“Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine perspiration” — Thomas Edison

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, your IQ is not fixed and you can increase your intelligence. Thomas Edison’s teachers threw him out of school and told him that he was “addled” and that there was nothing rattling around in his head except a couple of flies. So he went out, started reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and invented the electric light, the motion picture camera, and several hundred other things. So much for the conventional wisdom.

As I have said before, intelligence is not so much an attribute as it is a skill. You can develop it if you want to. So here are a few ways.

1. Learn Languages. Learn a couple Romance languages, at least one Germanic language, one East Asian language, Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. Actually, on second thought, you’d better learn them all. Kidding. But in all seriousness, learning language does several things. First, it develops and strengthens your left brain (where the Broca and Wernicke language areas are located). Second, it alerts you to different ways of thinking about the world (a language is a philosophy, a system of describing the world according to a certain perspective). And third, it frees your mind from your mind from mindlessly accepting the philosophy found in your native language.

2. Study broadly. People like to cubby-hole everything into neat little categories: art, history, science, philosophy, etc. But in reality, everything is connected. For instance, you can’t really understand art unless you understand science, history, and philosophy; this is because artists are heavily influenced by the zeitgeist and events of their time. Only by understanding the connections between subjects can you really attain a serious understanding of them.

3. Exercise both sides of your brain. Some people are left-brainers and some are right-brainers. The left brainers do math problems for fun; they are the rubik’s cube people, the would-be engineers and scientists. The right-brainers like art and the humanities. But I have observed that the most intelligent people are those who exercise both sides of their brain. For instance, Albert Einstein was a great physicist and a whiz at math; but he also played the violin and said that “imagination is more important than knowledge.” When you are an extreme left-brainer the right-brainers call you a nerd; and when you’re an extreme right-brainer the lefties call you an aesthete and a weirdo. But if both sides are strong there is a synergy and a balance.

4. Be artistic. Almost all of us exercise our left-brain much more than our right. Being highly intelligent requires that both sides be strong. To that end, choose your favorite art-form and start creating. It could be painting, drawing, sculpture, dance, music, poetry, or whatever. Ideally, you would choose two artforms: one literary (poetry or creative writing) and one of the visual or performing arts. Literary art strengthens your ability to analogize and to see (or see through) analogy. The performing and visual arts enhance your creativity.

5. “Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking.” I know I’ve brought up this Christopher Morley quote before, but it deserves repeating.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 14th, 2011 at 1:41 pm and is filed under General College Success Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.