Category: Intelligence

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).

An easy way to tell that you have higher intelligence.

Being a free spirit and refusing to conform with others is a sign of high IQ.

People with higher intelligence are less likely to follow the crowd, preferring to make their own decisions.

As a species, humans are remarkably open to social influence: people like to copy others, feeling that there is safety in numbers.

However, the effect can be damaging as some will deny their own senses to go along with others.

Instead, those with higher IQs only follow the crowd strategically.

For the study, 101 people were given a test that involved comparing the lengths of different lines.

They only had to decide which was longest, but not until they had been informed what other people thought.

The results clearly showed that people would deny information from their own senses to fit in with what other people thought.

In other words, many people preferred to be in the majority, rather than to be correct.

However, more intelligent people were less likely to go along with the majority.

The classic study on social influence (the Asch conformity experiment) was carried out by Professor Solomon Asch almost 70 years ago.

He found that 76% of people denied their own senses at least once to go along with others.

Often, though, social conformity is no bad thing, said Dr Michael Muthukrishna, who led the study:

“People are conformist – and that’s a good thing for cultural evolution.

By being conformist, we copy the things that are popular in the world.

And those things are often good and useful.

Our whole world is made up of things that we do that are good for us, but we don’t know why.

And we don’t need to know why.

We just need to know that most people do those things.”

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The study was published in the journal Evolution and Behavior (Muthukrishna et al., 2015).

The traits are so powerful that they are linked to intelligence when measured almost 40 years later.

Insatiable curiosity, an active fantasy life, a sensitivity to emotions and an appreciation of art and beauty are all linked to high IQ, a study finds.

High IQ may have a particularly strong link to curiosity because intelligence creates a ‘cognitive hunger’ — a desire to think.

Over the years, higher IQ drives people to keep exploring new experiences to satiate this hunger.

Curiosity, along with sensitivity to emotions, appreciation of beauty and an active fantasy life are all aspects of the major personality trait called ‘openness to experience’.

Being open to experience is so powerful that it is linked to intelligence when measured almost 40 years later.

Children who scored higher on IQ tests at just 11-years-old were more open to experience when they were 50-years-old, the psychologists found.

The study’s authors explain their results:

“…childhood intelligence is indeed positively associated with adult trait Openness, even when it was assessed almost four decades earlier when participants were at 11 years.

Intelligence may influence the development of personality in that intelligent people develop habits to satisfy their curiosity and ‘‘cognitive hunger’’ which are an essential ingredient of Openness.”

The conclusions come from a huge study of 17,415 people born in the UK in one week in March 1958.

Over the following 50 years they were given various personality and intelligence tests.

Children with higher IQs were more open to experience because of higher motivation at school, greater support from their families and higher social status, the researchers found.

They explain how these factors fit together:

“Parents of higher socioeconomic status may foster children’s trait Openness by providing better resources such as choosing good schools and cultural environment (theaters, museums, traveling abroad, etc.); intelligent children tend to use more mental activities (such as abstract ideas, learning new
vocabularies, or math formulas) than those who are less intelligent; school settings (quality of teaching, good facilities) may enhance pupils to engage more in school learning.

All these three factors may influence educational and
occupational achievement, which in turn, may increase
the scores on Openness.”

In other words, they believe that it is a higher IQ that mainly drives the development of greater openness to experience.

The study was published in the Journal of Individual Differences (Furnham & Cheng, 2016).

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.

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).