Increase your IQ by up to 15 points

I’m conscious that in more than one of these newsletters recently I have made the claim that ‘this is my favourite’ piece of simple science!

This one really does take some beating though – just for sheer simplicity.

As always with the science I quote, it is based on a robust research study, this time by psychologist Glenn Wilson at Kings College London. It was repeated and similar results were gained by the BBC’s Twinstitute programme – a brilliant armchair science watch given they put identical twins through different diets, activities and experiments to see what actually happened to people with the same make-up genetically speaking – a great way to do quick experiments in controlled conditions!

When I tell you the hack, you have to promise not to roll your eyes and raise your eyebrows like a teenager…

When you need your best brain on the job, put your phone away.

How’s your eyebrows?!

The last word in the penultimate sentence is the key one – ‘away’. Most of us when trying to pay attention to someone or something are in the habit of putting our phone on silent and face down on a table so we can’t get distracted by a flash or a beep.

But it turns out to get your best thinking done that’s not enough. The phone has to be out of sight to be out of mind enough to get you this IQ boost.

The great thing about the BBC series was that you could see the science with your own eyes – rather than via an academic paper. This experiment involved splitting the twins into two groups and getting them to do an IQ test. The first group had their phone taken away from them at the door to the examination room. No one found it strange to be asked to give their phones up – it was a test, right?

Phone usage was not mentioned to the other group as like with all good social experiments; they didn’t actually know what was really being tested! So, this group inadvertently (but with clever planning by the researchers!) did the test with their smartphones on the table. No one thought to use it to cheat, they just did what most of us do when we won’t use our phone for a while because we are concentrating on something else and put it to one side.

It was found that the twin with the phone on the table performed on average ten points worse than the twin who couldn’t see their phone.

In the Kings College London study the results were potentially more interesting because there was a gender skew, and they had enough participants for this to be statistically significant. The IQ of the women with their smart phones on the table dropped by 5 points. The mike-drop moment is that the IQ of the men in that smart phone laden room dropped by 15 points.

It was not the distraction of an actual call or text that was responsible for the lower IQ results – no one actually used their phone during the test – but the sheer presence of the phone. Being reminded by association that something might have happened on social media they’d like to know about, for example. Our brains are less efficient (so use more energy and need to think about something for longer) when we ‘switch’ from one task to another and try to do two things in parallel rather than completing one and then moving on to the other.

Remember, the small ‘clever’ part of our brain – the pre-frontal cortex – is not just responsible for answering an exam question and deciding if the answer is A, B or C; it is also responsible for imagining who might call or remembering that you need to order something online. When this part of your brain is doing one of those activities, it can’t do another one efficiently. It is likely that the twin with the phone on the desk was inadvertently switching between tasks – between doing the IQ test and wondering briefly about the latest news headline. The results of this experiment showed just how easily we get distracted – and how simple it can be to ‘allow’ our brains to be less efficient.

There might be a few differences on the edges – some people might be able to focus for longer than others, and we appear to be able to train our brains to focus better, but those differences may be marginal for most of us who won’t end up committing to extensive brain training. We all have the same fundamental biology. We all have a version of the same brain, of which just 5 per cent is given over to conscious ‘clever’ thought – partly because the pre-frontal cortex was the last part of the brain to develop, and our skulls won’t evolve enough to allow it to be much bigger for hundreds of thousands of years. Which none of us have!

To imagine that some people have found a way around this basic limitation is like being told that someone can run at Usain Bolt’s pace for six hours. You simply wouldn’t believe them.

So, there you are. Put your phone away. Not just because someone told you to, or because it reduces someone’s perception of your empathy for them (see Francis Frei and Anne Morris for more on that gem!) Put it away when you need to focus, or you won’t be as clever.

It’s that simple.