Category: Intelligence

The results come from a genetic genetic analysis of over half-a-million people.

Enjoying good mental health is a sign of higher intelligence, a recent genetic analysis of over half-a-million people finds.

People who are intelligent are 30 percent less likely to suffer from depression.

The findings come from a study probing the connection between intelligence and genetics.

The researchers also found that smarter people are likely to live longer and are at a lower risk of cancer.

Indeed, higher intelligence and health go together.

More intelligent people even have faster reaction times.

The results come from a study utilising a genetic analysis of 630,555 people of all ages.

The results showed that cognitive ability was linked to 148 different locations along the genome.

Dr Gail Davies, the study’s first author, said:

“This study, the largest genetic study of cognitive function, has identified many genetic differences that contribute to the heritability of thinking skills.

The discovery of shared genetic effects on health outcomes and brain structure provides a foundation for exploring the mechanisms by which these differences influence thinking skills throughout a lifetime.”

One disadvantage of intelligence, though, is that people with high IQs are 30 percent more likely to be short-sighted.

Pinning down the connections between intelligence and genes has been difficult, explained Professor Ian Deary, who led the study:

“Less than a decade ago we were searching for genes related to intelligence with about 3,000 participants, and we found almost nothing.

Now with 100 times that number of participants, and with more than 200 scientists working together, we have discovered almost 150 genetic regions that are related to how clever people are.

One thing we know from these results is that good thinking skills are a part of good health overall.”

The study was published in the journal Nature Communications (Davies et al., 2018).

Certain hairstyles made people look more sexy, others more good-natured or even more narrow-minded.

Medium-length casual-looking styles are judged as making women look more intelligent, a survey finds.

These styles are also linked to being good-natured.

Shorter, highlighted hairstyles on a woman make them look more outgoing and confident.

However, in one of those inevitable and irritating trade-offs, shorter hair is seen as less sexy on women.

The hairstyle that gives an intelligent sheen to a man was medium-length side-parted hair.

The bad news for men with these haircuts is that they were also seen as narrow-minded.

The sexiest hairstyle for a man was rated as short hair with a ‘front-flip’.

Actors Matt LeBlanc and Ben Affleck both often sport the front-flip.

The front-flip, however, was linked to being self-centred.

Some other findings from the survey:

• Long straight blond hair on women made them look sexier and richer, but also more narrow-minded.
• Men with shorter, highlighted hair were seen as confident and sexy, but also self-centred.
• Long hair on men is linked to lower intelligence but being good-natured.

As you can see, there was no one perfect hairstyle.

Many had a balance of positive and negative effects on people’s perceptions.

However, there were a couple of neutral hairstyles that did not seem to affect personality perceptions:

• Long, dark curly hair on women.
• Medium-length, centre-parted hair on men.

The results come from a survey in which people were shown pictures of the same man and women with varying haircuts — everything from long hair to bald.

Participants rated each photo on a number of different scales.

The survey was carried out by Professor Marianne LaFrance, who said:

“We wanted to learn whether the frame around the face — the hairstyle — can significantly alter how a person is seen.

We found that different hairstyles quickly lead others to ‘see’ different kinds of people.”

The survey was commissioned by a hair care brand.

How feeling like an expert, googling it and more could be lowering your intelligence.

1. Saturated fat reduces cognitive flexibility

A high-fat, high-sugar diet causes significant damage to cognitive flexibility, a study finds.

Cognitive flexibility is the ability to adjust and adapt to changing situations.

The research was carried out on laboratory mice.

They were given either a normal diet, a high-fat diet or a high-sugar diet.

After four weeks the mental and physical performance of mice on the high-fat or high-sugar diet began to suffer.

2. Multimedia multitasking shrinks the brain

Using laptops, phones and other media devices at the same time could shrink important structures in the brain, a study indicates.

Neuroscientists have found that people who use multiple devices simultaneously have lower gray-matter density in an area of the brain associated with cognitive and emotional control.

Multitasking might include listening to music while playing a video game or watching TV while making a phone call or even reading the newspaper with the TV on.

