2023 Author: Katelyn Chandter | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-05-21 13:08
Raising your intelligence to the next level brings success in your career and personal life. Science recognizes only three classic ways to improve your intellectual capabilities.
Almost every day there is some high-profile study from the series "Regular sex increases IQ" or "Consuming carrots makes you smarter."
But these are all grandmother's tales, because official science around the world recognizes only three classical ways to optimize your intellectual capabilities.
Physical exercises
Our society is a strange subject. On the one hand, we directly associate a person's success and good physical shape, linking fitness with intelligence. On the other hand, there is a stereotype that athletes … … let's just say, not the most intellectually savvy people.
So does exercise help you “get smarter”? The answer is yes. A number of experiments show that exercise directly affects mental performance. A classic 1975 study, for example, found that older adults who play tennis or badminton tended to perform significantly better on cognitive tests than their non-athletic peers. A series of 2010 studies showed that children 9-10 years old who move more, have better memory and a larger hippocampus - this is the seahorse-shaped brain organ that plays a key role in the functioning of both short-term and long-term memory.
Over the past ten years, at least four meta-analyzes have been conducted, based on officially published studies, that have come to one conclusion: physical fitness improves intellectual performance. Read this paragraph again and realize the main thing: you can develop your intelligence and memory simply by playing enough sports. You could even put it this way: playing sports three times a week is directly related to career growth.
Music teaching
Several years ago, a study known as the "Mozart Effect" thundered all over the world. Scientist Frances Rauscher and her colleagues concluded that if parents play Mozart's music to their children, even while they are still in the womb, babies become smarter. One of the American governors even offered to allocate 105 thousand dollars so that every child can listen to classical music from birth.
After some time, the study was crushed. One skeptic who said that "The Mozart Effect is complete nonsense" was psychologist Glenn Schellenberg of the University of Toronto.
And in 2004, it was Schellenberg who published a study report, the results of which stated: "Music lessons increase IQ." Young children were taught music for 36 weeks.
“After the term, children from music groups showed a significantly more significant increase in IQ,” concluded Schellenberg. He also noticed that it was not listening to Mozart (as Rauscher claimed) that raised IQ, but learning music and playing musical instruments.
This study was cited 363 times in other academic papers. In 2011, the scientist repeated a similar study, and the results were confirmed again. So far, no study has been published that refutes Schellenberg's findings.
Meditative concentration
The third way to develop to become smarter is meditation. How it works?
Psychologist Michael Posner - the author of a good hundred scientific papers - conducted an experiment in which the participants meditated daily. Michael admits that he expected to get the effect of meditation in a few months or even years. But, oddly enough, changes in the white matter of the brain were detected after two weeks.
Scientists believe that meditation is one of the best ways to improve a person's cognitive abilities, increase attentiveness and concentration, and expand the volume of working memory.
Posner's research has been confirmed around the world. The Chinese scientist Yu-Yuan Teng achieved a serious effect of meditative concentration within 5 days. Posner and Teng continued to work together and found that meditative concentration techniques lead to greater efficiency of the white matter of the brain, and in addition, it makes people relax, not get depressed, and also be happier.
All these ways to become smarter are good not only from the point of view of science, but also from the point of view of common sense, so go in for sports, meditate and buy yourself a piano, finally.