This is how education and training influence your intelligence.

How much of intelligence is genetic, how much is learned and how much is trained?

There are still those who say that intelligence is a trait that you are born with and is completely impervious to change.. As if it were the color of your eyes, the height or the shape of your hair.

If this were really so, there would be no difference between people who are educated and people who have never been to school, or people who have grown up in stimulating environments and people who have grown up in poverty.

We know that intelligence is housed in the most malleable and changeable organ of all. It is to be expected, then, that the intellect has the same properties and is susceptible to be trained and enhanced in various aspects.

One intelligence or several?

There are so many models that theorize the composition of intelligence or intelligences that we will not dwell on them here. But it is important to keep in mind that there is no single unifying theory, although they all speak more or less the same thing and refer to the same psychological phenomenon.

When we speak of intelligence we are talking about the capacity of our mind to face and adapt with the greatest speed and efficiency to the demands of the environment. These demands can be of all kinds, mathematical, linguistic, kinesthetic, musical, and so on. Perhaps there is a single intelligence that manifests itself through these abilities to a greater or lesser extent depending on the person, or perhaps they are separate intelligences that serve to successfully cope with different types of tasks. For the purpose of this article we are going to stick with the general definition of intelligence as an ability.

• You may be interested in this article by psychologist Bertrand Regader: "Howard Gardner's theory of Multiple Intelligences".

Inherited intelligence

From twin studies, we know that there is a strong correlation between the IQs of monozygotic twins separated at birth, while the correlation of the IQs of non-genetically identical Blood siblings is not as strong. In addition, when we take families with adopted children, we see that the IQ of the adopted children correlates more with the biological parents than with the actual parents..

So we know that intelligence, or at least the IQ we get from measuring it, is largely determined by DNA. Some here would shelve the development of intelligence and be content with this explanation. Fortunately, the issue is more complex.

Trained intelligence

Just because you are born with a certain ability does not mean that you will keep it forever for free.. One can be born with a genetics that allows him to develop athletic legs and end up atrophying them after spending hours and hours sitting down. Something similar happens with intelligence: he who does not train it ends up stagnating it.

Stimulation-rich environments such as books or interactive games promote intellectual development in children. We know this through adoption studies, where children who come from very impoverished environments, when they receive stimulation in adoptive families with a higher purchasing power and more stimulation, manage to reach IQ levels well above average. Not only families play a fundamental role in intellectual development, but also schooling and the type of methodology used by teachers have a decisive influence on children's intelligence.

At this point someone will ask: if the environment is such a powerful force, can we not optimize the didactic methodology of schools to improve the intelligence of students? The truth is that we can, and a multitude of projects have been developed over the last 30 years under this same premise.

The Intelligence Project

An example of this can be found in the Intelligence Project in Venezuela.. This is a program from the 1980s aimed at improving students' thinking skills and detecting how to optimize both the way of teaching and the didactic material itself. The units of this program include lessons on reasoning, language comprehension, verbal reasoning, problem solving, decision making and inventive thinking.

What is innovative about the program is not only its content, but the way in which it is taught to students. Moving away from the traditional approach that considers that learning is only the transmission of knowledge, the program is groundbreaking because it sees learning as a process of preparation and encouragement to manage one's own personal development.

The results after the implementation of this program were positive. Teachers reported changes in academic performance, especially those who apply the knowledge learned to other subjects. In addition, due to the more affective relationship generated between students and teachers, behavioral and affective changes occur in students. This closer teacher-student relationship has a facilitating impact on learning.

The North Carolina Abecedarian Project

This project was developed by the University of North Carolina in the 1970s. aims to produce long-term positive effects on children's intellectual development through high-quality education, with an emphasis on early interventions that cushion the disadvantages of children from poor backgrounds.

It is a project that is implemented from birth to the age of five. In this program children go five days a week to a center where they receive high quality educational care that addresses the children's intellectual needs through language and conversation activities, close care and educational games.

Not all children participate in the same games; game assignments are individualized. These interactive child-adult games include some traditional games, such as "cucutrás" or "peek-a-boo" in English, and more focused on specific concepts and skills are added as the child's development progresses.

Children who go through this program have higher proficiency in reading, mathematics and a slight increase in IQ. Likewise, these children have better school adjustment understood as longer schooling time, lower dropout rate, higher percentage of children who complete college and less probability of being teenage parents.

Although the results should be interpreted with caution, in general, it appears to be a beneficial it appears to be a beneficial program for children's intelligence that translates into higher academic proficiency and better job prospects in the workplace. and a better job outlook in adult life.

These programs shed light on the relationship between training, both early and throughout schooling, and higher intellectual competencies. The old view of intelligence as an immovable monolith has been discarded, since we now know that it is malleable and susceptible to change depending on how we educate it.