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'.
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.
Highly intelligent people are usually highly rational, even when they are also emotionally intense. They enjoy finding solutions to big problems and are aware of their deep potentials. However, they are often misunderstood. Being different, they are often scapegoated.
Both the cerebello-parietal component and the frontal component are associated with intelligence.
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.
The smarter the person, the faster information zips around the brain, a UCLA study finds. And this ability to think quickly apparently is inherited.
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.
Like most aspects of human behavior and cognition, intelligence is a complex trait that is influenced by both genetic and environmental factors.
Scientists don't know exactly what causes someone to be a genius. There is probably a genetic component to your level of intelligence. Certain types of genes influence how much intellectual power you have. Your child's genetic influences affect their motivation, confidence, and other traits.
Early twin studies of adult individuals have found a heritability of IQ between 57% and 73%, with some recent studies showing heritability for IQ as high as 80%. IQ goes from being weakly correlated with genetics for children, to being strongly correlated with genetics for late teens and adults.
Yes, some smart people lack common sense. Why? Intelligent people often override common sense with their considerable brain power — but this isn't always a good thing. Smart people think in situations where they should feel, like in relationships.
Empirical evidence suggests that especially parental education, parental income, and maternal IQ are important predictors of intelligence. Parental education together with maternal IQ and the child's sex were found to account for 24% of the variance in IQ at age 5 [6].
Studies have also found that higher IQ is associated with more mental illness, including depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder.
Scientists say that the higher your IQ, the more you dream. (Okay, everybody, let's start sharing our dreams with a friend.) The average person takes 10 minutes to fall asleep. Women blink twice as much as men.
Being a genius isn't as simple as being smart or having a high IQ. While intelligence is, of course, a prerequisite of genius status, there are other things at play here – including creativity, self-awareness, and an innate ability to ask questions few others have ever asked.
Geniuses think productively, not reproductively
They tend to come up with many different responses, some of which are unconventional and possibly unique. Leonardo da Vinci believed that to gain deep knowledge about a problem, you have to learn how to restructure it in many different ways.
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.
Siblings born closer together have more similar IQs than those born more years apart. This result is reflective of the nurture/environmental aspect of IQs. Siblings close in age share similar experiences and likely have similar socioeconomic upbringings as compared to siblings born further apart.
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.
They can, but it's not just that. It's that IQ is a very noisy measure of all intellectual talents averaged together, and some people with unimpressive general IQs can still be extremely talented in particular fields. Even such a stereotypically intellectual pursuit as chess only correlates with IQ at 0.24.
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.