can reading improve mental functions?

I’m not sure that it can improve your IQ persay but it definitely can expand your knowledge base, improve your vocabulary and can be a great conversation starter. My son reads a LOT and really notices that his friends who don’t read as much have much more limited vocabularies.

Good job expanding your horizons! Happy reading. :) (From a voracious reader.)

Recently I expressed to my optomotrist about my concern of my low iq score. He told be that I wasn’t getting dumber but that a large part of iq tests are based on reading, and that because of my vision problem it’s only going to be natural for me to score low on the test. I told him that I was woking with an academic tutor to develope my academic skills in reading decoding and reading comprehension, he told me that that’s good but I also need to just simply read and develop a love for it or I will always struggle with academics.

Yup! You got it!

Active reading gives you practice thinking so it can improve your mind. Yes, it can improve your IQ :-)

I think that reading can definitely improve your vocabulary, so on the verbal portion of an iq test you might see some improvement…but I don’t think it would be that dramatic…I am not entirely sure how many questions are strictly vocab (or very closely related) on an iq test….my gut feeling is that this would be the easiest part of the test to improve your score, mostly because everyone can improve their vocabulary by rote memorization (at least to an extent, using menenomics or otherwise). Fluid reasoning and cognitive speed, however, are more static.