Our intelligence manifests itself in different ways. For example, some quickly grasp new material when learning. Others quickly adapt to changes and easily find solutions in unusual situations.
Some experts attribute intelligence to high IQ, creativity, creativity, in the end. Unfortunately, a person often lives in conditions that can provoke a decrease in intelligence upon reaching a certain development threshold. It is different for everyone and depends on external (environment, influence of loved ones, climate, state of society) and internal factors (physiology, sleep and nutrition patterns, heredity). Do not confuse intelligence with any one manifestation of intelligence (memory, speed of thinking, ability to do quick mathematical calculations in the mind). Often those who are able to multiply five-digit numbers are completely lost when solving children's riddles or cannot guess the simplest rebus.
What is intelligence?
Intelligence allows you to quickly find a way out of difficult situations. It allows you to look for non-standard solutions and win in seemingly losing situations. Cognitive psychologists have found that this ability is inherent in nature, but can equally be developed or lost over time. With the help of the BrainApps service you can keep your mental abilities in good shape. You will be able to choose a convenient format for self-development, including solving non-standard problems.
In today's business environment, creativity and the ability to think outside the box are valued. There are special tests to identify character traits, emotional intelligence, and other capabilities in order to effectively use them in the company’s activities. What can you do to learn to be smart and use your brain 100%?
How to develop logic and thinking at home. 7 proven methods for children 5-12 years old
Still from the cartoon “Despicable Me”
A child with developed logical thinking stands out among his peers - it will be easier for him to study, solve school and everyday problems. The educational platform LogicLike talks about interesting working options for training logic for preschoolers and primary schoolchildren.
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It is interesting and effective to develop logic and thinking with your child at home. And for this you do not have to be a teacher or have any special knowledge. Experts recommend alternating types of games to train different types of thinking: visual-figurative and visual-actional, abstract-logical and verbal-logical, spatial, non-standard.
Oral games
Games with words are a very simple and accessible way to develop a child’s logical thinking, expand their horizons and, of course, increase their vocabulary. Choose games that teach you to identify analogies, generalize, distribute objects and phenomena into groups, and make logical connections.
- Play association games. Name an object and offer to name a similar one. Ask why the child chose it, what similar features he found.
- Come up with new endings for famous fairy tales.
- Write stories and poems together: someone starts one line, the other continues the meaning
- Play “Danetki”: think of an object, phenomenon or character and invite your child to guess it by asking questions that can only be answered “yes” or “no”.
- Play the “believe it or not” game. You say a phrase, for example, “all cats are red” or “a watermelon is a berry.” The child’s task is to answer whether the statement is true or false. If the answers and solutions are ambiguous or there are several of them, this is even good. The main thing is that the child can logically justify the answer.
Look-take-write-draw
Children for the most part are visual, so they like games with pictures and images. Activities using cards, paper and pen stimulate the development of figurative and logical thinking.
Here are some ideas for this type of activity:
- offer games for comparing and grouping objects by color, shape, size and other characteristics;
- solve puzzles with matches - “remove one match to make another figure”;
- make up stories based on pictures;
- solve riddles and puzzles on paper, go through labyrinths.
Board games
Colorful sets with drawings, figures, and clear rules attract both children and adults. Checkers, chess, sea battle, dominoes are time-tested classic games that will always be relevant and suitable for family recreation. They teach you to win gracefully and accept defeats, to enjoy communication and the process of the game.
In addition, tiles and pictures from board games can be used for teaching. Here are some ways.
- Invite your child to guess objects and toys by touch and shape.
- Arrange the figures or pictures according to the algorithm. For example, make sequences of them: increasing, decreasing, by color, size.
- Use dominoes and triminoes to learn counting, addition and subtraction.
Construction
Children by nature are builders and creators. Building games help develop motor skills, fine motor skills and creative thinking. Creating buildings according to diagrams and reproducing ideas in reality develops spatial and structural-logical thinking.
It would be nice to find time for joint activities with your child in this format. Using cubes you can create very entertaining tasks.
