TL;DR—It took me about 14 days to increase my IQ by 13 points, in a controlled experiment that involved no learning, it was a relatively pleasant process, more people should be doing this.
A common cliche in many circles is that you can’t increase IQ.
This is obviously false, the largest well-documented increase in IQ using nothing but training is one of 23 points.
A Standard Deviation of IQ
Alas it is a myth that persists, and when pushed on it people will say something like:
You can’t easily increase IQ in a smart and perfectly healthy adult permanently.
FINE — I’m a smart and perfectly healthy adult, I tested my IQ with 4 different tests: FSIQ, the public MENSA test, Raven’s progressive matrices, and Raven’s advanced progressive matrices.
Then I threw the kitchen sink at the problem, and went through every intervention I could find to increase IQ over the course of 14 days (this took ~3 hours per day).
This included no “learning”, or memory games, nor did it include any stimulants. It was all focused on increasing cerebral vascularization and broadening my proprioception.
I got a mean increase of 8.5 points in IQ (my control got 2), and if I only take into account the non-verbal components that increase is 12.6 (3.2 for my control). In other words, I became about a 1-standard deviation better shape rotator.
I observed an increase of > 4 points on all of the tests (and, sigh, if you must know: p=0.00008 on MWU for me, 0.95 for my control)
I used a control who was my age, about as smart as me, shared a lot of my activities, and many of my meals, and lived in the same house as me, in order to avoid any confounding. Also, to account for any “motivation bias” I offered to pay my control a large amount for every point of IQ they “gained” while retaking the tests.
Here is the raw data.
The Flowers for Algernon
The common myths around IQ and its “immutability” are best summarized here by Gwern.
“Given that intelligence is so valuable, if it was easy to get more of it, we would be more intelligent” -for one this argument is confusing IQ for intelligence, but, more importantly, it’s ignoring reality.
Many things are “valuable” yet we don’t have them because our evolutionary environment places constraints on us that are no longer present in our current environment. Nor is it obvious that many of the traits we value were useful for the human species to propagate, or had an easy way of being selected in our short evolutionary history.
Here, let me try:
In the mid-20th century: Your average human has about 50kg of muscles, and the most muscular functional human has about 100 kg of muscles. A human with 200kgs of muscles would be stronger than a grizzly bear, an obviously desirable trait, but our genetics just don’t go there, and you can only take training and steroids that far.
2021: We found a bunch of really fun compounds that’ll get a strongman to over 200 kgs, I’m not sure how much of the 210 kgs are muscle… but probably much, much more than any human had in a per-exogenous-hormones age.
In the mid-19th century: Fat storage is useful, if we could store as much fat as a bear we could do things like hibernate. Alas, the fatest humans go to about 200kgs, and people try to eat a lot, there’s probably a genetic limit on how fat you can get.
In the mid-20th century: Here’s a guy that weighs 635kg, putting an adult polar bear to shame.
And fine you say, becoming stronger and/or fatter than a bear requires tradeoffs, you won’t live past 50 or so and you will sacrifice other areas. But then let’s look at other things that are genetically determined, evolutionarily selected for (heavily), but where with modern tools we can break past imposed boundaries:
Thymic involution
Skin aging
Bone and cartilage repair
Eyesight
One reason why this point of view is so popular is because it commits one of the critical sins of our modern a-scientific world, it confuses the mean for the individual.
Study anything at the mean and the results are boring. We can get humans to become much stronger using training and drugs:
Try it in one very motivated guy and you get the mountain doubling his muscle mass and learning to lift cars in under 5 years.
Try it on a group of 20 somewhat motivated humans with highly skilled scientists and doctors, you get elite athletic teams.
Try it on a group of 10,000 people spread out across 100 hospitals in a study done by underpaid and overworked residents based on a 1 pager where the subjects are motivated to get 100$ and go home and you get… well, you get the point
More so than anything intelligence is under our control, the experience that is currently imparting upon itself these words is the thing that controls itself and the brain (the substrate upon which it will run anew every single moment).
To modify intelligence is to modify experience, and to do so requires the will to do so, as well as clever researchers willing to work with the person.
It’s trivial to see why you can’t just copy-paste some educational guidelines on a teacher’s computer or tell 100 therapists to parrot a few lines and increase intelligence. It’s even trivial to see why no drug would have any effect “on average”, just look at how people chose to use amphetamines, some become Paul Erdos, others become residents of downtown SF.
Why isn’t anyone doing this?
Going back to the original topic… why isn’t anybody doing this?
The research is there, we have thousands of studies on people with disabilities or dementia. Not all of them apply to healthy people, and not all of them are doing an optimal intervention, but you can reason your way into what could work and is safe.
