It's kinda cool that your daughter got scored on her desire to "keep at it". That's an interesting metric, tbh. As an anecdote, I can share you my experience with low-IQ people coming up with puzzles: They are derivative in form and they're often incomplete, with multiple fitting solutions, and no indication of which solution will be considered "correct". A good riddle is therefor a complex pattern: it follows a structured set-up, has a clue to identify the correct answer, and has an elimination factor to exclude wrong results. By simply reading those properties, you have inevitably gained intelligence, because you automatically mesh your notion of a riddle with the properties I present. You might accept them or reject them, but you're bound by the conclusions you draw, recalling them partially the next time you have to come up with a riddle. This is the acquisition of intelligence. You digest, analyze, consolidate, repeat, forget the details. The higher your intelligence, the more patterns you can combine and reproduce with a measure of success, potentially opening up the way to more interactions and more patterns. In contrast, the more you revert to immediate self-gratification, the less complex everything becomes, which generally reduces the variance of the interactions you'll have, and the more dumb you become. Smart people who suddenly decide to watch TV all day and never go out again, don't stay smart. We're not machines that suddenly stop working, but we do deteriorate gradually over time.