How to Improve Your IQ (Part 2)

Exercise The Body, Exercise The Brain

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.

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. o Study art and architecture, to see a visual representation of the mind in action. o 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. o New experiences trigger a release of the neurotransmitter dopamine, which increases neurons and create a sense of pleasure. o The more you learn, the more you'll know, and your intelligence will grow as a result.

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. o 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! o 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. o Anything that shakes up your mechanical approach to something is a potential rut to break away from.

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.

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. a. 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 rightly and think more logically, or a rightly could try going left-handed to be more creative. Keep in mind this is only a hypothesis, but worth exploring.

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. a. 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. b. Intense learning which is required by many challenging, professional careers can certainly trigger neurogenesis and improve brain's cognitive capacity.