign language makes your brain grow. Because you're navigating a new set of complex rules such as grammar different from your native tongue , it forces cortical thickening and increases in the volume of your hippocampus. One study found that participants who played brain training games developed by Luminosity bumped up their IQ by five to ten points — but only if they believed the training would have an effect on their cognition.

In other words, a lot of the benefit of these games may be all in our heads, kind of like a placebo effect. There are some instances in which brain training — but necessarily the kind marketed by companies on the internet — seems to boost some cognitive aspects. Perhaps the most promising form of brain training is relational skill training, which a study showed can boost IQ and scholastic aptitude.

Relational aptitude does not refer to interpersonal social interactions but rather to the competence in dealing with a wide variety of abstract relationships between things in our environment. For instance, Relational Frame Theory RFT states that understanding that the opposite of an opposite relation is the same relation, or that if A is more than B then B must be less than A.

Cassidy et al. The results were impressive 23 IQ points rise on average , to say the least, as summarized by the graphic below. Another study published in the British Journal of Educational Psychology picked off from where Cassidy et al. The researchers split 28 children aged between 10 and 11 into two groups.

One group was assigned to SMART Strengthening Mental Abilities with Relational Training , which taught the children to derive complex relationships between nonsense words across thousands of examples and using trial-by-trial feedback e. The second group was assigned to Scratch TM training, an online computer coding training programme produced by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Irrespective of what group they were part of, all participants received 29 hours of training. The relational skills training group improved their scores on all but one of the tests. Meanwhile, the Scratch group did not experience any significant increase in their test scores, IQ or otherwise.

It seems like relational skills intervention offers the most promising avenue for boosting cognitive abilities or recovering intellectual deficit. Research in this area is still in its early days, though, so more studies will be required before scientists might reach a definite conclusion. Tibi is a science journalist and co-founder of ZME Science. He writes mainly about emerging tech, physics, climate, and space. In his spare time, Tibi likes to make weird music on his computer and groom felines.