Neuro-Sculpting! Training Studio

Want To Be Smarter? Brain Fitness Training Is For You!

According to scientific research, using a strategically customized set of simple brain fitness training techniques, you can actually improve your memory, problem-solving ability, and overall chances of success because such an approach enhances your “Fluid Intelligence.”

University of Michigan researchers proposed in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that well-designed brain fitness training exercises can augment numerous processes within the brain’s Executive Function which plays a management role in the brain responsible for planning the future, achieving goals, self-control, and our personal sense of identity.

General intelligence tends to be broken into two categories; those of “crystalline” (or “crystallized”), and “fluid”. While crystallized intelligence consists of skills applied to carry out familiar tasks and can be executed without much mental effort, fluid intelligence tends to be a bit more challenging to the mind, often involving much adjustment and knowledge acquisition during a real-time effort. For instance, if you have already learned how to change a light bulb when you were younger and are tasked with replacing a series of one hundred bulbs, you are accessing crystallized intelligence – it is established, familiar, repetitive, and does not require a major cognitive shift or change in brain state to carry out. If, on the other hand, you were placed in a sizeable, utterly dark room and given the same task, with no idea whatsoever the location of any tools, ladders, bulbs, or sockets, then you would be tapping into your fluid intelligence to help you along the task.

When it comes to brain fitness training approaches, the techniques you employ can have a similarly low value vs. high value effect. If you sit down to engage in a type of brain teaser with which you have become familiar and it requires no challenging use of the wide range of your mental resources, then you would be leaning on crystallized intelligence to complete the task. However, if the cognitive challenges you employ require you to be curious, contemplative, creative, while forcing you to make many adjustments to your effort, then you are operating in the arena of fluid intelligence. As an example, learning a second language is good from a brain fitness perspective, but at some point your gains start to level off as your knowledge becomes crystallized in memory. To jumpstart your progress and drastically boost your fluid intelligence, you would actually travel to the country where the language is spoken and immerse yourself in the culture.

The more consistently you practice tapping into your fluid intelligence and pressing it to the limit, the more your brain will respond by strengthening your brain cells and the hundreds of billions of connections that they use to communicate with one another in order to meet the increased demand.