How do clever people think

Kathleen Vohs from the University of Minnesota says the messier you are, the smarter you are. A study Vohs published in Psychological Science featured two groups asked to devise creative uses for Ping-Pong balls. One group worked in a messy, cluttered environment while the other worked in a tidy setting. The messy group brainstormed substantially more creative and interesting ideas.

So before berating yourself for your perpetually cluttered desk, give yourself a few IQ points instead. If you love to learn, the more you'll learn and the smarter you'll get.

Science backs this up. A study from Goldsmiths University of London found that "how people invest their time and effort in their intellect" i. But it's not just learning more that makes you smarter, it's wanting to learn more, which is a trait common in intelligent people.

A study in the Journal of Individual Differences showed a correlation between people who scored high on IQ tests as a child and adults that were more curious and open to new ideas. Openness, as you might recall, has been linked to intelligence. These findings simply offer some insight on how your unique abilities might guide your pet preference.

Certain traits associated with dog people, like extroversion , might even suggest higher interpersonal intelligence. There are plenty of ways to look at intelligence, but most experts recognize that it goes well beyond book smarts. Maybe you sat back in class daydreaming about distant worlds and sketching them in your notebook or skipped school entirely to work or help take care of family members. Crystal Raypole has previously worked as a writer and editor for GoodTherapy.

Her fields of interest include Asian languages and literature, Japanese translation, cooking, natural sciences, sex positivity, and mental health. Practicing certain lifestyle habits may help boost your intelligence and stimulate your brain.

Research has shown that when done regularly, these…. A high IQ might give you a leg up in certain situations, like getting the job you want. Some people are born with the gift of emotional intelligence, but others have to learn it. The ability to know yourself and understand the emotions of…. This learning style is often referred to as learning with the hands or physical learning. Basically, people with bodily-kinesthetic intelligence can…. Find out what exams and screenings are recommended for men at every stage of life, as well as tips on what to ask your doctor.

Subscription boxes are the gift that keeps on giving. Here are a few of our top picks. Viome specializes in gut health testing kits — but do they actually work? Find out everything you need to know and more. Denatured alcohol is ethyl alcohol with substances added to make it unfit for human consumption.

Here's how it's different from I isopropyl alcohol. Learn why this happens, as well as other causes of white patches on your tongue. Health Conditions Discover Plan Connect. Medically reviewed by Timothy J. Much of our education system is aimed at improving academic intelligence; although its limits are well known, IQ is still the primary way of measuring cognitive abilities, and we spend millions on brain training and cognitive enhancers that try to improve those scores.

Anxiety can be common among the highly intelligent Credit: Thinkstock. The first steps to answering these questions were taken almost a century ago, at the height of the American Jazz Age. At the time, the new-fangled IQ test was gaining traction, after proving itself in World War One recruitment centres, and in , psychologist Lewis Terman decided to use it to identify and study a group of gifted children.

As you might expect, many of the Termites did achieve wealth and fame — most notably Jess Oppenheimer, the writer of the classic s sitcom I Love Lucy. Nor did their smarts endow personal happiness. Over the course of their lives, levels of divorce, alcoholism and suicide were about the same as the national average. It's lonely being smart Credit: Thinkstock. As the Termites enter their dotage, the moral of their story — that intelligence does not equate to a better life — has been told again and again.

At best, a great intellect makes no differences to your life satisfaction; at worst, it can actually mean you are less fulfilled. One possibility is that knowledge of your talents becomes something of a ball and chain. Indeed, during the s, the surviving Termites were asked to look back at the events in their year lifespan.

Rather than basking in their successes, many reported that they had been plagued by the sense that they had somehow failed to live up to their youthful expectations. Early achievers don't always go on to be successful Credit: Thinkstock. Those children who had been breastfed scored nearly seven points higher on an IQ test — but only if they had a particular version of the FADS2 gene. That version of the gene was present in roughly equal numbers among kids who were and weren't breastfed.

Figuring out the exact mechanism of this relationship between FADS2, breastfeeding, and IQ will require further study, the scientists noted in their paper on the finding. A study of more than 6, Brits born in found a link between high IQ in childhood and the use of illegal drugs in adulthood.

White, Catharine R. Gale, and David Batty. They conclude that "in contrast to most studies on the association between childhood IQ and later health," their findings suggest "a high childhood IQ may prompt the adoption of behaviors that are potentially harmful to health i.

Left-handedness used to be associated with criminality , and researchers are still unclear as to whether and why there are slightly more lefties among criminal populations. More recent research associates left-handedness with "divergent thinking," a form of creativity that allows you to come up with novel ideas from a prompt — at least among men.

In her review of a paper , New Yorker reporter Maria Konnikova writes :. Left-handers were more adept, for instance, at combining two common objects in novel ways to form a third — for example, using a pole and a tin can to make a birdhouse. They also excelled at grouping lists of words into as many alternate categories as possible. A Princeton study of thousands of people found that taller individuals scored higher on IQ tests as kids and earned more money as adults.

The researchers wrote : "As early as age 3 — before schooling has had a chance to play a role — and throughout childhood, taller children perform significantly better on cognitive tests.

Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa and colleagues found that , among Brits as well as Americans, adults who had scored higher on IQ tests when they were kids or teens drank more alcohol more often in adulthood than those who had scored lower. In , researchers looked at nearly 2, pairs of identical twins in the UK and found that the sibling who had learned to read earlier tended to score higher on tests of cognitive ability.

The study authors suggested that reading from an early age would increase both verbal and nonverbal i. A growing body of research suggests that anxious individuals may be smarter than others in certain ways, according to Slate's coverage of several different studies on anxiety.