Iq Best Quotes

As adults, these kids are mostly what you’d expect. Low IQ and poor cognitive skills. Problems with forming attachments, often bordering on autistic. Anxiety and depression galore. The longer the institutionalization, the worse the prognosis.

Societies are preoccupied with just about everything other than making good people. For some, it is intelligence. Parents are often more concerned with their children’s IQs than their children’s characters. And many people confuse higher education with decency and moral insight.

How’s this for fascinating: Heritability of various aspects of cognitive development is very high (e.g., around 70 percent for IQ) in kids from high–socioeconomic status (SES) families but is only around 10 percent in low-SES kids. Thus, higher SES allows the full range of genetic influences on cognition to flourish, whereas lower-SES settings restrict them. In other words, genes are nearly irrelevant to cognitive development if you’re growing up in awful poverty—poverty’s adverse effects trump the genetics.fn24 Similarly, heritability of alcohol use is lower among religious than nonreligious subjects—i.e., your genes don’t matter much if you’re in a religious environment that condemns drinking. Domains like these showcase the potential power of classical behavior genetics.

Once when I was about 13, in an angry fit, I walked out of the house vowing I would never return. It was a beautiful summer day, and I walked far along lovely lanes, till gradually the stillness and beauty calmed and soothed me, and after some hours I returned repentant and almost melted. Since then when I am angry, I do this if I can, and find it the best cure.

There is, and there always has been, an unusually high and consistent correlation between the stupidity of a given person and that person’s propensity to be impressed by the measurement of I.Q.

Skip Caray was my favorite announcer as I grew up listening to the Braves on TBS and on the radio. One night, listening to a game that was headed into extra-innings, the broadcast was just breaking away to commercial when Skip said, 'Free baseball in Atlanta!' One of the best lines I’ve ever heard.

When you have God doing something that any human being with an IQ north of 60 can do better and smarter, you got a lousy god!

An average teenager today, if he or she could time-travel back to 1950, would have had an IQ of 118. If the teenager went back to 1910, he or she would have had an IQ of 130, besting 98 percent of his or her contemporaries. Yes, you read that right: if we take the Flynn Effect at face value, a typical person today is smarter than 98 percent of the people in the good old days of 1910. To state it in an even more jarring way, a typical person of 1910, if time-transported forward to the present, would have a mean IQ of 70, which is at the border of mental retardation. With the Raven’s Progressive Matrices, a test that is sometimes considered the purest measure of general intelligence, the rise is even steeper. An ordinary person of 1910 would have an IQ of 50 today, which is smack in the middle of mentally retarded territory, between “moderate” and “mild” retardation.

Thank you, Anthony,” Dodson said. “Isaiah cogitates best when there are no distractions.” “What’s

At best, IQ contributes about 20 percent to the factors that determine life success, which leaves 80 percent to other forces.

Warm, fuzzy ideas and good intentions are a less effective foundation for policies than the truth. Policies based on incorrect ideas are, at best, a waste of resources. At worst, they may cause harm.

I began looking for these four: Smart. It doesn’t mean high IQ (although that’s great), it means disposed toward learning. If there’s a best practice anywhere, adopt it. We want to turn as much as possible into a routine so we can focus on the few things that require human intelligence and creativity. A good interview question for this is: “Tell me about the last significant thing you learned about how to do your job better.” Or you might ask a candidate: “What’s something that you’ve automated? What’s a process you’ve had to tear down at a company?” Humble. I don’t mean meek or unambitious, I mean being humble in the way that Steph Curry is humble. If you’re humble, people want you to succeed. If you’re selfish, they want you to fail. It also gives you the capacity for self-awareness, so you can actually learn and be smart. Humility is foundational like that. It is also essential for the kind of collaboration we want at Slack. Hardworking. It does not mean long hours. You can go home and take care of your family, but when you’re here, you’re disciplined, professional, and focused. You should also be competitive, determined, resourceful, resilient, and gritty. Take this job as an opportunity to do the best work of your life. Collaborative. It’s not submissive, not deferential—in fact it’s kind of the opposite. In our culture, being collaborative means providing leadership from everywhere. I’m taking responsibility for the health of this meeting. If there’s a lack of trust, I’m going to address that. If the goals are unclear, I’m going to deal with that. We’re all interested in getting better and everyone should take responsibility for that. If everyone’s collaborative in that sense, the responsibility for team performance is shared. Collaborative people know that success is limited by the worst performers, so they are either going to elevate them or have a serious conversation. This one is easy to corroborate with references, and in an interview you can ask, “Tell me about a situation in your last company where something was substandard and you helped to fix it.

These are crucially different. For example, how much do genes have to do with people’s scores averaging 100 on this thing called an IQ test? Then how much do genes have to do with one person scoring higher than another?

the ability to attend to a task and stick to long-term goals is the greatest predictor of success, greater than academic achievement, extracurricular involvement, test scores, and IQ. She calls this grit, and first discovered its power in the classroom, while teaching seventh-grade math. She left teaching to pursue research on her hunch, and her findings have changed the way educators perceive student potential. Gritty students succeed, and failure strengthens grit like no other crucible.

In my opinion, defining intelligence is much like defining beauty, and I don’t mean that it’s in the eye of the beholder. To illustrate, let’s say that you are the only beholder, and your word is final. Would you be able to choose the 1000 most beautiful women in the country? And if that sounds impossible, consider this: Say you’re now looking at your picks. Could you compare them to each other and say which one is more beautiful? For example, who is more beautiful— Katie Holmes or Angelina Jolie? How about Angelina Jolie or Catherine Zeta-Jones? I think intelligence is like this. So many factors are involved that attempts to measure it are useless. Not that IQ tests are useless. Far from it. Good tests work: They measure a variety of mental abilities, and the best tests do it well. But they don’t measure intelligence itself.

