Category: Intelligence

The type of music that signals a high IQ..

People who like instrumental music tend to have higher IQs.

Instrumental music includes everything that does not have lyrics, such as ambient, classical, smooth jazz, big band and some film soundtracks.

Almost everyone, whatever their IQ, though, likes vocal music.

A preference for vocal music does not provide a signal about intelligence.

The reason that higher IQ is linked to the preference for instrumental music has nothing to do with the cognitive complexity of the music.

Opera, for example, is often seen as complex, but it says nothing about people’s intelligence.

The study’s authors write:

“It would be difficult to make the case that big-band music is more cognitively complex than classical music.

On the other extreme, as suspected, preference for rap music is significantly negatively correlated with intelligence.

However, preference for gospel music is even more strongly negatively correlated with it.

It would be difficult to make the case that gospel is less cognitively complex than rap.”

The conclusions come from two surveys of thousands of people who were asked about their musical preferences and given IQ tests.

Both found a link between higher intelligence and preference for instrumental music.

The results showed that…

“…net of age, race, sex, education, family income, religion, current and past marital status and number of children, more intelligent Americans are more likely to prefer instrumental music such as big band, classical and easy listening than less-intelligent Americans.”

An evolutionary explanation

The explanation for this link between IQ and musical preferences may go back into our evolutionary past.

Dr Satoshi Kanazawa, the study’s co-author, thinks that instrumental musical is more ‘evolutionary novel’ and therefore linked to a higher IQ.

This explanation is highly debatable (see Dutton, 2013), but the link is still fascinating.

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The study was published in the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making (Kanazawa & Perina, 2011).

Genetic study finds that, beyond looks, this is the most important quality in a potential partner.

People are more likely to marry those with a similar level of intelligence to themselves.

It shows that when looking for a partner, people generally want someone similar to themselves.

Intelligence, like many other traits, is partly controlled by our genetic makeup.

So, effectively, people tend to pick others who have similar genetic traits.

The study’s authors write:

“Humans generally do not choose their mates randomly.

In the search for a suitable mate, among the highest-ranking qualities people look for in a potential partner are intelligence and educational attainment.”

And when you look at any random couple, there is a surprisingly high correlation between the two different individuals’ intelligence and their education.

The conclusions come from a UK DNA study of 1,600 married or cohabiting couples.

Dr David Hugh-Jones, the study’s first author, said:

 “Our findings show strong evidence for the presence of genetic assortative mating for education in the UK.

The consequences of assortative mating on education and cognitive abilities are relevant for society, and for the genetic make-up and therefore the evolutionary development of subsequent generations.”

Dr Hugh-Jones pointed out that over time the forces of evolution can increase social inequality:

“Assortative mating on inheritable traits that are indicative of socio-economic status, such as educational achievement, increases the genetic variance of characteristics in the population.

This may increase social inequality, for example with respect to education or income.

When growing social inequality is, partly, driven by a growing biological inequality, inequalities in society may be harder to overcome and the effects of assortative mating may accumulate with each generation.”

In other words, if intelligent people continue to marry other intelligent people, then the genes for intelligence may become increasingly concentrated with certain groups.

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The study was published in the journal Intelligence (Hugh-Jones et al., 2016).

This upbeat emotion is linked to having higher intelligence.

People who feel happier tend to have a higher IQ.

In fact, experiencing positive emotions, feeling lively and wide awake all predict higher intelligence.

The idea that more intelligent people tend to be grumpy or unhappy is probably not true, on average.

Part of this link between intelligence and happiness may be down to life circumstances.

More intelligent people tend to be better off, have higher levels of education and consequently have better jobs.

The findings come from a survey of 6,870 people who were given tests of happiness and IQ.

The results showed that people with higher IQs (120-129) were happier than those with lower IQs (70-99).

The average IQ across the whole population is 100.

The study’s authors write:

“In this large nationally representative study, we found that IQ is associated with self-reported happiness, which provides support for our hypothesis.

Levels of happiness were lowest in the lower IQ groups and highest in the higher IQ groups.”

People with higher IQs tend to have better health, the study also found.

Poor health may be linked to low IQ due to lower learning abilities, the study’s authors write:

“One study suggests that people with lower IQ are more
likely to experience health problems because of a reduced
propensity to learn, reason and problem-solve, and because of difficulties in adhering to complex treatments, which often require following detailed instructions, and self-monitoring.”

Another study has shown that stable happiness is also a sign of higher IQ.

People with higher IQs are just as happy at 31-years-old as they are at 51.

More intelligent people experience fewer drops in their happiness over the years.

In contrast, the happiness of people with lower IQs is not just lower overall, but also goes up and down more over the years.

