7 ways you can train yourself to be smarter

I like to think I'm a pretty smart guy — but we all do stupid things sometimes.

For example, I graduated near the top of my law school class, but I sometimes question how smart it was to go to law school in the first place.

And I'm reminded of the hour or so I spent not long ago searching for my glasses — only to realize they were perched on the brim of my baseball cap.

Most of us could a little more brainpower.

Writing in The New York Times, Richard Friedman, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College, examined the current state of scientific thought on whether we can truly train ourselves to be smarter.

As Friedman points out, it's "hardly an idle question considering that cognitive decline is a nearly universal feature of aging." The brain shrinks physically once we hit age 55, and about 11 percent of people over 65 wind up exhibiting signs of Alzheimer's disease.

Before we dive in, there's a bit of hair-splitting in brain science you ought to be aware of. It's that the goal is defined as enabling people to achieve their personal maximum intelligence — as opposed to increasing it. But either way, you'd be getting smarter.

With that in mind, here are seven keys to understanding what science says you can (and can't) do to increase your intelligence.

SEE ALSO: 24 daily habits that will make you smarter

1. Brainteasers work — but maybe just at making you better at brainteasers.

I'd expect some pushback on this one, because brain-training games are a multibillion-dollar industry. However, Friedman cites a British study that broke a group of students into four classes and tested how well they performed on tests after various forms of brain training and games.

"Although improvements were observed in every cognitive task that was practiced," he writes, "there was no evidence that brain training made people smarter. Scores on the benchmark test, for which subjects could not train, did not significantly increase at the end of the study."

2. Except that they seem to work for older people.

There's a little bit of hope, however. Older participants in the study — those over 60 years old — showed more increase in performance than younger people. So, the researchers continued the experiment with older participants in a follow-up study that lasted a full year.

"Results of this follow-up study, soon to be published in a peer-reviewed journal, generally show that continued brain training helps older subjects maintain the improvement in verbal reasoning seen in the earlier study. This is good news because it suggests that brain exercise might delay some of the effects of aging on the brain," Friedman writes.

3. Believing you can improve helps — at least with younger brains.

Now, we get into some of the really cool data. When it comes to younger people especially, studies have shown that simply convincing them that they can improve their intelligence can create a self-fulfilling prophecy in which they perform better on intelligence tests.

"These findings appear to have profound implications for educating young people," Friedman writes, "because they suggest that a relatively simple intervention ... can have a powerful effect: enhancing learning and motivation."