Category: Intelligence

One common sign of high IQ is obvious in childhood.

Learning to read at an earlier stage is a sign of higher IQ, a study finds.

The better a person’s reading skills at age 7, the higher their intelligence in later life.

It may be that reading from an earlier age helps to improve IQ.

If this is true, then helping children to read sooner may boost their intelligence.

Dr Stuart J. Ritchie, the study’s first author, said:

“Since reading is an ability that can be improved, our findings have implications for reading instruction.

Early remediation of reading problems might aid not only the growth of literacy, but also more general cognitive abilities that are of critical importance across the lifespan.”

The conclusions come from a study of 1,890 twins whose IQ and reading levels were tested between the ages of 7 and 16.

Twins were included because the researchers wanted to rule out the effect of the environment and genes.

It emerged from the results that among each pair of twins, the one that began to read earlier had a higher IQ later on.

Dr Ritchie said:

“If, as our results imply, reading causally influences intelligence, the implications for educators are clear.

Children who don’t receive enough assistance in learning to read may also be missing out on the important, intelligence-boosting properties of literacy.”

Dyslexia

Dyslexia — a type of learning difficulty causing problems with reading and writing — is not a sign of low IQ.

Professor John D. E. Gabrieli, who has published research on dyslexia and IQ, said:

“We found that children who are poor readers have the same brain difficulty in processing the sounds of language whether they have a high or low IQ.

Reading difficulty is independent of other cognitive abilities.”

The study was published in the journal Child Development (Ritchie et al., 2015).

Intelligent people often value novel things and also tend to be offbeat and rebellious.

People with high IQs are more likely to consume mind-altering substances, research finds.

Whether it is alcohol, tobacco or psychoactive drugs like LSD, intelligence and drug-taking are linked.

More intelligent people are also more likely to have sampled a variety of different recreational drugs in the past.

The explanation could be that intelligent people are attracted to novelty or that they do not fear becoming addicted due to higher self-control.

Offbeat and rebellious

On top of this people with higher intelligence are more likely to be original, offbeat and rebellious, research finds.

More intelligent people have a distinct, individual style and avoid following the crowd.

Non-conformists may be more intelligent because they are less afraid to break society’s conventions.

The conclusions come from a small study that asked 46 people about their ‘need for uniqueness’ and tested their intelligence.

They were asked whether they agreed with statements like:

• “I do not always need to live by the rules and standards of society.”
• “I tend to express my opinions publicly, regardless of what others say.”
• “When a style of clothing I own becomes too commonplace, I usually quit wearing it.”

The results showed that people with higher IQs were more likely to endorse statements indicating a preference for uniqueness.

More intelligent people may be more resourceful, which explains their independence, the study’s authors write:

“…the more intelligent someone is, the less dependent this person is on the group to acquire resources.

This means that highly intelligent people can afford more non-conformist behavior because of their capacity to secure resources in isolation.

…as general intelligence increases the need to conform to group norms decreases.”

These findings fit with another study that has found that people with high IQs drink more alcohol, although they are unlikely to be heavy drinkers.

Another possibility is that more intelligent people are more likely to get bored.

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The findings for fluid intelligence — the brain’s raw speed — were different for men and women.

The brains of people with high IQ have very efficient wiring, research shows.

The brain’s ‘wiring’ or ‘white matter’ refers to the nerve fibres that transmit information between areas.

White matter is sometimes called the superhighway of the brain: it transmits signals and regulates communication.

People with more efficient white matter, the study found, had greater general knowledge.

General knowledge — or as psychologists call it, crystallised intelligence — is one of two broad aspects of intelligence.

Dr Erhan Genç, the study’s first author, said:

“Although we can precisely measure the general knowledge of people and this wealth of knowledge is very important for an individual’s journey through life, we currently know little about the links between general knowledge and the characteristics of the brain.”

For the study, 324 were given brain scans and asked to answer a series of general knowledge questions.

The results showed that people with more efficient structural networks in their brain got more general knowledge questions correct.

Dr Genç said:

“We assume that individual units of knowledge are dispersed throughout the entire brain in the form of pieces of information.

Efficient networking of the brain is essential in order to put together the information stored in various areas of the brain and successfully recall knowledge content.”

The findings for fluid intelligence — the brain’s raw speed — were different for men and women.

Men, it emerged, who had bigger brains tended to have higher fluid intelligence.

Women with better functional connectivity, though, had higher intelligence.

Efficient brain networking is vital for intelligence, said Dr Genç:

“We assume that more efficient networking of the brain contributes to better integration of pieces of information and thus leads to better results in a general knowledge test.”

The study was published in the European Journal of Personality (Genç et al., 2019).

The drop comes about because of subtle social signals sent between people about their place in the hierarchy.

Being in a group can make some people lose around 15 percent of their IQ, research finds.

People who tried to solve problems in a group behaved as though they were significantly less smart than their IQ scores suggested.

The drop comes about because of subtle social signals sent between people about their place in the hierarchy.

In other words, some people start to feel inferior in a group and this affects their ability to think clearly.