What Mariah Carey should be telling them is to follow their abilities and make a dream out of what God gave them.” Marcus smiled that big sunny smile and saw the future in Isaiah’s eyes. “God gave you wings so you could fly up that pathway to the very top,” he said. “That’s where the best dreams are.” Isaiah

Let’s incorporate behavior. If someone has extensive frontocortical damage, how predictable is it that you’d note something odd about them, behaviorally, after a five-minute conversation? Something like 75 percent. Now let’s consider a broader range of behaviors. How predictable is it that this person with the frontal damage will do something horrifically violent at some point? Or that someone who was abused repeatedly as a child will become an abusive adult? That a soldier who went through a battle that killed his buddies will develop PTSD? That a person with the “montane vole” polygamous version of the vasopressin receptor gene promoter will have numerous failed marriages? That a person with a particular array of glutamate receptor subtypes throughout their cortex and hippocampus will have an IQ above 140? That someone raised with extensive childhood adversity and loss will have a major depressive disorder? All under 50 percent, often way under.

Starting with Theodor Adorno in the 1950s, people have suggested that lower intelligence predicts adherence to conservative ideology. Some but not all studies since then have supported this conclusion. More consistent has been a link between lower intelligence and a subtype of conservatism, namely right-wing authoritarianism (RWA, a fondness for hierarchy). One particularly thorough demonstration of this involved more than fifteen thousand subjects in the UK and United States; importantly, the links among low IQ, RWA, and intergroup prejudice were there after controlling for education and socioeconomic status. The standard, convincing explanation for the link is that RWA provides simple answers, ideal for people with poor abstract reasoning skills.

Many of us get anxious in test-taking situations regardless of our intelligence, preparation, or familiarity with the material. One of the reasons test anxiety is so common is that it is relatively easy to trigger. Even one episode of heightened anxiety is sufficient for us to feel intensely anxious when facing a similar situation in the future. Test anxiety is especially problematic because it causes massive disruptions to our concentration, our focus, and our ability to think clearly, all of which have a huge impact on our performance. As a rule, anxiety tends to be extremely greedy when it comes to our concentration and attention. The visceral discomfort it creates can be so distracting, and the intellectual resources it hogs so critical, that we might struggle to comprehend the nuances of questions, retrieve the relevant information from our memory, formulate answers coherently, or choose the best option from a multiple-choice list. As an illustration of how dramatic its effects are, anxiety can cause us to score fifteen points lower than we would otherwise on a basic IQ test—a hugely significant margin that can drop a score from the Superior to the Average range.

Dearest J.D.,” Mamaw wrote when she learned of the incident, “I must say I have been waiting for them dick face bastards to start on you—and now they have. Words aren’t invented to describe how they piss me off. . . . You just keep on doing the best you can do and keep thinking about this stupid asshole with an IQ of 2 thinking he is Bobby bad ass but he wears girls underwear. I hate all of them.

All societies that have tried to keep themselves ‘pure,’ from the Confucian Chinese through to the Castilian Spanish to the post-Wilhelmine Germans, have collapsed into barbarism, insularity and superstition. And swiftly enough for us to be certain that the fall was no more connected to the genes than was the rise. There is no gene for I.Q., and there is no genetic or evolutionary timing that is short enough to explain histories or societies.

Heritability of various aspects of cognitive development is very high (e.g., around 70 percent for IQ) in kids from high–socioeconomic status (SES) families but is only around 10 percent in low-SES kids. Thus, higher SES allows the full range of genetic influences on cognition to flourish, whereas lower-SES settings restrict them. In other words, genes are nearly irrelevant to cognitive development if you’re growing up in awful poverty—poverty’s adverse effects trump the genetics.

INTELLIGENCE Oh, what the hell? Let’s begin with something inflammatory. Starting with Theodor Adorno in the 1950s, people have suggested that lower intelligence predicts adherence to conservative ideology.33 Some but not all studies since then have supported this conclusion. More consistent has been a link between lower intelligence and a subtype of conservatism, namely right-wing authoritarianism (RWA, a fondness for hierarchy). One particularly thorough demonstration of this involved more than fifteen thousand subjects in the UK and United States; importantly, the links among low IQ, RWA, and intergroup prejudice were there after controlling for education and socioeconomic status. The standard, convincing explanation for the link is that RWA provides simple answers, ideal for people with poor abstract reasoning skills. INTELLECTUAL

The implications are stunning. An average teenager today, if he or she could time-travel back to 1950, would have had an IQ of 118. If the teenager went back to 1910, he or she would have had an IQ of 130, besting 98 percent of his or her contemporaries. Yes, you read that right: if we take the Flynn Effect at face value, a typical person today is smarter than 98 percent of the people in the good old days of 1910. To state it in an even more jarring way, a typical person of 1910, if time-transported forward to the present, would have a mean IQ of 70, which is at the border of mental retardation. With the Raven’s Progressive Matrices, a test that is sometimes considered the purest measure of general intelligence, the rise is even steeper. An ordinary person of 1910 would have an IQ of 50 today, which is smack in the middle of mentally retarded territory, between “moderate” and “mild” retardation.233

