The limit to one's intelligence

[carol]

I've been wondering, can someone do something to make himself smarter?

Or is there a limitation to one's ability to learn or his intellect?

[the tree]

The brain works by making neural connections, to make more connections, use it more. Making these connections is easier when your brain is still growing. Some people find it easier to make new connections than others. There may be a maximum amount of connections it is possible for one head to hold, I imagine this would be lots.

[carol]

A friend of mine told me that a person would reach his maximum at the age of fifteen.

[Bluenoise]

Let me guess your friend is like 13?

 

Or maybe he's just stopped getting smarter at that age. I know I'm 25 and I swear I'm still getting smarter.

[Edtharan]

With the onset of puberty, the number of neural connection actually gets reduced. The brain starts pruning it's connections, yet we get smarter.

 

So it si not simple the number of connections in the brain, but the quality of those connections (what they connect to and the organisation of them).

 

So, to get smarter, we first need to increase the number of connection, and then prune them, leaving the ones that are necessary.

 

We can still do this later in life, but at a much reduced rate (and so it is harder to learn new things). If we could "engineer" our brains so that we could make and break these connections at the same rate we did when we were children, then we might be able to dramatically increase human intelligence.

[weknowthewor]

Let's have something to measure one's intelligence here..

[carol]

I think there is something wrong with the link