Two GUARANTEED Ways to Profoundly
Improve Your Intelligence

by Win Wenger

Part One - Introduction

Part Two - Can and Should Intelligence Be Increased?

Part Three - Awareness and Attention-Span: A Breathtaking Discovery

Part Four - Image-Streaming

Note: This book is being published at this site with full authorization from the author. Please be advised of the copyright notice at the end of each page.

Independently conducted state university tests, running since 1989, demonstrate that with the second procedure, Image Streaming, per hour of easy entertaining practice one gains 8/10ths of a point "I.Q." With 25 hours' such practice, 20 points are gained, as are considerable classroom-related academic skills, a better balance of types of mental functioning according to the Kolb inventory, and even more striking in the more numinous but as yet unmeasured aspects of intelligence, creativity and experience. Where participants have participated to 50 hours, 40 points "I.Q." gain appear and we have not yet found any point where the benefits might start tailing off.

The purest form of the procedure being measured, at Southwest State University, Department of Chemistry & Physics, Marshall, MN 56258, is the second, Image-Streaming procedure given you here exactly. The best evidence is that which you can directly determine for yourself.

Short of that is the obvious commonsensical observation that if one improves the physical health, physical well-being and operating conditions of the physical brain, seat of our intelligence - as is the case with the first, held-breath underwater swimming procedure which so profoundly improves circulation to the brain, together with supply of food energy and nutrition and the flushing away of toxic wastes and fatigue poisons - improvements in intelligence-related functions obviously should and do follow. The operating conditions are further affected by the issue of span of attention paced by span of breathing, and.... well, I'm getting ahead of myself here. That's for Chapter III next.

Also, short of that, there is the most universally known and widely respected natural law of behavior and psychology, a natural law much the same way that the law of gravity is a law of physics. Even aside from the special uses we make of this Law of Effect - that "you get more of what you reinforce" - it is clear that every presently expressed brain function has antecedent functions upon which it is dependent: these in turn also have antecedents. Wherever the brain is performing less than optimally, one may go back along the chain to where the departure from optimum occurred, reworking those subroutines of the brain to better support the higher functions. One entire book of such procedures, at mostly the sensori-motor level, we published way back in 1974 and still carry, still correct and uncontroverted in every detail, in its 1985 edition.

The specialized use we've made of the Law of Effect is with regard to perception, particularly sensory feedback, and with regard to the Theory of Pole-Bridging in the Brain which was supported nicely by the results of the tests at Southwest State. With regard to perception: whenever you respond in some way to your own perception and not to someone else's second-hand knowledge such as you get wall-to-wall in the classroom, you: (1) reinforce that particular perception. (2) reinforce the trait or behavior of being perceptive. If the perceptions you are responding to are initially subtle, meaning that they arise in regions of your brain normally some distance from and offline from your focused verbal left temporal conscious mind, reinforcing those perceptions (3) reinforces more onto line with your conscious mind, those previously offline regions of the brain together with their resources and intelligence.

More generally, the theory of Pole-Bridging (and keep in mind the Law of Effect): our external senses - such as sight, touch, sound, etc. - are much more immediate than our internal senses, such as gut feelings, larger understandings, vision and mental images, etc. (That is why sports are more appealing to most than are the finer arts and intellectual pursuits, regardless of the relative value of either.) One corollary or aspect of the Law of Effect is: that the more immediate the reinforcement (or sensory feedback), other things equal, the more powerfully that shapes behavior or traits.

Inevitably, therefore: if the output functions of widely separate regions of the brain are expressed in a combination external action, the immediacy of sensory feedback from that external expression/action builds a more and more immediate relationship between those formerly unrelated brain regions, causing them to become more and more accessible to each other.

In thus bridging between regions of the brain remote from each other, to make the resources of each and the intelligence of each more intra-accessible: there is a second aspect which impacts even more strongly on apparent intelligence of the whole brain or whole person. That is the issue of phase relationships between such widely separate regions of the brain.

This phase relationship, or lag in time between when one part of the brain lights up on a given stimulus and when other parts then do so, appears to be crucial.

All of the brain does, sooner or later, light up on any major stimulus, but how the rest of the brain handles that stimulus appears to be set by the instructions which the first brain parts wrote into that stimulus as it is passed along.

