- Thinking you might be smarter than everyone else you know?
- You might be, scientists say, if you match any of the descriptions below.
- For example, smart people tend to be tall, funny, and firstborn children.
Everyone wants to be the smartest person in the room. How do you know if you are?
Over the course of decades, scientists have discovered a series of traits and behaviors linked to high intelligence. We've listed many of them below.
Note: These traits and behaviors don't necessarily make you smarter. They're simply associated with superior cognitive ability.
Read on to find out if you're as brainy as you think.
Alyson Shontell, Drake Baer, and Chelsea Harvey contributed to earlier versions of this post.
You don't smoke
A 2010 Israeli study compared the IQ and smoking status of 20,000 young men.
Results showed that:
- The average 18-to-21-year-old smoker had an IQ of 94, and the non-smoker had an IQ of 101.
- Those who smoked more than a pack a day had an average IQ of 90.
- In sibling sets, nonsmoking brothers were smarter than smokers.
You took music lessons
Research suggests that music helps kids' minds develop in a few ways:
- A small 2011 study published in the journal Psychological Science found that the verbal intelligence of 4- to 6-year-olds rose after less than a month of music lessons.
- A 2004 study, also published in the journal Psychological Science, found that 6-year-olds who took nine months of piano lessons had an IQ boost compared with kids who took drama lessons or no classes at all.
- In a 2018 study published in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience, kids given structured music lessons performed better than their peers on tests of verbal intelligence, planning, and inhibition.
But there's some evidence to the contrary, such as a 2017 review that suggests music training won't boost your cognitive abilities more generally — just your musical ones.
You're the oldest child
Oldest siblings are usually smarter, but it's not necessarily because of genetics.
An article in the December 2017 issue of the National Bureau of Economics Research Reporter argues that firstborn children are likely to become smarter, more successful, and richer than their siblings.
One possible reason, it says, is that parents are in some ways less invested in parenting after the first go-round.
Meanwhile, a 2015 review of studies, which included roughly 272,000 participants, found that differences in IQ and personality were so small as to be meaningless, pushing back on decades of other findings. In other words, it suggests that even if birth order is related to things like your job and your salary, it's not because firstborns are inherently smarter or, say, more outgoing.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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