A second case concerns Charles Whitman, the 1966 “Texas Tower” sniper who, after killing his wife and mother, opened fire atop a tower at the University of Texas in Austin, killing sixteen and wounding thirty-two, one of the first school massacres. Whitman was literally an Eagle Scout and childhood choirboy, a happily married engineering major with an IQ in the 99th percentile. In the prior year he had seen doctors, complaining of severe headaches and violent impulses (e.g., to shoot people from the campus tower). He left notes by the bodies of his wife and his mother, proclaiming love and puzzlement at his actions: “I cannot rationaly [sic] pinpoint any specific reason for [killing her],” and “let there be no doubt in your mind that I loved this woman with all my heart.” His suicide note requested an autopsy of his brain, and that any money he had be given to a mental health foundation. The autopsy proved his intuition correct—Whitman had a glioblastoma tumor pressing on his amygdala.

games. A summary: Exposing children to a violent TV or film clip increases their odds of aggression soon after.41 Interestingly, the effect is stronger in girls (amid their having lower overall levels of aggression). Effects are stronger when kids are younger or when the violence is more realistic and/or is presented as heroic. Such exposure can make kids more accepting of aggression—in one study, watching violent music videos increased adolescent girls’ acceptance of dating violence. The violence is key—aggression isn’t boosted by material that’s merely exciting, arousing, or frustrating. Heavy childhood exposure to media violence predicts higher levels of aggression in young adults of both sexes (“aggression” ranging from behavior in an experimental setting to violent criminality). The effect typically remains after controlling for total media-watching time, maltreatment or neglect, socioeconomic status, levels of neighborhood violence, parental education, psychiatric illness, and IQ. This is a reliable finding of large magnitude. The

David Brooks, “Our Founding Yuppie,” Weekly Standard, Oct. 23, 2000, 31. The word “meritocracy” is an argument-starter, and I have employed it sparingly in this book. It is often used loosely to denote a vision of social mobility based on merit and diligence, like Franklin’s. The word was coined by British social thinker Michael Young (later to become, somewhat ironically, Lord Young of Darlington) in his 1958 book The Rise of the Meritocracy (New York: Viking Press) as a dismissive term to satirize a society that misguidedly created a new elite class based on the “narrow band of values” of IQ and educational credentials. The Harvard philosopher John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 106, used it more broadly to mean a “social order [that] follows the principle of careers open to talents.” The best description of the idea is in Nicholas Lemann’s The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999), a history of educational aptitude tests and their effect on American society. In Franklin’s time, Enlightenment thinkers (such as Jefferson in his proposals for creating the University of Virginia) advocated replacing the hereditary aristocracy with a “natural aristocracy,” whose members would be plucked from the masses at an early age based on “virtues and talents” and groomed for leadership. Franklin’s idea was more expansive. He believed in encouraging and providing opportunities for all people to succeed as best they could based on their diligence, hard work, virtue, and talent. As we shall see, his proposals for what became the University of Pennsylvania (in contrast to Jefferson’s for the University of Virginia) were aimed not at filtering a new elite but at encouraging and enriching all “aspiring” young men. Franklin was propounding a more egalitarian and democratic approach than Jefferson by proposing a system that would, as Rawls (p. 107) would later prescribe, assure that “resources for education are not to be allotted solely or necessarily mainly according to their return as estimated in productive trained abilities, but also according to their worth in enriching the personal and social life of citizens.” (Translation: He cared not simply about making society as a whole more productive, but also about making each individual more enriched.)

made some teams much better than others. What they found was that individual intelligence (as measured by IQ) didn’t make the big difference. Having a high aggregate intelligence or just one or two superstars wasn’t critical. The groups that surfaced more and better solutions shared three key qualities. First, they gave one another roughly equal time to talk. This wasn’t monitored or regulated, but no one in these high-achieving groups dominated or was a passenger. Everyone contributed and nothing any one person said was wasted. The second quality of the successful groups was social sensitivity: these individuals were more tuned in to one another, to subtle shifts in mood and demeanor. They scored more highly on a test called Reading the Mind in the Eyes, which is broadly considered a test for empathy. These groups were socially alert to one another’s needs. And the third distinguishing feature was that the best groups included more women, perhaps because that made them more diverse, or because women tend to score more highly on tests for empathy. What this (and much more) research highlights is just how critical the role of social connectedness can be. Reading the research, I

