#IQ #intelligence #cognition #naturevsnurture
🧠 Is High IQ / Low IQ a real thing? 🧠
Have you ever wondered if some people are born smarter than others, or if intelligence is solely based on the environment we grow up in? The debate over whether IQ levels are predetermined or shaped by our surroundings has sparked controversy for years. Let’s dive into the discussion and unpack the truth behind high and low IQ.
## Nature vs. Nurture: The Great Debate
### – Nature: Are Some People Born Smarter?
– Research suggests that intelligence is partially inherited, with some individuals showing higher levels of cognitive ability from a young age.
– Studies have found a strong correlation between IQ scores of parents and their children, indicating a genetic component to intelligence.
– Certain genetic factors, such as variations in the COMT gene, have been linked to higher cognitive function in individuals.
### – Nurture: Does Environment Shape IQ?
– Environmental factors, such as access to education, nutrition, and mental stimulation, play a significant role in shaping intelligence.
– Children raised in enriched environments tend to have higher IQ scores than those raised in disadvantaged circumstances.
– Early childhood experiences, such as quality of parenting and exposure to language, can impact cognitive development and IQ levels.
## The Complex Interaction of Nature and Nurture
– IQ is not solely determined by genetics or environment but rather a complex interplay of both factors.
– Studies have shown that genetic predisposition can be influenced by environmental factors, leading to variations in IQ levels.
– The Flynn effect, which demonstrates the worldwide increase in IQ scores over time, suggests that environmental changes can positively impact cognitive ability.
## Debunking the Myth of High IQ / Low IQ
– The concept of high IQ and low IQ as fixed categories is a simplification of the complex nature of intelligence.
– IQ scores can fluctuate over time, influenced by factors such as education, health, and life experiences.
– Individuals with so-called “low IQ” can excel in certain areas, such as creative thinking or emotional intelligence, challenging the traditional notion of intelligence.
## Conclusion: Intelligence Is Dynamic and Multi-Faceted
In conclusion, the idea of high IQ and low IQ as rigid categories is outdated and oversimplified. Intelligence is a multifaceted trait shaped by a combination of genetic predisposition and environmental influences. While some individuals may have a natural advantage in cognitive abilities, everyone has the potential to improve their intelligence through education, learning, and personal growth.
Next time you find yourself pondering the question of high IQ and low IQ, remember that intelligence is not a fixed trait but a dynamic and malleable quality that can be nurtured and developed over time. Embrace your unique strengths and talents, and never underestimate the power of growth and resilience in shaping your cognitive abilities.🌟
So, the next time you catch yourself wondering if high IQ or low IQ is a real thing, remember that intelligence is a complex and dynamic trait that can be influenced by a multitude of factors. Nurture your mind, expand your horizons, and never stop learning and growing. Who knows, you may just surprise yourself with what you are truly capable of achieving. 🚀
For more insights on intelligence, IQ, and cognitive development, visit our website to explore a wealth of resources and information on this fascinating topic. Let’s embark on a journey of discovery and enlightenment together! 📚✨
Remember, intelligence is not a destination but a lifelong adventure. Embrace the quest for knowledge and self-improvement, and watch as your mind soars to new heights of understanding and wisdom. 🌈💡
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IQ is mostly, bullshit? Not quite but attaching a number to the spectrum of intelligence is, bleh.
But are there people naturally more gifted and less gifted? Yes, for sure. Does environment also play a part in fostering the desire to learn and grow? Also yes, for sure.
Plenty of people can have raw intelligence but never utilize it. I have a friend that struggles to do basic math but put her nose to the grind in order to learn it to pass her GED. There are variables.
Yes, some people are born with a high IQ and some with a low IQ. Environmental factors may have some influence, but the vast majority is a given. But the IQs in ~80% of people do not differ significantly. And acquired skills will dominate.
