Studies large and small have linked smarts with the likelihood of living to old age. For example, a study of people born in Scotland that was published in 2001 in the British Medical Journal found that the higher people scored on an IQ test at age 11, the more likely they were to survive to at least age 76.
Not all geniuses live a short life. In fact, STEM geniuses typically live well into their 80s or 90s and may never retire. Some even make it to age 100 or over!
People with higher IQs are less likely to die before the age of 79. That's according to a study of over 65,000 people born in Scotland in 1936.
For example, a person with an IQ of 115 was 21% more likely to be alive at age 76 than a person with an IQ of 100 (the average for the general population).
Anecdotally, smarter people do seem to live longer. Isaac Newton died in 1727 aged 84, the philosopher-mathematician Bertrand Russell lived to 97, while Nobel Prize-winning neurobiologist Rita Levi-Montalcini died in 2012 aged 103.
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.
Smart people also tend to be averse to failure, having a tendency to see failure as a sign of weakness or that something is wrong with them. The pressure is high to perform. And if life is not unfolding the way they want, smart people get super self-critical and the pressure to “get it right” gets even higher.
Researchers have previously shown that a person's IQ is highly influenced by genetic factors, and have even identified certain genes that play a role. They've also shown that performance in school has genetic factors.
Does an individual's IQ change with age? An individual's IQ does not change with age. In other words: if you did an IQ test now and then another one in 10 years' time, your IQ score will probably be very similar. This is because IQ is always measured relative to other people your age.
Furthermore, IQs of 200 would allow us to pursue activities and careers that most interest us, not just those we're mentally capable of, Haier said. We could master new languages in a few weeks, for example, or become brain surgeons.
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.
Part of it seems to be the lifestyle choices that smarter people tend to make: namely, that they smoke at much lower rates. Similarly, smarter people are more likely to follow other healthy practices, have a better handle on their health care, and be less likely to work in a job that puts them at physical risk.
For example, raw speed in processing information appears to peak around age 18 or 19, then immediately starts to decline. Meanwhile, short-term memory continues to improve until around age 25, when it levels off and then begins to drop around age 35.
A) Both born and made. You can't become a genius without a tremendous amount of work. You have to acquire sufficient expertise in an achievement domain to know what you're talking about or what you're doing.
They Have Higher IQs
Studies have shown that people with higher IQs are likely to deviate from familiar evolutionary traits, such as circadian rhythms. Night owls who opt to wake up in the later hours of the day and stay awake until the wee small hours of the morning may be exhibiting a form of evolution.
The study examined the ages and discoveries of Nobel Prize-winning scientists and inventors, and found that while true genius requires a lot of hard work early in life, most creative achievements happen much later—and even Einstein didn't fully work out his theory of relativity until his mid-thirties.
Notably, the average IQ score falls between 85 and 115. A score above 140, meanwhile, is considered to be genius level.
People between 65 and 69 years of age have an average IQ score of 114, which puts them in the superior intelligence or above-average end of the scale. But people between 70 and 74 years who are tested for IQ get an even higher average score of 119.
The IQ was originally computed as the ratio of a person's mental age to his chronological (physical) age, multiplied by 100. Thus, if a child of 10 had a mental age of 12 (that is, performed on the test at the level of an average 12-year-old), then the child was assigned an IQ of (12/10) X 100, or 120.
Boys, on the other hand, only receive a Y chromosome from their father and an X chromosome from their mother. That means all of your son's X-linked genes and traits will come straight from mom.
We inherit a set of 23 chromosomes from our mothers and another set of 23 from our fathers. One of those pairs are the chromosomes that determine the biological sex of a child – girls have an XX pair and boys have an XY pair, with very rare exceptions in certain disorders.
The mitochondrial genes always pass from the mother to the child. Fathers get their mitochondrial genes from their mothers, and do not pass them to their children.
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.
While they might have high standards and big picture concerns, research shows that people with high IQs are actually more likely to be happy; data from the research showed that people with the highest IQs were much happier than those with the lowest IQs.