How to Improve Your Intelligence

You can train all your life, but you’ll never be able to boost your IQ outside of a few points (though IQ does steadily drop across your lifetime).

IQ is relatively fixed, but luckily IQ isn’t the only, best, or most comprehensive measure of intelligence.

You can improve your fluid and crystallised intelligence.

You can do this through two avenues:

Specific brain exercises
Lifestyle factors

We’ll address both. I’m going to give you some esoteric brain training tips that you can immediately implement and some ways you can change your lifestyle to improve your intelligence.

But first:

What is fluid intelligence and crystallised intelligence?

Fluid intelligence is all about reasoning, being able to examine underlying assumptions and draw conclusions, analysing data and trends and patterns, logic, and solving abstract problems.

Crystallised intelligence is all about consolidating past learning with experience, widening your vocabulary range, the mechanics of language and analogy, and making sense of abstractions.

Fluid intelligence peaks around the age of 20, then declines largely due to inactivity.

By the time you reach the age of 25, your brain is basically fully formed and large-scale neuroplasticity development ends.

If you’re under 25, the more work you do now the better.
You’ll spend your time after 25 ameliorating decline.

Teenagers are so busy mindlessly scrolling through TikTok and Netflix, smoking bowls of weed, and actively speeding the degradation of their brain.

What they should be doing is reading A LOT of very challenging books, learning skills (everything from musical instruments to sports), and playing brain-taxing games like chess and backgammon.

It’s like fitness. It’s much easier to get into peak shape in your twenties and then hold onto it and be in fabulous condition throughout your thirties, forties, and fifties than it is to start working out for the first time mid-life.

Once you’ve hit your mid-twenties, your intellectual efforts are basically about holding all the brainy stuff you did when you were younger.

Fluid intelligence is basically intellectual acquisition and sharpening your processing power, whilst crystallised intelligence is bringing all of that to bear upon life as a result of experience.

That’s why Oscar Wilde’s maxim is so true:

“With age comes wisdom, but sometimes age comes alone.”

You can teach an old dog new tricks, but it’s eminently easier to build upon the tricks learnt as a new dog.

If you’re a young pup whose been trained well, once you’re older and you have all this life experience, you’ll become wise and all that stuff you learnt as a young-un will finally make sense.

There’s also the Theory of Multiple Intelligences

Basically you can have a dominant intelligence in any of these nine realms:

Spatial (pictures, painting)
Linguistic (verbal, writing)
Kinaesthetic (sports, bodily)
Interpersonal (social, people)
Intrapersonal (knowing yourself)
Existential (life/street smarts)
Naturalist (nature smart)
Musical (auditory, sounds)
Logical-mathematical (reason, numbers)

This theory used to be commonly excepted in psychological communities but has been somewhat discredited, with the finding that people have preferences and proclivities based on temperament, but we can learn through all avenues if we apply ourselves.

Personally I’m pegged as having linguistic, intrapersonal, and existential (maybe some spatial) primary intelligences.

My sister is extremely skilled with all things musical, so she’d be in the musical domain, and I believe she’s high in interpersonal and likely kinaesthetic intelligence.

My brother is also high in kinaesthetic intelligence, which is likely his primary, along with some interpersonal and existential thrown in there.

So how can you improve your intelligence?

We’ll talk about lifestyle factors for improving your intelligence first because they are the most important, will give you the most bang for your buck, and are easy to start implementing right away.

Blanket rule:

If you’re under 20, aim to cut your screen time down to less than an hour a day.

If you need to work on your computer, fine. Just don’t spend your free time mindlessly scrolling on your phone or binge-watching TV shows on your laptop.

All the work you do in adolescence, whilst your brain is still forming, will pay off in later life.

Now really is the time to put your foot down on the pedal intellectually speaking.

This means:

Read difficult books that are over your head. Philosophy, politics, literature, science, history. Start with this reading list and work your way through.
Learn new skills that will shape the way you think critically and analytically. Poker and chess are two games you should start learning and playing regularly. MasterClass has long in-depth video courses on both those subjects from a grandmaster and a world-class poker player. You could watch a module a night and put what you learn into practice.
Constantly take educational courses and learn new skills. The Great Courses have compelling lectures on every subject.
Learn a new language. Yes, it really is easier to learn a language the younger you are. Capitalise on that and aim to get conversational in at least two new languages before you’re thirty (most people in the world are bi or trilingual, so don’t worry, you can do it). After thirty, aim to add a new language for every decade of your life.
Follow a consistent exercise regime. Cardiovascular exercise has been scientifically proven to boost intelligence on multiple levels (working memory, processing speed, semantic memory, episodic memory, everything). Aim for 30-50 minutes most days, or before doing intellectual work. Strength training is also good for reducing inflammation and chronic stress, both things inhibit cerebral networks. So lift weights a few times a week too. Learning a sport also improves motor-coordination and peripersonal spatial awareness.
Sort your diet out, learn about healthy fats and start taking them on nutritionally every day. Fish 3x/ week is a good place to start. Replacing junk food snacks with nuts is another good idea. Drinking fish oil by the bottle is also a good idea (not a doctor though, so this isn’t medical advice).
Bulletproof your sleep. Sleep is where we consolidate memories and skills. So get a great mattress, sleep in a cool dark room, and turn off artificial lights a couple of hours before bed. Make yourself tired by taking magnesium and GABA, having a cold shower, and doing some foam rolling whilst reading fiction (this is literally my personal evening routine).

Now what about brain training games?

Brain training games like the kind you buy for the Nintendo DS aren’t that great (apart from Neuroracer, which has been shown to improve cognition).

All they do is improve how good you get at the specific game.

So you might as well just learn a new language, do crossword puzzles, or challenge someone to a game of chess. It would be much more fun, much better for your brain, and much more applicable across the span of your lifetime.

There are, however, some conceptual and abstract brain exercises you can do that would be beneficial if you add them into your daily routine.

You could run through a lot of these exercises whilst you’re in the shower/getting ready in the morning.

Think of these intelligence exercises like a brain warm-up for your day.

These exercises will get those neurons and synapses firing and make sure you have a productive day.

The first brain exercise is a visual one taken from the workshop of actors when they are sharpening their sense memory.

Basically, think of an object. Like a coffee cup. Or an apple. Anything.

Visualise it in your mind vividly:

What does it feel like?
How heavy it is?
What are its dimensions?
Does it have any designs/textural flaws?
How does the light hit it?
What colour is it?

Re-create the object in your mind and memorise.

You activate the same brain circuits that are involved when you deal with the real object itself.

That’s how actors can literally see a cup that doesn’t exist when they’re onstage in front of an audience.

Next, here’s an auditory exercise.

You know the sound effects in Disney movies are created using things you’d never have guessed?

Like crumpling a newspaper is used to create the sound of a crackling fire.

The laser blasts in Star Wars were created by hitting a high-tension wire with a hammer.

Do a sound exercise where you listen to things in your environment and try to come up with what those sounds could be used for other things.

Here’s an exercise that will improve your memory and recall.

Go to an art gallery.

Pay close attention to many of the pictures that speak to you.

Take pictures of them.

Later that day, try to recreate and recall those pictures in as much depth as possible before looking at the photographs to check if you’re right.

You can do this with a walk around your neighbourhood too.

Focus your attention on certain areas and then take a photo and compare your ability to reconstruct that area with the photograph at a later date.

You can also exercise your visual-spatial memory by taking advantage of an ancient memorisation technique called the memory palace.

The better your recall gets and the more you’re able to recreate real places in your mind, the more you’ll be able to scaffold other information onto them.

You can also hack your intelligence, memory, and academic performance through diet and exercise.

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