Riddles and puzzles
This is a great way to practice lateral thinking and logic with your children. The most understandable type of puzzles for everyone is oral, which were passed down from generation to generation and have survived to this day.
You can also find original collections of puzzles, for example, from the writer Lewis Carroll.
To boost your child’s imagination and spatial perception, use puzzles in the form of geometric shapes (Rubik’s cube, Tangram, Pentomino).
Chess problems
A good selection of problems on the chess board will introduce the child to chess pieces, the basic rules of the game and the coordinate plane. You can come up with tasks on your own on the chessboard or print ready-made ones from the Internet. Today's children may prefer an interactive format.
Checkmate the black King in one move:
For example, on our platform there are more than 100 chess problems for beginners, from simple to difficult.
Logic problems
Perhaps solving logical problems is the most effective way to develop logic and thinking. Books and manuals with tasks are convenient to take on the road. But their frequent drawback is the lack of consistency, clear presentation of theory and comments on the solution.
Logic and thinking can and should be developed and trained in different ways. The main task of the parent is to find and offer the child good games, educational sites or other interesting formats of activities that will stimulate the child’s development in the right direction. For example, you can study on the online platform Logiclike.com:
Entertaining logic and mathematics for developing thinking in children 5-12 years old
And also “Shapes, developments and reflections”, “Truth and lies”, “Motion problems” and more. The site has more than 3000 tasks, 15+ thematic categories, 3 difficulty levels.
LogicLike to help - have fun and develop!
Food for the brain
Oddly enough, the human brain is extremely voracious. It consumes a huge amount of energy. Low-fat protein foods rich in vitamins C, A, B and E are considered beneficial for the brain. It is important to start the day with a hearty, nutritious breakfast. But many are mistaken in thinking that the brain sleeps at night. At this time of day, several cycles of its activity go through. Undoubtedly, by morning our thinking apparatus has a certain degree of exhaustion and requires replenishment. A glass of freshly squeezed juice, scrambled eggs and toast will help you feel a surge of energy in the morning and set your brain up for productive work.
Examples of ingenuity
The area where ingenuity is most often demonstrated is study. An excellent example is a student who was able to easily smuggle a cheat sheet into an exam, where there was very strict control over this, and pockets were checked. You could only bring a pen and a bottle of water, which one student took advantage of. He printed out all the important formulas in the same font as all the information on the bottle - country of production, composition, legal information, etc. Instead, he pasted in text with formulas so that it was indistinguishable from what was written on the bottle. No one noticed this and the student easily used the cheat sheet.
Ingenuity also manifests itself in everyday life. As an example, we can cite the story of a mother who, having 2 small children, constantly did not get enough sleep, because... The children constantly demanded attention and made noise. One afternoon, when her strength was running low and she wanted to sleep, and the children continued to make noise, she decided to be smart and use a trick. She told the children that she would go to bed to rest and asked them to wake her up in 15 minutes and they would start cleaning the apartment. After that, silence reigned, the children hid in their rooms and did not make the slightest sound.
Another example of ingenuity is the ability to open a bottle of wine without a corkscrew. It would seem that the task is not easy, but ingenuity helps to use available means for this. For example, you can use a regular writing pen for this, pushing the cork inside the bottle, which will help pour the drink without problems.
Sleep and its importance for health
Just a simple lack of sleep can lower IQ test scores by 10-20 points. This means that on average, without a couple of hours of sleep, you lose more than 20% of your productivity. And after a sleepless night, it’s hard to solve even simple problems, not to mention creativity, creative thinking and quick wits.
If the day has been stressful, the level of cortisol in our body rises sharply. This hormone destroys brain cells, but is effectively eliminated during sleep. Constant lack of sleep can lead to migraines, body weakness, and constant fatigue.
Start talking to yourself
By self-talk we mean a healthy form of reflection, when a person analyzes his actions, understands his emotions, ambitions, needs, interests and other things that shape his personality.