Professor Read Montague, who led the research, explained how it worked:

“We started with individuals who were matched for their IQ.

Yet when we placed them in small groups, ranked their performance on cognitive tasks against their peers, and broadcast those rankings to them, we saw dramatic drops in the ability of some study subjects to solve problems.

The social feedback had a significant effect.”

In the real world, social signals can be sent in more subtle ways than announcing everyone’s performance.

It could be a social hierarchy known to everyone, how people speak or even their gender.

Women are particularly vulnerable to an IQ drop from being in a group, the researchers found.

Dr Kenneth Kishida, the study’s first author, said:

“Our study highlights the unexpected and dramatic consequences even subtle social signals in group settings may have on individual cognitive functioning.

And, through neuroimaging, we were able to document the very strong neural responses that those social cues can elicit.”

Professor Montague concluded:

“You may joke about how committee meetings make you feel brain dead, but our findings suggest that they may make you act brain dead as well.”

The study was published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (Kishida et al., 2012).

In most Western countries, the top 1 percent of earners make 20 percent of the national income — but are they smarter?

The top 1 percent of earners are a little less intelligent than those earning slightly less than them, research finds.

The finding is an interesting twist on the usual fact that smarter people earn more — which they do at ‘normal’ wage levels.

This study finds, though, that the association plateaus at around one standard deviation above the average.

In other words, when you are in the top 16 percent of people for IQ, you are smart enough to be in the top 1 percent of earners.

Indeed, you probably do not need to be that smart.

Extremely high IQ

The results may come as a surprise as people automatically associate wealth and power with greater ability.

Rich people are paid more for a reason (or so they tell us): because they are smart.

To explore this issue, the researchers used data from 59,000 Swedish army conscripts.

The key was to capture people with very high incomes, explained Dr Marc Keuschnigg, the study’s first author:

“This data trove permits us to test, for the first time, whether extremely high wages are indicative of extreme intelligence.

To do so, we needed reliable income data that covers the entire wage spectrum.

Survey data typically miss top incomes, but the registers offer full income data on all citizens.”

Power and influence

What the results revealed is that for most people, salaries do reflect cognitive abilities.

At ‘normal’ wage levels, smarter people get paid more, on average.

The relationship only broke down at higher levels — in this case, it was an annual wage of €60,000.

Above this level, people paid more were no smarter, indeed they were less smart than those earning a little less than them.

Top earners claim that their wages are justified by their greater talent.

This study begs to differ — at least in so far as intelligence is a useful trait in the highest earning jobs.

Wealth vs income

Compare this study with another finding that being smart has almost no relationship to wealth.

(Remember that wealth is different to income: people can be wealthy through inheritance without ever having had a job.)

That study found that people with high IQs are no more wealthy than those who are considerably less smart, on average.

This paints an even more pessimistic picture about the relationship between IQ and money.

Critics of IQ tests may see this as damning the test; those with more faith in the test might see it as damning any society espousing meritocratic values.

The study was published in the journal European Sociological Review (Keuschnigg et al., 2023).

When the ‘very brightest’ people tend to go to bed.

People with higher IQs tend to prefer going to bed later at night and getting up later in the morning.

The conclusions come from a study of adolescent bedtimes and their adult IQ.

Researchers found that on a weekday the ‘very bright’ adolescents went to bed at 12:29 am and got up at 7:52 am, on average.

In contrast, the ‘very dull’ went to bed at an average of 11:41 pm and woke up at 7:20 am, on average.

At the weekend, when people have more latitude to follow their own rhythms, the differences were even more obvious.

The study’s authors explain the average times:

‘‘Very dull” individuals on average go to bed at 00:35; ‘‘dull” individuals go to bed at 01:03; ‘‘normal” individuals  go to bed at 01:13; ‘‘bright” individuals go to bed at 01:25; and ‘‘very bright” individuals go to bed at 01:44.”

Bear in mind that all these times are for adolescents, who tend to sleep for longer than adults.

For adults, the equivalent times would probably by earlier as adults tend to have less freedom and they sleep for shorter periods.

Adults who naturally go to bed after 11pm and rise after 8pm would be considered night owls.

The study’s authors explain the link by referencing our evolutionary past.

Tens of thousands of years ago it would have been natural to go to bed earlier and get up earlier.

Going to bed late, though, would have been ‘evolutionary novel’.

In other words, as people have evolved and become more intelligent, they have also tended to stay up later.

Nocturnal activities are a relatively modern invention in evolutionary terms.

Whether or not this explanation is true is highly debatable (see Dutton, 2013), but the link between IQ and sleeping later exists nevertheless.

The study was published in the journal Personality and Individual Difference (Kanazawa & Perina, 2009).

Two-thirds of children report eating this food weekly.

Young people who eat fast food do 20 percent worse on standard tests of math, science and reading, research finds.

Those who eat more fast food at around 10-years-old get worse test scores three years later, the study found.

Two-thirds of young people eat at least some fast food each week.

