Have your ever felt like the dullest person in the room ? Does the low test score made you doubt your intelligence? Many people think their IQ is set in stone. They assume that one bad grade is a recipe for lifelong stupidity but your intelligence isn't predetermined. The portions of your brain responsible for learning memory and other forms of cognition can change over time. As you mature these regions develop at different rates. Some people will nurture them helping these regions grow dense and complex, other people will neglect them leaving them immature and slow.

Increasing IQ is not quick and easy. Developing lasting intelligence takes time and alot of hard work. So here we are with 2 techniques that will help you to develop your brain and boost your intelligence.

1. INDEPENDENT STUDIES

While advance degree offer an array of educational opportunities, you increase your IQ without spending thousands on an expensive program. In these days and age, information is everywhere. If you don't believe me, take your phone and Google any thing you want to know. I bet you that you will receive your answer there and even a in dept studies on that subject or books written by leading experts in the field, classes taught by experienced professionals. The modern world offers a limited supply of educational resources, all you have to do is use them. Many of the world's intelligent people found success outside of traditional academia, they checked out dozens of books from the library, they attended conferences, listened to seminars and network with others in their field. They took advantage of online courses where they not learn from the best but also honed new and unique skills. The information out there the resources are waiting to be read, absorbed and put into the practice. There's only one hurdle standing in your way, it's the same reason that most of the people struggle to educate themselves without traditional schooling. When you study on your own  there's no one telling you what to do. Outside of the classroom learning is game against yourself. If you want to increase your IQ, you're responsible for your own education.

If you falter you won't learn much, but if you stay self disciplined you'll discover an incredible habit which will carry with you for rest of your life. Will do you know, why is that ? Because independent study teaches you to love learning. You begin to crave new knowledge and synthesize that knowledge in ways that most people just don't understand. Have you ever noticed that most intelligent people aren't just good at one thing ? Their encyclopedia brains excel in specific fields but they draw from a wide bank of information. When you understand a myriad of subjects, your brain processes information in more innovative ways. You discover new solutions, connections and prospectives which you never would have seen other wise. So if you are interested in something, just keep up a book, read articles or enroll in an online course. Each and every time you discover something new, your cognitive abilities will grow a little bit more.

2. MUSICAL TRAINING

Did you learn piano as a kid ? Most people played some kind of instrument while growing up. Maybe be you played in a school band or just learned a couple of songs on the guitar. These days you may only remember a few cords but childhood hobby had a lasting impact on your brain. Even according to some studies, professional says that people who play instruments were better learners than almost anyone else. Imagine you're sitting in class, listening to a lecture on American history or cell biology, some students will retain more information than others. Their memories are geared towards certain kinds of stimuli, either verbal or visual. If you have strong verbal memory you learn the best from lectures, speeches and conversations. You retain and process spoken language quickly and efficiently but if you're a visual learner, lectures aren't your strong suit, instead you prefer diagrams and displays, which show information in a visual way. So how do these two types of learning relate to music ? After reading and memorizing music adults with musical trainings demonstrated fantastic verbal memories. In fact their verbal skills significantly outperformed everyone else in the study but they're not bad visual learners either. Their visual scores remained on par with the average visual learning, in other words musicians have a knack for both types of learning.

So what of these results mean for you ? If you learn an instrument you may become a capable learner across the board absorbing both verbal and visual stimuli. If you can learn in more diverse ways, your brain can process more information than the average person and understand subjects from a variety of angles.

But that's not all musical training does for your brain, but music can actually reconstructs the brain. Scientists call this brain plasticity which means the structure of your brain can change in response to your environment if your environment is more musical those changes become more dramatic. Your brain is most susceptible to change during major period of development like adolescence. During this period of significant musical training strengthen the regions of your brain associated with learning, memory, motor skills and auditory skills.