5 Ways To Increase Your Intelligence

As advances in artificial intelligence dominate news headlines and the tech continues to impress us with its seemingly ever-growing list of abilities, many are using the opportunity to reflect upon the nature and limits of human intelligence. Even narrowing down what intelligence is can be a difficult task, but a widely-accepted definition is something along the lines of the following: intelligence is the ability to alter your environment to achieve a desired outcome.

There's plenty left to debate and to question, even within that rather broad definition. Several questions remain: What about emotional intelligence and skill, like those related to empathy? How about the difference between the ability to grasp new academic concepts and deducing what someone is thinking? Regardless of which particular definition or application is more appealing or relevant to you, one thing we can probably all agree on is that it wouldn't hurt if we were more intelligent. But how exactly do you do that?

As it turns out, there are plenty of scientifically-backed methods of boosting your intelligence, and several of them are perhaps surprisingly intuitive and easy to achieve. So, whatever your motivations are to get smarter, let's take a look at five ways to increase your intelligence.

When in doubt, get your body moving. Aerobic exercise enhances cognitive performance — it's just a fact. Not only does it improve brain performance in the short term, but regular exercise is a key factor in preventing cognitive decline and staving off brain-related illnesses and conditions later in life, too. And you don't have to be a world-class athlete to see the benefits. Consistent moderate exercise can literally enlarge the hippocampus (the brain's memory center) by about 2%, according to figures provided by Harvard Medical School — that's enough to offset roughly two years of brain slow-down from aging. You won't become like the species that can actually de-age itself, but hey, take the wins when you can get them.  

And some brain benefits start rolling in the very minute you get moving. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, studies have shown that after a single session of vigorous physical activity, children aged 6 to 13 showed improved cognition while adults showed a reduction in anxiety.

Exercise also keeps you happy, which indirectly but not insignificantly boosts mental functions. Putting your body through physical challenges improves sleep quality and cardiovascular health, leading to an optimal state for the brain to learn and solve problems. Overall, physical activity will help your brain with its planning abilities, emotional regulation, and task initiation.

Another intuitive tip that's too easy to forget is getting enough sleep. After a day of socializing, working, and maybe a little more doom-scrolling than necessary, your brain is tired. Sleep strengthens mental functions, pure and simple. One of the most prominent effects it has is on the ability to hold your attention and focus — two things that are kind of vital if you're looking to up your intelligence stats. While you're asleep, your brain is busy consolidating memories and rejuvenating cognitive abilities. Memory, problem-solving skills, and even emotional processing all benefit from a good night's sleep.

Deep sleep is just as important. We're talking dreams, here. REM sleep is when your brain takes some gardening shears to your synapses, boosting memory and problem-solving in the process. Essentially, REM helps transfer short-term memories into long-term storage, meaning you remember more in the morning. This is also the stage of sleep that helps your central nervous system grow and develop. And people who experience less REM-stage sleep might be at elevated risk of developing dementia. Good sleep isn't an extra for intelligence, either. Even mild sleep deprivation impairs reasoning, attention, and decision-making.

There are a few ways you can make sure you're setting yourself up for proper sleep. First, maintain a consistent schedule. Second, ensure you've got a quiet, dark sleep environment going, and perhaps most importantly, avoid screens before you go to bed. Research shows that screens may inhibit melatonin production, a hormone that helps the body get ready to sleep in the evening. The cascading effect is that your body is getting primed to be alert when it otherwise would be calming down.

We get it — mindfulness can come across as little more than just a buzzword. But the basics behind the (lamentably often exploited) term are solid. In 2013, University of California Santa Barbara researchers published a paper in the journal Psychological Science in which they randomly assigned undergraduate students a class that taught either mindfulness practices or nutrition. At the end of the experiment, the students who took the mindfulness class had better verbal GRE test scores than those who took the nutrition class. They also "mind wandered" less during the test, something the other group struggled with. Put simply, by learning to quiet distractions and stay present, meditation helps you concentrate on what you need to.

Mindfulness isn't just about calming the mind, either; it can seriously help you build emotional skills. Research links regular meditation to higher emotional intelligence, largely by improving emotion regulation and empathy. Practitioners learn to recognize and accept feelings without overreacting, which leads to better self-awareness and social connection.

But perhaps the wildest fact about meditation is how it can physically change the brain. Scientists have shown that regular meditation practice leads to an increase in gray matter in the left hippocampus, posterior cingulate cortex, temporo-parietal junction, and cerebellum. The results? Researchers believe that meditation boosts brain regions involved in everything from learning and memory to perspective development and self-referential processing. In other words, consistent mindfulness practice strengthens the neural circuitry you need for both cognitive function and emotional well-being, and that's going to underpin higher intelligence in multiple areas. Empathy, it turns out, matters (it's also one of the personality traits correlated with higher intelligence).

There's no single brain-enhancing food that's going to turn you into a genius, but there are certainly better and worse diet choices if you're in the market to become a more intelligent person. This is another obvious one that can be hard to keep in mind, but maintaining a balanced diet of fruits, grains, vegetables, and protein are beneficial to your brain's ability to function, especially as you get older. Lean proteins found in fish and healthy fats from olive oil will help ensure a nourished brain while protecting against oxidative stress.

Studies show diet makes a difference. We've all heard of the benefits of the Mediterranean diet, and there's a reason for that. According to one study published in 2015 in JAMA Internal Medicine, older individuals who ate their fair share of antioxidant-rich foods, nuts, and olive oil displayed improved cognitive function compared to those who didn't. And with toxins found in some foods that could cause memory loss, it's good to be careful about what you eat. 

Of course, specific foods have standout benefits. Fatty fish like salmon and sardines are excellent sources of omega-3 fatty acids, which are linked to lower levels of Alzheimer's-related beta-amyloids, a kind of clumping protein that can damage the brain. Unsurprisingly, green, leafy vegetables are a friend of intelligence, too. Broccoli, spinach, and kale are just some examples of foods that supply the necessary nutrients to slow cognitive decline. And don't forget berries (literally) — some of these tasty little fruits can improve blood flow to areas of the brain that help with memory. Pro tip: Get some color in your diet, and you're probably going to be better off for it.

Use it or lose it is real. Challenging your brain through continuous learning can strengthen cognition and enhance mental agility. Research on older adults finds that with the proper training and practice, people over 65 can significantly improve memory, attention, and problem-solving skills. In fact, gains from brain training in areas like reasoning and processing speed have been shown to counteract typical age-related cognitive decline, keeping you sharper for longer.

With that said, learn new skills no matter what age you are. Scientists at the University of California Riverside have demonstrated the brain's amazing ability to adapt when we learn new things, even later in life. In an experiment, seniors took classes in unfamiliar skills (like learning a new language, photography, or music composition) for a few months. Surprise — their cognitive test scores improved and remained higher even one year after the learning program concluded. You don't need a formal program to reap the benefits of this, though. Engaging in activities like puzzles, reading, and playing strategic games like chess, can help keep your thinking sharp. The key is novelty and difficulty: regularly pushing yourself to tackle new mental challenges builds new and strengthens existing neural connections.

But one of the most helpful things you can do to become more intelligent is to work on being creative and staying curious. Creativity is often thought of as an in-built talent; you either have it or you don't. But creativity can be trained. In a 2023 paper published in Psych Journal, participants were given "creative thinking training" as an intervention for aggression. Compared to the study's control group, those who received the training came out as both more creative and less aggressive. And the effects of the training lasted 6 months after its completion.