You've probably seen those brain-training ads. The ones promising that if you just slide some colorful blocks around on your phone for ten minutes a day, you'll suddenly turn into a MENSA candidate. It’s a lie. Honestly, it’s mostly just a way to sell subscriptions to people who feel like they’re losing their edge. If you want to know how to get intelligent, you have to stop looking for shortcuts and start looking at how the brain actually builds its own hardware.
Intelligence isn't a fixed bucket. For a long time, psychologists like Lewis Terman thought your IQ was basically set in stone by the time you hit puberty. They were wrong. We now know about neuroplasticity—the brain's ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life. But here’s the kicker: your brain is incredibly lazy. It wants to automate everything to save energy. To get smarter, you have to force it out of that automation.
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It’s uncomfortable. If it feels easy, you aren't getting more intelligent; you're just practicing what you already know.
The Fluid vs. Crystallized Trap
Most people confuse "knowing things" with "being smart." Raymond Cattell, a psychologist back in the 1960s, broke intelligence down into two categories: fluid and crystallized. Crystallized intelligence is your database. It’s the facts you know, the vocabulary you’ve memorized, and the "how-to" knowledge you've accumulated. Fluid intelligence is the raw processing power. It’s your ability to reason, see patterns, and solve problems you’ve never seen before without relying on past experience.
When people ask how to get intelligent, they usually need a boost in fluid intelligence.
Think of it like a computer. Crystallized intelligence is the hard drive—the data stored on it. Fluid intelligence is the RAM and the processor. You can keep adding data to the hard drive (reading Wikipedia all day), but if the processor is slow, you’ll still struggle to synthesize that info into something useful. To actually upgrade the "processor," you need to engage in high-effort cognitive tasks.
One of the few methods backed by actual peer-reviewed research for increasing fluid intelligence is the "Dual N-Back" task. A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by Susanne Jaeggi showed that practicing this specific type of memory task could actually raise IQ scores. It's not fun. It feels like your brain is being put through a meat grinder. But that’s the point. It pushes your working memory to its absolute limit.
Read Deeply, Not Often
We live in a "summary" culture. You probably have a friend who brags about reading 100 books a year because they listen to 15-minute summaries on an app while driving. That's fine for trivia, but it does nothing for your cognitive depth.
Deep reading is a lost art.
When you read a complex text—something like Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman or even a dense piece of classic literature—your brain has to maintain a massive web of context. You’re tracking arguments, predicting outcomes, and visualizing scenarios. This is a massive workout for the prefrontal cortex.
If you want to know how to get intelligent, stop reading for "the gist." Read for the nuance.
Take the work of Carol Dweck on the "Growth Mindset." Most people think it just means "trying hard." But if you actually read her research, it’s about the underlying neurological belief that effort changes the brain’s structure. When you believe you can get smarter, you actually engage with difficult material longer. You don't give up when the "heat" in your brain starts to rise. That heat is the feeling of myelin—the fatty sheath around your neurons—thickening to make signals travel faster.
The Problem With Your Smartphone
Your phone is essentially an external lobotomy.
Every time you outsource a memory to Google or a route to GPS, you’re letting a part of your brain go dormant. A study from the University of London found that people who constantly multitask with electronic media saw a drop in their IQ that was greater than if they had stayed up all night or smoked marijuana.
Essentially, the "pings" and "notifications" train your brain to have a short-circuit attention span. You lose the ability to enter "Deep Work," a term coined by Cal Newport. Deep work is the state where actual intellectual breakthroughs happen. If you can't sit with a single problem for 90 minutes without checking your phone, you are effectively capping your intelligence.
Physicality and the Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor
It sounds weirdly simple, but the best way to get smarter might be to go for a run.
High-intensity aerobic exercise triggers the release of something called Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF). Scientists call it "Miracle-Gro for the brain." BDNF helps repair failing brain cells and protects healthy ones. More importantly, it encourages the growth of new neurons in the hippocampus, the area of the brain responsible for long-term memory and spatial navigation.
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If you are sedentary, your brain is operating in "maintenance mode." It isn't looking to expand.
