Research over the past twenty years has shown beyond a doubt that the brain is more like a muscle.  It gets stronger, a lot stronger, when you learn–and keep learning.  Use it or lose it.

David Brooks pulled all this together in a fascinating column on human nature in which he summarizes the developmental issues, pushing back on over-zealous evolutionary psychology and innate beliefs.  I quote the article:

The first problem is that far from being preprogrammed with a series of hardwired mental modules, as the E.P. types assert, our brains are fluid and plastic. We’re learning that evolution can be a more rapid process than we thought. It doesn’t take hundreds of thousands of years to produce genetic alterations.

Moreover, we’ve evolved to adapt to diverse environments. Different circumstances can selectively activate different genetic potentials. Individual behavior can vary wildly from one context to another. An arrogant bully on the playground may be meek in math class. People have kaleidoscopic thinking styles and use different cognitive strategies to solve the same sorts of problems.

Brooks emphasizes the role that social interaction and personal action plays in the development of our smarts:

But individuals aren’t formed before they enter society. Individuals are created by social interaction. Our identities are formed by the particular rhythms of maternal attunement, by the shared webs of ideas, symbols and actions that vibrate through us second by second. Shopping isn’t merely a way to broadcast permanent, inborn traits. For some people, it’s also an activity of trying things on in the never-ending process of creating and discovering who they are.

The real key to developing your smarts is smart practice.  That’s what babies do when they learn to talk, what astronauts do when they fly off into space, and what businesspeople do when they engage in continuous development–always building the toolkit–with the help of others.

But learning is a joint practice, not something you do alone. Annie Murphy Paul recently summarized research on the need for joint learning by laying out the relevant conclusions from research in educational psych, a study challenging the popular assumption “that it is the learner who knows best and that he or he should be the controlling force in her or his learning.”

There are three problems with this premise, Kirschner and van Merriënboer write. The first is that novices, by definition, don’t yet know much about the subject they’re learning, and so are ill equipped to make effective choices about what and how to learn next. The second problem is that learners “often choose what they prefer, but what they prefer is not always what is best for them;” that is, they practice tasks that they enjoy or are already proficient at, instead of tackling the more difficult tasks that would actually enhance their expertise. And third, although learners like having some options, unlimited choices quickly become frustrating—as well as mentally taxing, constraining the very learning such freedom was supposed to liberate.

So, the next time you see someone’s who’s really smart, he/she got there through joint learning and practice.  There are very, very few Bill Gates’ autodidacts. So when you think or talk of someone as dumb, there’s nothing really innate about his/her dumbness.  It’s just that the joint learning muscles haven’t been engaged.

How are you going to get smarter?
To develop your intelligence, you’re going to need to work at becoming a brain athlete, the same way a weightlifter or tennis player gets stronger.  Practice . . . and coaching.  Effort is not for dummies.  As Carol Dweck, the eminent Stanford psychologist puts it, “Even geniuses have to work hard for their achievements.”  Talent is not born, it’s grown