How to increase your IQ
If you have decided to try, here is the practical version: what has evidence behind it, what only looks like it does, and what is worth doing regardless of whether it moves a number.
The honest framing first, because it changes what you should do.
Raising your IQ can mean two different things: scoring higher on a test, or becoming a better reasoner. Almost everything sold as IQ improvement delivers the first and implies the second. Whether the second is possible at all is covered in can you increase your IQ. This page assumes you have decided to try and want the practical list.
What has the strongest evidence: education
Schooling is the intervention with the best support, and it is not close.
Studies exploiting natural experiments, such as changes to compulsory schooling laws and school entry cutoffs, converge on a genuine causal effect. Estimates commonly land between one and five IQ points per additional year of education.
That is a real, cumulative effect. It is also years of sustained work rather than a technique, which is why it rarely appears in listicles.
The practical version for an adult: structured learning with feedback beats passive consumption. A course you are assessed on does more than a documentary.
What genuinely moves a score, and is not cheating exactly
Sleep. Deprivation measurably degrades working memory, attention and processing speed, and a test samples all three. Turning up rested is not a trick, it is measuring yourself accurately instead of measuring yourself tired.
Treating health problems. Untreated hearing and vision loss quietly depress test performance. So do depression, chronic stress and some medications. Several of these are treatable, and a decline that looks cognitive is sometimes none of those things.
Correcting deficiencies. Where malnutrition, iron deficiency or iodine deficiency exists, fixing it produces real cognitive gains, particularly in childhood. Supplementing an already well-nourished adult does not.
Aerobic exercise. Best evidenced as protective against age-related decline rather than as a way to raise a score. Worth doing regardless.
Practice effects. Take any test twice and you will usually do better the second time. You learned the format, not more reasoning. Gains of several points on retest are normal and expected, and are the mechanism behind most dramatic before-and-after claims.
What does not work: brain training
The commercial brain training industry rests on a claim called far transfer, that practising a specific cognitive task improves general ability.
The consistent finding is that near transfer happens and far transfer largely does not. Practise a working memory task and you get better at that task, and at things closely resembling it. Large well-controlled studies and meta-analyses have repeatedly failed to find meaningful gains in general reasoning.
This is not an obscure academic dispute. In 2016 the maker of Lumosity settled with the US Federal Trade Commission over advertising claims about real-world cognitive benefits.
If you enjoy the games, enjoy them. Just do not expect them to move anything that matters.
What to do instead
The uncomfortable conclusion is that reasoning ability in adults is fairly stable, and the things that push on it are slow and general. But almost nothing you actually want to do requires a higher score.
Skills, knowledge and judgement are far more trainable than the underlying ability, and they are what outcomes turn on. Someone in the average range with a decade of deliberate practice will outperform someone in the superior range who never developed the craft. That gap is covered properly in does IQ predict success.
A practical ordering for anyone who wants the effort to pay:
- Fix sleep and any untreated health problem first. Largest fast return, and it is measurement accuracy rather than improvement.
- Take on structured learning you are assessed on, in a domain you care about.
- Build domain skill deliberately, with feedback, over years.
- Skip the apps.
If you want a baseline to compare against later, our free IQ test takes about ten minutes and shows the result immediately. Bear in mind that retesting brings practice effects, so a later improvement is not necessarily a real one.
Key takeaways
- Education has the strongest causal evidence, at roughly one to five points per additional year of schooling.
- Sleep, treating untreated health problems, and correcting real nutritional deficiencies all produce measurable gains.
- Brain training produces near transfer but not far transfer. Lumosity settled with the FTC over its claims in 2016.
- Practice effects mean retesting usually yields a few extra points without any change in ability.
- Supplements help only where an actual deficiency exists.
- Skills and knowledge are far more trainable than underlying reasoning, and matter more for outcomes.