7 signs you're smarter than average

If you’re the youngest or middle child in your family, get ready for some unwelcome news: Your eldest sibling is likely right when they brag about being the oldest and the wisest.

And you can blame your parents for this.

Research published in the Journal of Human Resources found that firstborn children outperform their younger siblings on cognitive tests starting from infancy — they are better set up for academic and intellectual success thanks to the type of parenting they experience.

“First-time parents tend to want to do everything right and generally have a greater awareness of their interactions with and investments in the firstborn,” Jee-Yeon K. Lehmann, co-author of the research and an economist at the Analysis Group in Boston, told NBC’s “TODAY.” “With each subsequent child, parents tend to relax to a greater extent what they might deem as non-essential needs for their kids.”

So while your parents may love and care for all their children equally, firstborns tend to get the most mental stimulation, since they receive the undivided attention of both parents and all that first-time anxiety.

@NRuedisueli via Twenty20

Once parents have successfully brought one child into the world, they find it more challenging to devote the same level of time and investment to subsequent children. The research found, for instance, that parents spend less time reading to their younger children as well as teaching them basic concepts, such as the alphabet. Later-born kids were also less likely to be given mentally engaging activities or toys.

This shift in parenting had no impact on a child’s attitude or personality, but it did lead to increased academic confidence and performance for firstborns, according to the research, which is based on an analysis of data collected in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth.

So parents, as tempting as it may be to dial back on the learning activities, Baby Einstein toys and alphabet singalongs, especially when you’re juggling multiple demanding kids, try to hang on to a dose of the overzealous panic you had with your first. Such heavy early investments in your child’s intellect do seem to have long-lasting positive impacts on their development.

This early parental investment bump may also be behind the findings of other studies on birth-order differences, which have shown that the eldest child tends to have a slight IQ advantage of a point or two over their siblings, are 30% more likely to be CEOs or politicians, and 7% more likely to aspire to stay on in education than their younger brothers or sisters.

There were two other factors that could also contribute to the intelligence difference, Lehmann’s research found. With later pregnancies, mothers were less likely to cut out alcohol and breastfeed.

A recent analysis found that most research mischaracterizes the relationship between music and skills enhancement.

In 2004, a paper appeared in the journal Psychological Science, titled “Music Lessons Enhance IQ.” The author, composer and University of Toronto Mississauga psychologist Glenn Schellenberg, had conducted an experiment with 144 children randomly assigned to four groups: one learned the keyboard for a year, one took singing lessons, one joined an acting class, and a control group had no extracurricular training. The IQ of the children in the two musical groups rose by an average of seven points in the course of a year; those in the other two groups gained an average of 4.3 points.

Schellenberg had long been skeptical of the science underpinning claims that music education enhances children’s abstract reasoning, math, or language skills. If children who play the piano are smarter, he says, it doesn’t necessarily mean they are smarter because they play the piano. It could be that the youngsters who play the piano also happen to be more ambitious or better at focusing on a task. Correlation, after all, does not prove causation.

The 2004 paper was specifically designed to address those concerns. And as a passionate musician, Schellenberg was delighted when he turned up credible evidence that music has transfer effects on general intelligence. But nearly a decade later, in 2013, the Education Endowment Foundation funded a bigger study with more than 900 students. That study failed to corroborate Schellenberg’s findings, finding no evidence that music lessons improved math and literacy skills.

Schellenberg took that news in stride while continuing to cast a skeptical eye on the research in his field. Recently, he decided to formally investigate just how often his fellow researchers in psychology and neuroscience make what he believes are erroneous — or at least premature — causal connections between music and intelligence. His results, published in May, suggest that many of his peers do just that.

To pinpoint precisely how music lessons change the brain over time, scientists would ideally assign children randomly to different groups, as Schellenberg did in his 2004 study, only over a longer period of time. One group of children might be assigned to take piano lessons for years, while the other group would receive no music education at all. Because this is generally not possible to do for the sake of a psychological experiment, many researchers rely on studies where they compare children who already take lessons to those who don’t, correcting for variables such as socioeconomic status. But even with this correction, such studies can only find correlation; they cannot prove causation.

