Maintain high levels of mental activity
The more conversations you have had as a child or have with your child, the more intelligent you or your child become. So if you want to power up your child’s or your own brain, then have more conversations. Start this form of brain training as early as humanly possible. Simple brain games involving naming objects and solving puzzles make learning a social as well as an educational matter and this improves everyone’s IQ.Communication increases our vocabulary, which is important for our general intelligence levels. Kids whose parents read to them most days have higher IQs. However, the key to an increased IQ is not just to read, but to read interactively to a child. That means that you should use an interesting and varying tone of voice, showing lots of relevant emotion as you read. Look for signs of interest or reactions in the child and ask those questions as you go, making sure the child understands what is being read. For example, you could stop and ask: “What do you think happens next?” You can also check to see if they can tell you the meaning of a word, or you can provide one for them. This makes reading a fun social activity and this is where the real IQ boost comes from. This is probably the simplest and most important thing you can do for your child and it is why TV and audio stories played from CDs or computers just will not do the trick. It turns out that kids need their parents! Engaging with stories is very good for a child’s intellectual development, as shown in the article “What Reading Does for the Mind” by Cunningham .
But don’t worry if you were never read to as a child. Exercising the brain and keeping mentally active is always a good idea, no matter what age you are now. Fun activities like crosswords, Sudoku, or whatever similar activity takes your fancy have long been suspected by neuroscientists to help improve your cognitive ability. Even struggling to understand a map or a badly written flat-pack furniture assembly guide will exercise your spatial and reasoning abilities. One of the simplest things you can do to make your brain sweat is to try to understand points of view that you do not agree with. Open your mind and listen to arguments that make no sense to you and try to find some sense in them.