Edit:
“Environmental factors may have some influence”
I worded this wrong (English is not my first language). I meant that you can’t really increase your IQ by studying/reading. Environmental influences such as diet, metal health of course have a significant impact on human brain development, so they also affect IQ
IQ is a real thing, in that it is a statistically reliable test, but it’s also been shown to be a horrible measurement of intelligence, in that it only measures a few forms of intelligence rather than “general intelligence” as a whole, and there are many forms of intelligence that IQ tests have no form of measuring. As Albert Einstein once famously said: “everybody is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
I don’t necessarily agree that everyone is a genius at something, but there are many forms of intelligence and ability. People are no doubt born with varying levels of natural ability in varying areas, and it is just as doubtless than our upbringing plays just as large a role, maybe even a larger one.
Edit: clarified a bit of the first paragraph
IQ is very hard to pinpoint the source. You can have very intelligent parents and stupid kids, and the opposite is true.
However, I would also say it can be nurtured as kids with alot of privilege could develop with better IQ.
That being said, you can have a high IQ and have the wisdom of a frog. Or you can have a low IQ and be literally the best at something
Yeah, massively influenced by environment. Toxins and diet impact development
IQ is a way to get a number from testing how people perform on different tasks. So, yes, an IQ score is a real thing.
The question is whether it actually measures intelligence, and what higher or lower numbers might mean.
Let’s imagine that we’ve created a test that scores how well people do at, say, sub-atomic nuclear physics concepts. You will clearly get a distribution of people who know a little, people who know next to nothing, and some people who know a hell of a lot. The *shape* of the distribution is important. You might have a lot of people who understand a little bit, but only a handful of people who truly understand the concept…but you might have a much larger part of the population who don’t understand anything at all. In other words, you might get something that looks like a \ on a chart rather than a bell curve.
What the bell curve in IQ tests is supposed to reflect is the idea that most of the population is “average” intelligence, with small numbers who are significantly below that average, and similarly small numbers who are significantly above that average. It seems like a normal — in a statistical sense, “normal” has a special meaning — distribution, hence the curve of number of people of different IQ scores looking like a flared out bell shape.
It has been decades since I had any psychology classes on intelligence, but let’s take a simple argument: Do we actually *know* that intelligence has that bell-curve distribution? Or, is that just an artifact of the tests we use to measure IQ? (Kind of like our sub-atomic physics test.) Now, this question may already have been answered, but it is the sort of thing you’d want to ask if you were trying to figure out if IQ tests are actually telling us something useful or not.
A century ago, when IQ tests were used in the US military to identify officer candidates, there were sometimes questions that depended more on your experience and cultural knowledge than on your innate intelligence. Questions on baseball, for instance.
I remember when my oldest child went through some basic intelligence testing before he was allowed, as a four-year-old, into half-day kindergarten in our school district. He could read, so he was doing great on a lot of things, but he was lost on “What sound does a dog make?” At the time, we had no neighbors who owned dogs, no family members he knew of who owned dogs, and we were a cat family, so we talked about cats a lot. He hadn’t seen cartoons on TV showing dogs, so he didn’t have an answer for that question. It wasn’t a lack of intelligence, but just a lack of knowledge in a particular area.
I know there was some research suggesting that human intelligence is different in different areas, like mathematical intelligence, spatial intelligence, musical intelligence, and so on. Having a single “intelligence quotient” is, therefore, an oversimplification; kind of like saying the temperature of the Earth is 25°F because you’ve averaged out all the measurements in order to get one number.
You can definitely learn more things. It might not be easy, depending on the topic. Exposing yourself to good sources for documentaries, for instance, can broaden your knowledge. Reading books written by good authors can also help. The same is true with things like YouTube videos: If you can find quality ones, you can learn all sorts of things, but there are a lot of poor-quality channels out there.
The more you learn, the more connections you are making in your brain. The more you think about what you learn, and talk about it, you are making even more connections. Maybe you won’t have great insights or become the next Einstein, but you can still understand some things that you didn’t before. That’s more important than worrying about your number on Team IQ.
Most definitely.
I’m not sure what more proof there is of this than looking around at the people you grew up with.
Was there not always a stupid kid in school? A smart kid? These kids had very similar education, yet you knew all along that one kid was stupid and one kid was smart.
