Category: Intelligence

How high intelligence could have a mental cost for some.

Disorders of mood could be the price some people pay for high intelligence.

Psychologists have found that higher childhood IQ is linked to features of bipolar disorder in young adulthood.

The research adds fuel to the debate over the connection between intelligence, creativity and mental health issues.

For the research, 1,881 people were followed from age 8 until they were 22 or 23 years old.

Their IQ was measured along with any characteristics of mood disorders.

The results showed that having ten more IQ points  at age 8 was linked to being in the top ten per cent for having manic personality traits in their early twenties.

Professor Daniel Smith, one of the study’s authors, said:

“A possible link between bipolar disorder and intelligence and creativity has been discussed for many years and many studies have suggested a link.

In this large study, we found that better performance on IQ tests at age eight predicted bipolar features in young adulthood.

We are not saying that high childhood IQ is a clear-cut risk factor for bipolar disorder but rather that there is likely to be a shared biology between intelligence and bipolar disorder which needs to be understood more fully.

Many other factors – including family history of mental illness, childhood adversity, stressful life events and drug misuse – are known to increase an individual’s risk of developing bipolar disorder.

Our finding has implications for understanding of how liability to bipolar disorder may have been selected through generations.

One possibility is that serious disorders of mood such as bipolar disorder are the price that human beings have had to pay for more adaptive traits such as intelligence, creativity and verbal proficiency.

This work will inform future genetic studies at the interface of intelligence, creativity and bipolar disorder, and will help with efforts to improve approaches to the earlier detection of bipolar disorder in adolescents and young adults.”

The study was published in the British Journal of Psychiatry (Smith et al., 2015).

Three ways to tell if you have a high IQ.

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

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.”

Related

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• 12 Hidden Factors That Are Secretly Lowering Your IQ (P)

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.

Forget book smarts — this is what really sets intelligent people apart.

Being nice is a sign of high IQ: highly intelligent people are better at cooperating and more generous to others.

Smart people are almost three times as generous as those with lower cognitive abilities.

The reason may be that smarter people are more patient — a quality that is critical for cooperation.

More patience allows people to step back from a situation and exert self-control.

The study involved hundreds of people given a test of a type of intelligence called ‘cognitive reflection’.

This measures people’s ability to override a quick, obvious response that turns out to be wrong, in order to get the right answer.

Here are two of cognitive reflection tests used in the study:

• If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long will it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?
• In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake?

The answers are at the bottom of the article.

Clever people are more patient when searching out the real answer, it emerges.

Subsequently, people who did better on this test were also up to three times more generous in a game that tested people’s generosity.

The reason could be that people with intelligence have more patience, the study’s author, Dr Lohse, writes:

“Subjects with higher cognitive abilities have been shown to be more patient and to be able to exert higher levels of self-control.

Martinsson et al. (2014) demonstrate that subjects with higher self-control capabilities cooperate more.

Similarly, Fehr and Leibbrandt (2011) show that more patient subjects in the lab cooperate more in the field.”

The answers are…

The answers are 5 minutes for the first problem and 47 days for the second.

If you didn’t get these, remember the test is designed to make you think a little longer and harder.

The study was published in the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (Lohse, 2016).

This bold and confident sign is linked to higher academic achievement.

People who are very sure of their intellectual abilities are, in fact, smarter than others.

Intellectual arrogance was linked to higher grades in the study.

People who are intellectually arrogant tend to agree with statements such as, “I believe my own ideas are superior to others.”

People are seen as intellectually arrogant when they are extraverted, dominate the group and want to be the centre of attention.

Professor Wade C. Rowatt, study co-author, said:

“One possibility is that people who view themselves as intellectually arrogant know what they know and that translates to increases in academic performance.”

The study followed the work of 103 students over a semester.

The results showed that those who felt they were superior to others performed better in their coursework.

However, people who were more humble about their abilities were better liked by their peers.

So, intellectual arrogance may come with a social penalty.

The study’s authors were surprised by the results: they had predicted that intellectual humility would be linked to better performance.

However, this was not the case.

Dr Benjamin R. Meagher, the study’s first author, still thinks humility is a vital trait:

“What I think is important about intellectual humility is its necessity for not only science, but for just learning generally — and that applies to the classroom, a work setting, wherever.

Learning something new requires first acknowledging your own ignorance and being willing to make your ignorance known to others.

People clearly differ in terms of their willingness to do something like that, but that willingness to learn, change one’s mind and value the opinion of others is really needed if people and groups are going to develop and grow.”

Related

• 10 Lifestyle Strategies That Will Optimise Your IQ (P)
• 12 Hidden Factors That Are Secretly Lowering Your IQ (P)

The study was published in the Journal of Research in Personality (Meagher et al., 2015).

One musical skill may indicate higher intelligence.

People who have higher IQs can keep a beat more precisely.

Participants with higher IQs find it easier to keep a regular beat on a drum pad.

One reason may be that precise timing is vital for problem-solving and overall brain efficiency.

Brain scans revealed that people with higher intelligence had more white matter in parts of the brain important for problem-solving, planning and managing time.

These factors were also linked to an improved ability to keep time.

This suggests that better timing may be built into the brains of more intelligent people at a fundamental level.

Professor Fredrik Ullén, a pianist and neuroscientist who led the study, said:

“It’s interesting as the task didn’t involve any kind of problem solving.

Irregularity of timing probably arises at a more fundamental biological level owing to a kind of noise in brain activity.”

The study included 34 people who tried to copy the clicking of a metronome by hitting a drum pad.

They were given 20 beats to warm up, then they had to keep the same rhythm going for a further 45 beats.

The results showed that the more intelligent people were, the better they could keep time when the metronome stopped.

Professor Ullén said:

“All in all, this suggests that a factor of what we call intelligence has a biological basis in the number of nerve fibres in the prefrontal lobe and the stability of neuronal activity that this provides.”

Faster brains make quicker perceptual judgements and are also better at solving puzzles or analysing decisions.

For example, people with higher IQs find it easier to tell which way an object is moving.

Related

• 10 Lifestyle Strategies That Will Optimise Your IQ (P)
• 12 Hidden Factors That Are Secretly Lowering Your IQ (P)

The study was published in the Journal of Neuroscience (Ullén et al., 2008).