They taught him how to milk cows and now they expected him to tame lions. Perhaps they expected him to behave like all good lion tamers. Use a whip and a chair. But what happens to the best lion tamer when he puts down his whip and his chair. Goddamnit! It was wrong. He felt cheated, he felt almost violated. He felt cheated for himself, and he felt cheated for guys like Joshua Edwards who wanted to teach and who didn’t know how to teach because he’d been pumped full of manure and theoretical hogwash. Why hadn’t anyone told them, in plain, frank English, just what to do? Couldn’t someone, somewhere along the line, have told them? Not one single college instructor? Not someone from the board of Ed, someone to orientate them after they’d passed the emergency exam? Not anyone? Now one sonofabitch somewhere who gave a good goddamn? Not even Stanley? Not even Small? Did they have to figure it out for themselves, sink and swim, kill or be killed? Rick had never been told how to stop in his class. He’d never been told what to do with a second term student who doesn’t even know how to write down his own goddamn name on a sheet of paper. He didn’t know, he’d never been advised on the proper tactics for dealing with a boy whose I.Q. was 66, a big, fat, round, moronic 66. He hadn’t been taught about kids’ yelling out in class, not one kid, not the occasional “difficult child” the ed courses had loftily philosophized about, not him. But a whole goddamn, shouting, screaming class load of them all yelling their sonofbitching heads off. What do you do with a kid who can’t read even though he’s fifteen years old? Recommend him for special reading classes, sure. And what do you do when those special reading classes are loaded to the asshole, packed because there are kids who can’t read in abundance, and you have to take only those who can’t read the worst, dumping them onto a teacher who’s already overloaded and those who doesn’t want to teach a remedial class to begin with? And what do you with that poor ignorant jerk? Do you call him on class, knowing damn well he hasn’t read the assignment because he doesn’t know how to read? Or do you ignore him? Or do you ask him to stop by after school, knowing he would prefer playing stickball to learning how to read. And knowing he considers himself liberated the moment the bell sounds at the end of the eighth period. What do you do when you’ve explained something patiently and fully, explained it just the way you were taught to explain in your education courses, explained in minute detail, and you look out at your class and see that stretching, vacant wall of blank, blank faces and you know nothing has penetrated, not a goddamn thing has sunk in? What do you do then? Give them all board erasers to clean. What do you do when you call on a kid and ask “What did that last passage mean?”and the kid stands there without any idea of what the passage meant , and you know that he’s not alone, you know every other kid in the class hasn’t the faintest idea either? What the hell do you do then? Do you go home and browse through the philosophy of education books the G.I bill generously provided. Do you scratch your ugly head and seek enlightenment from the educational psychology texts? Do you consult Dewey? And who the hell do you condemn, just who? Do you condemn elementary schools for sending a kid on to high school without knowing how to read, without knowing how to write his own name on a piece of paper? Do you condemn the masterminds who plot the education systems of a nation, or a state or a city?

It’s amazing how someone’s IQ seems to double as soon as you give them responsibility and indicate you trust them. — Timothy Ferriss, The Four-Hour Workweek

There are two main types of self-regulation: behavioral and emotional self-regulation. Behavioral self-regulation involves regulating your own behavior and acting in a way that fulfills your best long-term interests. An example of behavioral self-regulation is what was mentioned above when you feel like quitting but show up anyway. Behavioral self-regulation enables you to feel one way but act differently because acting this way serves your best interests.

Being a genius in your own world doesn't mean that you have a high IQ, you need to empower your brain by asking questions never asked by others, reading good books, having self-awareness, and above all choosing the best library in your locality.

one study found that the higher your best friend’s IQ at age eleven or twelve, the higher your IQ would be at age fifteen, even after controlling for natural levels of intelligence.

When astronaut Mike Massimino was a graduate student at MIT, he took a small robotics class. Of the ten people in the class, four became astronauts. If your goal was to make it into space, then that room was about the best culture you could ask for. Similarly, one study found that the higher your best friend’s IQ at age eleven or twelve, the higher your IQ would be at age fifteen, even after controlling for natural levels of intelligence. We soak up the qualities and practices of those around us.

Recent studies have found that the best predictor of career success in any field is not IQ, grades, or standardized test scores but participation in one or more mentally intensive leisuretime activities or hobbies—anything from painting, composing music, or writing poetry to programming computers, creating videos, or playing around with scientific ideas or mathematics. This is true for professionals of all kinds; it is true for business entrepreneurs and CEOs; it is true for artists, academics, and entertainers.

Suppose there was some group of people who selected beginning chess players for some chess program according to what seemed to be their “innate talent.” They would teach a group of youngsters how to play and then, after three or six months had passed, look to see who were the best. We know what would happen. On average, the kids with higher IQs would have an easier time in the beginning learning the moves and would be selected for further training and grooming; the others would not be offered a spot in the program. The end result would be a collection of chess players with much higher than average IQs. But we know that in the real world there are many grandmasters who don’t score particularly well on IQ tests—so we would have missed the contributions of all of those people who could become great chess players.

The IQ and the life expectancy of the average American recently passed each other going in opposite directions.

*Gone are the days of Benton's childhood, when his sticky fingers dung through caramel-glazed popcorn and peanuts for treasure, such as a plastic whistle or BB game or, best of all, the magic decoding ring that little Benton wore on his index finger, pretending it empowered him to know wgat people thought, what they would do and which monster he would defeat on his next secret mission. *The toy surprises inside are games printed on folded white paper, cheap as hell, and require the IQ of a pigeon.

We have two brains, two minds—and two different kinds of intelligence: rational and emotional. How we do in life is determined by both—it is not just IQ, but emotional intelligence that matters. Indeed, intellect cannot work at its best without emotional intelligence. Ordinarily the complementarity of limbic system and neocortex, amygdala and prefrontal lobes, means each is a full partner in mental life. When these partners interact well, emotional intelligence rises—as does intellectual ability.

On Intelligence: Intelligence will not make you rich unless your intelligence is about getting rich. Corollary: Intelligence will lead one to to appreciate things that cost money over things that make money. Corollary: Being a genius is antithetical to being successful unless you're a genius at being successful. Corollary: Being intelligent does not make you rich but it can keep you from being poor. Corollary: Intelligence leads to interests, mostly not gainful. Corollary: Intelligence is like molasses, with effort, it goes where you put it. Rubbers are best for those who refuse to use them. Corollary: Intelligence adds but stupidity multiplies. Corollary: Reverse evolution is the new norm. Only luck can save one from one's own stupidity. Only idiots regard a second chance the same as the first. The higher the IQ, the greater the chance of self-deception. Still waters are often shallow puddles.