E: intelligence is NOT the only factor. I did not say it was, but the question is if intelligence (IQ) exists – and it does. Stop telling me other things play a role, obviously they do – If nobody ever taught Einstein how to count, he would not have been a mathematician, clearly education and other factors matter.
Intelligence is basically two things: Creativity and problem-solving ability.
IQ is one of the most well-documented scientific phenomenons in history. There’s a reason the military uses IQ tests for placement. Because it’s measurable and it works.
That being said, IQ isn’t just a product of birth, there’s also tons of factors that go into it. It doesn’t stop increasing until you’re done growing basically, and nutrition, family, life-style, education, temperament, all play a very big role in forming your intelligence.
>IQ, short for intelligence quotient, is a measure of a person’s reasoning ability. In short, it is supposed to gauge how well someone can use information and logic to answer questions or make predictions.
“IQ” seems like a tricky thing to pinpoint precisely.
But yes, it’s obvious by looking at even a small sample size that people are born with different levels of intelligence. It’s unclear how much of an impact environment has, but I think most people that it’s “some”.
IQ and intelligence are correlated but are different. But in general, having a higher IQ means that you are able to learn faster and retain knowledge better. But it could also be something else. You could have a photographic memory and just mark the test, but still have no idea what you are doing.
Environment does have a fact to play. And is one of the biggest factors.
Yes but it’s not fashionable to admit it anymore because the implications are too depressing for a lot of people to deal with.
[every time iq gets mentioned i think back to this video.](https://youtu.be/UBc7qBS1Ujo?si=iKcWd-gCxTBDVyfB) fair warning though it’s a long one and covers a decent amount of the history of iq and it’s nefarious uses
This video from Veritasium will answer all your questions about IQ: https://youtu.be/FkKPsLxgpuY
Both nature and nurture affect a person.
And yes it is a real thing, with its imperfections.
EQ is also a real thing.
It’s probably best not to even waste time worrying about this. It’s not going to have much impact on your life unless you worry about it.
Yes
Yes Virginia, there are smart people and there are dumb people.
both
yes and no, the thing is that it doesnt correlate with success much apart from in the extreme cases, there can be 2 reasons for that, the first is that intelligence isnt rewarded in our society and the second would be that iq only shows a part of the full picture, from what I know iQ can be increased quite a bit with learning stuff and doing problem solving and certain psychological issues can also affect it, also it measures general inteligence as you get tested in a wide variety of fields that come together to determine your iQ so you could be a genius in a few parts but under average in others therefore not showing up as someone extraordinary in the results even if your problem solving skills are at the level of Stephen Hawking.
All in all iQ doesnt matter unless youre at either of the extremes.
Also I forgot to mention in the ways to boost your iQ yes its possible to do that and by quite a bit but dont expect to get to genius level just by studying, thats where genetics play a big role.
Hmmmm. Posting this on No StupidQuestion forum. 😜
Just kidding.
Absolutely. You will see this everywhere.
Remember 6th grade math classes. Same teacher different student.
But not everyone got the concept.
Same analogy every where in life.
i think it’s genetics. Vice versa. If your parents have low/average IQ. You are kinda different but also the same in a way.
wtf kinda question is that? are you stupid?
^(/s)
I think people have more or less innate story telling abilities in their minds. The stories can be in different languages – music, math and chess for example – and they can be more visually oriented or go well into deep pattern recognitions. The testing of our conscious access to such stories is, I think anyway, what is tried for in IQ testing.
What do you understand by IQ? If you just mean intelligence, then yeah, some people are simply born smarter than others.
Although intelligence can be nurtured. I believe everyone could be what we call a smart person if they had the correct circumstances when growing up.
Both.
This may get DV to hell and back, but you do see the name of this sub, right?
I think the devils in the details…
/s
My understanding is that IQ is a measurement of G, or general cognitive ability, basically how fast your brain computes, is able to recognize patterns, etc.
I think there are 2 aspects of your question:
1. What determines a person’s IQ?
From my understanding both genetic and environmental factors influence IQ. I believe on the low end IQ is about 50% genetic. This link likely increases when extreme environmental factors are ruled out i.e. malnutrition, abuse, etc. So overall as nutrition has increased in the past 100+ years, people’s IQs have increased as well.