Dr. John Ratey, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, has documented this extensively in his book Spark. He found that students who exercised before school performed significantly better on standardized tests than those who didn't. It wasn't just about blood flow; it was about the chemical environment created in the brain.
- Aerobic Exercise: Aim for 30 minutes of elevated heart rate to spike BDNF.
- Complex Movement: Activities like rock climbing or Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu require "proprioception"—knowing where your body is in space—which forces the cerebellum to work overtime.
- Consistency: The cognitive benefits of a single workout last for a few hours, but the structural changes take months.
Social Intelligence and the "Double-Loop"
We often think of the "lone genius" in a room full of chalkboards. In reality, intelligence is highly social.
Chris Argyris, a business theorist at Harvard, talked about "Double-Loop Learning." Most people are stuck in a single loop: they have a problem, they try a solution, and if it fails, they try another solution. Double-loop learning involves questioning the assumptions behind the problem in the first place.
You can’t easily do this alone. Your own biases are invisible to you.
When you engage in high-level debate with people who are smarter than you, you’re forced to see the "cracks" in your own logic. This is why the "echo chamber" of social media is so dangerous for intelligence. If you only ever hear things you agree with, your brain’s "critical thinking" pathways begin to atrophy. You become a pattern-matching machine rather than a reasoning one.
Seek out people who disagree with you but are intellectually honest. It’s exhausting. It’s also how to get intelligent in a way that actually matters in the real world.
The Cognitive Cost of Diet and Sleep
You can't build a skyscraper with cheap wood.
The brain consumes about 20% of your total daily calories despite being only 2% of your body weight. If you're eating highly processed sugars, you’re causing neuroinflammation. This "brain fog" isn't just a feeling; it's a physical slowing of the synaptic transmission.
Omega-3 fatty acids, specifically DHA, are the literal building blocks of the brain's cell membranes. If you aren't getting enough, your brain has to use inferior fats, which makes the membranes more rigid and less efficient at sending signals.
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And then there’s sleep.
During sleep, your brain’s glymphatic system opens up. Think of it as a dishwasher for your head. It flushes out metabolic waste, including amyloid-beta, which is the stuff that builds up and leads to Alzheimer's. More importantly for intelligence, sleep is when "consolidation" happens. This is when your brain moves information from short-term "scratchpad" memory into long-term structural knowledge. Pulling an all-nighter to study is the single dumbest thing you can do for your intelligence. You might "know" the facts for the test, but you haven't integrated them into your fluid intelligence.
Actionable Steps to Level Up
If you're serious about this, stop looking for "hacks." Start building a lifestyle that demands more from your brain.
- Adopt the 20-Minute "Struggle" Rule: When you hit a problem you don't understand—whether it’s a math equation or a technical manual—do not look up the answer for at least 20 minutes. Force your brain to dwell in the discomfort of not knowing. This is where the actual growth happens.
- Learn a Non-Native Language: This is perhaps the most powerful "all-around" brain trainer. It forces you to switch between different rule sets (grammars) and increases the density of gray matter in the left hemisphere.
- Practice Active Recall: After you read something, close the book and write down everything you remember on a blank sheet of paper. Don't look back until you're done. This "pulling" of information strengthens the neural pathways much more than "pushing" information in by re-reading.
- Kill the Passive Consumption: Limit your time on "infinite scroll" platforms. These are designed to keep you in a state of passive, low-level stimulation that discourages deep thought.
- Prioritize "Novelty": Take a different way home. Use your non-dominant hand for basic tasks. Try a hobby you are naturally bad at. Novelty forces the brain to create new pathways rather than relying on the "paved roads" of habit.
Getting intelligent isn't about being born lucky. It’s about being a disciplined architect of your own mind. It requires a rejection of the easy, the fast, and the summarized in favor of the difficult and the deep. If you aren't feeling the mental "burn," you aren't growing. Real intelligence is a byproduct of sustained, focused effort against the grain of your own mental laziness.
Start by picking one complex topic this week—something you find intimidating—and commit to reading the foundational papers or books on it for 30 minutes every morning. No phone. No distractions. Just you and the difficulty of the ideas. That is where the transformation begins.
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