The study was published in the journal Psychological Medicine (Ali et al., 2013).

People with more of this in their blood did better on intelligence tests.

Eating leafy greens helps preserve intelligence over the lifetime.

Leafy greens and other foods contain lutein, a plant pigment that protects the brain from aging.

People with more lutein in their blood did better on intelligence tests, the study found.

Lutein collects in the cell membranes of the brain, playing a ‘neuroprotective’ role.

Foods that contain high levels of lutein include leafy green vegetables like kale and spinach, as well as broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage.

Dr Marta Zamroziewicz, the study’s first author, said:

“Previous studies have found that a person’s lutein status is linked to cognitive performance across the lifespan.

Research also shows that lutein accumulates in the gray matter of brain regions known to underlie the preservation of cognitive function in healthy brain aging.”

For the study, 122 people aged 65 to 75 took tests of crystallised intelligence.

Crystallised intelligence is akin to general knowledge.

Blood tests revealed that people with higher levels of lutein did better on these tests.

Scans also revealed that lutein helped preserve critical areas of the brain.

Professor Aron Barbey, study co-author, said:

“Our analyses revealed that gray-matter volume of the parahippocampal cortex on the right side of the brain accounts for the relationship between lutein and crystallized intelligence.

This offers the first clue as to which brain regions specifically play a role in the preservation of crystallized intelligence, and how factors such as diet may contribute to that relationship.”

Dr Zamroziewicz said:

“Our findings do not demonstrate causality.

We did find that lutein is linked to crystallized intelligence through the parahippocampal cortex.”

Professor Barbey said:

“We can only hypothesize at this point how lutein in the diet affects brain structure.

It may be that it plays an anti-inflammatory role or aids in cell-to-cell signaling.

But our finding adds to the evidence suggesting that particular nutrients slow age-related declines in cognition by influencing specific features of brain aging.”

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The study was published in the journal Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience (Zamroziewicz et al., 2016).

These qualities are not usually associated with intelligence.

Highly intelligent people are more likely to be trusting and generous.

Trusting people tend to believe that others are honest and will not harm them.

Intelligent people are able to override the perfectly natural worry that other people will betray them.

While being trusting is not something people usually associate with intelligence, this research clearly shows a link.

The reason for the link may be that human intelligence has evolved to be trusting, as it helps society function.

For the study, 80 people played an economic game that tested how trusting they were.

They were also given a test of their ‘cognitive reflection’.

Cognitive reflection 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 the tests of cognitive reflection 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.

More trusting

The research also showed that smarter people behaved in a more trusting way towards others.

The study’s authors write:

“It is not hard to imagine that the ability to trust is largely beneficial in a society where survival and prosperity crucially hinge upon the capacity to exchange with counterparts with various degrees of familiarity.

All such transaction […] require an important element of trust.”

In other words, society gets on better if people trust each other.

The study’s authors write:

“…trust has been shown to impact economic variables such as growth and financial development as well as entrepreneurship and trade.

In sum, trust is seen as the lubricant that facilitates exchange in society so its relevance cannot be overstated.”

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.

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The study was published in the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (Corgnet et al., 2015).

People with higher intelligence tend to have this musical ability.

People who can learn a tune more easily have higher intelligence, research suggests.

People with higher IQs were able to learn to play “Happy Birthday” on the piano more accurately in the study.

Whether or not people believed they could improve did not seem to matter.

Instead, pure intelligence predicted how well they did, not a ‘growth mindset’.

A growth mindset is a belief that basic abilities can be improved through hard work.

Musical aptitude was the only other factor that mattered, said Mr Alexander Burgoyne, the study’s first author:

“The strongest predictor of skill acquisition was intelligence, followed by music aptitude.

By contrast, the correlation between growth mindset and piano performance was about as close to zero as possible.”

The study included 171 people who had little or no experience playing the piano.

All were given tests of their mindset and their intelligence.

They followed a video guide that taught them to play “Happy Birthday”, which contained 25 notes.

Afterwards they were rated on their performance of the simple song.

The results showed that IQ mattered most in predicting who did well.

When IQ was taken into account, even musical aptitude paled into insignificance.

Mr Burgoyne said:

“The results were surprising, because people have claimed that mindset plays an important role when students are confronted with challenges, like trying to learn a new musical instrument.

And yet, it didn’t predict skill acquisition.”

There were also some interesting patterns in the results:

• Some learned quickly within six minutes.
• Some were poor at first, but soon improved.
• Some faded away as they lost motivation.
• The rest could not work it out at all.

Mr Burgoyne said:

“Our study examined one of the earliest stages of skill acquisition.

