Educational Interventions can Raise Your IQ
Many psychologists once believe that IQ is fixed at birth, but that is an outdated position based on ideology as much as on bad science. Mounting evidence has been coming in over the past two decades that your IQ in both kids and adults can rise as a result of increased educational exposure and if people engage in brain training exercises.
The view that IQ is fixed for life and cannot be improved has been discredited thanks to several recent studies. One such study which was recently published by Norwegian scientists Christian N. Brinch and Taryn Ann Galloway. They got around the problem of trying to separate the effect of education on IQ from the possibility that more intelligent people simply choose to have more education. Their study involved examining the effects of an increase in the duration of compulsory schooling in Norway in the 1960s. This change extended the minimum time in education for all Norwegians from 7 to 9 years. The authors cleverly hypothesized that the IQs of people who experienced this extra mandatory education should have increased by the time they reached adulthood.
The researchers had access to excellent records of cognitive ability taken by the military for all eligible males at age 19 and they used these to calculate the IQ of each individual in the study. This allowed them to show that IQ had risen by 0.6 of a point on average for all Norwegian males over the period of study, but HAD RISEN BY 3.7 POINTS for every extra year of education received. These findings provide very strong support for the ideas that education can increase IQ, but more importantly is that those people who are exposed to extra education benefit even greater.
The conclusion is the more we learn, the fitter he brain becomes leading to improved levels of IQ. This poses the question, if children and adults know how to learn better, would our normal education system have a bigger impact on their intellectual development and life choices?
The rises in IQ from this study result from a very broad exposure to education extension, but research now shows that IQ rises obtained by an extra year of education are dwarfed by the IQ rises obtainable using the scientifically developed brain training developed by psychologists and authors at RaiseYourIQ, which helps the user to become expert in a range of cognitive skills underlying many forms of intelligence used in education, work, and in everyday life. Teaching people to learn easier and quicker using the Brain Training course leads to a 20-30 point IQ increase.
Click here to learn more about SMART Brain Training and the science behind it.
You can view the full original article conducted by the Norwegian scientists here: [Brinch & Galloway](http://www.pnas.org/content/109/2/