The protocol I came up with was rather pleasant and very safe.
It involved no “learning”, “memory training” or anything else in that realm.
It didn’t involve any stimulants during the test. And no “typical” stimulants were used during the intervention.
It didn’t even involve a harder exercise regime than what I’d usually do, on the contrary, I toned down my exercising by a bit.
I by no means used an optimized setup either, I just cobbled together the hardware and drugs I needed on a 400$ budget, and I used the equipment and people available to me in the tiny town of Christchurch, New Zealand.
So I doubt this is an information, safety, or resource problem for most people. Rather, I think the problem at stake here is that most people feel like change is “bad” at a pretty deep level.
We are usually not comfortable making our brain & mind i.e. “ourselves” the subject of cold objective critique and experimentation — even when we are, we are reluctant to sustain the effort that results in change over time, it feels “wrong” in many subtle ways.
I’ve seen people (and myself) who enjoy signaling or enacting change, but going through it just feels sucky, wasteful, and uncertain. When people are subjected to systems that will change them (prison, school, army), it’s always under huge social pressure and threats of violence, and the systems rely on the assumption that change will be slow (years) and negative (setting constraints on cognition & perception).
So, it may be that increasing IQ, while trivial, just sits at odds with “human nature”.
Conclusion
I have no strong conclusion here, I think my n=2 experiment and the framing in which I’m placing its results might help people detach from the mistaken conclusion that IQ is immutable.
Indeed, we should assume that among mutable things about people, IQ sits at the top.
For now, I am trying to get data from more people in a controlled setting, and will probably know how well this generalizes soon.
Edit: The method that I used consisted of targeted NIR interference therapy, short UV during the morning, a lot of inversion-based exercises where I focused on contracting/relaxing neck and face muscles, a few customized breathing exercises (think wim hof), figuring out the correct levels for a bunch of cholinergic vaso[dilators/modulators] (think noopept), massage therapies to reduce tension on the spine, some proprioception-heavy movement practices, a niche tibetan metta meditation series… and about 5 other things that are even harder to compress. The main point is that “the method” doesn’t matter so much, you can just google “intervention to increase IQ”, find 50 things, dig through the evidence, select 20, combine them, and assume 5 work
IQ Disclaimer: IQ is not intelligence. Intelligence is a fuzzy concept, it is subjective. Nor is it indicative of success in life more so than high school grades (and we all know the people that peaked in high school or college). I talk about IQ because it is a “hard to fake” metric with a lot of data behind it, in that sense it is useful in the same way talking about “money” is useful. I do not condone psychometric literature which tends to be of poor quality nor do I condone the pop biases people have about IQ, which are even sillier than the academic “research” around it.
Psychometry disclaimer: Essentially all well-studied IQ tests are very poorly designed, in that it’s impossible to retake the test without learning effects playing a big role. This requires controlled experiments to “prove” anything, and if we cared about increasing a meaningful fact of intelligence we ought to drop typical psychometry and instead create intelligence tests designed to be retaken. I am using “typical” IQ tests here because I am aiming to prove a point to the external world, I would not use such a thing as a “private” benchmark.
Mind sharing a more complete description of the things you tried? Like, the sort of description which one could use to replicate the experiment?
Are you interested in replicating the experiment ?
Yup.
[EDIT April 5: I do not currently “have the ball” on this, so to anybody reading this who would go test it themselves if-and-only-if they don’t see somebody else already on it: I am not on it.]
Can you email me ? I’d love to set this up for you. If you’re in the bay I might run a cohort for this, and if you aren’t I can send you detailed instructions (but would love for you to have a control … I am trying to get a standardized protocol so people doing things the same way ~ish would help me)
You would need ~300$ worth of equipment and substances (off amazon), and for the version I’m doing now an EEG but one may go without it I suppose.
Ideally you’d also want to throw money on some helpers along the way, I managed to incorporate most the “wowo” stuff myself but there are many ways to get “wowo” wrong, I’ve come to think, and I was lucky enough to filter out many wowo people in my life and build (what I think is) a pretty good framework for “how wowo applies to me” (in this case wowo standing in for stuff like “how to do Yin yoga with visualizations that enhance the poses & breath holds that help relax specific muscle groups”—but like, 10x such things and to some extent individualized)
Still, I have little doubt that if this replicates in 6 more people it could replicate in a dedicated someone doing this remotely, even with cheap equipment & no on-site help.
Can you CC me too?
