In the movie ‘Limitless’, Bradley Cooper plays the role of a struggling writer who boosts his IQ with a new drug. In the ensuing drama, we watch as Cooper’s character writes a best-selling book, cracks the stock market and eventually enters politics.
The movie is one of my favourites largely for the seemingly outlandish concept it portrayed — that humans could improve their cognitive ability beyond what they were born with.
The intelligence that we are endowed with is the single most predictive indicator of our future life outcomes; those with high measured intelligence are more likely to go to college, achieve higher salaries, and even live longer.
Despite the undeniable importance of intelligence, the conventional wisdom is that there is nothing we can do to improve what we were born with. The self improvement sector instead focuses its attention on either our physical health, by promoting nutrition and exercise, or the volume of content we have amassed through reading books or taking courses (known as crystallised intelligence).
Notably absent from the conversation is the more foundational matter of how efficiently our brain actually processes and accesses information, solves problems and makes decisions (known as fluid intelligence).
Surprisingly, research suggests it isn’t true that our fluid intelligence is immutable. Better still, to improve our intelligence we needn’t steal untested drugs or take money from scary loan sharks as is portrayed in Limitless; all we need to do, in simple terms, is exercise our brain.
There is an abundance of evidence now that the practice of meditation not only improves our fluid intelligence, but that the effect is significant.
Some highlights from the academic research are:
Three studies on 362 high school students in Taiwan found that those randomly assigned into a test-group to meditate showed statistically significant improvements in all 7 tests designed to measure creativity, spatial reasoning, inspection time, and intelligence as measured by Cattell’s Culture Fair Intelligence Test (CFIT for short) compared to a control group who napped for the same amount of time. The results were all also statistically significant.
In another study, 100 Indian & American University students were tested on Cattell’s Culture Fair Intelligence Test (CFIT) and Hick’s reaction time and were found to have very significant improvements relative to a control group (statistically speaking). The improvements were very statistically significant for CFIT, three reaction time tests were all also statistically significant.
So how big could the effect be? One study reported that when children with ADHD were administered a type of neurofeedback similar to meditation, theirs IQ scores increased by an average 23% (33 points for children with starting IQ below 100).
Outside of academia, it might surprise you that many of the most successful people you can name are meditation advocates. I personally came upon meditation while reading Ray Dalio’s book. Dalio is one of the most revered people in finance, running Bridgewater Associates — the world’s largest hedge fund. Here are some other names you might know that are daily meditators:
Tiger Woods, Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan, Lebron James, John John Florence, Tom Brady, Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic, Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo and Lewis Hamilton.
You might have noticed that the names in the list above aren’t business leaders or academics, they’re sportspeople. In fact, the names in the list above are regarded as being some of the GOATs (Greatest Of All Times) in their respective sports. The correlation between meditation practice and hyper-success is so strong, that in making this list, I literally just googled the best sportspeople I could think of and added “meditation” and realised an incredibly high strike rate. So why are so many sportspeople ardent meditators?
We can only assume it is due to some of the other benefits of meditation like the ability to maintain focus for extended periods and ignore distractions. For example, in a study where participants had to track moving objects amongst distractions as shown in this video, meditators had a statistically significant 9% improvement in accuracy post-meditation vs. their pre-meditation results (a control group showed no improvement).
It is startling to see such convincing academic evidence in complete agreement with the lived experience of hyper-successful people.
I have been practicing meditation for 15 minutes a day over the past four months, and my personal experience certainly supports the academic results above. I’m finding it easier to concentrate, problems are easier to solve, and my general productivity seems to be far beyond what it was.
So, for 15 minutes a day, do you think it’s worth trying? Or are you too busy to make yourself smarter?
Disclaimer
What is commonly referred to as “intelligence” is complex, and doesn’t have a consensus definition among researchers. Also, I’m not a neuroscientist, I have no qualifications in this area, and everything I understand about meditation is self learned.