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If a fairly long time lapses before other, later parts of the brain become involved, the first part has time to complete its work and write "close-out" instructions into the stimulus as it is passed along: "Here's how it was done, folks!" If, however, the phase relationship is so close that subsequent parts of the brain start to interact on that stimulus before the first part can finish, these iterate back and forth reverberating on that stimulus, and begin doing so with a far more involved, sophisticated set of handling instructions being written into that stimulus for handling by the rest of the brain: "Well, this is what we've done so far and its results, and we're checking this thing now, but there's this and that and that you should pick up on and you might also want to look into thus-&-so..." The person with good tight phase relationships between the various regions of his brain, characteristically will do more to that stimulus, see more in that stimulus, perceive more relationships to that stimulus. In other words, even with the same brain equipment, the person with good tight phase relationships between the regions of his brain will characteristically see, perceive, think, react in more intelligent ways. If you choose not to call this a higher level of intelligence, the burden of proof and definition is on you!

Let's look for a moment at where the belief was built, that intelligence can not be improved. All the texts upon which our educators, psychologists and geneticists depend in their training, used to build that case squarely upon Sir Cyril Burt's purported study of identical twins which had been separated at birth and raised in differing environments. In case you missed it, more and more questions about the internal evidence arose in those studies until Burt himself finally admitted that not only had he made up the studies out of his own head, but had also made up the names of his colleagues published as co-authors in those studies!

--And most of those texts, today, no longer cite Burt's "studies" by name, only saying instead, "studies show that...."

Such is the power of the stake of having people irrevocably dependent upon (your) professional services, no matter what. --And you're not responsible for doing anything if there's really nothing can be done.....

(Also, we have to remember that though the systematically skeptical sciences may be the best thing we have going on this planet at the present time, that both the sciences and the professions are human social groups first, and what they are "supposed" to be a long second. --All the more so to the extent that their high-minded members are unconscious of their own in-group territorialistic instincts. We all have those instinctive behaviors: any species which did not, so exhausted its times of plenty as to become extinct when conditions varied. --But in this and several other related instances, most of humanity is now suffering because this territoriality plays unalloyed amidst those people and institutions to whom we have entrusted the care and developments of our minds and of our children's minds.)

Gentle Reader:

--Is it other than reasonable and desirable to become abler to identify and readily solve a variety of problems? --That such skills can be trained or practiced and nurtured (or, in keeping with the Law of Effect, reinforced)?

--Is it other than reasonable or desirable to become abler to cope successfully with a wide variety of stimuli and situations? Nor reasonable that such a skill can be trained, practiced and/or reinforced?

--...to be abler to understand, both in words and beyond words? --Is it not reasonable that such skills can be trained, practiced, reinforced?

--...to become abler to think and perceive, in enough detail and enough scope and
enough variety and enough richness and enough depth to involve a large conceptual and verbal vocabulary in support of these processes? --And will not both experiences and vocabulary-building affect such skills?

--Is it not good, and reasonable, to become abler when need be to respond to the
unexpected quickly and effectively? --Do not only a host of trainable skills, but readily changed physiological conditions, greatly affect such speed and accuracy of response? (Why else do we train up response patterns and physical condition in competitive sports? But - ah, we forgot: giftedness is worth something to society only in athletics. It's so much more valuable to society for one to be able to throw a football well than to write a new symphony or a new formula. --though train with Image Streaming et.al. and you may well also become abler to throw that football!-- But still, it is an everyday experience, familiar everywhere, to train such response skills and speed, even if it's only done in sports!)

Ah, but put such factors together and call them "intelligence," and suddenly you and everyone has a whole mythology and catechism running through your heads, with the contents of that myth and cant usually having little to do with the reality.

Besides Burt's purported "studies," professional texts still often cite two other bases for the belief that intelligence cannot be meaningfully improved. One of these bases is the speed of response to stimuli, not only on timed tests but as measured cross-culturally. All such measures, though, depend upon easily changeable visual functions which have been routinely trained and re-trained since the 1930s, most notably by developmental (or behavioral) optometrists! See also the above references to sports.

The other basis is the tendency of the highly intelligent to practice some form of what psychologists call "mental rehearsal." Yet hundreds of programs today effectively teach forms of "mental rehearsal," overtly as in "Inner Tennis" or by inducing it as in Suggestopedia, for example.

Aside from all the many practical aspects and benefits of increasing your intelligence: sometime, with a color-blind friend by your side, gaze together at an absolutely gorgeous sunset. Ask your color-blind friend whether and why s/he'd like to see in color. If you tape-recorded the resultant discussion, transcribed it, and substituted the word "intelligence" for "color," most of that discussion would still bear...

--And now, let's go directly for one of these two procedures which can put so much rich "color" into your every experience....

Go To Part Three

©1998 by Project Renaissance (regarding this internet version only, other copyrights may apply). While we encourage the free distribution of this article (complete text only, including this notice and acknowledgement of source), we do require that expressed permission be granted by Project Renaissance for any major republication. For minor printing and sharing, we only request that you notify us.

To reach Win Wenger, please visit his website at Project Renaissance

This version originally published on Anakin's Brain (now Genius By Design)