A Brilliant Sign That You Have A High Fluid IQ

People with high fluid intelligence are likely to have this ability.

People with high fluid intelligence are likely to have this ability.

The ability to store more items in short-term memory indicates a higher fluid IQ, psychological research reveals.

While there may be no limit to long-term memory, short-term memory is much smaller.

The average number of things people can store in short-term memory — whether words, numbers or whatever — is four.

Short-term memory only lasts around 15 to 30 seconds.

Being able to store more than this, suggests an above-average IQ.

However, being able to store these items clearly is NOT linked to IQ.

Dr Keisuke Fukuda, the study’s first author, said:

“Clarity, relates to how well a person can detect small changes.”

In other words, high IQ is linked to the quantity of items a person can store in short-term memory, not the quality.

For the study, 79 people had their fluid intelligence tested.

Fluid intelligence refers to the speed at which the brain works.

It is like the raw power of an engine or the speed at which a computer can process information.

They were then shown between four and eight items on a screen at the same time.

After a second they were shown another object and asked whether it had appeared in a particular location.

People with higher fluid intelligence were better at remembering if they had seen the item before.

However, people with higher fluid intelligence were no better at remembering where the item had been.

Professor Edward Awh, study’s co-author, said:

“The number of things people can remember is robustly correlated with fluid intelligence — the larger number remembered, the higher the IQ.

Resolution in memory is not predictive of IQ at all.”

The study was published in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review (Fukada et al., 2011).

What People With High IQs Do When Faced With Temptation

How long can you wait for your reward?

How long can you wait for your reward?

Having stronger self-control is a sign of higher intelligence, research finds.

Faced with temptation, more intelligent people stay cooler.

In the study, those with higher intelligence waited longer for a larger reward.

For the study, 103 people were given a series of tests that involved choosing between small financial rewards today or larger ones later on.

For example, let’s say I offer you $5 right now, or $10 in a month’s time.

Choosing the larger reward later on makes sense, but immediate returns are tempting.

Psychologists call this ‘delay discounting’: the longer people have to wait for a reward, the more they discount its value.

In other words, “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”.

The results showed that people with higher intelligence could wait longer for their reward, so demonstrating higher self-control.

Brain scans revealed that people with higher IQ had greater activation in an area called the anterior prefrontal cortex.

This area of the brain allows people to manage complex problems and deal with competing goals.

Dr Noah Shamosh, the study’s first author, said:

“It has been known for some time that intelligence and self-control are related, but we didn’t know why.

Our study implicates the function of a specific brain structure, the anterior prefrontal cortex, which is one of the last brain structures to fully mature.”

The study was published in the journal Psychological Science (Shamosh et al., 2008).

4 Positive & Upbeat Personality Traits Linked To High IQ

The personality traits that are signs of high intelligence.

The personality traits that are signs of high intelligence.

People whose personalities are happy, energetic and lively have higher IQs, research finds.

Higher IQ is linked to experiencing more positive emotions, enjoying complex problems, having a larger vocabulary and understanding things more quickly.

The researchers found that smarter people were less stressed when given a taxing task to do.

They were also more engaged with it.

People with higher IQs were more likely to agree with statements like:

  • I am quick to understand things.
  • I have a large vocabulary and enjoy being intellectually engaged.
  • I enjoy tackling difficult problems.

The more people agreed with statements like these, the higher their IQ was, researchers found.

The study included 440 people who completed surveys of their happiness and IQ.

The results showed that energetic lively people had higher fluid intelligence.

The study’s authors conclude:

“The results indicated that Intellect was generally associated with lower stress (low distress and worry and high task engagement) before and after intelligence tests.”

Fluid intelligence refers to the speed at which the brain works.

It is like the raw power of an engine or the speed at which a computer can process information.

Fluid intelligence is contrasted with crystallised intelligence.

Crystallised intelligence is something like general knowledge: the information that people have learnt about the world over the years.

The reason that IQ and happiness are linked could be down to how much importance is placed on being smart in Western cultures.

The authors write:

“It is striking that Intellect was correlated with affect even in Study 1, in which there was no requirement to perform an intellectual task.

At least in Western cultures, intellect may be of sufficient importance to the self-schema that it influences general emotional functioning.”

The study was published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences (Zajenkowskia & Matthews, 2019).

How Reading For Pleasure Affects Your IQ (M)

Around half the children in the study had little or no experience of reading for pleasure or did not pick up the habit until later on.

Around half the children in the study had little or no experience of reading for pleasure or did not pick up the habit until later on.


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3 Signs Of High IQ & Ability To Read Other People’s Personalities

Three ways to tell if you have a high IQ.

Three ways to tell if you have a high IQ.

People who can predict the behaviour of others have higher personal intelligence, research finds.

Two other signs of high personal intelligence are self-motivation and being able to anticipate desires.

The idea of personal intelligence is broader than IQ.

