Can You Improve Your IQ? What the Evidence Shows

Q: Can adults improve their IQ?

Adult braining can still benefit from learning new skills, regular exercise, good sleep, and managing depression or chronic stress. These tend to preserve existing function and improve performance on specific tasks, but very large permanent IQ gains in adults are not supported by the evidence.

The Promise and the Reality

Open a phone app store and you will find no shortage of products promising to "raise your IQ" in just minutes a day. The implied claim is appealing: cognitive ability is like muscle, train it and it grows. This guide is going to push back against that simple story, but only after granting what the better research does support. There are real, evidence-backed ways to improve your cognitive performance. They are mostly less glamorous than the marketing.

To ask the question honestly, we need to separate three different things that often get blurred together:

Your IQ score on a specific day. This is a measurement, not a fixed trait, and it can shift for many reasons unrelated to underlying intelligence.
Performance on specific cognitive tasks. You can clearly get better at tasks you practice. That is not the same as becoming smarter.
Underlying intelligence. This is what tests try to capture. Whether it can be substantially raised in adults is the genuinely contested question.

Each domain has different answers.

What Can Move Your Score on a Single Test

A measurable number of points on an IQ result can shift for reasons that have nothing to do with changes in your underlying intelligence. These are well documented:

Sleep. A single night of poor sleep can trim working memory and processing speed by enough to visibly affect a score. Multiple good nights before testing produces measurable improvement.
Test familiarity. Taking even one practice test reduces the cognitive load of navigating the format on test day, freeing up attention for the actual questions. This can move a score by several points.
Anxiety and stress. Excessive anxiety impairs working memory and reasoning. Practices that calm test anxiety often improve performance more than any cognitive training does.
Mood and depression. Depression measurably slows thinking. Treating or managing depression is one of the larger reversible hits to cognitive performance.
Blood sugar, hydration, time of day. Smaller but still real factors. A protein breakfast and a mid-morning testing slot often beat a late-afternoon slot after a heavy lunch.

If you are preparing for a real evaluation, fixing these is the most reliable short-term lever. It is also why taking a free practice test like ours, with no stakes and instant feedback, is genuinely useful: it reduces test-day unfamiliarity before anything that matters.

Education: The Most Reliable Lever

If you want to know the most credible way IQ rises over the long term, it is schooling. This sounds obvious until you look at how strong the evidence actually is. Multiple large studies, including recent natural experiments based on changes in compulsory schooling laws, find that each additional year of schooling is associated with an IQ gain of roughly 1 to 5 points, depending on the study design and the quality of schooling involved.

Why is this so consistent? Because IQ tests measure skills that schooling directly trains: vocabulary, mathematical reasoning, reading comprehension, abstract problem framing, and attention under time pressure. The crystallized portion of IQ, which our fluid vs. crystallized intelligence guide explains in more depth, grows almost by definition through sustained study. The fluid portion also benefits, although more indirectly. Adults who return to school in middle age tend to see measurable rises in their cognitive test scores over follow-up.

The practical takeaway is straightforward. If you want a smarter mind, learning difficult new material for years is one of the few interventions with strong empirical support. Shortcuts do not seem to work nearly as well.

Brian Training Apps: What Works and What Doesn't

So what about the apps? The scientific literature on commercial brain training is, on balance, skeptical. The clearest finding across large studies (including the 2010 Cognitive Training Evaluation by the UK Medical Research Council, the 2017 Lumosity federal settlement analysis, and many academic meta-analyses) is a pattern: people get better at the trained tasks, sometimes dramatically so, but transfer to broader cognitive ability is small to nonexistent.

Working memory training deserves its own nuance. Susanne Jaeggi and colleagues published several oft-cited studies suggesting that working memory practice can produce small gains in fluid reasoning. Subsequent large replication studies reduced the size of these effects substantially. The most defensible current reading is:

Near transfer is real. Practicing a working memory task improves performance on similar working memory tasks.
Far transfer is small. Effects on broad fluid reasoning, when present, are modest and contested.
Durability is uncertain. Gains from short bursts of training fade if practice stops.

The honest bottom line: brain training apps will make you better at brain training apps. Whether they make you broadly smarter is much less clear. If you enjoy them, by all means keep at it. Just calibrate your expectations.

