To submit your questions email us at questions sciencefocus. Lottie Storey is a writer, journalist and editor of the one-off special magazine Creative Journeys: Artistic Inspiration from Around the World. Lottie Storey Social networks. Contrary to popular belief, creative thinking does not equal "thinking with the right side of your brain".
It involves recruitment from both halves of your brain, not just the right. In order to do this well, you need both right and left hemispheres working in conjunction with each other. Sternberg has been on a quest to not only understand the fundamental concept of intelligence, but also to find ways in which any one person can maximize his or her intelligence through training, and especially, through teaching in schools.
As part of a research study, The Rainbow Project [pdf], he created not only innovative methods of creative teaching in the classroom, but generated assessment procedures that tested the students in ways that got them to think about the problems in creative and practical ways, as well as analytical, instead of just memorizing facts.
He wanted to find out if by teaching students to think creatively and practically about a problem, as well as for memory, he could get them to i Learn more about the topic, ii Have more fun learning, and iii Transfer that knowledge gained to other areas of academic performance. He wanted to see if by varying the teaching and assessment methods, he could prevent "teaching to the test" and get the students to actually learn more in general.
He collected data on this, and boy, did he get great results. In a nutshell? On average, the students in the test group the ones taught using creative methods received higher final grades in the college course than the control group taught with traditional methods and assessments.
But—just to make things fair— he also gave the test group the very same analytical-type exam that the regular students got a multiple choice test , and they scored higher on that test as well. That means they were able to transfer the knowledge they gained using creative, multimodal teaching methods, and score higher on a completely different cognitive test of achievement on that same material.
Sound familiar? I mentioned earlier that efficiency is not your friend if you are trying to increase your intelligence. Unfortunately, many things in life are centered on trying to make everything more efficient. This is so we can do more things, in a shorter amount of time, expending the least amount of physical and mental energy possible.
Take one object of modern convenience, GPS. GPS is an amazing invention. I am one of those people GPS was invented for. My sense of direction is terrible. I get lost all the time.
So when GPS came along, I was thanking my lucky stars. But you know what? After using GPS for a short time, I found that my sense of direction was worse. If I failed to have it with me, I was even more lost than before. So when I moved to Boston—the city that horror movies and nightmares about getting lost are modeled after—I stopped using GPS. I had a new job which involved traveling all over the burbs of Boston, and I got lost every single day for at least 4 weeks.
I got lost so much, I thought I was going to lose my job due to chronic lateness I even got written up for it. But—in time, I started learning my way around, due to the sheer amount of practice I was getting at navigation using only my brain and a map. I began to actually get a sense of where things in Boston were, using logic and memory, not GPS. I can still remember how proud I was the day a friend was in town visiting, and I was able to effectively find his hotel downtown with only a name and a location description to go on—not even an address.
It was like I had graduated from navigational awareness school. Technology does a lot to make things in life easier, faster, more efficient, but sometimes our cognitive skills can suffer as a result of these shortcuts, and hurt us in the long run. Not a big deal. Your overall health will probably decline as a result. Your brain needs exercise as well. If you stop using your problem-solving skills, your spatial skills, your logical skills, your cognitive skills—how do you expect your brain to stay in top shape—never mind improve?
Think about modern conveniences that are helpful, but when relied on too much, can hurt your skill in that domain. Translation software: amazing, but my multilingual skills have declined since I started using it more. Same goes for spell-check and autocorrect. In fact, I think autocorrect was one of the worst things ever invented for the advancement of cognition. You know the computer will catch your mistakes, so you plug along, not even thinking about how to spell any more.
As a result of years of relying on autocorrect and spell-check, as a nation, are we worse spellers? I would love someone to do a study on this. There are times when using technology is warranted and necessary. Walking to work every so often or taking the stairs instead of the elevator a few times a week is recommended to stay in good physical shape. Lay off the GPS once in a while, and do your spatial and problem-solving skills a favor.
Keep it handy, but try navigating naked first. Your brain will thank you. And that brings us to the last element to maximize your cognitive potential: Networking. If not, start. By networking with other people—either through social media such as Facebook or Twitter, or in face-to-face interactions—you are exposing yourself to the kinds of situations that are going to make objectives much easier to achieve. By exposing yourself to new people, ideas, and environments, you are opening yourself up to new opportunities for cognitive growth.
Being in the presence of other people who may be outside of your immediate field gives you opportunities to see problems from a new perspective, or offer insight in ways that you had never thought of before. Learning is all about exposing yourself to new things and taking in that information in ways that are meaningful and unique—networking with other people is a great way to make that happen.
Steven Johnson , author who wrote the book "Where Good Ideas Come From", discusses the importance of groups and networks for the advancement of ideas. If you are looking for ways to seek out novel situations, ideas, environments, and perspectives, then networking is the answer. Your job is to select the right conclusion based on given statements. Syllogisms often contain statements that go against your knowledge or feeling.
By exercising syllogisms you learn to coop with these feelings so you can select the right answer. Below you will find some quick tips that can help you increase your IQ.
These tips are based on several scientific studies and have proven to be able to increase your IQ. Take a free IQ test , or read the article about IQ test for children. Using our tests Tickets for tests. Frequently asked questions About test Team Used and mentioned Contact. JavaScript For full functionality of this site it is necessary to enable JavaScript. Here are the instructions how to enable JavaScript in your web browser. Can you increase your IQ? Why practice pays off Practicing IQ tests is mostly just a matter of trying them.
Figures The same goes for series of figures. In part because it lifts the energy levels available for computation in your brain. Countless studies find that meditating for as little as 20 minutes a day not only boosts your mood and lowers your stress levels, but also improves efficiency when it comes to deep cognitive processing.
This is core to fluid intelligence, and part of what helps you become truly innovative. If you replaced 20 minutes of surfing Facebook with 20 minutes of meditating using an app like Calm or HeadSpace , you'd get smarter and lose absolutely no value in your life.
According to science out of Loughborough University's Sleep Research Centre, every hour less than the recommended eight hours of sleep a night can knock off a full point from your IQ.
In fact, their report concluded that regularly losing two hours of sleep a night can cause someone with an average IQ to become "borderline retarded. According to neuroscience, learning a foreign language makes your brain grow. Because you're navigating a new set of complex rules such as grammar different from your native tongue , it forces cortical thickening and increases in the volume of your hippocampus. In plain language, that means you're causing the language centers in the brain to expand, which eventually helps with other language tasks like negotiating, reading, and problem-solving.
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