Connective talents are useless, of course, if people can’t perform the work. And the most talented people in every occupation have huge advantages over their ordinary peers. Dean Keith Simonton, who studies greatness and genius, finds that whether it comes to songwriters, composers, scientists, programmers, or filmmakers, the top 10 percent generate as much or more output than the other 90 percent. The superiority of great bosses is seen in a summary of eighty-five years of research on employee selection methods. Frank Schmidt and John Hunter found that the top 15 percent of professionals and managers produced nearly 50 percent more output than their average peers. The strongest predictors of performance included general mental ability (IQ and similar measures), job sample tests (having people prove they can do the work), and evaluations by peers; other useful predictors included structured employment interviews (where each candidate is asked the same questions in the same order) and conscientiousness (self-discipline and follow-through, similar to grit). These findings provide ammunition for bosses who stock up on the best talent and believe that little else is required. Yet without constructive connections among people, collective performance and humanity is tough to achieve – no matter how many superstars are in the fold.

Ellington would be growing up in a culture saturated with an idea you might call the cognitive hypothesis: the belief... that success today primarily depends on cognitive skills - the kind of intelligence that gets measured on IQ tests... and that the best way to develop these skills is to practice them as much as possible, beginning as early as possible. ...But in the past decade, a disparate group of scientists have begun to produce evidence that calls into question the cognitive hypothesis. What matters most in a child's development... is whether we are able to help her develop a very different set of qualities: self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit, and self-confidence. Economists refer to these as noncognitive skills, psychologists call them personality traits, and the rest of us sometimes think of them as character.

In 1997 Gary McPherson studied 157 randomly selected children as they picked out and learned a musical instrument. Some went on to become fine musicians and some faltered. McPherson searched for the traits that separated those who progressed from those who did no. IQ was not a good predictor. Neither were aural sensitivity, math skills, income or a sense or rhythm. The best single predictor was a question McPherson had asked the students before they had even selected their instruments: How long do you think you will play? The students who planned to play for a short time did not become very proficient. The children who planned to play for a few years had modest success. But there were some children who said, in effect: "I want to be a musician, I'm going to play my whole life." Those children soared. The sense of identity that children brought to the first lesson was the spark that would set off all the improvement that would subsequently happen. It was a vision of their future self.

Smart players that communicate well talk about what’s best for the ball. They feed their teammates a concise stream of information that helps those teammates solve their soccer problems. They are like chess-masters moving the pieces to orchestrate the attack, directing the ball from one teammate to the next. That’s what smart players do. What most players do is see the teammate who has the ball and then scream, “JENNY! JENNY! JENNY!” And there’s poor Jenny at midfield, trying her best to evade two determined opponents and the only help she’s offered is ten teammates shouting her name from ten different directions. Listen – Jenny already knows her name. What Jenny needs is some useful information that will help her out of her current unpleasant predicament. Jenny needs a teammate saying something like, “Drop it to Danielle.” That’s the kind of information she can actually use. Instead she gets, “JENNY! JENNY! JENNY!

In 1904, a test of intelligence that later evolved into the IQ test was developed by French researcher Alfred Binet as a tool for assessing the learning progress of French schoolchildren. His assumption was that lower intelligence signaled, not an inability to learn, but a need for more and different teaching.

Figure 2.2 Number of connections over 25 years across brain areas. This process — neural exuberance followed by pruning of connections — makes the human brain highly adaptable to any environment. Is the infant born in an urban or an agricultural society? Is it the year 2012 or 1012? It doesn’t really matter. The brain of a child born in New York City or in Nome, Alaska, is similar at birth. During the next two decades of life, the process of neural exuberance followed by pruning sculpts a brain that can meet the demands, and thrive in its environment. Brain differences at the “tails” of the distribution As with any natural process there is a range of functioning, with most individuals in the middle and a small percentage of individuals being far above and far below the mean. While the general pattern of increasing and decreasing brain connections is seen in all children, important differences are reported in children whose abilities are above or below those of the average population. To investigate children above the normal range, Shaw used Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to follow brain structure in 307 children over 17 years. Children with average IQs reached a peak of cortical thickness (and therefore number of neural connections) around age 10, and then pruning began and continued to age 18. Children with above-average IQs had a different pattern: a brief pruning period around age 7 followed by increasing connections again to age 13. Then pruning ensued more vigorously and finished around age 18. There were also differences in brain structure. At age 18, those with above-average IQs had higher levels of neural connections in the frontal areas, which are responsible for short-term memory, attention, sense of self, planning, and decision-making — the higher brain functions. At the other end of the spectrum, individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia, compared to normal children, lose 3% more connections each year from age 10 to 18. Symptoms of schizophrenia emerge in the late teens, when the cortical layer becomes too thin to support coherent functioning. A thinner cortical layer as a young adult — about 20% less than the average — could account for the fragmented mental world of people diagnosed with schizophrenia. Who is in control? Neural exuberance — increasing and decreasing connections — is genetically controlled, but the child’s experiences affect which connections are pruned and which remain. Circuits that a child uses are strengthened. So a youngster who learns to play the piano or to speak Italian is setting up brain circuits that support those activities — she will find it easier to learn another instrument or language. ​Warning to parents: This doesn’t mean you should inundate your toddler with Italian, violin, martial arts, and tennis lessons. Young children learn best when following their natural tendencies and curiosity. Children learn through play. Undue stress and pressure inhibits the brain’s natural ability to learn.

