If you want to improve your intelligence and IQ, the following methods will help you to do so.

Look for novelty

To become engineers, you need to look for novelty. If you take a look at the geniuses that we had like Einstein, they wear skill in different and multiple areas and so we called them polymaths. You need to seek out novel activities, learn a new domain. You should be open to new experiences. If you are high on openness, you will constantly seek new information, new activities to engage in and new things to learn, new experiences in life. Using your brain to become better in different activities will help you to improve your intelligence and IQ.

When are seeking novelty, you are creating new synaptic connections with every new activity. These connections build on each other and because of that your neural activity will increase. That will result in creation of more connections which will be built on other connections and in that process learning will happen.

There are researches going on about neural plasticity as a factor in individual differences in intelligence. Plasticity generally means the number of connections made between neurons, how that affects subsequence connections and also talks about the duration of these connections. Such research focuses on how much new information you can take in and how much of it you can retain. When you constantly learn new things, you are using your brain in a state of learning.

Challenge yourself

If you want to increase your intelligence and IQ, you will have to challenge yourself. Brain training games will help you to improve your intelligence will stop such brain training games means memorisation and fluency type games which can increase the speed of processing. Such games includes Sudoku. However, simply playing Sudoku will not increase your intelligence. You will need to challenge yourself. Once you master Sudoku, you will need to move onto the next challenging activity or challenging game. If you want your brain to keep making new connections and keep them active, you will need to keep moving onto another challenging activity when you reach the point of mastery in one.

Think creatively

Think creatively does not mean thinking with the right side of your brain. Creative cognition on the other hand means diverging thinking on a wide range of topics or subjects, making remote associations between ideas, switching back and forth between conventional and unconventional thinking and also generating original and new ideas.

Do things the hard way

If you are trying to do everything more efficiently and trying to do more things in a shorter amount of time, it may not help your brain. If something is more efficient and easy for you, it may not help you to increase your intelligence and IQ. If you learn to do something the hard way, your brain needs to work more and needs to remember more things. That way by working more, your brain can become better at doing things and at the same time it will also increase your intelligence and IQ. If you're taking shortcuts and making life easier, faster and more efficient, sometimes that may hurt your cognitive skills.

References References 1. Roadmap To Genius – Improve Intelligence & IQ
2. Theories of Intelligence
3. How We're Smart