For his recent study, Schellenberg asked two research assistants to look for correlational studies on the effects of music education. They found a total of 114 papers published since 2000. To assess whether the authors claimed any causation, researchers then looked for telltale verbs in each paper’s title and abstract, verbs like “enhance,” “promote,“ “facilitate,” and “strengthen.” The papers were categorized as neuroscience if the study employed an electroencephalogram or a brain imaging method like magnetic resonance, or if the study appeared in a journal that had “brain,” “neuroscience,” or a related term in its title. Otherwise the papers were categorized as psychology. Schellenberg didn’t tell his assistants what exactly he was trying to prove.

After tallying their assessments, Schellenberg concluded that the majority of the articles fallaciously claimed that music training had a causal effect. The overselling, he also found, was more prevalent among neuroscience studies, three quarters of which mischaracterized a mere association between music training and skills enhancement as a cause-and-effect relationship. This may come as a surprise to some. Psychologists have been battling charges that they don’t do “real” science for some time — in large part because many findings from classic experiments have proved unreproducible. Neuroscientists, on the other hand, armed with brain scans and EEGs, have not been subject to the same degree of critique.

“I have never thought that flute lessons make you better at solving differential equations,” said Lutz Jäncke, a neuropsychologist from the University of Zurich in Switzerland who praised Schellenberg’s new study. “His criticism is justified.”

Not everyone agrees. “Most neuroscientists are not quite as stupid as Glenn seems to think they are,” wrote Robert Zatorre, a neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal and an authority on the science of music and the brain, in an email to Undark. He added that “just looking to see whether a publication uses causal language decontextualizes the way that an author may have nuanced or interpreted their findings.”

In other words: the authors might write a catchy headline or abstract, but use more cautionary language in the fine print of their articles. (Schellenberg pointed out that those are the elements of an article that other scientists read first, sometimes exclusively.)

Zatorre compared Schellenberg’s view to that of “climate change deniers who say that there is no need to worry about greenhouse gases changing the climate” because our knowledge of climate change is “based entirely on correlational evidence.”

Still, to argue for a cause-and-effect relationship, scientists must attempt to explain why and how a connection could occur. When it comes to transfer effects of music, scientists frequently point to brain plasticity — the fact that the brain changes according to how we use it. When a child learns to play the violin, for example, several studies have shown that the brain region responsible for the fine motor skills of the left hand’s fingers is likely to grow. And many experiments have shown that musical training improves certain hearing capabilities, like filtering voices from background noise or distinguishing the difference between the consonants ‘b’ and ‘g’.

But Schellenberg remains highly critical of how the concept of plasticity has been applied in his field. “Plasticity has become an industry of its own,” he wrote in his May paper. Practice does change the brain, he allows, but what is questionable is the assertion that these changes affect other brain regions, such as those responsible for spatial reasoning or math problems.

Jäncke agrees. “Most of these studies don’t allow for causal inferences,” he said. For over two decades, Jäncke has researched the effects of music lessons, and like Schellenberg, he believes that the only way to truly understand their effects is to run longitudinal studies. In such studies, researchers would need to follow groups of children with and without music lessons over a long period of time — even if the assignments are not completely random. Then they could compare outcomes for each group.

Some researchers are starting to do just that. The neuroscientist Peter Schneider from Heidelberg University in Germany, for example, has been following a group of children for ten years now. Some of them were handed musical instruments and given lessons through a school-based program in the Ruhr region of Germany called Jedem Kind ein Instrument, or “an instrument for every child,” which was carried out with government funding. Among these children, Schneider has found that the those who were enthusiastic about music and who practiced voluntarily showed improvements in hearing ability, as well as in more general competencies, such as the ability to concentrate.

To establish whether effects such as improved concentration are caused by music participation itself, and not by investing time in an extracurricular activity of any kind, Assal Habibi, a psychology professor at the University of Southern California, is conducting a five-year longitudinal study with children from low-income communities in Los Angeles. The youngsters fall into three groups: those who take after-school music, those who do after-school sports, and those with no structured after-school program at all. After two years, Habibi and her colleagues reported seeing structural changes in the brains of the musically trained children, both locally and in the pathways connecting different parts of the brain.

