Start the journey of maximising brain power

Do you at times feel deep inside you lies a smarter person who could think faster, be wittier, and solve complex problems with ease? I mean when you are sober.

When I used to drink, after a few beers, I used to feel like my immense intellectual capacity would make great inventors shiver in their boots.

Do you believe you are actual smarter or at least you are created smarter than you think? I am always amazed that most parents have faith in the intellectual potential of their children.

When the child is young and she starts babbling incoherently, the parents, will be telling everyone who cares to listen how intelligent his daughter is. I have no doubt about the immense intellectual capacity of children.

Scientists have claimed that the brain grows most at age 0-3 years. During this period, a child’s brain is like a sponge. It soaks information and seems to have fun doing so.

Think about it. When children come into this world they know no language. Yet within a period of three short years, they will learn and speak languages without a formal teacher or any structured learning assistance.

The child is born a genius and remains so until you take him/her to school or teach him/her. In many instances, things seems to go terribly wrong.

The joy of learning gradually slides away and the giggling disappears. The look of curiosity when learning is now replaced by an anxious contorted face which is constantly buried deep in books for fear of being ridiculed incase of failure.

In many instances, IQ (Intelligence Quotient) has been used as a measure of one’s intellectual abilities. IQ is a measure that was developed from a series of standardised test to measure and compare intelligence among humans.

Having a high IQ can make certain aspects of life easier, especially when it relates to scholastic activities.

The beauty of intelligence is that it is not fixed as it was believed for many decades.

It is possible to increase one’s IQ. When I first discovered that, I was excited about the possibilities of feats human beings can achieve. In the course of time, I decided I had to find a way to make this happen in real-life.

So I got down to it. Over the years, I spent hundred of hours researching, learning and experimenting, my goal being to get smarter, in my new found field of neuroscience.

One of the things I discovered is that the human brain is in many ways similar to a muscle.

It is highly trainable and it adapts and evolves based on the stimuli it receives. This is what neuro-plasticity is all about.

Just like how anyone has the power to reshape his/ her body and increase athletic prowess through physical training, cognitive training allows one to significantly increase mental capacity over time by forming new neurons and creating new neural pathways.

The first thing one can do to increase his/her IQ is exercise. One thing that stimulates the brain is exercise.

People who exercise tend to have higher IQs than those who do not. Research has shown on average that people who take care of their bodies are more intelligent than the chronic couch potatoes. Exercise is one of the easiest ways through which one can boost his/ her IQ simply because it is free.

The author is a life coach and founder of Peak Performance International- a human potential development firm coach@peakperformance-int.com