What if I were to tell you that purely six months from now your IQ could be 25 percent higher than what it is today? And what if I told you that all you needed to do was perform a simple daily exercise that would make it happen? In fact, there is powerful evidence that by doing this one easy exercise, you can marvelously increase your IQ — and even make yourself a genius! So what is this humble, easy and tremendous “genius exercise” that will supercharge your brain? This: Keep a daily journal or diary. Every day, or several times a day, write down all your thoughts on paper. Do it consistently for one complete year, and you will rapidly grow more clever — guaranteed.

Consider:

• Researcher Catherine Cox studied the habits of 300 geniuses – luminaries such as Isaac Newton, Einstein, Thomas Jefferson – and discovered that all of them were “compulsive” journal or diary keepers.

• A study determined that only one percent of the world’s population habitually engaged in day after day journal writing. The study also found that that same one percent were almost always super high achievers, and that they almost always lived longer than the mundane for their time, place and era.

• Thomas Edison wrote an incredible 3 million pages of notes, letters and personal thoughts in hundreds of personal journals throughout his life.

• The brilliant cosmologist Steven Hawking contracted Lou Gehrig’s sickness more than 30 years ago and was give just partner years to live. Hawking is a shriveled up lump of a human being restricted to an electronic wheelchair. He cannot speak, write, or even move more than simply a trifle. But 32 years after contracting his bad health, Hawking is considered among the world’s unsurpassed thinkers. He remarried a few years ago after a divorce, and shows no signs of slowing down with his contributions to cosmology and quantum relativity theory. Although unable to definitely keep a journal, Hawking has used computers and other mechanical assistants to continually record not only new ideas and scientific theories, but his own inner reflections.

• When he was a young man, Albert Einstein took a young woman sailing for a date. The date didn’t go very well. The young woman was frustrated because Einstein hardly said a word to her — but instead spent the whole day scribbling in a small journal he carried with him.

Now here’s more good news: to get all of the IQ building effects of day by day journaling, you don’t even have to write down anything that is coherent! This fact is demonstrated in the the journal of one of the great minds of the 19th Century, English inventor Thomas Faraday, a man much Admired By Einstein himself.

Faraday filled thousands of notebooks with seeming utter nonsense. Many have studied the journals of Faraday hoping to discover the key to his brilliant mind. All have been frustrated. In Win Winger and Richard Poe’s book, The Einstein Factor, one researcher wrote:

“(Faraday’s) Diaries have the irritating form of ideas jotted down, repeated and forgotten … a morass or articulated and unarticulated principles, concepts, observations and physical facts.”

In fact, the greatest method to build your IQ seems to be carrying a journal with you throughout the day and writing down any random thoughts as they occur to you. Now an added bonus: Keeping a daily “random thoughts” journal will not only make you smarter, but may also increase your life span! The evidence for this come from a charismatic study of a group of atypical nuns in Mankato, Minnesota.

The nuns are unique in that just about all of them live well past the run of the mill age of death for women in Minnesota. Most of them live well into their 90s, and some top the 100-year mark. Few or none of them have ever suffered from senile dementia or Alzheimer’s sickness. What do the sisters all have in common? That’s right — they are all obsessive journal keepers. Keeping a journal is a requirement of their particular order. And yes, a study of the nuns’ IQs showed that they were all well above average. Of course, there were other variables in the clean and serene lifestyle of the sisters that most likely contributed to their smarts and long life — but journal keeping is the single key element they all had in common. So there you have it. Buy a notebook and carry it wherever you go. Jot down your random thoughts, reflect upon what you write, and shortly, you’ll be enjoying your shiny new super-powered IQ!