Smarter

Smarter is one “slow learner” turned A student’s experimental account of improving his intelligence by 16% through various tests, lessons and exercises and explains how you can increase your intelligence in scientifically proven ways.

Intelligence was divided into two parts as early as the 1970s. Back then, scientists discerned them as follows:

Fluid intelligence. Crystallized intelligence.

Fluid intelligence is your capacity for logic thinking and reasoning. When you’re presented with a new problem you haven’t seen before, and then try to analyze it by spotting patterns, thinking about principles and building your own reasoning around how to overcome it, that’s fluid intelligence at work.

This is the part of your intelligence that scientists believed to be fixed until a few years ago.

Crystallized intelligence is the knowledge base you build up over time, including facts, the memory of how to perform certain tasks or actions (like riding a bike) and knowing how to read. This kind of knowledge constantly grows.

Fluid intelligence reaches its peak during young adulthood (which is why great mathematicians often have their biggest breakthroughs early in their lives) and is also closely correlated with the physical size of your brain, which is why scientists long thought it’s impossible to change – but as it turns out, that’s not true.

In 2008, Susanne Jaeggi conducted a study including computer games of the so-called N-back type. These games usually show you different elements, one after the other, and then ask you questions for which you have to remember the element that you saw “N back”, where N can be any number.

For example, if I give you an iPad and show you an A on its screen, followed by a B and then a C, and I ask you to tell me what the first letter was (A), this’d be a 2-back game, because you’ll have to remember the letter that came two positions before the C.

After four weeks of playing these kinds of games, the participants of the study showed a 40% increase in fluid intelligence tasks.

This was the first time a study in a scientific context had proven that fluid intelligence can actually be improved with practice. That’s great news for you and me, and for the 70 million people who already play these kinds of games created by companies like Lumosity.

Also, games similar to these could even help people with illnesses like ADHD.

Do you know what a meta-study is? It’s a study of studies. For training working memory, like in the study above, a meta study was conducted in 2013, which brought up the following issue: while effective in the short term, most of the results from training working memory could…