Category: Intelligence

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).

How high intelligence could have a mental cost for some.

Disorders of mood could be the price some people pay for high intelligence, research finds.

Psychologists have found that higher childhood IQ is linked to features of bipolar disorder in young adulthood.

The research adds fuel to the debate over the connection between intelligence, creativity and mental health issues.

For the research 1,881 people were followed from age 8 until they were 22 or 23-years-old.

Their IQ was measured along with any characteristics of mood disorders.

The results showed that having ten more IQ points  at age 8 was linked to being in the top ten per cent for having manic personality traits in their early twenties.

Professor Daniel Smith, one of the study’s authors said:

“A possible link between bipolar disorder and intelligence and creativity has been discussed for many years and many studies have suggested a link.

In this large study, we found that better performance on IQ tests at age eight predicted bipolar features in young adulthood.

We are not saying that high childhood IQ is a clear-cut risk factor for bipolar disorder but rather that there is likely to be a shared biology between intelligence and bipolar disorder which needs to be understood more fully.

Many other factors – including family history of mental illness, childhood adversity, stressful life events and drug misuse – are known to increase an individual’s risk of developing bipolar disorder.

Our finding has implications for understanding of how liability to bipolar disorder may have been selected through generations.

One possibility is that serious disorders of mood such as bipolar disorder are the price that human beings have had to pay for more adaptive traits such as intelligence, creativity and verbal proficiency.

This work will inform future genetic studies at the interface of intelligence, creativity and bipolar disorder, and will help with efforts to improve approaches to the earlier detection of bipolar disorder in adolescents and young adults.”

The study was published in the British Journal of Psychiatry (Smith et al., 2015).

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).

Peak emotional intelligence (EQ) means that people are better at dealing with their emotions at this age.

It is not until their 60s that people reach their peak levels of emotional intelligence (EQ), research finds.

At this age, people are generally better at seeing the positive side of stressful situations and empathising with the less fortunate.

Professor Robert Levenson, study co-author, said:

“Increasingly, it appears that the meaning of late life centers on social relationships and caring for and being cared for by others.

Evolution seems to have tuned our nervous systems in ways that are optimal for these kinds of interpersonal and compassionate activities as we age.”

Emotional intelligence study

In one study people of different ages were shown video clips with different emotional content — some were sad and disgusting.

Those in their 60s did better than those in their 40s and 20s at focusing on the positive aspects of the clip — they were better at using what psychologists call ‘positive reappraisal’.

This suggests their emotional intelligence is higher.

Younger people, though, were better at distracting themselves from the clips.

In another study, psychologists tested how physiologically sensitive people of different ages were to the clips.

The results showed that older people reacted more strongly to sadness.

Dr Benjamin Seider, the study’s first author, said:

“In late life, individuals often adopt different perspectives and goals that focus more on close interpersonal relationships.

By doing so, they become increasingly sensitized to sadness because the shared experience of sadness leads to greater intimacy in interpersonal relationships.”

Age and emotional intelligence

Being sensitive to sadness is actually a good thing, Professor Levenson explained:

“Sadness can be a particularly meaningful and helpful emotion in late life, as we are inevitably confronted with and need to deal with the losses we experience in our own life and with the need to give comfort to others.”

The study’s authors conclude:

“…older adults may be better served by staying socially engaged and using positive reappraisal to deal with stressful challenging situations rather than disconnecting from situations that offer opportunities to enhance quality of life.”

The study was published in the journal Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (Seider et al., 2011).

Smart people are not that much more wealthy, but people with high IQs do have higher incomes.

Being smart has almost no relationship to wealth, research reveals.

People with high IQs are no more wealthy than those who are considerably less smart, on average, a study has found.

Perversely, very clever people are actually at a slightly higher risk of financial problems.

Dr Jay Zagorsky, the study’s author, said:

“People don’t become rich just because they are smart.

Your IQ has really no relationship to your wealth.

And being very smart does not protect you from getting into financial difficulty.”

This may explain why there are so many rich people with low IQ and poor people who are highly intelligent.

High IQ = higher income

The slight wrinkle is that people with higher IQs do tend to have a higher income.

As Dr Zagorsky explains, though, that income is different from wealth:

“Financial success for most people means more than just income.

You need to build up wealth to help buffer life’s storms and to prepare for retirement.

You also shouldn’t have to worry about being close to or beyond your financial limits.”

Research on IQ and income and wealth

The conclusions come from 7,403 people in the US who were tracked for almost 40 years in a nationally representative survey.

It found that the income difference between someone of average intelligence and someone in the top 2 percent is only around $12,000 a year.

However, people of average intelligence had similar amounts of wealth as the more intelligent.

So, how come intelligent people earn more, but are not more wealthy?

This study can’t tell us, but it might be that high-IQ people are not saving as much.

Dr Zagorsky said:

“Just because you’re smart doesn’t mean you don’t get into trouble.

Among the smartest people, those with IQ scores above 125, even 6 percent of them have maxed out their credit cards and 11 percent occasionally miss payments.

Professors tend to be very smart people, but if you look at university parking lots, you don’t see a lot of Rolls Royces, Porsches or other very expensive cars.

Instead you see a lot of old, low-value vehicles.”

This might also suggest that professors — and other intelligent people — have different values and aspirations in life.

Dr Zagorsky concluded:

“Intelligence is not a factor for explaining wealth.

Those with low intelligence should not believe they are handicapped, and those with high intelligence should not believe they have an advantage.”

The study was published in the journal Intelligence (Zagorsky, 2007).

Smart people’s brains are not just bigger, they are also different. Here’s how.

People with bigger heads are, on average, more intelligent, research confirms.

Bigger heads contain bigger brains, which have more neurons (brain cells), which make people smarter.

However, the latest neuroscience research suggests there’s a twist.

When you ‘listen’ electrically to the brain running, the more intelligent ones make less ‘noise’.

It’s like a larger, more powerful engine somehow running quieter.

Smart people’s brain are different

It turns out that on top of having larger brains, more intelligent people have fewer connections between neurons in the cerebral cortex, research finds.

The reason is that the brains of intelligent people are more efficient — this is known to psychologists as the ‘neural efficiency hypothesis of intelligence’.

The conclusion comes from a neuroimaging study that looked at the brain’s microstructure.

Analysis of the brains of 259 people measured the number of dendrites in their brains.

Dendrites are extensions of brain cells that reach out towards other brain cells, enabling them to communicate with each other.

IQ tests showed that people with fewer dendrites were more intelligent.

Smart people’s brain are more efficient

It is more than just size that matters, it is how efficiently your brain cells communicate.

With fewer dendritic connections there is less ‘noise’ in the brain and the signal is purer.

Fewer dendrites also consume less energy — hence, a more efficient brain.

Here is the author’s schematic depiction (from Genç et al., 2018):

Dr Erhan Genç, who led the study, said:

“The assumption has been that larger brains contain more neurons and, consequently, possess more computational power.

However, other studies had shown that — despite their comparatively high number of neurons — the brains of intelligent people demonstrated less neuronal activity during an IQ test than the brains of less intelligent individuals.

Intelligent brains possess lean, yet efficient neuronal connections.

Thus, they boast high mental performance at low neuronal activity.”

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

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).