All of us know people with little “book knowledge” who are nonetheless sharp and insightful. “Fluid intelligence” is that ability to solve problems, understand things and detect meaningful patterns. Of course, you can read little or nothing at all and still be brilliant at “reading between the lines” of a conversation.

But in today’s world, fluid intelligence and reading generally go hand in hand.

In fact, the increased emphasis on critical reading and writing skills in schools may partly explain why students perform, on average, about 20 points higher on IQ tests than in the early 20th century.

The so-called Flynn effect is named after James Flynn. A New Zealand professor who has devoted much of his career to studying the worldwide phenomena of increasing IQ scores. But if reading can increase fluid intelligence, the converse is also true: increased fluid intelligence also improves reading comprehension, according to studies by Jason Chein of Temple University in Philadelphia.

He used “working memory” tasks that train people’s ability to juggle and continually update multiple items of attention – to keep track of a moving dot, for instance, and recognise when it lands on a spot it occupied two, three or more moves ago.

In papers published in scientific journals in 2010 and 2011, he showed that as both younger and older adults improved their performance on working-memory tasks, they were better able to comprehend reading materials.

Check out for more interesting information on this website:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jan/23/can-reading-make-you-smarter

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