It involves using intelligence to predict people’s behaviour.

Someone high in personal intelligence is able to analyse correctly their own and other people’s personalities.

People high in personal IQ know how best to deal with other people and how they will react.

Professor John Mayer, the expert on personality and intelligence who came up with the theory, said:

“Think of all the ways we read and interpret the people around us each day: We notice body language and facial expressions to estimate one another’s moods.

We draw initial guesses about personalities based on how people dress and present themselves, and we adjust how we interact with them accordingly.

We run through scenarios in our heads, trying to anticipate how others will react, in order to choose the best course in dealing with a boss, a coworker, or a partner.”

Reviewing decades of research on personality and intelligence, Professor Mayer has found it comes more naturally to some:

“We pick up on small pieces of feedback about ourselves from others, which we incorporate into a fuller and more accurate perception of ourselves.

And we make all kinds of decisions–about work-life balance, the neighborhood we live in, or who we spend our time with–based on what we think will be the best fit for our personalities.”

Professor Mayer concludes:

“People who are high in personal intelligence are able to anticipate their own desires and actions, predict the behavior of others, motivate themselves over the long term, and make better life decisions.”

→ Discover 22 more signs of intelligence.

The book is called Personal Intelligence: The Power of Personality and How It Shapes Our Lives and is published by Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.

These 3 Personality Traits Indicate High IQ

The surprising traits that indicate high intelligence.

The surprising traits that indicate high intelligence.

Being genuine, cooperative and sincere are all linked to having a high IQ, research finds.

Although being ‘nice’ is not linked in the popular imagination with being intelligent, this study found that it was.

The study also found that half of the connection between high IQ and being ‘nice’ was down to genetics.

Other personality features that are linked to high IQ include being a seeker of variety, intellectually curious, imaginative and sensitive to emotions.

All of these are aspects of ‘openness to experience’, which is one of the five major aspects of personality.

Openness to experience is frequently strongly linked to high IQ by studies.

The study included 2,488 people who were given tests of personality and intelligence at 12 and 18-years-old.

Genetic modelling was used to examine the links between intelligence, personality and genes.

The results were explained by the study’s authors:

“Intelligence as measured by IQ was positively associated with
openness to experience and agreeableness.

Moderate phenotypic correlations [genetic associations] between agreeableness and IQ were also of interest.

Earlier studies reported small correlations between intelligence and agreeableness.

There have been a few studies on altruistic behavior in young children that found a positive relation with IQ.”

In fact, people with high IQs are better at working well with other people, other studies have found.

That is why those with high IQs are so essential: without them society would not work.

Being cooperative, in particular, may have strong links to higher IQ, the authors write:

“…unique aspects of human cognition are driven by social cooperation.

The cooperative attitudes of the subjects scoring high on agreeableness could therefore be the shared underlying factor in the relationship with IQ.”

The study was published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences (Bartels et al., 2012).

4 Wonderful Personality Traits Linked To High IQ

The traits are so powerful that they are linked to intelligence when measured almost 40 years later.

The traits are so powerful that they are linked to intelligence when measured almost 40 years later.

Insatiable curiosity, an active fantasy life, a sensitivity to emotions and an appreciation of art and beauty are all linked to high IQ, a study finds.

High IQ may have a particularly strong link to curiosity because intelligence creates a ‘cognitive hunger’ — a desire to think.

Over the years, higher IQ drives people to keep exploring new experiences to satiate this hunger.

Curiosity, along with sensitivity to emotions, appreciation of beauty and an active fantasy life are all aspects of the major personality trait called ‘openness to experience’.

Being open to experience is so powerful that it is linked to intelligence when measured almost 40 years later.

Children who scored higher on IQ tests at just 11-years-old were more open to experience when they were 50-years-old, the psychologists found.

The study’s authors explain their results:

“…childhood intelligence is indeed positively associated with adult trait Openness, even when it was assessed almost four decades earlier when participants were at 11 years.

Intelligence may influence the development of personality in that intelligent people develop habits to satisfy their curiosity and ‘‘cognitive hunger’’ which are an essential ingredient of Openness.”

The conclusions come from a huge study of 17,415 people born in the UK in one week in March 1958.

Over the following 50 years they were given various personality and intelligence tests.

Children with higher IQs were more open to experience because of higher motivation at school, greater support from their families and higher social status, the researchers found.

They explain how these factors fit together:

“Parents of higher socioeconomic status may foster children’s trait Openness by providing better resources such as choosing good schools and cultural environment (theaters, museums, traveling abroad, etc.); intelligent children tend to use more mental activities (such as abstract ideas, learning new
vocabularies, or math formulas) than those who are less intelligent; school settings (quality of teaching, good facilities) may enhance pupils to engage more in school learning.

All these three factors may influence educational and
occupational achievement, which in turn, may increase
the scores on Openness.”

In other words, they believe that it is a higher IQ that mainly drives the development of greater openness to experience.

