The beauty of life is that every day is a learning experience. Nothing is stagnant. You wake up every morning and you have a chance to experience something new, and you can never exhaust the number of things to be learnt. It’s beautiful.
You are a combination of the things you consume. If someone were to ask you what makes you who you are, your answer would probably have to do with what you spend the most time doing. This includes what you eat, watch, believe in, listen to, where you work, what you do for fun, and the people you hang around. That’s why you must guard your environment as much as you can to ensure that it is building you rather than breaking you. You must put yourself in the right disposition to build your intellectual capacity.
By definition, intellectual capacity is the ability of an individual to adapt, think, rationalise, change, learn, analyze, and act. It is the development of the cognitive sense of an individual. Growing your intellectual capacity is a secret weapon that can unlock more doors for you in life than you can imagine. It will help you to become more resourceful, knowledgeable, and educated.
Here are a few ways of doing so.
- Expand your horizons
Make friends with people who aren’t your age. Hang out with people whose first language isn’t the same as yours. Get to know someone who doesn’t come from your social class. This is how you see the world. This is how you grow.
Surrounding yourself with familiarity leaves you stuck in a bubble. You don’t get to learn new things. If you are trying to expand your intellectual capacity, you may want to change this mindset. Think about it. Even as you make friends and interact socially, you might want to pick out the people who are different from you in one way or another. More often than not, you will learn something new from these people. Don’t be stuck in your comfort zone. The unfamiliar gifts you with diverse experiences which vastly increase your knowledge. The brain responds to new things by creating new neural pathways. Each new pathway becomes stronger with repetition giving us new skills and strengths.
- Read
Cultivating a reading habit is extremely important. It’s quite limiting to base your life around only what is happening around you and what you are experiencing. Reading takes you through a thousand lifetimes in a few pages. If possible, you should read books and articles that are enlightening. Read about things that you completely didn’t know about. Reading stimulates your imaginative process. Without your conscious effort, your brain is translating the words into images that play like a movie in your mind. The act of reading helps to heighten overall brain function and increase memory.
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- Train your brain
There are very many things that you can do during your passive time to expand your intellectual capacity. The best thing is that with technology, you get to do some of these things on your phone as the day goes. Doing puzzles, for example, reinforces existing connections between our brain cells. It also increases the generation of new relationships. This, in turn, improves mental speed and thought processes. Jigsaw puzzles are especially good for improving short-term memory.
You can play card games like solitaire to improve your intellectual capacity. Solitaire is one of the best card games to improve thinking skills as well, the solitaire game can be very good for your mental health and it can help you exercise your mind. When you do something that does not require you to be perfect, the mind treats it as relaxation. solitaire helps the mind do that. Other than that, it helps you make better decisions and improve your thinking skills. The delicate nature of the game and the fact that it requires the player to be concentrated leads to improved mental retention. It involves creating patterns and matching cards. This makes the brain able to organize things in sequences and orders. It is a game which is more liked by people for the past two centuries. Besides all these facts, this game was developed at the same time as the personal computer was launched.
Aside from this, playing Tetris leads to a thicker cortex and may also increase brain efficiency. This was proven in research where the girls who played the game showed greater brain efficiency. Compared to controls, the girls that practised also had a thicker cortex, but not in the same brain areas where efficiency occurred.
The Rubik’s cube is also very efficient in training the brain. Solving the cube can improve our spatial intelligence, mental reflex, memory, patience, concentration, and much more.
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- Physical activity
Exercising is great for physiological, mental, and physical needs. On top of all this, it is good for the brain. Exercise promotes brain plasticity by stimulating the growth of new connections between cells in many important cortical areas of the brain. It aids the release of hormones which provide an excellent environment for the growth of brain cells.
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- Magnesium-rich foods
If you are trying to expand your intellectual capacity, your diet obviously matters. Magnesium-rich foods have been linked to improving brain performance. This includes dark chocolate, avocados, nuts, legumes, tofu, whole grains, and some fatty fish. Elevating brain magnesium content via increasing magnesium intake might be a useful new strategy to enhance cognitive abilities.
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- How you dress
How much effort do you put in your dressing? It might be more important than you think. It enhances your intelligence. According to Healthline, The “Stroop Test” showed that people who wore lab jackets performed better on mental performance tests than those in the control group who did not wear the lab coat.
You must embrace how important it is to dress for the professional role you play. When you dress appropriately people take you more seriously. The brain responds not to just to knowledge but also mood. When you dress better you feel better. The more you elevate your mood, the more open, flexible, and intelligent you become.
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- Sleep
We all know that resting and sleeping is good for our health. Now, research has proven that it helps to build intellectual capacity. Sleep is important to several brain functions, including how nerve cells (neurons) communicate with each other. Your brain and body stay remarkably active while you sleep. Recent findings suggest that sleep plays a housekeeping role that removes toxins in your brain that build up while you are awake.
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- Hydrate
Water is life. It is necessary for so many physiological processes, including the health of the brain. Your brain is about 75% water. When your brain is functioning on a full reserve of water, you will be able to think faster, be more focused, and experience greater clarity and creativity. On top of this, when the brain is fully hydrated, the exchange of nutrients and toxins will be more efficient, thus ensuring better concentration and mental alertness.
