People with high fluid intelligence are likely to have this ability.
These conversations boost our ability to ignore distractions, remember important things, make decisions and monitor ourselves more efficiently.
These conversations boost our ability to ignore distractions, remember important things, make decisions and monitor ourselves more efficiently.
Ten minutes having a regular conversation is enough to boost brain power, research finds.
The boost from ten minutes getting to know someone was equivalent to that from solving crossword puzzles.
The research suggests that having a friendly chat with someone could be a great way of preparing yourself for a mentally challenging task.
Professor Oscar Ybarra, who led the study, said:
“This study shows that simply talking to other people, the way you do when you’re making friends, can provide mental benefits.”
The research looked at what psychologists call executive function.
This is the ability we all use in everyday life to ignore distractions, remember important things, make decisions and monitor ourselves.
The study compared different types of social interactions to see which provided the greatest benefit.
Fascinatingly, competitive conversations provided little cognitive benefit.
When people are competitive with other, they tend to withdraw within themselves.
Friendly conversations, meanwhile encourage empathy and trying to work out what the other person is thinking.
Professor Ybarra said:
“We believe that performance boosts come about because some social interactions induce people to try to read others’ minds and take their perspectives on things.
And we also find that when we structure even competitive interactions to have an element of taking the other person’s perspective, or trying to put yourself in the other person’s shoes, there is a boost in executive functioning as a result.”
Professor Ybarra continued:
“Taken together with earlier research, these findings highlight the connection between social intelligence and general intelligence.
This fits with evolutionary perspectives that examine social pressures on the emergence of intelligence, and research showing a neural overlap between social-cognitive and executive brain functions.”
The study was published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science (Ybarra et al., 2016).
Four things that indicate high intelligence in a person.
Four things that indicate high intelligence in a person.
Being open to experience, cooperative, happy and having strong perceptual skills are all signs that you have a high IQ, psychological research finds.
Of these, being open to experience is a particularly strong sign…
Insatiable curiosity, an active fantasy life, a sensitivity to emotions and an appreciation of art and beauty are all linked to high IQ.
These are all aspects of the major personality trait called ‘openness to experience’.
People who are open to experience are more interested in things that are complex, new and unconventional.
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.
Intelligent people are better at cooperating with others.
While personality traits like being generous and conscientious have an effect on cooperation, higher IQ is the main factor that encourages people to work well together.
People with higher intelligence use more consistent strategies and consider the consequences of their actions.
That is why people with high IQs are so essential: without them society would not work.
Happy people have higher intelligence.
The finding goes against the popular idea that being intelligent somehow predisposes people to unhappiness.
The study looked at happiness in the best-known sense of feeling positive emotions and being satisfied with your life.
The results showed that people with the lowest IQ (70 – 99) were the least happy in comparison to those with the highest IQs (120 – 129).
People with high IQs have stronger basic perceptual skills, research finds.
For example, they can tell which way objects are moving more quickly.
They are also better at blocking out background information to make their judgement.
Imagine a ball thrown at high speed — a more intelligent person can pick up its trajectory faster.
A higher IQ makes the brain faster at a fundamental level.
It helps underline that high IQ is about more than just solving puzzles or making the ‘right’ decision.
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Scientists identify four eating patterns that impact your mental state.
How people’s cognitive abilities are changing across the generations.
This parenting strategy leads to children with IQs 6 points higher.
This parenting strategy leads to children with IQs 6 points higher.
Children raised by nurturing parents develop higher IQs, research finds.
Many of the children in the study, who were raised in Brazil and South Africa, had faced considerable adversity, such as poverty and low birth weight.
But when they experienced responsive caregiving and the opportunity to learn, it was possible for them to reach their full potential.
Responsive caregiving involves being sensitive to the needs of the child and knowing how to respond to them.
Typical nurturing activities include reading to the child, playing games with letters and numbers as well as singing songs together.
Professor Maureen Black, study co-author, said:
“We found that adolescents who were raised in nurturing environments had IQ scores that were on average 6 points higher than those who were not.
This is a striking difference that has profound implications by increasing the intelligence of entire communities.
A nurturing environment also led to better growth and fewer psycho-social difficulties in adolescence, but it did not mitigate the effects of early adversities on growth and psycho-social difficulties.”