You can do this in any form convenient for you: in your head, on paper or orally, for example, by speaking your thoughts into a voice recorder (listening back and analyzing your thoughts after a while can be useful). Start having an honest dialogue with yourself, admitting to yourself your fears and true desires.
Interesting games, simulators, tests
Intelligence can and should be trained. The BrainApps service has prepared a powerful tool for you - a personal account that clearly demonstrates the progress of the development of your abilities. How it works? By regularly exercising according to your chosen program, you improve the interaction between different parts of the brain. By completing tasks and exercises, you improve your thinking abilities. In addition, you learn to interact more effectively with memory, both short-term and long-term. Your self-development should be based on personal feelings, abilities, aspirations and goals.
How to develop thinking
The human brain, like muscles, needs to be trained - without regular work, the ability to think weakens. Many people don’t know where to start and how to develop their thinking; each age category has its own requirements.
For an adult
There is a misconception that an adult’s thinking has finally formed and further development is impossible. In fact, regardless of age and profession, a person is able to develop the capabilities of his brain.
To develop thinking in general, the adult brain must be constantly developed in the following directions:
- The ability to compare and contrast events, facts and phenomena. This also includes critical thinking, which questions what is happening;
- Abstraction of thought – the ability to move from detailed analysis to generalized analysis using figurative concepts;
- The ability to concretize is a process opposite to abstraction, it presupposes the ability to move away from images and direct thoughts to one point;
- The ability to analyze - disassemble a holistic situation into details with the ability to comprehend each of them;
- The ability to synthesize - to assemble into a single whole the individual components of events and phenomena;
- The ability to use strategic skills - to find action algorithms that lead to achieving the goal.
Note! Good literate speech, both verbal and written, is of great importance. Thinking itself is impossible without the ability to express one’s thoughts, so the first steps on the path to development are literacy, speech training, and vocabulary replenishment.
Man and woman talking
Children and teenagers
The first years of life, the child is guided by instincts, he is familiar with the feeling of hunger and worries, but his thought processes do not yet work. At the age of 6-7, children are already able to think figuratively; at this age they study in the lower grades; the success of learning depends on mental development. Preschool age is a period of life in which the skills necessary for further development are laid.
How to develop a child's thinking? The ontogenesis of thinking goes through several stages. Children are different in that their physical actions are a means of expressing thoughts. It is difficult for a child to disassemble and collect information, but he strives to carry out these manipulations with real objects. A good example is a children's pyramid, which a child assembles and disassembles into pieces. Any learning process should take place in a playful way, so the child’s development depends entirely on the parents, who decide what he will play.
If a preschooler perceives everything in action, adolescence is the time when adult thinking is formed. The level of intelligence is not yet sufficiently developed; adolescents often perceive complex information, but cannot formulate their thoughts due to insufficient vocabulary. All school activities are aimed at the development of adolescents; in addition, you can do training for thinking.
Smart schoolboy
Start writing down your thoughts
This can be any form convenient for you - from a diary that you won’t show to anyone, to detailed posts on Instagram that have every chance of spreading across the Internet.
Recording your thoughts is the next form of reflection, when your opinion does not arise and disappear after a few minutes, but takes shape and settles in your mind (or even in the minds of other people).
- FAQs How to become smarter every day: neuroscientists advise Believe me, these are very useful recommendations.
Ideally, you need to write every day for at least half an hour. If you try, the practice of writing down your thoughts can be made as much of a habit as morning exercises. It is enough to introduce it into your life and not forget about it.
Communicate with smart and experienced people
In fact, the people around you have a huge influence on you, despite the fact that you are so independent and independent. It is not for nothing that the saying “tell me who your friend is, and I will tell you who you are” has been circulating among people for a long time.
That is why if you want to become smarter, you need to gravitate towards people who communicate on smart topics, think with their chin in their hand, and look smart.
- FAQs 4 ways to boost your emotional intelligence in 2021 An essential guide to mental well-being.
In this case, you won’t even notice how your orientation towards knowledge and creation will change. The main thing is not to be afraid to change your environment, and everything will definitely work out.
