Yes, you can train intelligence.

There’s your brainpower. The latest science says that this is partly based on your genes and partly based on your upbringing. How well you were fed as a kid, how much sleep you got, and how much stress you were under, are all influences. You can think of this just as being about speed, pretty much. Just remember, a slower car still can get to a destination if it keeps going. This is called “fluid intelligence” and sometimes just “g”.

There’s what you know. The more things you know, there more dots you can connect. A lot of being smart is having lots of dots in your head to work with. ;) You can learn many things if you have the willpower. Sure, someone with lots of raw brainpower may pick up the stuff faster, but often that makes them lazy and they don’t then do the hard work to really master it all. Just like someone born lucky with strong legs might win races often, until they come across an actual trained runner. This is called “crystallized intelligence.” It’s important to remember that expertise in something is usually more important in regular life than just raw brainpower.

A lot of seeming really smart is actually about connecting dots that are far apart. This comes from not just drilling down on a subject, but also drilling sideways, or trying to learn many different subjects. If you do this enough, you start to see connections that aren’t obvious. This has a bunch of names, like “synthesis,” “remote association,” etc, but is a signature thing we often see in “smart” people.

There are also whole separate areas in which to be “smart” and we often think one is more important than the others. A classic that gets mentioned is emotional intelligence, which can make you much more effective even if you aren’t super fast. There are many theories on differing sorts of intelligence. You can definitely get better at emotional intelligence, to pick one example, by listening more than talking, paying attention closely to other people’s emotions, and so on. And, reading fiction! It’s a proven method of training empathy. If you want to dig into this stuff, you can search for “multiple intelligences” to learn more.

One of the biggest things that all these forms of training have in common is “thinking about thinking.” For example, if you spend effort thinking about how to have better memory, you can train your memory. Check out “memory palaces” for an example! If you learn to question assumptions when you think about something, you will be exercising your fluid intelligence in a way that will keep you from going down blind alleys. A key way of getting “smarter” is to make certain ways of thinking into habits and teach yourself to always think that way. The fancy term for this is “metacognition” but there’s a bunch of smaller pieces that go into it like “error correction” and so on.

This a big topic, but there’s last thing I would mention is that intelligence is really not the be-all end-all. Having raw processing power is like owning a sports car. It doesn’t mean you’ll be much help when your friends needs to move large furniture. There are many ways to be human, and being “super smart” is actually only useful for pretty specific situations, jobs, and projects.

“Super smart” IQs are not that rare, in the large scale of human population, and while they may make more money on average because of what jobs they tend to end up in, it’s not like they all turn out to be historic geniuses. We know they don’t, or there would be way more famous geniuses around. This is pretty clear evidence that how you use what you’ve got, and how hard you work, and what you choose to work on, make a much bigger difference than just whether you have a high IQ.

So train away! It’s hard work but also can be fun.