The research included over 1,600 children who were tracked from birth to their teenage years.
Both prenatal and early life adversity tends to lower IQ and is linked to problems adjusting psychologically.
However, a nurturing environment created by caregivers counteracts the disadvantages of early adversity.
Professor Black said:
“I think our findings could apply to communities here in the U.S. where children are hungry, living in poverty or lacking in access to medical care.”
Getting involved with children is the key, said Professor Black:
“Get children involved in friendly activities as much as possible rather than parking them in front of a screen.
Children love to learn and in a nurturing environment they can grow into adolescents and adults with the abilities to care for themselves, their families, and their communities.”
The study was published in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health (Trude et al., 2020).
The brains of highly intelligent individuals are better at staying focused, the research suggests.
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).
Three ways to tell if you have a high IQ.
Three ways to tell if you have a high IQ.
People who can predict the behaviour of others have higher personal intelligence, research finds.
Two other signs of high personal intelligence are self-motivation and being able to anticipate desires.
The idea of personal intelligence is broader than IQ.
It involves using intelligence to predict people’s behaviour.
Someone high in personal intelligence is able to analyse correctly their own and other people’s personalities.
People high in personal IQ know how best to deal with other people and how they will react.
Professor John Mayer, the expert on personality and intelligence who came up with the theory, said:
“Think of all the ways we read and interpret the people around us each day: We notice body language and facial expressions to estimate one another’s moods.
We draw initial guesses about personalities based on how people dress and present themselves, and we adjust how we interact with them accordingly.
We run through scenarios in our heads, trying to anticipate how others will react, in order to choose the best course in dealing with a boss, a coworker, or a partner.”
Reviewing decades of research on personality and intelligence, Professor Mayer has found it comes more naturally to some:
“We pick up on small pieces of feedback about ourselves from others, which we incorporate into a fuller and more accurate perception of ourselves.
And we make all kinds of decisions–about work-life balance, the neighborhood we live in, or who we spend our time with–based on what we think will be the best fit for our personalities.”
Professor Mayer concludes:
“People who are high in personal intelligence are able to anticipate their own desires and actions, predict the behavior of others, motivate themselves over the long term, and make better life decisions.”
→ Discover 22 more signs of intelligence.
The book is called Personal Intelligence: The Power of Personality and How It Shapes Our Lives and is published by Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.
This parental behaviour is linked to more intelligent children.
This parental behaviour is linked to more intelligent children.
Children whose parents are ‘chatterboxes’ tend to have higher IQs, research finds.
Children hearing more speech from their caregivers had better reasoning and numeracy skills, the observational study found.
Some children in the study heard twice as many words as others.
Perhaps less surprisingly, children who heard higher quality speech from their parents, using a more diverse vocabulary, knew more words themselves.
For the study, tiny audio recorders were fitted to 107 children aged between 2 and 4.
They were recorded for 16 hours a day for three days at home.
Ms Katrina d’Apice, the study’s first author, explained the results:
“Using the audio recorders allowed us to study real-life interactions between young children and their families in an unobtrusive way within the home environment rather than a lab setting.
We found that the quantity of adult spoken words that children hear is positively associated with their cognitive ability.
However, further research is needed to explore the reasons behind this link — it could be that greater exposure to language provides more learning opportunities for children, but it could also be the case that more intelligent children evoke more words from adults in their environment.”
While parental talk was linked to children’s cognitive abilities, their parenting strategy was linked to their behaviour.
Specifically, positive parenting was linked to less aggression, disobedience and restlessness.
Positive parenting involves responding to children in positive ways and encouraging them to explore the world.
Professor Sophie von Stumm, study co-author, said:
“This study is the largest naturalistic observation of early life home environments to date.
We found that the quantity of adult spoken words that children were exposed to varied greatly within families.
Some kids heard twice as many words on one day as they did on the next.
The study highlights the importance of treating early life experiences as dynamic and changeable rather than static entities — approaching research in this way will help us to understand the interplay between environmental experiences and children’s differences in development.”
The study was published in the journal Developmental Psychology (d’Apice et al., 2019).
This is not something people usually associate with intelligence — but the study clearly shows a link.
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).
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