Having the smarts has never been about how much you know or your grades but rather the pace at which you acquire new information. Longitudinal studies have shown that IQ is fixed at an early age, so you’re stuck with what you’ve got.
There is nothing much that can be changed, you are a genius, smart, average or….. well I don’t want to sound insulate. Don’t afraid if you are the latter because it will not determine your fate in life.
Research has revealed that it isn’t even the most important factor—a high IQ still isn’t a bad thing to have. In fact, I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t mind having one.
Most of us move through life never knowing exactly how smart we are. IQ is a difficult thing to measure unless you have enough money to even give a trained professional to ‘measure’ your IQ. However, there are some characters that only people with high IQ have, they include;
1. You’re anxious.
It’s hard to think of anxiety as a good thing, but evidence suggests that it might not be all bad. Psychiatrist Jeremy Coplan studied patients with anxiety disorders and found that the people with the worst symptoms had higher IQ scores than those with milder symptoms. Other studies have found higher verbal IQ scores in people with higher levels of anxiety.
2. You were an early reader.
A British study of 2,000 pairs of identical twins found that, despite their identical genes, the children who started reading earlier had higher IQ scores (both verbal and nonverbal) than their siblings. On the surface, this one seems easy enough to explain away: the kids who learned to read early did so because they were smarter. But that wasn’t the case. The researchers concluded that learning to read early actually had a developmental impact—it made the kids smarter. So, if you were an early reader, it might not be because you’re smart. It may be that you’re smart because you were an early reader.
3. You’re left-handed.
It turns out that all of those teachers who tried to force lefties to write with their right hands may have had it backward. While there is a small and, as of yet, unexplained correlation between being left-handed and being a criminal, there are some intellectual benefits to being a southpaw. One large study demonstrated that left-handedness is associated with divergent thinking, all the more so in males. This unique ability to combine two unrelated objects in a meaningful way is a sign of intelligence.
4. You took music lessons as a kid.
There are a number of studies demonstrating that musical training enhances verbal intelligence and executive function, a skill that’s critical to focus and self-control. So, if you took music lessons when you were a kid, that’s a good sign.
5. You’re funny.
Class clowns rejoice! Research shows a strong connection between being funny and having high scores in both verbal intelligence and abstract reasoning. It appears that your witty banter is the product of a sharp mind. Now, you just need to come up with a joke about that.
There you have it, do you think you are still smart? This list is far from exhaustive, so if none of the items above apply to you, it doesn’t exclude you from having a high IQ. But if a lot of these items do apply to you, you just might be smarter than the average bear.