A tip I learned was that bad spellers (like me) usually try to sound out words. A better way to remember spelling is though visualization. All great spellers use this method. What you do is picture the word out in your mind. Then you just read it out loud or to yourself.

If you visualize you will certainly succeed in spelling more word correctly.

There are sometimes words that we just can’t get right. To remember these words you just have to put in a bit more mental effort.

Try these tips -

1. Find Patterns in the lettering.
2. Try to think of a phrase out of the letters.

Here is an example for #2 -

For the word Supersede (not supercede) use -Superman does not ‘c’ lex luther-

The idea is to add more mental tags that you can bring to mind when you try and spell the word.

Spelling is simple if you know how to do it. Now, you know.

What About My Age?

As you get older you start to notice more that you have lost things or forgot where you put something. Then you blame your age for your ‘lack’ of memory. The fact is that being older does not mean that your memory will get worse. In fact, studies have shown that age does not induce memory loss, just a decrease in reaction time.

Then Why Do I Forget?

There are many different reasons why you may forget things. The big reason is that you are not consciously not trying to remember. In other words, you are not fully paying attention. The reason that you are not paying attention could be that you are not interested, or you’re thinking about something else.

• Not Interested - When you are not interested you tend not to pay attention. When you don’t pay attention you will not be able to memorize it.
• When you are thinking about something else - You will not be able to memorize what you want to, because your conscious mind will be centered around something else.

Conscious and Subconscious

• Your conscious - what you are currently thinking about. Your conscious is very limited compared to your subconscious.
• Subconscious - The subconscious is more vast then your conscious. It is kind of like the autopilot of your body, while your conscious is working on something else the subconscious is doing everything else. Like your subconscious is currently feeling the sensations on your forehead while you were reading this.

Keep reading on to learn how effectively use your conscious to quickly and easily learn new things and memorize more easily.

How do you increase your IQ? Well first you need to know the answer to “What is IQ“. Once you understand what IQ is, you will understand that IQ is not really what you know. It is more like a skill. To develop skills you need to practice, and that is what I have outlined. These are general IQ increasing techniques that will start you off.

General IQ Increasing Techniques -

These are some practical techniques that should help you process information faster and improve comprehension.

• Learn to Speed Read - Speed reading is where you look at text and quickly skim through it. When you skim read try to pull out only the information that is important. You do not need to know everything on that one page. Developing your speed reading skills will help you process a large amount of text easily. It can also be applied to increasing your knowledge base by practicing your skills in reading factual articles on the internet.
• Play the Ultimate Game of Geniuses | Chess - Chess is the best game that you can play that makes you apply strategy. Chess makes you visualize the board in your mind and think what move you should do and how your opponent will counter it. What is great about this game, is that it makes you practice using both halves of your brain.
• Do Word Searches - Word searches are magical because they make you look at the big picture to find the words. If you look at one line at a time then you will never finish it. Looking at the big picture is a big element of IQ.
• Play Sudoku - Sudoku is a great game, not because it is fun to do and can be done anytime when you are bored. It is great because it exercises the mind. You need to look at the big picture and process which numbers you are missing and place them in the right area. It is also a great little “IQ Test” that you can do anywhere by doing them as fast as you can, and timing yourself.
• Use a Rubik’s Cube - Rubik’s Cubes also make you look at the big picture and make you find a way to fix a problem. Rubik’s Cubes are always fun to play with and are fairly inexpensive.  If you don’t fully understand the math of the Rubik’s Cube, you should look it up online. There are many articles and videos that will show you how it’s done.

Use Mind Games for Creativity, Logic, and Processing Speed - I have a whole separate article on this but I’ll touch up on it here. Mind games are simple games that you can play anywhere. An example is quickly adding up the price of all of your groceries and applying coupon discounts to them in your head.

Physical Ways to Increase Your IQ -

IQ and mental performance is widely influenced by our physical health. Therefore working on your health will help increase your IQ. Here are some quick ways to make yourself more healthy.

• Take a Morning Walk or a Jog - Running in the morning is just really rewarding, it just feels right. That is because walking/running in the morning will get fresh oxygen into your lungs and improve blood flow to the brain. This would be a good way to start a day where later, you have to take a test. Also, running in the morning helps relieve stress and anxiety.
• Lay off the Drugs, Alcohol and Caffeine - all of these negatively effect your health. Smoking is especially bad because it lowers your oxygen intake.
• Meditation Improves Brain Power - A daily 15 minutes just sitting down in a quiet room meditating does wonders for your mind. First and foremost, meditation relieves stress. Secondly, it makes you more calm and your attentiveness doubles. The more aware that you are the easier it is to learn.
• Simple Deep Breaths - Breathing Deeply improves circulation to the brain and helps us relax away tension, both of which improves IQ. This helps because normally we take small breaths. Just a quick tip: You will breath deeper if you breathe through your nose.
• Eating Complex Foods to Increase IQ - The brain need glucose to operate at max power. Glucose is like calories for the brain, but unlike calories we can’t store glucose in fat. We have to get a constant supply of glucose. It does not matter what you eat, because everything has glucose (candy, pasta, cereal). The only difference is how we get the glucose. There are two types of foods, simple foods and complex foods. Simple foods are sugar, and fruits. These are built simply and our body can take it all quickly, kind of like a sugar rush for the brain. Complex foods are like pastas or cereal. These foods are harder for the body to break down and kind of drip feed the brain with glucose.
• Take Deep Sleeps or Power Naps - When you sleep your brain is ingraining in you head what you did that day and what you learned. Then when you wake up from a deep sleep you will feel refreshed because your brain is ready to learn again. Then you can take power naps. These are little naps that you can take about 45 minutes a day that will refreshen your brain and make you more aware and alert. (Benjamin Franklin Took Power Naps)

Psychological Aspects of IQ - These are different parts of your mental health. These include stress levels and your mood. These can be influenced in many ways. The only tip that I can give you is to try and stay relaxed and calm. Remember that stress kills brain cells.

