Ever wondered how you can improve your IQ? Studies show that you can become smarter. This does not mean that you start using more of your brain. It simply means that you can enhance your cognitive skills.
You can surely train your brain to perform better in the areas that you want. For example, if you want to become a better athlete, you need to practice and re-wire your brain to not feel tired easily. You can do it with regular practice, loads of exercise, balanced diet, adequate rest and meditation.
One entertaining way to wind up a neuroscientist is to pretend to believe the popular notion that we use only 10% of our brains.
This myth is the premise of Luc Besson’s new film, Lucy, starring Scarlett Johansson as a woman who overdoses on a designer drug that supercharges her intelligence. The 10% figure, as Besson happily acknowledges, is utter cobblers. It persists, not because it’s true, but because it captures a nagging feeling that we could be doing vastly more with our minds, if only we knew how.
The ideas in this edition of Do Something won’t change the percentage of your brain that you use, but they might improve your cognitive skills, while delivering the pleasing sensation of getting brainier. The key isn’t how much of your mental capacity you’re using: it’s what you’re using it for.
To get smarter, of course, you need to decide what you mean by “smarter”. There’s little doubt that giving your mind a workout – on cryptic crosswords or sudoku, say, or memorising the capitals of US states – will make you better at that specific task. There’s also plenty of research demonstrating the benefits of treating your brain like the physical organ it is – which means plenty of aerobic exercise, a healthy diet, sufficient sleep, maybe some meditation. In studies on mice, it wasn’t mentally stimulating activities that spurred the biggest cognitive improvements: it was running on treadmills.
Tweaking your surroundings, even your clothing, might help: in one intriguing study, wearing a lab coat, stereotypically associated with braininess, appeared to boost performance on certain tests. And if all you care about is appearing smarter to others, social psychology has all sorts of suggestions: speak confidently and expressively; smile rather than frown; wear glasses; and use a middle initial. (In a recent experiment, “David F Clark” was rated as a better intellect than “David Clark”; “David F P R Clark” did even better.)
When researchers talk about improving brainpower, what they care about most is “fluid intelligence” – the general ability to manipulate information, solve problems and generate ideas. Unlike sudoku skills, fluid intelligence is transferable: if you could enhance it, you’d expect to reap benefits in multiple areas of life.
So can you? Few topics in psychology are more controversial, but the most promising evidence comes from a remarkably unpleasant brain-training game called the “dual n-back”, which involves a visual and aural memory test – you can try it at soakyourhead.com. The key finding is that getting smarter entails doing things that feel uncomfortably hard. Once you’re a crossword champion, by all means carry on doing crosswords for fun. But if you want to get smarter, do something you’re not good at.
This insight – that becoming brainier needs to feel a little tough – helps answer another fraught question: is technology making us smarter, or more stupid? It depends. Use it to eliminate cognitive tasks, and there could be a negative effect – that’s why it’s worth challenging yourself to navigate without GPS. Use it to expose yourself to demanding new material, on the other hand, and it’ll help. In his book Curious, Ian Leslie argues that we need to cultivate “epistemic curiosity” – not a scattered quest for novelty, but a focused, disciplined commitment to mastering new terrain.
Instead of leaping from one topic to another online, pick one subject and plunge deeply; put down your tablet and seek out books, or others who share your interest; try to retain facts instead of relying on web searches. As Einstein put it, “one should not pursue goals that are easily achieved. One must develop an instinct for what one can just barely achieve through one’s greatest efforts”. And rumour has it he was pretty clever.
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