I work from the same office as John; and the location also happens to have dozens of LessWrong readers work there on a regular basis. We could probably set up an experiment here with many willing volunteers; and I’m interested in helping to make it happen (if it continues to seem promising after thinking more about it).
Is this in the bay?
I’m in SF right now and 6 friends (3 control, 3 intervention) are doing a self-experiment on a version of this stuff with me.
What I’d say is:
a) Wait until March 13/14th when I will have the data, that way it’s not a waste
b) If you think it’s a success (I can just give you the raw data and you can run your own analysis) and you have 6 or more people that want to part-take (split control/intervention, ideally—the controls can just go after) -- I can come over for a few days and help you set up + lend some of my hardware (I’m currently working on a NIR stimulation system that uses an EEG for feedback) | If you’re not in the bay I might be able to set up a remote version
I’m not making a hard commitment here since this whole experiment started as part of a broader neurotech I’m running (not for increasing IQ, but rather for preventing cognitive decline in young adults, however it’s fun to play with stuff like IQ while I don’t have a full neuroscience lab /w me) -- which is to say my schedule is what you’d expect from doing an early stage startup, minced—but it would be awesome to try.
Feel free to email me (george3d6@gmail.com is what I use nowadays) and cc whoever may be interested, but I’d rather hype things up (or drop them) once I have the extra data.
Is there some reason why you don’t want to post the procedure here, on Less Wrong?
Because it’s an individualized approach that is a WIP and if I just write it down 99% of people will execute it badly.
If someone is smart enough to do this in a solo fashion they can literally google search for various techs used in various diseases, figure out what’s easy and would fit a healthy person, then do it.
I posted a broad overview of what I did, I can’t actually get it into a format where I could instruct someone to replicate everything well, that’s practically my point… if this was pill-level difficulty I’d be on shelves by now, but it’s not, it’s easy but easy at a level that’s hard to reach in current social structures.
Why is that a problem? Do you mean this in the sense of “if I do this, it will lead to people making false claims that my experiment doesn’t replicate” or “if I do this, nothing good will come of it so it’s not even worth the effort of writing”.
As someone who runs a lot of self-experiments and occasionally helps others, I’m disappointed in but sympathetic to this approach. People are complicated: the right thing to do probably is try a bunch of stuff and see what sticks. But people really, really want the answer to be simple, and will round down complicated answers until they are simple enough, then declare the original protocol a failure when their simplification doesn’t work.
I think it would be valuable for George to write up the list of interventions they considered, and a case report on how he fine tuned the procedure for himself. Possibly valuable enough to pay for it. But I think he’s doing the right thing by refusing to write out a formal protocol at this stage.
I mean if I write this it will sound very weird and not be followable because it includes things like:
I am trying to replicate this with more people right now so I’d rather not dilute the intervention specifically—hence why this post was not about what I did as much as why one ought to expect increasing IQ, in general, works.
Me reading this post:
wow wtf these results, cool if true!
… * a bunch of explanation * …
*the post ends*
wait what did you actually do for “increasing cerebral vascularization and broadening my proprioception”?
What were your interventions?
Update: found them on your substack:
I realize that I was too vague with it, I think my main point is not so much:
Because what I did was not that difficult, but rather “there’s a lot of cases of IQ increases happening and people ignore them, here’s why”—hence why I lead with a study showcasing a much higher increase and advise people to do a search and see the hundreds (thousands) of studies attesting to such.
For further study: Did the observed increase represent a repeatable gain, or an optimization? Within-subject studies show a full SD variation between test sessions for many subjects, so I would predict that “a set of interventions” could produce a “best possible score” for an individual but hit rapid diminishing returns.
Will have an update on this in 2 weeks or so.
Follow up question: is this a permanent gain or temporary optimization (eg without further intervention, what scores would the subject get in 6 months?)
We know for sure that eating well and getting a good night’s sleep dramatically improves performance on a wide array of mental tasks. It’s not a stretch to think other interventions could boost short term performance even higher.
I made a manifold market for if this will replicate: https://manifold.markets/g_w1/will-george3d6s-increasing-iq-is-tr I’m not really sure what the resolution criteria should be, so I just made some that sounded reasonable, but feel free to give suggestions.
Lovely, if I end up doing this with the LW people that data might be credible enough to close the market ?
Otherwise I can provide confirmation from the people I’m doing it with presently (all fairly respectable & with enough of a reputation in the bay tech scene)
I can ping you to resolve NO if the first run fails.
Sounds good. Yes I think the LW people would probably be credible enough if it works. I’d prefer if they provided confirmation (not you) just so not all the data is coming from one person.
Feel free to ping me to resolve no.