That may seem compelling, but Habibi’s children were not selected randomly. Did the children who were drawn to music perhaps have something in them from the start that made them different but eluded the brain scanners? “As somebody who started taking piano lessons at the age of five and got up every morning at seven to practice, that experience changed me and made me part of who I am today,” Schellenberg said. “The question is whether those kinds of experiences do so systematically across individuals and create exactly the same changes. And I think that is that huge leap of faith.”

Did he have a hidden talent that others didn’t have? Or more endurance than his peers?

“Neuroscientists, they go, ‘Personality? That’s not my issue,’” Schellenberg said. But personality has to be instantiated in the brain, he argued: “It’s not in the knee!” When researchers compare two groups of people, they always try to account for pre-existing differences, but if they don’t know where talent or endurance are located in the brain, they might miss them.

Music researchers tend, like Schellenberg, to be musicians themselves, and as he noted in his recent paper, “the idea of positive cognitive and neural side effects from music training (and other pleasurable activities) is inherently appealing.” He also admits that if he had children of his own, he would encourage them to take music lessons and go to university. “I would think that it makes them better people, more critical, just wiser in general,” he said.

But those convictions should be checked at the entrance to the lab, he added. Otherwise, the work becomes religion or faith. “You have to let go of your faith if you want to be a scientist.”

Cigarette smokers have lower IQs than non-smokers, and the more a person smokes, the lower their IQ, a study in over 20,000 Israeli military recruits suggests.

Young men who smoked a pack of cigarettes a day or more had IQ scores 7.5 points lower than non-smokers, Dr. Mark Weiser of Sheba Medical Center in Tel Hashomer and his colleagues found.

“Adolescents with poorer IQ scores might be targeted for programs designed to prevent smoking,” they conclude in the journal Addiction.

While there is evidence for a link between smoking and lower IQ, many studies have relied on intelligence tests given in childhood, and have also included people with mental and behavioral problems, who are both more likely to smoke and more likely to have low IQs, Weiser and his team note in their report.

To better understand the smoking-IQ relationship, the researchers looked at 20,211 18-year-old men recruited into the Israeli military. The group did not include anyone with major mental health problems, because these individuals are disqualified from military service.

According to the investigators, 28 percent of the study participants smoked at least one cigarette a day, around 3 percent said they were ex-smokers, and 68 percent had never smoked.

The smokers had significantly lower intelligence test scores than non-smokers, and this remained true even after the researchers accounted for socioeconomic status as measured by how many years of formal education a recruit’s father had completed.

The average IQ for non-smokers was about 101, while it was 94 for men who had started smoking before entering the military. IQ steadily dropped as the number of cigarettes smoked increased, from 98 for people who smoked one to five cigarettes daily to 90 for those who smoked more than a pack a day. IQ scores from 84 to 116 are considered to indicate average intelligence.

Recruits aren’t allowed to smoke while intelligence tests are administered, the researchers note, so it’s possible that withdrawal symptoms might affect smokers’ scores. To address this issue, they also looked at IQ scores for men who were non-smokers when they were 18 but started smoking during their military service. These men also scored lower than never-smokers (97 points, on average), “indicating that nicotine withdrawal was probably not the cause of the difference,” the researchers say.

The researchers also compared IQs for 70 pairs of brothers in the group in which one brother smoked and the other did not. Again, average IQs for the non-smoking sibling were higher than for the smokers.

The findings suggest that lower IQ individuals are more likely to choose to smoke, rather than that smoking makes people less intelligent, Weiser and his team conclude.

Overweight men and women have less grey and white matter in key areas of the brain, the study claims

The research involved sophisticated brain images of 32 adults recruited from the city of Baltimore in Maryland, 16 men and 16 women

Anyone who had a history of brain damage, substance abuse or mental illness was excluded from the group.

Outlining the object of the study, the authors said: ‘It has been suggested that body composition itself might somehow affect the neural systems that underlie cognition, motivation, self-control and salience processing, which would in turn affect one’s ability to make better lifestyle choices, forgoing immediate and/or highly salient rewards for the sake of longer-term health and wellness goals’.

The researchers measured Body Mass Index, a commonly measure of how overweight a person is, and body fat percentages and compared them to differences in brain structure and function.