Now this is where it gets fun, try to apply as many of these tips to your lifestyle. It is not that hard (as you already know). A daily IQ exersize is a good thing, it will keep your mental capacities in top shape, even as you get older.

What do I mean?

Let me give you an example. Lets say that you needed to memorize over 100 words for a spelling and vocabulary test. You have tried to look at them say them out loud to memorize the spelling and read them to yourself over and over again. Naturally this takes forever. Now, your friend does another method. He works on one word at a time, and consciously visualizes the word and the meaning. Then he tries to put it in a sentence and in doing so is adding tags to that word in his mind. This is considered a less time consuming way because once you do this with a word, you are guaranteed to remember it.

You find that you have been spending most of your time trying to memorize the 100 words and your friend has memorized them with much less effort.

The first step to working smarter not harder is to find a method that takes you a lot of time and see if your can do it another way. An example is if you are trying to work on your abs. You have been doing 100 sit-ups everyday and still have not seen much results. Then, you look online for something more effective. You find an exercise online called the reverse cruch. This exercise does not hurt your lower back, it better targets your abs, and can be done in less time.

This can also be applied to expanding your knowledge base and increasing your intelligence. If you want to learn about roman history, instead of looking in a library for a book on the subject, with a few clicks you can find vast amounts of knowledge from an internet search.

When you are not paying attention your memories won’t be as big as you would otherwise, then we have a problem retrieving that information when we need it.

- To remember someones name do this - Actually listen closely. Think of his/her face and try to picture that name right underneath. Then try your best to spell it in your head. Ask questions about the way the name is spelled, like is that Niel with an ‘E’ or an ‘A’.

The basic idea is to tell yourself to “REMEMBER THAT” that instantly sends a command to your brain telling it to remember that piece of information. Then just visualize it a bit and it will sink in.

You can also create tags about specific pieces of information. Again this takes visualization, what you do is to associate a picture or thought, to a word that you can mentally see and read.

Simple Right? Well that’s all it takes to start remembering things better and increase your intelligence.

Mental games are fun if you have nothing else to do and they will provide some fun in a dull idea.

Here are some mental games that I like to play when I am doing something a little boring.

1. When I go shopping I do all the math in my head. The total price, with tax & without, and how much change I will get back if I pay with a certain bill.
2. If I am walking down a street and I see a sign with letters on it. I try to rearrange those letters to make other words.
3. When I look at an object I try to think of as many ways that that object can be used to do something else. An example- That chair could be used by the batman to beat up the joker if he has nothing else.
4. Try to think of objects as a person. What would it act like? What would it sound like? How tall will it be?
5. When I walk into a building I try to think of as many ways to escape from the inside if we get attacked by aliens.

I know that some of these might sound silly but they get you into the mood when you are bored and they are great training for your brain. Try them out and tell us if you have any new games that you play.

Amazon Product Description

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Inner Voice

It is not odd to wonder what others think of us. We often think that mistakes we make will always be picked up. This is to such a high degree that it may effect our daily lives. An example is it may keep you from answering a question in school because you might get it wrong.

A way to stop it

This point was brought up in the Book IQ Power-Up by Ron Bracey

To separate fact from opinions you should try to view success and failure slightly differently. Try to think of two different situations. Think of one situation where you succeeded in something that you felt proud of, in another try to remember a situation where you failed to reach a sought after goal. Then answer these questions.

• How did you know how you succeeded or failed?
• How did you feel in each situation?
• How did people around you react to what you had done?
• Which of these three things had the most impact on your feelings of success and failures?

We can use logical reasoning to make assumptions, through known facts. A very popular phrase that depicts logic is this: Every man is mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal.

Logic is obviously used everywhere, at work, when we are learning a new language, etc. etc.

Now something that you do not realize normally, is that your inference can be wrong even though it seems that the evidence you know concurs it to be true.

Let me introduce you to the way logic works… (the following is an excerpt from the book IQ Power-up)

“The Ladder of Inference” -

1. “Observable Fact - The sun rises in the east and sets in the west
2. Selective Detail - The sun appears to be moving
3. Inference - The sun is moving
4. Assumption - The sun is circling the earth
5. Conclusion - The earth is the center of the universe”

I hope you know that this inference is in fact, false.

Even though this was is an incorrect model of the universe, you can see why people a long time ago used to believe that is was the truth. Then, after this is thought to be the truth we will then come to more false conclusions after using this as our observable fact.

A simple way to better your logic skills and make sure that all of your deductive reasoning is correct is to research all of your evidence and make sure that it is all true.

Studies show that overall intelligence is closely linked to the status of your working memory. Don’t frown if you think you are to old to better your memory, the reason being is you can make your memory better at virtually any age.

Working Memory - Has been also stated as short term memory

Working memory is used for holding on to information that you don’t need to know forever. An example would be doing a quick math problem in your head. You remember the numbers on a math problem, you find the answer, you write it down, then you go on to the next problem. When you go on to the next problem your brain will automatically discard the information, unless you have some reason to try and remember it.

How It Works -

Both halves of your brain send signals to the area of the brain that sorts out information. From there the information gets sorted into 2 separate folders.

• The first folders name is ‘long term memory’. If it is sorted into this folder it will stay in your memory until a later date.
• The second folders name is ‘fading memories’. These memories will slowly fade away.

If you want to learn more about Expanding Your Memory Read - Memory Power-Up: 101 Ways to Instant Recall