How neuroscience can boost your IQ
The IQ test, developed by Lewis Terman at Stanford University led psychologists to believe in what Richard Gardner calls the "IQ way of thinking".
The IQ way of thinking is that we are all born with a given amount of intelligence, that there's nothing anyone can do to change this native endowment, and that IQ and college admissions tests can tell you if you are one of the smart ones or not.
This way of thinking is false: You can in fact improve your IQ.
Petty and Field1 showed years ago that IQ test scores can and do change. Michael Petty is Chief Scientist at The Neural.
Others have since shown indisputably that the human brain is plastic, that it reacts to new stimuli by building new neural pathways. Research by Maguire and others shows that the brain of an expert, such as a chess player, a taxi driver or a musician, is functionally and structurally different from that of a non-expert.
London taxi cab drivers have larger hippocampi than matched controls and the amount of time the individual has worked as a cab driver predicted the size of the posterior hippocampus. What is more differences in hippocampal size are the results of experience and training as a cab driver and not a consequence of pre-existing differences in the structure of the brain. It is now well established that learning at any age changes the structure of the brain2.
The old concept of IQ is out of date.