Category: Intelligence

The personality trait that is linked to higher intelligence.

Being cooperative is a sign of high intelligence, recent research finds.

More intelligent people tend to be cautious with their trust at first, then build it up with experience.

People who are cooperative tend to be more helpful, believe in teamwork and be mutually supportive.

In addition, those who are cooperative tend to be better at seeing the big picture and learning from experience.

Higher intelligence allows people to process information more quickly.

All these factors are signs that someone’s IQ is high.

Professor Eugenio Proto, who led the study, said:

“People might naturally presume that people who are nice, conscientious and generous are automatically more cooperative.

But, through our research, we find overwhelming support for the idea that intelligence is the primary condition for a socially cohesive, cooperative society.

A good heart and good behaviour have an effect too but it’s transitory and small.

An additional benefit of higher intelligence in our experiment, and likely in real life, is the ability to process information faster, hence to accumulate more extensive experience, and to learn from it.

This scenario can be applied to the workplace, where it’s likely that intelligent people who see the bigger picture and work cooperatively, will ultimately be promoted and financially rewarded.”

The conclusions come from people playing a series of games that tested cooperation.

Each involved trading off risk against reward.

The results showed that people who were more agreeable and conscientious were also more cooperative.

However, the influence of these personality traits was dwarfed by that of IQ.

Those with lower IQs, the study found, tend not to use a consistent strategy and disregard the consequences of their actions.

The study’s authors explain:

“Higher intelligence resulted in significantly higher levels of cooperation and earnings.

The failure of individuals with lower intelligence to appropriately estimate the future consequences of current actions accounts for these difference in outcomes.

Personality also affects behavior, but in smaller measure, and with low persistence.”

The study was published in the Journal of Political Economy (Proto et al., 2018).

The foods can even restore memory in older people.

Flavanols, which naturally occur in fruit and vegetables, can make you smarter, new research finds.

People who consumed a cocoa drink laced with flavanols performed 11 percent faster on complex cognitive tests than those given a placebo.

Flavanols work by increasing blood oxygenation.

Flavanols are present in grapes, cocoa, apples, berries, tea and many other foods.

Dark chocolate is a particularly rich source of cocoa flavanols.

Dr Catarina Rendeiro, study co-author, said:

“Flavanols are small molecules found in many fruits and vegetables, and cocoa, too.

They give fruits and vegetables their bright colors, and they are known to benefit vascular function.

We wanted to know whether flavanols also benefit the brain vasculature, and whether that could have a positive impact on cognitive function.”

The small study included 18 people given either a flavanol-rich drink or a placebo.

Two hours later, brain scans showed that those who had consumed flavanols had blood oxygenation three times higher in response to hypercapnia.

Hypercapnia means the elevation of carbon dioxide in the bloodstream.

Dr Rendeiro explained the results:

“Our results showed a clear benefit for the participants taking the flavanol-enriched drink – but only when the task became sufficiently complicated.

We can link this with our results on improved blood oxygenation – if you’re being challenged more, your brain needs improved blood oxygen levels to manage that challenge.

It also further suggests that flavanols might be particularly beneficial during cognitively demanding tasks.”

Long-term flavanol consumption

Taking cocoa flavanols over the long term has also been linked to a variety of mental benefits.

In elderly people, they have been shown to improve cognitive performance, attention, processing speed and verbal fluency.

These effects are particularly strong among elderly people starting to see age-related mental decline.

One study, published in Nature Neuroscience, found a high-flavanol diet could restore aspects of older people’s memory back to that of a typical 30- or 40-year-old.

The study was published in the journal Scientific Reports (Gratton et al., 2020).

This bright quality is linked to higher intelligence.

Feeling more happiness is a sign of a higher IQ, research finds.

Indeed, stable happiness is also a sign of higher IQ.

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

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

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 conclusions come from a national survey of all 17,419 babies born in Britain during one week in 1958.

Those that stayed in the study were asked about their levels of happiness from ages 31 to 51.

The results are explained by Dr Satoshi Kanazawa, the study’s author:

“…childhood general intelligence emerged as the strongest predictor of the life-course variability of happiness.

More intelligent children on average tended to grow up to be more stable in their subjective well-being throughout adulthood.”