3. Googling it makes you feel cleverer than you are

Searching the internet makes people feel they know more than they really do, a study finds.

And it doesn’t seem to matter much that people don’t actually find the information for which they were searching.

Matthew Fisher, who led the research, said:

“The Internet is such a powerful environment, where you can enter any question, and you basically have access to the world’s knowledge at your fingertips.

It becomes easier to confuse your own knowledge with this external source.

When people are truly on their own, they may be wildly inaccurate about how much they know and how dependent they are on the Internet.”

4. Too much sugar damages memory

Otherwise healthy people with high blood sugar levels are more likely to have memory problems, according to a study published in the journal Neurology.

One of the study’s authors, Dr. Agnes Flöel, said:

“…even for people within the normal range of blood sugar, lowering their blood sugar levels could be a promising strategy for preventing memory problems and cognitive decline as they age.

5. Experts know less than they think

‘Know-it-alls’ don’t know as much as they think, research finds.

The more people think they know about a topic, the more likely they are to claim that totally made-up facts are true, psychologists have found.

Ms Stav Atir, the study’s first author, explained:

“The more people believed they knew about finances in general, the more likely they were to overclaim knowledge of the fictitious financial terms.

The same pattern emerged for other domains, including biology, literature, philosophy, and geography.

For instance, people’s assessment of how much they know about a particular biological term will depend in part on how much they think they know about biology in general.”

6. Poor sleep ruins thinking skills

The damage that poor sleep does to your thinking skills is mammoth.

Sleepy brains have to work harder while short-term and long-term memory is worse.

Attention and planning are worse and it’s easier to follow habits and difficult to create new strategies.

Sleep deprivation even damages the ability to read other people’s facial emotions.

Read on: Sleep Deprivation Symptoms: 10 Psychological Effects

7. Physical exhaustion hits mental performance

Both mental and physical stress can interact to cause fatigue, a study finds.

The brain’s resources in the prefrontal cortex — an area used for planning and control — are divided during physical and mental activity, the research found.

The research is one of the first to show how mental and physical tasks can interact to fatigue the brain.

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Are taller people really smarter or is IQ unrelated to height?

Smarter people are indeed more intelligent, research finds.

The reason is that the genes that are correlated with height are also correlated with intelligence.

The conclusion comes from a study of the DNA of 6,815 people.

Of course, there are still people who are short and intelligent, plus those who are tall and dim.

But, on average, there is a small association between being taller and having higher intelligence.

Around 70 percent of the genetic differences in IQ and height come down to genetic factors, the rest was environmental.

Why taller people are smarter

Multiple studies over the last 50 years have found links between greater height and higher intelligence.

The explanation for the phenomenon could be that tall, intelligent people tend to look for other tall, intelligent people to mate with.

Dr Matthew Keller, who has conducted a twin study on the phenomenon, says:

“It does look like there are genes that influence both height and IQ.

At the same time, it also looks like people who are taller are slightly more likely to choose mates who are smarter and vice versa.

Such mate choice causes ‘IQ genes’ and ‘tall genes’ to become statistically associated with one another.

There are a lot of exceptions, but there’s a statistical relationship that does happen more than would be expected by chance.”

The studies were published in the journals Behaviour Genetics and PLoS Genetics (Marioni et al., 2014; Keller et al., 2013).

Smarter men do look more intelligent, but the faces of high IQ women do not reveal their intelligence.

Can you tell how intelligent someone is just from their facial features?

Only if they are a man, according to a study published in the journal PLoS One (Kleisner et al., 2014).

The study finds that when judging men just on their facial appearance, there was a relationship with actual intelligence.

But when it came to women, there was no relationship between how intelligent people were perceived and how intelligent they actually were.

The authors speculate that this is because women are primarily judged on their attractiveness and this swamped any judgements about intelligence.

These predictions were in stark contrast to people’s assumptions about the connection between appearance and intelligence.

The faces that look high IQ vs low IQ

People strongly agreed on the type of face that looked intelligent, which was:

“In both sexes, a narrower face with a thinner chin and a larger prolonged nose characterizes the predicted stereotype of high-intelligence, while a rather oval and broader face with a massive chin and a smallish nose characterizes the prediction of low-intelligence.”