Lead researcher Chase Figley, an assistant professor in the department of radiology at the University of Manitoba, said that the brain scans were very thorough.

He said they covered changes across the whole brain but also ‘specific networks’.

In particular he was interested in the ‘salience network’, which he described as the ‘seat of motivation, willpower, and the ability to persevere through physical and emotional challenges’.

The results showed that there was ‘no significant difference’ in terms of white matter between people who had a normal weight and people who were fat.

Researchers said that their findings could explain why overweight people make poor diet choices - they do not have the mental capacity to control themselves

In a surprise twist, people with a higher BMI actually had slightly more grey matter overall.

However looking at specific networks on the brain a different picture began to emerge.

In particular, heavier and fatter people had less white matter in the salience network.

There were also differences in the dorsal striatum, an area of the brain involved with habitual behaviour.

Professor Figley told the National Post, a Canadian newspaper: ‘It stands to reason that these changes could further affect the ability of overweight individuals to exert self-control and maintain healthy lifestyle choices’.

He added that it was not clear if the brain differences predispose certain individuals to becoming fat, or vice versa.

However he said: ‘There are previous studies that imply elevated body fat can cause these sorts of brain changes’.

Britain is the fattest country in Europe and 67 per cent of men and 57 per of women are overweight or obese.

Some 26 per cent of boys and 29 per cent of girls are overweight or obese, compared to 17.5 per cent and 21 per cent in 1980.

The costs of treating overweight people for conditions like diabetes and heart problems is already costing billions with some saying that it could bankrupt the NHS in the future.

Obesity has also been linked to dementia and early onset brain shrinking.

The study was reported in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience.

Meta-analysis finally settles the debate about left-handedness and intelligence.

“Lefties are smarter than righties!” “Left-handers are more intelligent than right-handers!” These and similar “fun facts” about left-handedness are quite common on social media, but are they actually true? The fact is that more than 30 million Americans are left-handers, and at first glance, it seems somewhat odd that a preference to write or draw with the left and not the right hand should affect how smart someone is.

The idea that left-handedness might be associated with general intelligence (or any other cognitive ability for that matter) seems to be related to the fact that the origin of handedness has very little to do with the hands themselves. It is impossible to judge whether someone is a left-hander or a right-hander just by looking at the hands, as long as the person is not performing any action. Bones, muscles, tendons, and any other parts of the hands of left- and right-handers typically do not show any visible differences. Instead, the preference to use one hand over the other for fine motor tasks such as writing is caused by the brain (Ocklenburg et al., 2013). Thus, it is at least conceivable that genetic or environmental factors that influence brain development in such a way that someone becomes a left-hander might also affect the development of brain areas linked to intelligence.

Along these lines, it is not impossible that left-handedness and intelligence are linked. But are they really? Empirical studies show surprisingly ambiguous results. Some studies find that right-handers are more intelligent (Nicholls et al., 2012), while others find the exact opposite (Ghayas & Adil, 2007). Such differences between studies are not uncommon in psychological science and can often be explained by sample characteristics and the specific methods used to assess handedness and intelligence. Therefore, it is hard to determine the true effect by looking at single studies.

To finally settle the debate on left-handedness and intelligence, Eleni Ntolka and Marietta Papadatou-Pastou, two researchers from the University of Athens in Greece, performed a so-called meta-analysis of published studies on left-handedness and intelligence (Ntolka & Papadatou-Pastou, 2018). A meta-analysis integrates the results of several empirical studies, which has the advantage that the sample size is much larger, increasing statistical power and rendering the analysis less likely to be affected by sample characteristics of individual studies.

Overall, Ntolka and Papadatou-Pastou (2018) integrated the results of 18 studies that had measured full IQ scores in different handedness groups. Altogether, data from 20,442 individuals were included. Three meta-analyses on possible differences in standardized IQ score between different handedness groups were conducted:

1. Left-handers compared to right-handers
2. Non-right-handers (e.g., left-handers and mixed-handers) compared to right-handers
3. Mixed-handers compared to right-handers

The results? There were no differences in mean IQ scores between right-handers and non-right-handers, or between right-handers and mixed-handers. For the comparison between right-handers and left-handers, however, there was a statistically significant effect, showing that right-handers had a higher average IQ than left-handers. Importantly, this effect was tiny and unlikely to have any substantial effect in real life. To illustrate this, the authors gave the following example: Assuming that left-handers had an average IQ of 100, and both left-handers and right-handers had similar variation in their data, then right-handers would have an average IQ of 101.05. Furthermore, the effect lost statistical significance when one study was excluded from the meta-analysis. These findings led the authors to conclude that the absolute magnitude of IQ differences between left-handers and right-handers is extremely small and that any intelligence differences between the two groups in the general population are negligible.