However, the reason that more intelligent people enjoy stable happiness was not clear from the study.

Dr Kanazawa writes:

“More intelligent individuals were significantly more stable in their happiness, and it was not entirely because: (1) they were more educated and wealthier (even though they were); (2) they were healthier (even though they were); (3) they were more stable in their marital status (even though they were); (4) they were happier (even though they were)…”

Satisfaction with life

Higher satisfaction with life is also a sign of high intelligence, a previous study has found.

People who are more satisfied with their life and their job score higher on tests of general mental ability.

Satisfaction with life is one of the two major aspects of happiness, along with the feeling of positive emotions in the moment.

The study was published in the British Journal of Psychology (Kanazawa et al., 2014).

Fluid intelligence is the ability to solve problems, apply logic and identify patterns.

Having larger pupils is linked to higher fluid intelligence, a study finds.

Fluid intelligence is the ability to solve problems, apply logic and identify patterns.

It is contrasted with crystallised intelligence, which involves using skills, knowledge and experience.

The differences are visible to the unaided eye, despite the relatively small size of the pupils.

The pupils are the black part in the centre of the eye.

They open and close in response to the amount of light falling on them.

The pupils also respond to how much work the brain is doing and other psychological factors.

The study’s authors explain:

“Starting in the 1960s it became apparent to psychologists that the size of the pupil is related to more than just the amount of light entering the eyes.

Pupil size also reflects internal mental processes.

For instance, in a simple memory span task, pupil size precisely tracks changes in memory load, dilating with each new item held in memory and constricting as each item is subsequently recalled.”

Dilated pupils have been shown to reflect when a person’s brain is overloaded with information, how interested a person is in what is being said to them, whether they are in pain and much more.

Measuring pupils

For the study, 40 people’s baseline pupil size was measured — half were in the top quartile for intelligence, the other half in the bottom quartile.

Baseline pupil size is measured when a person is sitting down, not doing too much.

The authors describe the results:

“…we have shown that large differences in baseline pupil size, even observable to the unaided eye, exist between high and low cognitive ability individuals engaged in a cognitively demanding task and cannot be explained by differences in mental effort.”

The study was published in the journal Cognitive Psychology (Tsukahara et al., 2016).

This is not something people usually associate with intelligence — but the study clearly shows a link.

Highly intelligent people are more likely to be generous and altruistic, psychological research finds.

Altruistic people are unselfish and sometimes deny themselves so that others can have more.

Intelligent people may be more generous partly because they can afford it.

People with higher IQs generally have greater resources, or can expect to recover what they have given later on.

Generosity is not something people usually associate with intelligence — but this study clearly shows a link.

The study’s authors write:

“In the first study, we found that those who contributed more than their fair share to a public good were more intelligent, as measured by two relatively independent measures of general intelligence.

In the second study, we showed that those who possess a dispositional tendency to value joint benefits more than
their own, scored higher on an intelligence test.”

For the study, 301 people played games that involved either donating to others or keeping things for themselves.

The results revealed that intelligent people were more generous to others.

People who were more egotistical — keeping more for themselves — tended to be less intelligent.

People with higher IQs were more concerned with the public good.

The authors write:

“The evidence presented supports the possibility that unconditional altruism may serve as a costly signal of general intelligence because altruism is costly and is reliably linked to the quality ‘general intelligence’.

Consistent with the finding that children’s intelligence
predicts later socio-economic success better than parents’ attributes, we assume that intelligence is an indicator of future resources.

As a consequence, someone with high cognitive skills may be able to donate more in advance than someone with lower skills.”

In other words, intelligent people can afford to be more generous because they have more to give.

The study was published in the Journal of Research in Personality (Millet & Dewitte, 2007).

This sign indicates stronger reasoning and better analytical and conceptual thinking.

Being a ‘night owl’ is a sign of high IQ, research finds.

Night owls prefer to stay up late at night and rise later in the morning.

This sleep pattern is linked to stronger reasoning and better analytical and conceptual thinking.

Despite higher intelligence, night owls tend to get slightly worse grades in school.

This may be because the school day starts too early for them.

Morning types who rise early, also known as ‘larks’, tend to do around 8% better in school.

Later in life, though, the higher intelligence of night owls tends to shine through.

