Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Can IQ be improved?

I'm not sure if there are any threads like this, already, but...
I picked up a bunch of books from the library the other day. I m doing research for articles I am writing for my early learning website. One of the books I came across was Raise a Smarter Child by Kindergarten and claimed 30 IQ points were up for grabs.

I don't know if those IQ points are cumulative like that, but I certainly believe IQ can be improved with the right environment / diet / nurturing.

He maintains that we are all born with genes to learn (I guess some have genes that give them the potential to have very high IQs or low IQs.) The right environment, diet, and stimulation causes those genes to be "turned on" (or keeps "bad" genes from getting turned on, at least.)
He focuses mostly on 0-3 years old when we know the brain is making a lot of connections.

This stuff is not only in his book, but in most of the other books I picked up. I've come across this stuff over and over as I've done my research.

Things that might improve IQ:
*breastfeeding (I know not everyone thinks breast milk boosts IQ, but I do. It makes sense that getting less than optimum nutrition might cause the brain not to develop "optimally". Formula doesn't come close to breast milk yet because we don't even know everything that is in breast milk, plus breast milk is living tissue.)
*Stimulating learning activities (I remember learning how if a baby has cataracts, her brain will sacrifice the brain cells used to see and that can impair vision for the rest of the baby's life, which is why they remove them very early now. So it makes sense to do activities that stimulate and reinforce connections in the brain.)
*Nutrition after breast milk (Same premise as breast milk.)
*Music / Playing an instrument
*Creating a prepared environment so your child has a lot of opportunities to learn.
*Limit TV.
*Keeping toxic chemicals out of your home as much as possible.

I mostly see it as helping your child to fulfill whatever their genetic potential is (both in their ability to think and learn and also overall health), not necessarily give kids a magical 30 extra IQ points out of nowhere.

What do you think?


PS. This isn't a blame the mother / father thread where I'm trying to make people guilty for formula feeding or turning on a TV. I was hoping that wouldn't happen in this forum. I've seen it happen in other places. I'm interested in the scientific basis of these ideas, and not how they make people feel.

From what I can find online, that book fires my snakeoil detectors. I'd be wanting citations to peer-reviewed papers for every claim about everything says makes a difference, and then I'd be looking up the papers myself to see whether they really said that. Unless the claims were things I wanted to be true, of course ;-) For example:
My understanding, though it could be out of date or wrong, is that at this point, despite people having looked, we have practically nothing in the way of convincing connections between specific gene variants and IQ. Therefore I doubt that it can be known that particular environmental factors turn on or off particular relevant genes - we don't even know which genes that is! Without concrete evidence to the contrary, therefore, I'd write this off as pseudo-science: he's saying something that he guesses to be true and it sounds good, but he can't know.

Whether, and if so to what extent, IQ can be improved by environment is a highly controversial topic. The best book I've read on this is Flynn's What is intelligence? but even this does not really answer the question.

In the end, the right answer is probably "who cares?". Many (all?) aspects of achievement *can* be improved by working at them, and the ability to work constructively can also be improved by practice. And for 0-3yos, the appropriate work of both kinds is play....

And yes, we've discussed this before at length (at least once that I remember), but I have a feeling it was in a thread whose title didn't match the contents very well, and am failing to find it.

He has a lot of resources listed in the back, but like I said, this stuff is in many of the books and things I have read. It isn't just him. All of these "experts" seem to be really excited about everything we've been learning about how babies 0-3 learn.


Well, I'm pretty sure motor skills can be improved if the baby has a chance to practice, right? I would think the same applies to the ability to think and problem solve. We also know that if a child is exposed to toxic chemicals (all kids are today) and eats a crap diet, this can lead to health problems.

Childhood cancer is the expression of the "wrong" genes you don't want turned on. I would think it is likely that brain functioning would also be affected by neurotoxins and poor nutrition (well, it is. I know there are many studies showing how toxic chemicals and poor nutrition can affect a growing child.) In the womb, babies develop problems or birth defects if a mother takes toxic substances or doesn't get enough of the right nutrients. Babies who are severely neglected don't develop properly.

So the flip side of this might be that if you provide good food, a safe healthy environment, and a stimulating one for a baby's brain, then she can develop optimally.

I do remember reading quite a few studies linking a higher IQ with breastfeeding and other things, but someone always tries to contest these findings, so I have no clue if they are definitive findings.