The study was published in the Journal of Individual Differences (Furnham & Cheng, 2016).

2 Personality Traits That Indicate High IQ

This is not something people usually associate with intelligence — but the study clearly shows a link.

This is not something people usually associate with intelligence — but the study clearly shows a link.

Highly intelligent people are more likely to be generous and altruistic, psychological research finds.

Altruistic people are unselfish and sometimes deny themselves so that others can have more.

Intelligent people may be more generous partly because they can afford it.

People with higher IQs generally have greater resources, or can expect to recover what they have given later on.

Generosity is not something people usually associate with intelligence — but this study clearly shows a link.

The study’s authors write:

“In the first study, we found that those who contributed more than their fair share to a public good were more intelligent, as measured by two relatively independent measures of general intelligence.

In the second study, we showed that those who possess a dispositional tendency to value joint benefits more than
their own, scored higher on an intelligence test.”

For the study, 301 people played games that involved either donating to others or keeping things for themselves.

The results revealed that intelligent people were more generous to others.

People who were more egotistical — keeping more for themselves — tended to be less intelligent.

People with higher IQs were more concerned with the public good.

The authors write:

“The evidence presented supports the possibility that unconditional altruism may serve as a costly signal of general intelligence because altruism is costly and is reliably linked to the quality ‘general intelligence’.

Consistent with the finding that children’s intelligence
predicts later socio-economic success better than parents’ attributes, we assume that intelligence is an indicator of future resources.

As a consequence, someone with high cognitive skills may be able to donate more in advance than someone with lower skills.”

In other words, intelligent people can afford to be more generous because they have more to give.

The study was published in the Journal of Research in Personality (Millet & Dewitte, 2007).

2 Personality Traits Linked To Higher IQ

People with these two traits had higher crystallised intelligence.

People with these two traits had higher crystallised intelligence.

Being open to new experiences and more extraverted are both linked to higher intelligence, research finds.

People who are open to experience tend to have a more active imagination, higher sensitivity to beauty and more intellectual curiosity, among other things.

Open people tend to retain general information better and they are also better at storing memories in the short term.

The results come from a survey of 381 people aged 19- to 89-years-old.

They were split into different groups depending on their cognitive performance.

The type of intelligence measured in the study is known as ‘crystallised’.

This refers to the ability to use learned information and is often tested through general knowledge and vocabulary.

In a twist to the findings, though, it turned out that some adults over 60 performed as well as younger people.

Among these people, it was being disagreeable that was linked to higher IQ.

Other research has also found that people who are highly intelligent tend to be independent and aloof.

The study’s authors conclude:

“The results also suggests that there are differences in personality–intelligence relationships between those who retain a normal level of overall cognitive ability in old age and those older adults who are cognitively superior.”

The study was published in the journal Personality and individual Differences (Baker & Bichsel, 2006).

The Vitamin Linked To Higher IQ

Deficiency in this vitamin is very common.

Deficiency in this vitamin is very common.

Higher vitamin D levels during pregnancy are linked to higher IQ among children, research finds.

Unfortunately, vitamin D deficiency is common in the general population and especially among Black people.

Around 80 percent of Black pregnant women may be deficient in vitamin D.

Ms Melissa Melough, the study’s first author, explains:

“Melanin pigment protects the skin against sun damage, but by blocking UV rays, melanin also reduces vitamin D production in the skin.

Because of this, we weren’t surprised to see high rates of vitamin D deficiency among Black pregnant women in our study.

Even though many pregnant women take a prenatal vitamin, this may not correct an existing vitamin D deficiency.

I hope our work brings greater awareness to this problem, shows the long-lasting implications of prenatal vitamin D for the child and their neurocognitive development, and highlights that there are certain groups providers should be paying closer attention to.

Widespread testing of vitamin D levels is not generally recommended, but I think health care providers should be looking out for those who are at higher risk, including Black women.”

The study included over 1,500 women and their children, who were tracked over five years.

The results showed that children had higher IQs at 4-6 years old when their mothers had higher vitamin D levels during pregnancy.

Ms Melough said:

“Vitamin D deficiency is quite prevalent.

The good news is there is a relatively easy solution. It can be difficult to get adequate vitamin D through diet, and not everyone can make up for this gap through sun exposure, so a good solution is to take a supplement.”

The recommended daily intake for vitamin D is 600 IU.

The average intake in the US is just 200 IU, with the remainder required from exposure to the sun.

Unfortunately, most people do not get enough exposure to the sun, especially in the winter months.

Foods that contain high levels of vitamin D include cow’s milk, breakfast cereals, fatty fish and eggs.

Ms Melough said:

“I want people to know that it’s a common problem and can affect children’s development.

Vitamin D deficiency can occur even if you eat a healthy diet.

Sometimes it’s related to our lifestyles, skin pigmentation or other factors outside of our control.”

The study was published in The Journal of Nutrition (Melough et al., 2020).