Building Better Brains; September / October 2012; Scientific American Mind; by John Jonides, Susanne M. Jaeggi, Martin Buschkuehl and Priti Shah; 5 Page(s)

If you want to strengthen your abdominal muscles, you can do sit-ups. Tone your upper body? Push-ups. To flex your intellectual muscles, however, or boost your children's academic performance, the answer is less clear. An exercise to stretch memory, tighten attention and increase intelligence could improve children's chances of coasting comfortably through life—and give adults a leg up as well.

The very notion flies in the face of conventional wisdom. Most people presume that no matter how hard they work, they are not going to get any smarter. Some subjects in our research laboratory, though, have increased their IQ scores after training their brain for as little as three weeks. The improvement can be significant enough that, anecdotally at least, a few participants