I know with breastfeeding, all the literature makes it sound like breastfeeding is a bonus and gives your child better health and a higher IQ or whatever. In reality, feeding your child anything but breast milk may result in a lower IQ, health problems, etc. No one wants to put it that way. (Except her: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2812877/)

So, I see these "bonus" IQ points (if real) as being a result of your child having access to healthy food and such, which is the ideal circumstance (of course, people don't even agree on what a healthy diet looks like.) The book should really say thing like "Feed your kid chicken nuggets all day and that might impact his health and brain functioning. Feed him more vegetables and fruits and he will be more likely to function optimally."
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Also, the way I think of IQ:
To me, an IQ test mainly tests how well you can detect patterns and problem solve. These are thinking skills. I don't know if you can practice IQ test type problems and actually improve your score as an adult, but perhaps it is possible to influence IQ when you are talking about a baby whose brain is just starting to get organized.

I think of IQ as g or as the general amount of intellectual amplitude you have.

You can do things to make sure you don't reach your potential, but I don't think you can increase the potential.

I do a lot of the things you mentioned, too, and it would be extremely hard to do most of it if I had to work full-time and/or was a single mother like some of my friends. I have a friend who desperately wanted to breastfeed her children and couldn't get it to work for her. I don't want to make anyone feel bad in this thread... A lot of this stuff you need support to achieve (and time off from work, too), breastfeeding included.

I am thinking that studies would try to control for the giftedness of parents, but intelligent parents may also be more likely to breastfeed / use eco-friendly products / read books, etc.?

That is kind of what I am thinking. Since I am writing articles along these lines, I am thinking that parents would appreciate knowing what kinds of things they can do to help their child develop optimally. Of course, you risk making them feel like crap if they can't do these things so that is a problem. I personally think that is why these books say things like "Increase your child's IQ" instead of "DON'T do THESE THINGS or you may LOWER your child's IQ."
People want to feel good, not bad.

My sense from most of the research I have read is that there are threshold effects involved, where levels of nutrition (including things like DHA), environmental stimulation, and personal interactions below a certain level, and toxins and stressors above a certain level negatively impact development, but these effects are not at all linear, and you can't create a genius by overstimulating and overfeeding your baby.

I agree. It isn't enough to provide a book list in a bibliography. He needs to provide references to specific papers with evidence for what he's claiming. I would go one step beyond reading the papers that are referenced. I'd also do a general literature search (peer-reviewed, not popular) on the subject. Sometimes people cherry-pick the literature to suit their agendas (the anti-vaccine movement is a case in point).


True, but skills and aptitude are different things. You can get better at running if you work at it every day, but most people will just never run 400 meters in under 50 seconds, no matter how much they practice.


I think that damaging something is typically a lot easier than improving it. Think about how much damage you can do to your body with one five-second vertical fall onto concrete and how long it would take to recover from it. Or think about how quickly a tornado can wreck your house compared to how long it takes to redo the floors in only one room.

I agree about promoting optimal development. That said, I don't believe claims of huge IQ jumps. I think about it this way: if it was really possible to create long-lasting IQ gains on the order of two standard deviations (e.g. from the 50th to the 98th percentile), nearly everyone would be doing this and we'd have a crazy-smart society. It's more likely that, if anything, optimal circumstances can provide a very small boost (but I don't actually know this for a fact). The boost they provide to physical and emotional health is probably much greater and probably also has more profound effects.


Well...cancer is an extremely complicated disease. I don't pretend to be an expert on the subject, but there's definitely a lot more to it than simply turning on the wrong genes (I'm not sure that the term "wrong genes" really applies). Cancer is an interplay of genetic and environmental factors. Some genes are too active and some aren't active enough. Some have mutations. Etc. etc. Cancer is a mess.

I was thinking uh oh, we did all the stuff on the high IQ list.... and look what happened. Perhaps turning on the TV and giving the child some processed food might have made knocked off a few IQ points and made life easier.

I attended a lecture that did extensive studies on string instruments lessons. They used a control group in LA area and found that one year of string or piano increase IQ by 8-7 points. You could replicate this by a second year but that was teh extent of what was studied. It had to be string or piano, not voice, not drums, not brass. I had copied the lecture notes here several years ago.

Also, they have done extensive studies about what happens in the teen years and development and it could explain why some known entrepeneurs don't show any thing extraordinary and then suddenly become great risk and problem solvers. Teen years have a great deal of development in the frontal lobe or working memory. Something the piano or string lessons seem to develop. You can have good develop in the intellectual area early but working memory has to be developed and that is the ability to deal with a lot of facts and deal with an "emergency" situation. So you can have a real smart kid but if the working memory isn't developed, then they cannot problem solve well, on the spot kind of thing.

All this is cumulative.

I tried to do all the early stuff, I figured it better to have an advantage and not, really not knowing how much it all helped. And in the end, we are who we are as parents. I am finding DD more like me as each day passes. I am hoping to improve on the inital prototype.

Ren