The three image below show what people perceive as low, average and high intelligence appearances in men and women:

The research was carried out in the Czech Republic, so these associations between facial features and perceived intelligence may be culturally specific.

But, as you’ll see from these photos, people’s perceptions of intelligence were also associated with attractiveness.

In other words, more attractive people also appear more intelligent, possibly due to the halo effect and/or possibly because there is a small association between higher attractiveness and higher actual intelligence.

Smile to look intelligent

Finally, the study found…

“…a correlation between semblances of emotions of joy or anger in perceptions of high or low intelligence in faces, respectively.

The ‘high intelligence’ faces appear to be smiling more than the ‘low intelligence’ faces. A similar pattern was described for the perception of trustworthiness.”

On the other hand:

“…low-intelligence faces are perceived as untrustworthy and considered angrier.”

In the other words: frown to look more stupid and smile to look more intelligent.

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People with a larger head size also have larger brains and are more likely to have higher IQs, a study finds.

People born with larger heads are more intelligent, according to the results of a large study.

Head size — along with greater brain volume — is also linked to having a more successful future.

Those with larger heads are more likely to go on to higher education.

This is probably because children with greater head size have higher scores on tests of verbal and numerical reasoning.

Head size and intelligence study

The findings come from the UK Biobank study, which is following half a million Britons.

Their physical and mental health is being monitored and connections to their genes are being analysed.

The research has been running for over 10 years.

The findings of the study underline the link between health and intelligence.

People who are taller and have a larger head size and, therefore, larger brains are also more likely to be healthy, the genetic study found.

Smarter people had a lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s diabetes and other diseases.

Dr Saskia Hagenaars, the study’s first author, said:

“The study supports an existing theory which says that those with better overall health are likely to have higher levels of intelligence.”

Dr Stuart Ritchie, who co-authored the study, said:

“This study tests whether genes that are linked to mental abilities and educational attainment are also genes that are related to some disorders.

We found that there are many overlaps: to take one example, genes related to being taller are also related to obtaining a college or university degree.

We also asked whether the sets of genes associated with many disorders and traits predicted people’s actual levels of cognitive abilities.

We found many overlaps there, too.

To take one example, people with more genes linked to cardiovascular disease tended to have lower reasoning ability.”

The study was published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry (Hagenaars et al., 2016).

Hairy chests and body hair may say something about a man’s IQ — now we know why some men undo more shirt buttons than they should.

A hairy chest signals higher intelligence in a man, somewhat tongue-in-cheek research finds.

Dr Aikarakudy Alias, a psychiatrist, has found that hairy chests are more frequent among men who are highly educated, such as doctors.

Dr Alias surveyed male trainee doctors in the US and found that 45 percent of them were ‘very hairy’.

This is in comparison to the 10 percent of men in the general population who had very hairy chests.

The same was also true when Dr Alias looked at the academic rankings among students.

Among engineering graduates, the top students had more body hair than the students who ranked lower.

Hairy chested Mensa men

The evidence doesn’t stop there — even if you are wishing it would!

A survey of 117 male members of the high intelligence society Mensa found they were more likely than average to have a hairy chest.

The most intelligent also had hair on their backs.

Had enough yet?

Yes?

Tough. There’s more.

Dr Alias has also looked at the body hair of boxers.

After examining pictures of top-ranked boxers, he has found that the world champions were less hairy than non-champions.

What this proves I’m not entirely sure.

That you need to be less intelligent to be a world champion?

That can’t be it.

Einstein had no body hair

Of course, not all intelligent men are covered in body hair.

Just look at Albert Einstein, who reportedly had no body hair at all.

Still, it raises the questions of what all this means for the modern fashion for men shaving their body hair?

Could they be shaving off a proud signal of their higher intelligence?

Answers on a postcard to anyone but me.

The studies were presented at the eighth Congress of the Association of European Psychiatrists in 1996 by Dr Aikarakudy Alias.

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