The website Lumosity offers a series of brain games used by 50 million brain trainers. Brain games market themselves as a way to increase fluid intelligence. This applies to problem-solving skills extended from the game to real-life situations, which represents the crux of the games. One study conducted in proved that a game called Duel N-Back demonstrated that fluid intelligence developed in participants. Duel N-Back receives great praise from its users. Essentially, it functions as a memory retention game.
Unfortunately, scientists cannot replicate the results of the test. This has cast doubt on the experiment controls used in the original study. Despite the skepticism, research on the advantages of brain games remains an exciting field for neuroscience. Including 30 minutes of cardiovascular exercise in your daily routine will enhance your mental clarity and intelligence. Research from Concordia University claims that getting more blood and oxygen to your brain does wonders for cognitive health.
Not only does the biological aspect play a role, but multitasking while exercising also stimulates multiple areas of the brain. Picking up an instrument will not only impress your friends, it will make you smarter. When you play an instrument, you employ a vast area of your brain at once. Consider the senses. You use your visual, auditory, and physical capacities all while playing an instrument.
Your experience of playing music uses tons of cognitive processes simultaneously, for instance:. Scientists frequently employ magnetic resonance imaging MRI technology to study the brain during tests.
When participants in one study played an instrument, many different parts of the brain lit up on the MRI scan. Getting into the habit of practicing an instrument daily, even for a short period, will improve your brain function and intelligence.
You need to eat, so why not power your intelligence with brain-booster super foods? Certain foods contain qualities proven to enhance brain power. No need to order any fad food online — the best foods line the shelves of your local grocery store. The best foods for brain function all contain high levels of fat. Historically, fat has a bad reputation. People generally believe that eating fat makes you fat. Some fats do affect your body negatively, but not all.
The foods to avoid contain trans fats. Often labeled on packages as partially hydrogenated oil, trans fat contributes to high cholesterol, inflammation, diabetes, stroke, and other health problems. Instead of trans-fat rich items like potato chips, choose a food high in monounsaturated fats, like fish or nuts.
Your brain will thank you. After all, the human brain consists of 60 percent fat. The famous TV scientist Bill Nye suggested in the s that the next time someone calls you a fathead, you should take it as a compliment. The brain needs fat to run properly.
Despite its small size, about 2 percent of our body weight, the brain sucks up 20 percent of our energy. To keep your mind in peak condition, pack your fridge with these supercharged, brain accelerating wonder foods:.
Almonds and hazelnuts are vitamin E champions. Essential for cognitive function, vitamin E improves memory and verbal functions. Pack some nuts in your granola bar, salad, or trail mix: They contain tons of protein, which is also valuable for brain health and stamina throughout the day.
Other foods like olive oil, eggs, small amounts of red wine, dark chocolate, blueberries, and coffee also assist brain activity. For now, your best starting point involves the heavyweights: avocados, salmon, and nuts. Incorporate these foods into your daily diet and feel your intelligence sharpen. Establishing a short, daily meditation practice can beef up your concentration, alertness, creativity, and intelligence.
Numerous studies show a direct link between meditation and increased brain activity. Many prominent university researchers claim meditation benefits the brain:. At this point, several options present themselves. The most effective method of mediation for beginners involves a mantra. Ideally, a mantra is a nonsense word or phrase which you repeat, silently, to yourself. The mantra can sound like anything. Instead, acknowledge the thought, guide it away, and return to focusing on the mantra.
Stop wasting your time with people who hold you back or make you feel bad about yourself. Being selective about who you spend your time with becomes increasingly strategic with age, as it has been said that you are the sum of the five people you spend the most time with.
If the people who surround you impact you so deeply, you should learn to attract others you admire, and phase out toxic relationships in your life. You can implement this idea by finding people online who share a mutual desire for self-improvement. To get started, here are three articles you can check out:. Doing something new every day will give you a wide range of perspectives to pull from in your small, everyday areas of specialization. For example, people with naturalist intelligence like to analyze, and manipulate the things in their environment.
Doing new things helps you learn, which then makes you more readily adaptable to new circumstances. Having a wide range of knowledge of unconventional situations promotes innovation by inspiring you to think outside of the box and giving you examples to follow. Doing new things deepens your character and makes other people look up to you as being an inspiring person. Knowing you have the ability to do more things will also make you more confident.
Doing unfamiliar tasks will stimulate your brain and make you smarter. Here is a list of over things to learn beginning today. From to , a pair of researchers studied 31 middle school special needs students. Sixteen of the students were given their typical math instruction, while the remainder of the students went through a week chess training program in addition to their regular math instruction.
This suggests that playing games keeps your brain sharp and helps you comprehend new information better. This type of list-making boosts your happiness and confidence, which are two components of intelligence. Intelligence is often seen as a predetermined trait, which limits people's motivation to try to change their own level of intelligence.
However, studies have shown that there is a link between IQ and happiness beginning in childhood and spanning across one's life. When it comes to confidence, if you have a healthy self-esteem, you will be more accepting of yourself. Other people will be able to see this confidence, and will give you more credibility when you are talking about any given subject.
