Category: Intelligence

One more benefit of being above average in intelligence.

People with higher IQs are likely to live longer, according to research.

Those with high intelligence in childhood are less likely to get heart disease, strokes, respiratory diseases and dementia later on.

Higher intelligence may allow people to learn better health behaviours and cope more effectively with problems over the years.

Some of the lowered risk is down to the fact that more intelligent people are less likely to smoke.

The conclusions come from a Scottish study that included 938 people who were followed for over 25 years.

The results showed that for every 15 points of higher IQ, people’s risk of dying was reduced by 17 percent.

This study found the link between IQ and longevity was strongest in children brought up in poorer neighbourhoods.

Higher intelligence, then, is particularly beneficial to the longevity of poorer people, said Dr Carole L. Hart, the study’s first author:

“The significant interaction found between IQ and deprivation suggests that IQ in childhood is less important in terms of mortality for people who live in more affluent areas in adulthood than for people who live in deprived areas.”

It is not yet clear how IQ is related to longevity, said Dr Hart:

“It is possible that low childhood IQ leads to adult deprivation, which in turn leads to earlier death.”

Some studies have suggested that IQ and longevity are linked to the same sets of genes.

Another possibility is that adverse circumstances, which are often linked to being poor, can lower IQ.

Worse nutrition, educational opportunities and deprived areas may all take their toll on mental development.

Other studies have also suggested that higher IQ leads to a longer life.

The study was published in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine (Hart et al., 2003).

Do you pass the financial test of intelligence?

People with high IQs are more patient in financial matters, research finds.

They are willing to wait longer to increase their money and to endure the risks involved.

The survey of 1,000 people in Germany tested how long people would wait for a series of rewards, analogous to putting it into a savings account.

For example, people were given $100 to have now, or they could choose to wait one year to get more.

Would you wait one year to get $110, $120 or $150?

Or would you rather just have the $100 right now?

Professor Armin Falk, study co-author, summarised the results:

“The more intelligent the test subjects were, the more patient and tolerant of risk they were.”

Impatient people generally wanted a higher reward for waiting one year to get their money.

Intelligent people did not demand so much reward for taking the risk.

It seems that intelligence, risk tolerance and patience are closely related.

It is important to see the connections between risk and reward.

Professor Falk said:

 “Anyone who does not have this ability may be better advised to follow the principle of ‘A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.'”

The study was published in the American Economic Review (Dohmen et al., 2010).

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).