Brain Fitness Exercises – How to Increase Your Intelligence
French psychologist Alfred Binet, a keen student of human individualities and potentials and the inventor of the first IQ test, considered the concept of fixed intelligence a "brutal pessimism." He worried that a low IQ score might carry with it an indelible stigma. But others soon sought to use IQ to discriminate and categorize; Henry Goddard, for instance, the father of IQ testing in the United States, privately favored forced sterilization of those he thought of as mental defectives and publicly advocated programs of segregation.
The idea that a person's relative intelligence was inherent and unchanging soon became conventional wisdom. But in the decades since Goddard championed the testing of immigrants as they landed at Ellis Island, a growing body of research has proven that Binet was right and Goddard was wrong. All kinds of environmental and circumstantial factors determine and modify a person's intelligence over time.
The research then supports the idea that we could take steps to change our intelligence. However, despite many attempts, until recently no one had been able to devise a method for doing so in a measurable and reliable way.
Training Working-Memory Increases Fluid Intelligence
It was Graeme Halford (a Professor of Psychology at the University of Queensland) who first proposed that the brain functions that work on problem-solving compete for processing cycles with the functions that control working-memory. Halford theorized that our capacity to hold things in our mind overlaps with the functions of fluid intelligence.
Halford's theory inspired researchers from the Universities of Michigan and Bern to propose that increasing working-memory capacity might free up brain power to dedicate to solving problems. Using a specially designed exercise to progressively train visual and aural working-memory capacity, the scientists set about testing their hypothesis.
Their study tested participants' fluid intelligence before and after training using questions from a standard IQ test administered in a restricted time period. And to allow for familiarity with the test they compared these results to those of a group who hadn't received any training. Remarkably, the study not only demonstrated that fluid intelligence could change with working-memory training, the degree of change was dramatic. With 19 days of training, the fluid intelligence scores for each person in the trained group increased by at least 40% more than those in the non-trained group.
When the results of this study were published in April, they garnered a lot of attention in the media and the scientific community. But the biggest reaction came from people who read about the results and wanted to try the training for themselves. (In the interests of full disclosure, my company has released a commercial version of the training. Feedback from those who've used the training at home have confirmed the researchers' findings; some even taking before and after IQ tests on their own dime and recording substantial increases in IQ scores on full-scale certified tests.)
With this landmark study, we can finally get beyond the idea of IQ as a label, just as Binet hoped.
