Previous research had shown that in spite of having more brain cells to share the heavy lifting, smarter brains don't tend to work as hard, displaying less metabolic activity when subjected to an IQ test compared with those who struggle to attain high scores.
It is often assumed that high IQ people will be more successful. From Jay Gatsby in “The Great Gatsby” to Steve Jobs of Apple, people often associate success with intelligence. However, evidence suggests that having a high IQ is hardly a guarantee for financial, academic, or creative success.
Science supports laziness
The data found that those with a high IQ got bored less easily, leading them to be less active and spend more time engaged in thought.
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'.
A high IQ in a knowledge economy benefits people for: Problem solving at work. Learning at work. Adaptability at work.
FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) When did Elon Musk take an IQ test? The Tesla CEO is estimated to have an IQ score of around 155.
An average person scores 100 on an IQ test using the Stanford-Binet IQ scale. A score of 137 to 160 is considered the top 1 percent to .
Souza's study demonstrated that an individual with an IQ of 126 or higher can often learn in one hour what it would take someone with an IQ in the standard range 4-5 hours to learn. This means that gifted people can truly read and understand faster than an average person.
The smarter the person, the faster information zips around the brain, a UCLA study finds. And this ability to think quickly apparently is inherited. The study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, looked at the brains and intelligence of 92 people. All the participants took standard IQ tests.
Is good memory an indicator of intelligence? Essentially, yes, but not in the way you may think. Short-term memory storage is linked to greater signs of intelligence as measured in IQ tests. But having perfect recall isn't necessarily correlated with high intelligence.
Research suggests that highly intelligent people get bored easily and spend more time thinking, behaviour that comes across as 'laziness'. A study by the Florida Gulf Coast University looked at a group of 'thinkers' and 'non-thinkers', studying their activity levels over the course of a week.
Dipankar Trehan points out that highly intelligent people tend to be "very individualistic." Interestingly, recent research suggests that smarter people tend to derive less satisfaction than most people do from socializing with friends.
There's also a common misunderstanding that individuals with slow processing speed may not be smart. However, we know that this isn't the case. Many people with slow processing speed possess high intelligence and may have a high IQ. It just takes them longer to process information and articulate a response.
Research has shown that there is a high correlation between being intelligent and socially anxious. The higher your IQ, the higher the chance your social apprehension is higher than usual. Of course, that doesn't mean that your social anxiety should be classified as a disorder.
However, there is also a lot of research that shows that depression actively leads to a detrimental development of the frontal lobe, ultimately affecting your intelligence and lowering your IQ because you're simply too depressed to think straight, or can't complete certain cognitive tasks anymore.
Scientists have long known that our ability to think quickly and recall information, also known as fluid intelligence, peaks around age 20 and then begins a slow decline.
Talking fast seemed to signal confidence, intelligence, objectivity and superior knowledge. [However, another study in a different context has found that speaking slowly is linked to sounding intelligent, so the link is far from proven.]
People with higher psychometric intelligence have, on average, larger brains, and possibly faster neural conduction speed. A few small functional brain-scanning studies suggest that, in healthy individuals, people who are of higher IQ have lower cerebral metabolic rates during mentally active conditions.
Studies have also found that higher IQ is associated with more mental illness, including depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder.
Not unexpected
“It is not that people with high IQ are simply better at visual perception…instead, their visual perception is more discriminating. They excel at seeing small, moving objects but struggle in perceiving large, background-like motions” he added.
Which Country Has the Highest Average IQ? According to a 2019 study by researchers Richard Lynn and David Becker at the Ulster Institute, the highest average IQ scores in the world belong to the Japanese, with the citizens of Taiwan and Singapore close behind.
Like most aspects of human behavior and cognition, intelligence is a complex trait that is influenced by both genetic and environmental factors.