New Insight Into Aging Brains
“Study Links 24% of Intelligence Changes Over a Person’s Life to Genetic Factors”
"X hits the spot"
Nex's Tumblr
The Unleashed Mind: Why Creative People Are Eccentric
“Highly creative people often seem weirder than the rest of us. Now researchers know why”
Scientists and autism: When geeks meet
“Psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen thinks scientists and engineers could be more likely to have a child with autism. Some researchers say the proof isn’t there.”
IQ Isn't as Fixed as Once Believed, Research Suggests
“The researchers also found that shifts in IQ scores corresponded to small physical changes in brain areas related to intellectual skills, though they weren’t able to show a clear cause and effect.”
Think You’re Smarter Than Animals? Maybe Not
“A few recent research papers describe animal competence at social and cognitive tasks that humans often struggle with — mastering conversational etiquette, understanding botanical classification, competing on game shows and figuring out how to get a drink when you’re thirsty and the only glass of water is glued to the table and your hands are tied behind your back.”
Are Smart People Getting Smarter?
“A brand new study, “The Flynn Effect Puzzle,” currently in press at Intelligence, and led by Jonathan Wai at Duke University, has found an interesting way to assess the right tail of the distribution. By looking at approximately 1.7 million scores of 7th grade students between 1981 and 2000 on the SAT and ACT, as well as scores of 5th and 6th grade students on the EXPLORE test, the psychologists were able to investigate the extent to which the Flynn effect exists in the right tail of the bell curve.”
Larger Brains May Have Evolved Due to Sports, Not Smarts
“Conventional wisdom presumes that the larger the brain, the more intelligent the animal must be. Though it seems logical that a creature with more grey and white matter crammed inside its head would have greater mental acumen than an animal with lesser anatomy, the evidence surrounding this claim is mixed.”
Garett Jones on IQ and Economic Growth
“It was on how high-IQ pairs in experimental games do significantly better on trust and cooperation. He then reasoned from that to higher IQ creating more solutions to cooperation problems and, therefore, creating more economic growth.”
Smart People Do More Drugs--Because of Evolution
“Here’s how it goes: intelligence evolved as a way to deal with “evolutionary novelties”—to help humans respond to things in their environment to which they were, as a species, unaccustomed. Thus, smart people are more likely to deal with new things and try them. Those new things seem to include drugs.”
Liberalism, atheism, male sexual exclusivity linked to IQ
“The reasoning is that sexual exclusivity in men, liberalism and atheism all go against what would be expected given humans’ evolutionary past. In other words, none of these traits would have benefited our early human ancestors, but higher intelligence may be associated with them.”