There’s another level at which attention operates, this has to do with leadership, I argue that leaders need three kinds of focus, to be really effective, the first is an inner focus, let me tell you about a case that’s actually from the annals of neurology, there was a corporate lawyer, who unfortunately had a small prefrontal brain tumour, it was discovered early, operated successfully, after the surgery though it was a very puzzling picture, because he was absolutely as smart as he had been before, a very high IQ, no problem with attention or memory, but he couldn’t do his job anymore, he couldn’t do any job, in fact he ended up out of work, his wife left him, he lost his home, he’s living in his brother spare bedroom and in despair he went to see a famous neurologist named Antonio Damasio. Damasio specialized in the circuitry between the prefrontal area which is where we consciously pay attention to what matters now, where we make decisions, where we learn and the emotional centers in the midbrain, particularly the amygdala, which is our radar for danger, it triggers our strong emotions. They had cut the connection between the prefrontal area and emotional centers and Damasio at first was puzzled, he realized that this fellow on every neurological test was perfectly fine but something was wrong, then he got a clue, he asked the lawyer when should we have our next appointment and he realized the lawyer could give him the rational pros and cons of every hour for the next two weeks, but he didn’t know which is best. And Damasio says when we’re making a decision any decision, when to have the next appointment, should I leave my job for another one, what strategy should we follow, going into the future, should I marry this fellow compared to all the other fellows, those are decisions that require we draw on our entire life experience and the circuitry that collects that life experience is very base brain, it’s very ancient in the brain, and it has no direct connection to the part of the brain that thinks in words, it has very rich connectivity to the gastro- intestinal tract, to the gut, so we get a gut feeling, feels right, doesn’t feel right. Damasio calls them somatic markers, it’s a language of the body and the ability to tune into this is extremely important because this is valuable data too - they did a study of Californian entrepreneurs and asked them “how do you make your decisions?”, these are people who built a business from nothing to hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, and they more or less said the same strategy “I am a voracious gatherer of information, I want to see the numbers, but if it doesn’t feel right, I won’t go ahead with the deal”. They’re tuning into the gut feeling. I know someone, I grew up in farm region of California, the Central Valley and my high school had a rival high school in the next town and I met someone who went to the other high school, he was not a good student, he almost failed, came close to not graduating high school, he went to a two-year college, a community college, found his way into film, which he loved and got into a film school, in film school his student project caught the eye of a director, who asked him to become an assistant and he did so well at that the director arranged for him to direct his own film, someone else’s script, he did so well at that they let him direct a script that he had written and that film did surprisingly well, so the studio that financed that film said if you want to do another one, we will back you. And he, however, hated the way the studio edited the film, he felt he was a creative artist and they had butchered his art. He said I am gonna do the film on my own, I’m gonna finance it myself, everyone in the film business that he knew said this is a huge mistake, you shouldn’t do this, but he went ahead, then he ran out of money, had to go to eleven banks before he could get a loan, he managed to finish the film, you may have seen

Similarly, one study found that the higher your best friend’s IQ at age eleven or twelve, the higher your IQ would be at age fifteen, even after controlling for natural levels of intelligence. We soak up the qualities and practices of those around us.

IN ADDITION, THROUGHOUT THESE CHAPTERS, I OFFER PRACTICAL insights about genius such as these: IQ, mentors, and Ivy League educations are greatly overrated. No matter how “gifted” your child is, you do him or her no favor by treating him or her like a prodigy. The best way to have a brilliant insight is to engage in creative relaxation: go for a walk, take a shower, or get a good night’s sleep with pen and paper by the bed. To be more productive, adopt a daily ritual for work. To improve your chances of being a genius, move to a metropolis or a university town. To live longer, find your passion. Finally, take heart, because it is never too late to be creative: for every youthful Mozart there is an aged Verdi; for every precocious Picasso, a Grandma Moses.

along with having good relationships, one of the best predictors of health and happiness—better than social class, IQ, and genetic factors—is having a sense of purpose in life and passing it down to the next generation.

Self-control, managing these disruptive feelings and impulses as best you can i.e. not letting them overtake your entire thinking. Trustworthiness, I touched on this within the self-awareness section but having a guide to maintain standards of integrity and honesty can be particularly important. Acting ethically and authentically will help a person to better self-regulate their emotions from the outset. Holding yourself to these high principled standards automatically eradicates most emotions of fear, guilt and general self loathing before they even arise making them much easier to manage if they do appear. Conscientiousness, i.e. the ability to take responsibility for your own actions and performance. Being held accountable for meeting the objective a person sets out for themselves and being organized and careful about their work. Adaptability, the ability to adapt and be flexible when emotions arise is also fairly critical. It will allow a person to more smoothly handle a situation, especially one of high pressure or shifting priorities. They will be able to adapt their responses and situational tactics to better fit a fluid environment. Innovation, this is more about being open and even seeking new and novel ideas. It’s about entertaining an original problem but exploring a variety of sources of information and even coming up with new ideas and fresh perspectives in thinking for solving current problems.