Yeap, that was my impression. I will just confirm “no” and direct other people to confirm “yes” to you—and, if you believe the trust adds up, you can resolve the market.
Nitpick that doesn’t bear upon the main thrust of the article:
More plausibly Josh Silvas weighs 220-ish kg, not 400 kg, and there’s no way he has anywhere near 300+ kg of muscle. To contextualize, the heaviest WSM winners ever weighed around 200-210 kg (Hafthor, Brian); Brian in particular had a lean body mass of 156 kg back when he weighed 200 kg peaking for competition (‘peaking’ implies unsustainability), which is the highest DEXA figure I’ve ever found in years of following strength-related statistics.
I saw that too and I don’t think it’s a nitpick. All of that was raised in support of the idea that human limits are much greater than we think, so having a couple of examples that are off by a factor of two is not a small difference. In addition to the wild claims about a human with 350 kg of muscle mass, I know the world record for unequipped deadlift is just shy of 1,100 pounds/500kg. “Lifting a car” can’t mean picking it off the ground entirely no matter how small it is; my Miata weighs about 2,400 pounds and other than something like a Lotus Elise it’s right at the lowest weight available. I’m willing to buy “picking up the back of a tiny car while leaving the front wheels on the ground, but again that’s not what you implied.
I have no idea about whether you raised your IQ with your method, but the exaggeration of facts I do know makes me suspicious.
See my correction, agree with both points, I don’t think it changes the example, I did a quick google and I’m not into weightlifting/strongman stuff, so I didn’t realize my misinformation was an order of magnitude off.
I still think it’s essentially fair to say these dudes are “buffer” than historical dudes and seem to owe that to advances in training and (primarily) PEDs
I very much doubt this will work. I am also annoyed you don’t share your methods. If you can provide me with a procedure that raises my IQ by 20 points in a manner that convinces me this is a real increase in g, I will give you one hundred thousand dollars.
See my other replies:
Because it’s an individualized approach that is a WIP and if I just write it down 99% of people will execute it badly.
If someone is smart enough to do this in a solo fashion they can literally google search for various techs used in various diseases, figure out what’s easy and would fit a healthy person, then do it.
I posted a broad overview of what I did, I can’t actually get it into a format where I could instruct someone to replicate everything well, that’s practically my point… if this was pill-level difficulty I’d be on shelves by now, but it’s not, it’s easy but easy at a level that’s hard to reach in current social structures.
Also I have no idea if overall +20 points is possible in healthy adults, as I push the limits playing around with this as a side project I’ll figure it out (:
I found a similar claim with the methods included (and even official IQ test): https://youtu.be/lyV8rx2PrYw?t=89
It’s a n=1 experiment, and it requires effort (quad-n-back training), so I won’t claim that it’s worth 100K, but I hope it’s at least worth the time to read my reply.
I also believe that there’s a lot of low-hanging apples in increasing IQ, like meditation and eating plenty of blueberries and eggs.
Looks to me he’s training on the test set tbh. His ambition to get an IQ of 195 is admirable though.
I believe you, but why do you only want to explain the exact stems in private messages? Are you uncomfortable giving away your work for free, or afraid that some of the methods will be ridiculed?
Meditation has been shown to increase IQ. Exercise has been shown to increase IQ. Visualization has been shown to increase IQ. Reductions in stress has been shown to increase IQ. Exercises which help with balance have been shown to decrease ADHD symptoms. Some low-risk supplements can increase IQ (btw I don’t recommend lions mane). More oxygen and better breathing is a plus. Anti-inflammatory foods are recommended.
There’s also a method called “image streaming” which increases IQ, but I haven’t seen research on it, and those who have done it claim that some of the results go away over come once you stop doing it.
I do believe your results. I’d just like a list of things you’ve tried for my convenience and in order to learn a few more things, or to get a better understanding of why certain things work.
At this point though, I’m more interested in the trade-offs than in increasing my IQ. Education has made me more robotic, and it has made me think before I act (which does make me smarter), but this has made it harder to enjoy the moment and to “let go” and be myself.
By the way, learning a second language will slow down your word retrieval. Learning a third has no extra overhead, though. There’s a lot of obscure knowledge like this. Why is it good for your intelligence to learn to play an instrument in your childhood? My intuition tells me that it’s because synesthesia help you create more connections between things, which makes it easier to remember new information.
Edit: Judging by the raw data, it seems like like your verbal IQ decreased? It’s really important. I should know since my spatial IQ is about 50 points above my verbal IQ.
Because it’s an individualized approach that is a WIP and if I just write it down 99% of people will execute it badly.
