Category: Intelligence

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).

The bacteria has also been linked to reduced anxiety and higher serotonin levels.

Exposure to a common bacteria present in the soil boosts learning behaviour.

The bacteria — mycobacterium vaccae — may also act as an antidepressant and lower anxiety.

We can probably get sufficient exposure to the bacteria by simply working in the garden, walking through the woods or digging in the dirt.

For thousands of years human beings have lived close to nature.

It is only recently, with the advent of industrialisation, that we have begun leading such antiseptic lives.

Being closer to nature probably has considerable benefits to both health and cognition.

The conclusions come from a study in which mice were fed the bacteria.

The results showed they navigated a maze at twice the speed.

Dr Dorothy Matthews, the study’s lead author, explained:

“Mycobacterium vaccae is a natural soil bacterium which people likely ingest or breath in when they spend time in nature.”

For the study, mice were fed a diet with the M. vaccae bacteria added to it.

The idea was inspired by previous research that involved injecting the deactivated bacteria into mice.

The bacteria spurred on growth of neurons, boosted serotonin levels and decreased anxiety.

Dr Matthews said:

“Since serotonin plays a role in learning we wondered if live M. vaccae could improve learning in mice.

We found that mice that were fed live M. vaccae navigated the maze twice as fast and with less demonstrated anxiety behaviors as control mice.”

Once taken off the diet, though, the mice slowed down somewhat, although they were still faster than the control mice.

Dr Matthews said:

“This research suggests that M. vaccae may play a role in anxiety and learning in mammals.

It is interesting to speculate that creating learning environments in schools that include time in the outdoors where M. vaccae is present may decrease anxiety and improve the ability to learn new tasks.”

The study was published in the journal Behavioural Processes (Matthews & Jenks, 2013).