Making a list of the things you have completed can act as a reminder of how far you have already come in whatever you are working on. This can keep you motivated to keep moving forward with your work and continue to learn. Scientists have proven that being bilingual boosts your intelligence. This means that learning a new language will improve your cognitive abilities. It can have a significant effect on your brain, even improving your intelligence in areas that are not related to language and shielding you from dementia in old age.
In fact, knowing two languages has been shown to delay the onset of dementia by five years, and knowing three languages delays it by 6. Knowing four or more languages delays the onset of dementia by nearly a decade. When you learn a new language, you are exercising your brain in a way that uses every form of memory that you have. Think about it—when you learn a new language, you have to essentially learn a new dictionary of words, and the grammatical rules to put all of these words together.
You also have to use your muscles and motor skills to speak with the correct pronunciation—and you have to be able to do it quickly, instinctively, and without having to stop and figure out each translation. You need to know the words and understand the relationships between them. Once you are equipped with this knowledge, studies have shown that you will have an improved attention span, a better memory, and more self-control.
When learning a new language, make sure to take on a growth mindset. Pursue the challenges and aim to stretch beyond your capacity. To get started, here is a review of the 7 best language learning apps and software. This is one key step in the Feynman technique , a way to learn something faster and more efficiently.
Researchers have found that students who are enlisted to tutor others work harder to fully comprehend the material, recall it correctly, and apply it to real-life situations better. If you are learning not only for your own sake but to be able to explain the lessons to someone else, you need to have a firm grasp on the material. This may be why studies have found that first-born children tend to be more intelligent than their subsequent siblings, because they spend time teaching their younger siblings lessons they have already learned themselves.
Also, getting feedback from a student further enhances one's learning. A student's questions can inspire teachers to consider and explain t he material in ways they had not previously thought about. What's more, watching a student solve problems lets the teacher see their knowledge being put to use. Mindfulness is the capacity to focus on the current moment without judgment.
It is cultivated from daily meditation—doing some deep belly breaths brings more oxygen to your brain, slows your heart rate, and allows you to release thoughts of the past or future, bringing your entire self into the moment. Practicing mindfulness boosts your ability to make smarter decisions. When you are not present in the moment, you may be tempted to multi-task—and studies have found that people who allow themselves to get distracted by incoming email or phone calls at work had a to point decrease in their IQs.
What's more, multi-tasking can actually damage your brain. Those who switch their attention quickly from one thing to another have a lower brain density in the area of the brain that is responsible for empathy and cognitive and emotional control.
Check out this post for the right way to incorporate mindfulness into your daily life. Research shows that when people write their notes longhand, they retain information longer and can better grasp new ideas.
Yes, it takes longer to write out notes instead of typing them, but taking this time to digest the material is critical. This means that students who write their notes rather than type them gain a better understanding of lesson materials. When you are typing your notes, you are likely to record almost everything you hear without considering the meaning behind the words or processing the material. You're simply mindlessly transcribing what you hear, which does not require a lot of cognitive activity.
Alternatively, when you take handwritten notes, you are unable to write down every word the teacher says. This forces you to listen, summarize the information, and list the key points.
Howard Berg falls in this category. He claims to be able to read tens of thousands of words per minute and offers a widely advertised reading course. Another popular course in this vein is the SpeedLearning program. True speed readers, who are approaching a thousand words a minute read without subvocalizing i.
If you can read without subvocalizing, you are on your way to greater reading speed. But the bottom line in reading is always comprehension. For this reason, our favorite work here at Super Scholar on the subject of reading is not one that stresses speed but rather one that stresses comprehension: How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren. Slow and steady will allow you to read an enormous amount of material.
Just cutting out an hour of television a day and devoting it instead to sustained reading can turn you into a scholar. Writing is an essential part of scholarship. Some great scholars have been terrible writers—the strength of their ideas carried them to the top even though their writing style was abysmal. But these are the exceptions.
Clarity and precision of expression can only help you as a scholar. Finally, every writer, professional or not, would profit enormously from having a copy of The Chicago Manual of Style. The latter is an incomparable reference work on all aspects of going from thought to word to printed page. Scholars are not just in the business of thinking up great ideas.
They also have to sell them. Besides dealing with the basics of rhetoric, it is filled with very helpful advice for the budding writer. Although the book draws many of its examples from philosophy and religion, the lessons on argumentation that it lays out are universal in scope.
Also useful here would be a good book on critical thinking of the sort taught in a first or second year college philosophy course. Among the worst fears that people have is public speaking. Yet as a scholar, you will be called on to discuss your ideas. Public speaking is therefore part of the scholarly life. Here are some books we at Super Scholar have found valuable in this regard. If you want actual practice in public speaking, Toastmasters International operates thousands of clubs to give members experience in the art of listening and speaking.
Plenty of books and courses exist on speaking and on organizing presentations. Though aimed more at a business setting, it is still useful in general. Gilman and Karen E. Berg contains useful advice about the relative merits of going with and without PowerPoint projected images can distract the audience from the speaker.
Many scholars end up becoming full-time teachers. Scholars need facility with numbers. Some scholars such as mathematicians, physicists, and engineers tend to score high on the math portions of standardized tests and have fewer problems dealing with numbers.
Other scholars, often on the humanities side, prefer to have as little to do with numbers as possible. But numbers are a part of life, so we better learn to live with them. Numbers are often abused. Consequently, they are easily abused. If, for instance, you compute a probability of 5.
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