So no matter what social media fun fact pages tell you: Sorry, left-handers, you are not smarter than the rest of the population.

About 68% of families in the USA have a pet, according to statistics. 36.5% of them own a dog, while 30.4% of households own a cat. It seems dogs are maintaining their position as man’s best friend, however, it turns out that owning a cat could indicate many interesting facts about their owners.

Bright Side looked carefully at the latest study about pet owners (cats, in particular) and is eager to share with you its unexpectedly interesting results.

Besides cats’ amazing abilities in helping humans to lower stress, to overcome difficulties, and to cope with loss, having a fluffy feline friend says a lot about your character and personality in general.

Surprisingly, people tend to opt for those pets who compliment their lifestyle and match their habits. And a recent study from 3 big universities (University of Florida, Carroll University, and Marquette University) explains why.

It was Samuel D. Gosling from the University of Texas at Austin who first came up with the idea to compare dog owners with their pets. He managed to outline some common traits between humans and their best friends, but cat people were not there on his list.

Next, Denise D. Guastello, an Associate Professor at Carroll College together with Andrea D. Guastello and Stephen J. Guastello held a big and one-of-a-kind study that compared the personalities of dog and cat people. The main idea was to understand the relationship between human personalities and their preferences for a pet species.

About 600 undergraduate students were involved in the study where 16 psychological factors of theirs were assessed by psychologists. Those factors included reasoning, warmth, emotional stability, liveliness, dominance, etc.

Based on the answers the participants gave, the study showed that the students who had a dog were more outgoing and extroverted while those who owned a cat were more sensitive and creative.

There is another trait that the researchers spotted in cat owners — despite their sensitivity, these people are always able to stand up for their interests and their point of view.

Perhaps, the most interesting trait that was spotted is intelligence. This paper declares that cat people scored higher on reasoning (i.e., general intelligence) than dog people. Surprise!!!

All in all, whether you are a cat person, a dog person, or a fish person, it’s the connection with your pet that matters the most. These fluffy guys are always there beside you whether you are a nerd or an outgoing and open-minded person.

A team of researchers at Edinburgh University in Scotland has found a correlation between genes associated with height and those associated with intelligence. In their paper published in the journal Behavior Genetics, the group describes how they studied the DNA of 6,815 unrelated people and discovered what they describe as a direct correlation between height and intelligence—taller people are smarter, they say.

While the team's study results are likely to cause quite a stir, particularly among those lower in physical stature, it does add to a growing body of research that suggests there are physical, mental and in some cases emotional differences between people related to body size (both height and girth). In this effort, the team used data obtained from Generation Scotland: Scottish Family Health Study—where both medical tests and mental aptitude were tested—intelligence was measured via four basic metrics: mental reaction times, linguistic ability, processing speed and powers of recall.

In analyzing data from the study, the team found what they describe as a "significant genetic correlation" between IQ and height—between taller and shorter people. Those that were shorter were on average, found to be slightly less intelligent than their taller counterparts. It's important to note that the researchers are not suggesting that all short people are less intelligent, or that all tall people are more intelligent. Instead they are pointing out averages across a population. Also important to note is that the Family Health Study did not use standard IQ tests to measure intelligence.

The research team also claim that 70 percent of the genetic differences they found regarding IQ and height could be attributed to genetic factors—the rest could be chalked up to environment.

Other studies have found that there exists different health risks for people of different heights—some have found that shorter people, for example, are more likely to suffer from cardiovascular disease, while taller people tend to die younger than shorter people. Studies that have looked for intelligence differences based on height, however, have been few and far between. The researchers in Scotland point out that prior studies have relied mainly on testing people related to one another—theirs, they claim, is the first study to measure people who are completely unrelated.