Early experiences can be formative, but I would caution against drawing conclusions about skilled musicians based on our study of beginners.”

The study was published in the journal Intelligence (Burgoyne et al., 2019).

Scores on IQ tests change dramatically when people feel poor.

Feeling poor causes IQ to drop by around 10 points or roughly 10 percent.

Worrying about a lack of money uses up people’s cognitive resources, leaving them less brainpower to deal with other problems in life.

It is not that the poor are less intelligent, explains Professor Sendhil Mullainathan, study co-author:

“Our results suggest that when you’re poor, money is not the only thing in short supply.

Cognitive capacity is also stretched thin.

That’s not to say that poor people are less intelligent than others.

What we show is that the same person experiencing poverty suffers a cognitive deficit as opposed to when they’re not experiencing poverty.

It’s also wrong to suggest that someone’s cognitive capacity has gotten smaller because they’re poor.

In fact, what happens is that your effective capacity gets smaller, because you have all these other things on your mind, you have less mind to give to everything else.

Imagine you’re sitting in front of a computer, and it’s just incredibly slow.

But then you realize that it’s working in the background to play a huge video that’s downloading.

It’s not that the computer is slow, it’s that it’s doing something else, so it seems slow to you. I think that’s the heart of what we’re trying to say.”

A cognitive tax

In one study the researchers conducted in a mall, low- and middle-income shoppers were given IQ tests.

Half, though, were first asked what they would do if their car broke down and the repairs cost $1,500.

This made poorer people start worrying about money and reduced their scores on the subsequent test by around 10 percent.

Professor Mullainathan said:

“For the poor, because these monetary concerns are just below the surface, the question brings them to the top.

The result was, for that group, the gap between the rich and the poor goes up, in both IQ and impulse control.

There was no gap in the other group, but ask them anything that makes them think about money and you see this result.”

Another study compared farmers in rural India.

Professor Mullainathan explained:

“The month after the harvest, they’re pretty rich, but the month before – when the money has run out – they’re pretty poor.

What we did is look at the same people the month before and the month after the harvest, and what we see is that IQ goes up, cognitive control, or errors, goes way down, and response times go way down.

The effect here is about two-thirds of the size of the effect found in the mall study – it’s at least nine or 10 IQ points, just between these months.”

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The study was published in the journal Science (Mani et al., 2013).

Research examined the link between bilingualism and intelligence.

Children who use a second language at home have a higher IQ.

The study looked at 100 Turkish children growing up in the UK, speaking English to their friends and at school.

The results showed that children who spoke Turkish at home had higher IQs than those who only spoke English.

Bilingualism may act as a kind of ‘cognitive reserve’, the scientists think.

Those with more cognitive reserves may be better able to resist Alzheimer’s and similar neurodegenerative diseases.

Dr. Michael Daller, study co-author, said:

“It is easier to develop concepts at a young age in a first language and then learn a new word for it later in a different language.

Children who have to learn to understand things for the first time in a less familiar language will find it much harder, so it follows that the children in our study who had done this scored lower on the IQ test.

The research suggests parents can help their children develop their intelligence by encouraging them to use their native language at home, as this won’t be supported at school.”

The study was published in the journal Neurology (Craik et al., 2010).

Higher intelligence is associated with this personality type.

People whose personalities can accept vagueness and confusion tend to have a higher IQ.

Those who accept ambiguity tend to be open-minded, creative and relaxed about problems that do not have a definitive answer.

Given that the world is filled with grey areas, this allows those who can accept ambiguity to make better decisions.

Other personality traits linked to high IQ are taking risks, being conscientious and being competitive.

Conscientiousness is a sign of higher fluid intelligence, which is the speed at which the brain works.

People with higher IQs are also more likely to have ‘Type A’ personalities, which are characterised by a competitive nature.

The conclusions come from a study of 820 people in the UK who completed assessments of their personality and intelligence.

The personality traits are part of the High Potential Traits Inventory, which is, the authors write a:

“…measure of personality traits directly relevant to workplace behaviours, thoughts and perceptions of the self and others at work.”

Four personality factors were linked to intelligence.

Being able to cope with vagueness is a strong sign of high IQ, the authors write:

“This study found that multiple intelligence measures were predictive of higher tolerance of uncertainty.

Previous researchers have found that more intelligent
individuals are able to adequately adapt to and evaluate
changing work tasks, leading to greater accuracy in decision-making.”

People who are curious also had higher IQs the study found:

“Curiosity – marked by high openness, creativity, imagination, and cognitive complexity – was hypothesised to associate with higher levels of intelligence.

individuals high on curiosity exhibited higher levels of WM ability.”

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The study was published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences (Furnham & Treglown, 2018).