Dr Kelly Purtell, the study’s first author, said:

“There’s a lot of evidence that fast-food consumption is linked to childhood obesity, but the problems don’t end there.

Relying too much on fast food could hurt how well children do in the classroom.”

The conclusions come from a study of 11,740 adolescents in the US.

More than 50 percent of children reported eating fast food 1-3 times a week.

About 10 percent said they ate it every day and 10 percent ate it every other day.

Less than one-third never ate any fast food.

The researchers controlled for many other factors, including how much TV they watched, the socio-demographic natures of their schools and neighbourhoods and the other foods they ate.

Dr Purtell said:

“We went as far as we could to control for and take into account all the known factors that could be involved in how well children did on these tests.”

This study does not make it clear why fast food consumption is linked to a lower score on standard tests.

However, a lack of essential nutrients such as iron is linked to poorer cognitive development.

High-sugar and high-fat diets are also repeatedly shown to be bad for learning and memory processes.

Dr Purtell said:

“We’re not saying that parents should never feed their children fast food, but these results suggest fast-food consumption should be limited as much as possible.”

The study was published in the journal Clinical Pediatrics (Purtell & Gershoff, 2014).

Peak emotional intelligence (EQ) means that people are better at dealing with their emotions at this age.

It is not until their 60s that people reach their peak levels of emotional intelligence (EQ), research finds.

At this age, people are generally better at seeing the positive side of stressful situations and empathising with the less fortunate.

Professor Robert Levenson, study co-author, said:

“Increasingly, it appears that the meaning of late life centers on social relationships and caring for and being cared for by others.

Evolution seems to have tuned our nervous systems in ways that are optimal for these kinds of interpersonal and compassionate activities as we age.”

Emotional intelligence study

In one study people of different ages were shown video clips with different emotional content — some were sad and disgusting.

Those in their 60s did better than those in their 40s and 20s at focusing on the positive aspects of the clip — they were better at using what psychologists call ‘positive reappraisal’.

This suggests their emotional intelligence is higher.

Younger people, though, were better at distracting themselves from the clips.

In another study, psychologists tested how physiologically sensitive people of different ages were to the clips.

The results showed that older people reacted more strongly to sadness.

Dr Benjamin Seider, the study’s first author, said:

“In late life, individuals often adopt different perspectives and goals that focus more on close interpersonal relationships.

By doing so, they become increasingly sensitized to sadness because the shared experience of sadness leads to greater intimacy in interpersonal relationships.”

Age and emotional intelligence

Being sensitive to sadness is actually a good thing, Professor Levenson explained:

“Sadness can be a particularly meaningful and helpful emotion in late life, as we are inevitably confronted with and need to deal with the losses we experience in our own life and with the need to give comfort to others.”

The study’s authors conclude:

“…older adults may be better served by staying socially engaged and using positive reappraisal to deal with stressful challenging situations rather than disconnecting from situations that offer opportunities to enhance quality of life.”

The study was published in the journal Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (Seider et al., 2011).

Smart people are not that much more wealthy, but people with high IQs do have higher incomes.

Being smart has almost no relationship to wealth, research reveals.

People with high IQs are no more wealthy than those who are considerably less smart, on average, a study has found.

Perversely, very clever people are actually at a slightly higher risk of financial problems.

Dr Jay Zagorsky, the study’s author, said:

“People don’t become rich just because they are smart.

Your IQ has really no relationship to your wealth.

And being very smart does not protect you from getting into financial difficulty.”

This may explain why there are so many rich people with low IQ and poor people who are highly intelligent.

High IQ = higher income

The slight wrinkle is that people with higher IQs do tend to have a higher income.

As Dr Zagorsky explains, though, that income is different from wealth:

“Financial success for most people means more than just income.

You need to build up wealth to help buffer life’s storms and to prepare for retirement.

You also shouldn’t have to worry about being close to or beyond your financial limits.”

Research on IQ and income and wealth

The conclusions come from 7,403 people in the US who were tracked for almost 40 years in a nationally representative survey.

It found that the income difference between someone of average intelligence and someone in the top 2 percent is only around $12,000 a year.

However, people of average intelligence had similar amounts of wealth as the more intelligent.

So, how come intelligent people earn more, but are not more wealthy?

This study can’t tell us, but it might be that high-IQ people are not saving as much.

Dr Zagorsky said:

“Just because you’re smart doesn’t mean you don’t get into trouble.

Among the smartest people, those with IQ scores above 125, even 6 percent of them have maxed out their credit cards and 11 percent occasionally miss payments.

Professors tend to be very smart people, but if you look at university parking lots, you don’t see a lot of Rolls Royces, Porsches or other very expensive cars.

Instead you see a lot of old, low-value vehicles.”

This might also suggest that professors — and other intelligent people — have different values and aspirations in life.

Dr Zagorsky concluded:

“Intelligence is not a factor for explaining wealth.

Those with low intelligence should not believe they are handicapped, and those with high intelligence should not believe they have an advantage.”

The study was published in the journal Intelligence (Zagorsky, 2007).