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Once the knowledge or skill you gain gets easy, fluid intelligence benefits largely disappear.
There are lots of ways you can get smarter:
- You can harness the power of interleaving by learning several things in succession.
- You can vary the way you study.
- You can test yourself.
- Believe it or not, simply getting more sleep can actually make you smarter.
But what you can’t really do is “brain train” your way to higher intelligence.
Hold that thought.
While there are a number of ways to define “intelligence,” let’s focus on two:
- Crystallized intelligence is accumulated knowledge: facts, figures. In short, “educated.” Which is a good thing, except we all know people who are “book smart” but not necessarily smart smart.
- Fluid intelligence is the ability to learn and retain new information and to use that knowledge to solve a problem, learn a new skill, recall existing memories and modify them with new knowledge, etc. Think knowledge not just for knowledge’s sake, but applied intelligence.
Becoming more educated isn’t necessarily easy, but the process is reasonably simple.
Improving fluid intelligence can be harder, which is one reason why “brain training” tools like crossword puzzles, Sudoku, cognitive training apps, etc., are fairly popular.
But do they make you smarter? And more to the point, do they improve your fluid intelligence?
Probably not.
A study published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences assessed the impact of brain training games on fluid intelligence. After participants played Tetris for several weeks, cortical thickness and cortical activity increased.
Both are signs of an increase in neural connections and learned expertise. In simple terms, the participants’ brains bulked up and got smarter. But after those first few weeks, cortical thickness and activity started to decrease, eventually returning to a pre-Tetris mastery level, even though their skill levels remained high.
They didn’t lose brain power. Instead, their brains became so efficient at playing Tetris that increased neural connections became unnecessary. Nor did they have to use more mental energy. As with most things, once they figured it out, it got easier, and then relatively easy.
Unfortunately, no matter how much work it takes to learn new information or gain new skills, “easy” doesn’t cause improvements in fluid intelligence over the long term. Once you gain knowledge or skill, you certainly benefit from the increase in crystallized intelligence, but your fluid intelligence quickly returns to a more baseline level.
While the analogy isn’t perfect goofy, it’s like performing a physical task using muscle memory — although in this case, you’re using “brain memory.”
That’s the problem with, say, brain-training games. Solving Sudoku puzzles, and only solving Sudoku puzzles, won’t improve your fluid intelligence in other areas, no matter how much of a Sudoku master you become. Becoming a Sudoku master only makes you better at solving Sudoku puzzles.
The same is true for business skills. Learning how to use QuickBooks to keep your books will improve your fluid intelligence, until you master it. Learning to use a new CRM application will improve your fluid intelligence, until you master it. Once you achieve a level of (skill) comfort, your brain no longer has to work as hard, and all that new mental muscle starts to atrophy.
Which leads us to the (literally) uncomfortable point.
To keep improving your fluid intelligence, once you master a new process, a new routine, a new skill, a new anything, you need to focus on learning something else.
The key is to stay uncomfortable, and keep challenging yourself.
Do that, and you get to double-dip: You gain new knowledge, new skill, new experience, and keep your brain bulked up since it has no choice but to keep forging new neural connections.
That double-dip also makes it easier to keep getting smarter at a biological and neurological level. The more you know, the more you can leverage the power of associative learning, the process of relating something new to something you already know. In simple terms, associated learning is like saying, “Oh, OK: [This] is basically like [that].”
The more you learn, the more likely you will be able to associate old knowledge with new things. Then you only have to learn differences or nuances, and are able to apply additional context — context that also helps with memory storage and retrieval — to the new information you learn.
All of this makes learning even easier, which a study published in Intelligence shows results in being able to learn even more quickly and retain a lot more. As the researchers write, “The fastest learners, despite having the fewest number of study opportunities, remembered more and relearned faster.”
Keep pushing yourself to learn new things about your business, your customers, your industry, etc. In a broader sense, keep pushing yourself to learn new things about whatever interests you.
Not only will you increase your crystallized intelligence, you’ll also improve your fluid intelligence.
Win-win.
This post originally appeared at inc.com.
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