If someone is smart enough to do this in a solo fashion they can literally google search for various techs used in various diseases, figure out what’s easy and would fit a healthy person, then do it.
I posted a broad overview of what I did, I can’t actually get it into a format where I could instruct someone to replicate everything well, that’s practically my point… if this was pill-level difficulty I’d be on shelves by now, but it’s not, it’s easy but easy at a level that’s hard to reach in current social structures.
I’m perfectly fine giving this away for free, I am doing so as we speak with some people in SF :)
Agree, social conditioning and amphetamins are a bad approach to increasing IQ.
See note, I got interrupted during a time sensitive task and didn’t care about it ⇒ so I moved forward, otherwise I’d have had to retake non-verbal components that I did care about.
I’m not a native speaker anyway (learned English in my teens), so the verabl IQ standalone is fairly meaningless.
I see! Thanks for your reply.
Even if you make a perfect recipe, I don’t think it will be on the shelves ever. The brain changes in response to effort, and generally only when it believes that you’re doing something relevant/important. People who are looking for an easy way to super-intelligence might be the types who try to get around effort rather than welcome it. And I guess that the random participants in scientific studies might be too average as well, that they don’t try hard enough to get the desired effects.
I hope your experiments go well! It will be interesting to see what the ceiling is on the long-term results (and how many effects you can stack)
Did you feel a subjective increase in your intelligence? E.g. feeling like you’re thinking faster, more clearly, having a better memory?
Do you think this is permanent? Or will you have to keep up all of the interventions for it to stay +13points indefinitely?
Will retest in 2 weeks and probably in 6-12 months too. But some of the bits I did I quite like and I’ll just keep doing
It has been 15 days. Any updates? (sorry if this seems a bit rude; but I’m just really curious :))
The shining light on the head intervention has previously been discussed on LW: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rH5tegaspwBhMMndx/led-brain-stimulation-for-productivity?commentId=rGib9Ju4RJCgsBEtg
(IMO: Small effects with cheap devices, unclear side effects; larger effects with medical-grade lasers, but easy to hurt yourself and also unclear side effects; having the sun shine red/IR light at you probably works better.
I want to read more about the other interventions, will email you.
Someone should run studies.)
Define “small” ? I’m using ~100W of NIR + RED and my current EEG feedback + NIR stimulation prototype will be at 24W (but with clever use of interference, which no devices do at the moment afacit, if you know of one I’d love to buy it though)
Hmm, interesting! What devices do you use?
(I meant small effect sizes)
Given your plans to expand the research/testing and the interest from a couple (at least two expressly stating the interest) of others here to try reproducing the results or trying the approach, can we anticipate an update in the near future?
yes
I would be more interested in list of sources, because I googled “targeted NIR interference therapy IQ” and the first post in Google is yours.
Thirteen points?! If I could get results like that, it would be even better than the CFAR handbook, which merely doubled my IQ.
I’m confused whether:
the point of this article is that the IQ tests are broken, because some trivial life improvements (like doing yoga and eating blueberries) will raise your IQ score or whether:
the point of this article is that you actually raised your “g” by doing trivial life improvements, and we should be excited by how easy it is to become more intelligent
Skimming it again I’m pretty sure you mean (2).
Somewhere in between actually, I tried to do something like (2) but in part I’m sure it’s (1)
I avoided any conceptual/learning tasks and just did brain stimulation, non-stimulant drugs and various physical practices to avoid (1) as much as possible
You can toally do n-back training or take IQ tests to increase your IQ, and it’s pretty boring.
Gut reaction: I’d bet most of the effect comes from things “think noopept”
You should try this and see, if noopept yield that much at doses where there’s no CV side effects that’d be a great and novel finding
There seem to be some critical methodological errors here that have easy fixes. First, the intervention subject took the same or strictly more time in the second test compared to the first, and the control took the same or less time. This is pretty bad for iq tests of this sort, you would already expect more time to result in better scores. Second, the SAME tests were used for before and after, and some of the tests literally tell you the answers after you do the questions. In particular, the spatial aspect of the first test tells you the answers for a large number of the questions, so this is quite prone to practice related increases, and the spatial subsection in particular was used to judge fluid intelligence change. Considering you seemed to be operating under the assumption that the scores on different tests are measuring the same thing, why not just take different tests before and after?
All of these issues are resolved by having controls and by the variance within control.
Using different tests, given that the results don’t correlate very well, would be a mistake.
I am unclear on if you are claiming that your process would work on an intelligence test designed to be retaken (and you didn’t use one because it would be less legible) or that it wouldn’t work on one. I think the former though.
The former, there are no good tests designed to be retaken otherwise I’d use it with one.