Once in the world of work, night owls tend to do better because of their higher intelligence.

Higher inductive reasoning abilities, in particular, are linked to more prestigious jobs and higher incomes.

Around one-third of the population are night owls, with one-quarter preferring to rise early.

The remainder fall somewhere in between, being neither early risers nor late sleepers.

The conclusions come from a study of 887 adolescents in Spain.

All were given tests of intelligence and this was compared to their performance in school and sleep habits.

The results showed that night owls had higher IQs but did worse in school.

This could be partly explained by night owls being nonconformists, the authors write:

“Evening adolescents tend to act out in an independent and nonconforming manner and resist following traditional standards (perhaps early morning schedules), also they tend to be creative, something that probably is not promoted at school.”

Commenting on the study, Professor Jim Horne, of Loughborough University, said:

“Evening types tend to be the more extrovert creative types, the poets, artists and inventors, while the morning types are the deducers, as often seen with civil servants and accountants.

We have looked at morning and evening types and we found that personalities tended to be different.

Evening types were more social, more people-oriented.

They will probably be good at cryptic crosswords, while morning types go for the more logical ones.”

The study was published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences (Díaz-Morales & Escribano, 2013).

This test can quickly identify someone with higher IQ.

People with high IQs have stronger basic perceptual skills, research finds.

People with higher IQs find it easier to tell which way an object is moving.

They are also better at blocking out background information to make their judgement.

The reason is that the brains of people with higher IQs work faster.

It helps underline that high IQ is about more than just solving puzzles or making the ‘right’ decision.

For the study, people had to judge lines moving across a screen.

Here is an example:

The results showed that the more intelligent people were, the quicker they picked up the direction of the drifting lines.

Dr Duje Tadin, co-author of the paper, said:

“Because intelligence is such a broad construct, you can’t really track it back to one part of the brain.

But since this task is so simple and so closely linked to IQ, it may give us clues about what makes a brain more efficient, and, consequently, more intelligent.”

However, sometimes people were shown small images, sometimes large.

What this shows is that people with high IQs are better at suppressing background information.

Mr Michael Melnick, study co-author, said:

“Being ‘quick witted’ and ‘quick on the draw’ generally go hand in hand.

From previous research, we expected that all participants would be worse at detecting the movement of large images, but high IQ individuals were much, much worse.”

The study may help researchers identify the neural correlates of intelligence, said Dr Tadin:

“We know from prior research which parts of the brain are involved in visual suppression of background motion.

This new link to intelligence provides a good target for looking at what is different about the neural processing, what’s different about the neurochemistry, what’s different about the neurotransmitters of people with different IQs.”

The study was published in the journal Current Biology (Melnick et al., 2013).

The brains of highly intelligent individuals are better at staying focused, the research suggests.

People with higher IQs have more stable interactions between regions of their brain, a study finds.

The finding contributes to the scientific debate on what makes some people more intelligent than others.

Some say that high IQ brains are more efficient, others that it is superior connections between brain regions that generate higher cognitive abilities.

This study suggests a more subtle answer: that it is stability in processing that produces the best neural results.

Higher intelligence is linked to states of high integration in the brain: when different areas are working well together.

It is as though the brains of people with higher intelligence are able to coordinate the different regions more efficiently.

Dr Kirsten Hilger, the study’s first author, said:

“The study of the temporal dynamics of human brain networks using fMRI is a relatively new field of research.

The temporally more stable network organisation in more intelligent individuals could be a protective mechanism of the brain against falling into maladaptive network states in which major networks disconnect and communication may be hampered.”

The study included 281 people who were given brain scans and IQ tests.

Researchers analysed the brain scans for how integrated they were over time.

The brain has a modular structure: one area is devoted to vision, another to the emotions, still another to making decisions and so on.

However, what this study found was that integration between the modules was linked to higher IQ.

The researchers found that this integration was most marked in regions of the brain that are important for attention.

Dr Hilger said:

“At present, we do not know whether the temporally more stable brain connections are a source or a consequence of higher intelligence.

However, our results suggest that processes of controlled attention – that is, the ability to stay focused and to concentrate on a task – may play an important role for general intelligence.”

The study was published in the journal Human Brain Mapping (Hilger et al., 2019).