What Genuinely Helps Long-Term

If brain training is mostly a mirage and education is the proven path, what else can you do? The strongest evidence points to several categories of activity, none of them quick fixes:

1. Aerobic Exercise

Regular aerobic exercise is one of the most consistently supported interventions for cognitive health. Multiple randomized trials show measurable improvements in executive function and processing speed after several months of moderate aerobic activity. The proposed mechanism is improved blood flow, increased brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), and the long-term protection exercise offers against cardiovascular risk factors that harm the brain.

2. Learning Genuinely New Skills

The brain adapts to what you ask of it. Learning a new language, a musical instrument, juggling, complex dance, or programming forces the formation of new neural patterns. The key word is new: returning to something you have done for years provides less cognitive stretch than starting something difficult from scratch.

3. Sleep and Stress Management

Sleep is when memory consolidates and metabolic waste is cleared from the brain. Chronic sleep deprivation depresses nearly every cognitive function IQ tests measure. Chronic stress similarly impairs working memory and reasoning. Both are modifiable and both produce real, if unglamorous, cognitive gains when fixed.

4. Treating Depression and Anxiety

Depression and anxiety produce cognitive symptoms that can look like a 10-point IQ drop in severe cases. Effective treatment — therapy, medication, lifestyle change — often returns performance to baseline. This is one of the most underappreciated cognitive interventions in public discussion.

5. Managing Cardiovascular Risk Factors

High blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, smoking, and heavy alcohol use all accelerate cognitive aging. Managing these in midlife appears to preserve cognitive function into older age. Dementia risk is now thought to be substantially modifiable through these midlife factors.

What Probably Doesn't Help

It is just as useful to name the things people often believe will raise IQ but for which the evidence is thin:

Listening to Mozart or "smart music." The "Mozart effect" is small, short-lived, and applies to specific spatial tasks rather than overall intelligence.
Nothing supplements with weak evidence. Most nootropic supplements marketed for cognitive enhancement show small or null effects in well-run studies, with the possible exception of omega-3 for people whose diet is deficient.
Single-session crash practice apps. A few minutes of an app does not produce durable change.
"Subliminal" or passive programs. No credible evidence supports passive cognitive improvement.

What This Means for Your Online IQ Score

If you have just taken an online IQ test, you might wonder which parts of your score are improvable and which are not. Here is the honest reading:

Your verbal and knowledge-based scores will move as you learn. Reading more, studying more, and engaging in rich conversations reliably grow crystallized intelligence, and those gains are visible in test results over months and years.

Your visual-spatial and fluid reasoning scores are harder to move up permanently, but you can protect them by exercising, sleeping well, and continuing to learn challenging skills. Quick-fix training apps appear to produce limited transfer.

Your score on the day can be improved by several points through familiarity, sleep, and managing anxiety. If you are planning to take a serious standardized test, take a practice version first to remove the unfamiliarity tax. Our free practice IQ test is designed for exactly this purpose.

And remember: the most useful reading of your result is the category breakdown, not the headline number. Knowing where your strengths are is more actionable than chasing a slightly higher total. For a discussion of what IQ does and does not predict, see our guide on IQ and career success.

FAQs

Can you increase your IQ score?

Your score on a given day can be raised by a few points through test familiarity, sleep, and reduced anxiety. Long-term gains in underlying ability are smaller and rely on quality education, sustained cognitive activity, and good health rather than quick-fix brain training.

Does brain training increase IQ?

Most controlled studies find that brain training improves performance on the trained tasks but produces limited transfer to general IQ. Working memory training shows some near-transfer effects, but broad gains in fluid reasoning remain small and contested.

Does education raise IQ?

Yes, modestly and reliably. Each additional year of schooling is associated with a measurable rise in IQ, with estimates of 1 to 5 IQ points per year in several studies. The effect is strongest when education is of reasonably good quality.

Can adults improve their IQ?

Adult brains can still benefit from learning new skills, regular exercise, good sleep, and managing depression or chronic stress. These tend to preserve existing function and improve performance on specific tasks, but very large permanent IQ gains in adults are not supported by the evidence.

Does practicing IQ tests make you smarter?

Practicing IQ test items mainly improves your score on similar items by reducing the cognitive load of navigating the test format itself. It does not appear to meaningfully raise underlying intelligence, but the score effect can be useful if you are preparing for an upcoming evaluation.

Try the Free Practice Test →