One subset of this Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth – as it’s called, although these youths were also precocious in non-mathematical areas – were the best of the best: their SAT scores were the top 0.0001 per cent of the population. And 30 years after they had taken the SAT, these 320 ‘scary smart’ people (to quote the researchers) had achieved an astonishing amount (Kell et al., 2013). They had become high-ranking politicians, CEOs of companies, high-ups in government agencies, distinguished academics, journalists for well-known newspapers, artists and musical directors. They had been awarded patents, grant money and prizes, and had produced plays, novels, and a huge amount of economic value. They had, in other words, made incalculable contributions to society, for everyone’s benefit. Overall, then, it seems that particularly high IQ scores are related to particularly impressive achievements. Moreover, and importantly for our question here, another analysis by Benbow and Lubinski showed that, even within the top 1 per cent of SAT scorers, those with higher IQs were doing better: they had higher incomes and were more likely to have obtained advanced degrees (Robertson et al., 2010). There are, it seems, no limits to the benefits of a high IQ: even within the cleverest people, intelligence keeps on mattering.

one study found that the higher your best friend’s IQ at age eleven or twelve, the higher your IQ would be at age fifteen, even after controlling for natural levels of intelligence

Here are ten facts about IQ. These facts are debated and often controversial among the general public but far less so among scientists who study intelligence. The best review of the academic literature supporting these facts is a 2012 paper by Richard Nisbett and colleagues – an interdisciplinary team of leading scholars, household names within intelligence research, comprised of psychologists, an economist, a behavioral geneticist, and a former President of the American Psychological Association. Their areas of expertise include cultural and sex differences in intelligence, the effect of social and genetic factors that affect intelligence, the development of intelligence over the lifespan, the relationship between economic development and intelligence, and changes in intelligence over history 1. IQ is a good predictor of school and work performance, at least in WEIRD societies. 2. IQ differs in predictive power and is the least predictive of performance on tasks that demand low cognitive skill. 3. IQ may be separable into what can be called ‘crystallized intelligence’ and ‘fluid intelligence’. Crystalized intelligence refers to knowledge that is drawn on to solve problems. Fluid intelligence refers to an ability to solve novel problems and to learn. 4. Educational interventions can improve aspects of IQ, including fluid intelligence, which is affected by interventions such as memory training. Many of these results don’t seem to last long, although there is strong evidence that education as a whole causally raises IQ over a lifetime. 5. IQ test scores have been dramatically increasing over time. This is called the Flynn effect after James Flynn (also an author of the review mentioned above), who first noticed this pattern. The Flynn effect is largest for nations that have recently modernized. Large gains have been measured on the Raven’s test, a test that has been argued to be the most ‘culture-free’ and a good measure of fluid intelligence. That is, it’s not just driven by people learning more words or getting better at adding and subtracting. 6. IQ differences have neural correlates – i.e. you can measure these differences in the brain. 7. IQ is heritable, though the exact heritability differs by population, typically ranging from around 30% to 80%. 8. Heritability is lower for poorer people in the US, but not in Australia and Europe where it is roughly the same across levels of wealth. 9. Males and females differ in IQ performance in terms of variance and in the means of different subscales. 10. Populations and ethnicities differ on IQ performance. You can imagine why some people might question these statements. But setting aside political considerations, how do we scientifically make sense of this? Popular books from Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve (1994) to Robert Plomin’s Blueprint (2018) have attributed much of this to genes. People and perhaps groups differ in genes, making some brighter than others. But humans are a species with two lines of inheritance. They have not just genetic hardware but also cultural software. And it is primarily by culture rather than genes that we became the most dominant species on earth. For a species so dependent on accumulated knowledge, not only is the idea of a culture-free intelligence test meaningless, so too is the idea of culture free intelligence.

Humans learn best from other (live) humans. Perhaps more surprising, people learn from teaching other people—often more than the pupils themselves absorb. Consider this finding: firstborn children have an IQ that is on average 2.3 points higher than that of their younger brothers and sisters. After disconfirming several potential explanations, such as better nutrition or differential parental treatment, researchers concluded that firstborn children’s higher IQs stem from a simple fact of family life: older siblings engage in teaching younger ones.

there is strong scientific evidence that persistent cannabis use affects how adolescent and teenage brains develop, and can permanently lower their IQ. One of my best friends when I was a kid smoked a lot of weed, and he feels it harmed him for life. He may be right. Developing brains are more fragile than adult brains: they need to be protected.

In 1921, Terman decided to make the study of the gifted his life work. Armed with a large grant from the Commonwealth Foundation, he put together a team of fieldworkers and sent them out into California’s elementary schools. Teachers were asked to nominate the brightest students in their classes. Those children were given an intelligence test. The students who scored in the top 10 percent were then given a second IQ test, and those who scored above 130 on that test were given a third IQ test, and from that set of results Terman selected the best and the brightest. By the time Terman was finished, he had sorted through the records of some 250,000 elementary and high school students, and identified 1,470 children whose IQs averaged over 140 and ranged as high as 200. That group of young geniuses came to be known as the “Termites,” and they were the subjects of what would become one of the most famous psychological studies in history. For the rest of his life, Terman watched over his charges like a mother hen. They were tracked and tested, measured and analyzed. Their educational attainments were noted, marriages followed, illnesses tabulated, psychological health charted, and every promotion and job change dutifully recorded. Terman wrote his recruits letters of recommendation for jobs and graduate school applications. He doled out a constant stream of advice and counsel, all the time recording his findings in thick red volumes entitled Genetic Studies of Genius.

Thinking is not a part-time activity. To arrive at plausible answers the C must be given the time to put their IQ, and the collective IQ of their team, to best use.

make them progress more smoothly. As you write, be sure that the transitions between one idea and another are clear. If you move from one idea to another too abruptly, the reader may miss the connection between them and lose your train of thought. Pay particular attention to the transitions from one paragraph to another. Often, you’ll need to write transition sentences that explicitly lead the reader from one paragraph to the next. Clarity Perhaps the fundamental requirement of scientific writing is clarity. Unlike some forms of fiction in which vagueness enhances the reader’s experience, the goal of scientific writing is to communicate information. It is essential, then, that the information is conveyed in a clear, articulate, and unclouded manner. This is a very difficult task, however. You don’t have to read many articles published in scientific journals to know that not all scientific writers express themselves clearly. Often writers find it difficult to step outside themselves and imagine how readers will interpret their words. Even so, clarity must be a writer’s first and foremost goal. Two primary factors contribute to the clarity of one’s writing: sentence construction and word choice. SENTENCE CONSTRUCTION. The best way to enhance the clarity of your writing is to pay close attention to how you construct your sentences; awkwardly constructed sentences distract and confuse the reader. First, state your ideas in the most explicit and straightforward manner possible. One way to do this is to avoid the passive voice. For example, compare the following sentences: The participants were told by the experimenter to press the button when they were finished (passive voice). The experimenter told the participants to press the button when they finished (active voice). I think you can see that the second sentence, which is written in the active voice, is the better of the two. Second, avoid overly complicated sentences. Be economical in the phrases you use. For example, the sentence, “There were several different participants who had not previously been told what their IQ scores were,” is terribly convoluted. It can be streamlined to, “Several participants did not know their IQ scores.” (In a moment, I’ll share with you one method I use to identify wordy and awkwardly constructed sentences in my own writing.) WORD CHOICE. A second way to enhance the clarity of one’s writing is to choose one’s words carefully. Choose words that convey precisely the idea you wish to express. “Say what you mean and mean what you say” is the scientific writer’s dictum. In everyday language, we often use words in ways that are discrepant from their dictionary definition. For example, we tend to use theory and hypothesis interchangeably in everyday language, but they mean different things to researchers. Similarly, people talk informally about seeing a therapist or counselor, but psychologists draw a distinction between therapists and counselors. Can you identify the problem in this

Like a bug drawn to light, Trump’s trust and respect tend toward those who praise him as the sun and moon. A fellow Republican questions his policy? They are a sad, crazy loser with a low IQ who can’t help but cry on their knees before his majesty. A foreign dictator wishes him a happy birthday and slurs an American rival? Best of brotherly love sent across the sea.

Wikipedia: The IQ Controversy, the Media and Public Policy The role of genetics in the black-white IQ gap has been particularly controversial. The question regarding this in the survey asked "Which of the following best characterizes your opinion of the heritability of black-white differences in IQ?" Amongst the 661 returned questionnaires, 14% declined to answer the question, 24% said that there was insufficient evidence to give an answer, 1% said that the gap was "due entirely to genetic variation", 15% voted that it was "due entirely to environmental variation" and 45% said that it was a "product of genetic and environmental variation". According to Snyderman and Rothman, this contrasts greatly with the coverage of these views as represented in the media, where the reader is led to draw the conclusion that "only a few maverick 'experts' support the view that genetic variation plays a significant role in individual or group difference, while the vast majority of experts believe that such differences are purely the result of environmental factors.

In one study of U.S. eighth graders, for example, the best predictor of academic performance was not the children’s IQ scores—but their self-discipline. Mastery of math never made anyone get to work on time, finish a thesis, or use a condom.

memories are easier to make and last longer when acquired in teen years compared with adult years. This is a fact that should not be ignored! This is the time to identify strengths and invest in emerging talents. It’s also the time when you can get the best results from remediation, special help, for learning and emotional issues. We’ve all long thought that the IQ with which you were “branded” in grade school after taking one of those aptitude tests was the final word on your intellectual destiny. Not true. There is solid data to show that your IQ can change during your teen years, more

Almost everything you’ve just said is wrong,” said Delaney. “In BAU we call them repeaters. They can be from any ethnic group. Any age, within reason. A lot of them are married with a big family. You could live next to one and never know it. The poor social skills and low intelligence are reasonable assumptions, but not always the case. Most evade capture for a long time due to their victim selection. Most victims of repeaters have never met their killer before. Even a dumb repeater can operate for years before the cops catch up to them. But then there’s the one percent. They have highly developed social skills, their IQ is off the scale, and whatever it is in their heads that makes them kill can be successfully hidden from even their closest friends. We don’t catch their kind too often. Best example would be Ted Bundy. And contrary to what you’ll see on TV—these killers don’t want to get caught. Ever. Some will go to extraordinary lengths to ensure they stay out of jail, including masking their kills. Others, while they still don’t want to get caught, secretly want someone to acknowledge their work.

The Endogenous personality combines high intelligence with the ‘inner’ personality; and it used to be fairly normal for Endogenous personalities to gain admittance to the most elite institutions. However, nowadays, it is clear that college admission criteria are much less likely to select for intelligence than in the past. In other words, attendance at the most selective institutions is no longer a matter of being of the highest intelligence. Partly this is because of the changing nature of educational evaluations – the best reports and grades at school or top performance in exams are no longer so ‘g-loaded’ that is, they are less correlated with general intelligence than they used to be (some of this may be due to the IQ test score inflation which is termed ‘the Flynn Effect’).

I'm gonna take all my sadness, frustration, anger and energy and channel it into becoming the best possible student. I AM GOING TO BECOME A LEARNING MACHINE.

Similarly, one study found that the higher your best friend’s IQ at age eleven or twelve, the higher your IQ would be at age fifteen, even after controlling for natural levels of intelligence. We soak up the qualities and practices of those around