2. How accurate is IQ as a measurement of Intelligence?
Kinda a hard question to answer since you have to define intelligence first. There is some evidence that IQ correlates with how successful you are in life, like how much money you will make. Imo there is some correlation between IQ and how fast your brain works, but it’s not 100%. There’s also the factor that intelligent people don’t always succeed in life, and what cultural factors may influence your ability to do well on the test.
I have a relatively high IQ but can barely function in daily life. IQ is meaningless to me
Yes and no. There are very obviously people who are smarter or who are dumber, and both genetics AND environment play a factor in that. IQ, however, does not exist.
IQ is a score from a specific test, which as been proven time and time again to have little relation to perceived intelligence, in addition to being neither accurate or precise with little to no retest-ability. In simpler terms, it’s a bad test, used for bad reasons, and doesn’t actually tell us anything.
Is athletic and un-athletic a real thing?
Iq is based on solving problems with the answer being right in front of you. Pattern recognition ect.
there is nice paper that discussed iq and i think methodology is sound, they are comparing identical twins to non identical.
genetics is major factor, but upbringing has its influence
[paper](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1041608007000982)
Eh, kinda but not really? Nature vs. nurture is a debate as old as time, and nobody really has a definitive answer.
What we can tell you is that IQ as a concept is deeply flawed, and there’s no objective measure of intelligence because what we call “intelligence” is actually the gestalt presence of a handful of different factors.
So basically if someone tells you they have a 150 IQ you should point and laugh at them. Even if that’s true (and it usually isn’t), all that IQ tests actually measure is your ability to take IQ tests.
It is, but it measures very specific things and it had historically been used very ineffectively when applied across cultures. Sometimes it can even be imprecise when applied within the culture it was developed for. So it’s real, and it reflects real differences, but testing is wildly unreliable.
>Is High IQ / Low IQ a real thing ?
Yes.
>Are some people born smarter than others and some are born dumber […] ?
Yes.
>[…] or the environment they grow up in dictates the levels of IQ?
Yes.
Imo it’s a thing, but it has little bearing on ones happiness/struggles/success…
Imo it’s like either dropped in a complex maze or a simple maze. In either case you try to make progress and may never find the exit… Basically I’m saying that it’s in a person’s nature to dwell on their struggles, and it is also other people’s nature to not let it keep them down… It all depends on the individual and in that sense it kinda doesn’t matter
I’ve got a processing speed iQ of 84 and that sounds about right.
A badly looked after stock Ferrari is still likely to outperform a well maintained stock Toyota Corolla; and the Corolla will need a lot of work to stay in front if it gets there. People are the same. We arrive with a set of talents which determine our peak performance. Some are just plain better made from stock. It sucks, but you have to work with what you got.
Put me in a room full of people that like argumentation, discussion, analysation, marketing, langauges and creativity and I will be the smartest bitch
Put me in a room full of logic riddles and math I’m a lost hoe.
That being said, some people are born with exceptional skill, but lacking other qualities. I can guarantee you, some of the smartest scientists would have a stroke to understand modern concepts or ideas people with a lower IQ have established.
Both environment and mind plays a role, the human brain is very fascinating.
Yes. Ever look at, or listen to someone and think “A brick wall has more potential than you”.? Those are the people who are on the lower end of the scale, you know the lead paint eaters, the ones who’ll touch fire again to make sure it’s hot, you know the type, the kind of people who you can pass a full knife to saying it’s full with out them trying to cut their arm to be sure.
IQ is practically the most studied and more importantly, most scientifically proven, reproducible concept in psychology. (Which is really important because almost half of modern psychology papers are not reproducible, meaning they are scientifically practically worthless) .
Main factors seems to be genetic and nutrition. How much your environment enables the person should also have some influence, but not as much as people think , because someone who grew up with everything can easily still be really low on IQ , and someone who grew up in really bad situation can have really IQ.
One thing important to understand is it is not measure of being a good person or bad person, or emphaty. So someone can be extemely clever and do not give a shit about social norms and be completely awkward, even look like dumb. This isn’t due to that person not “getting it” but not giving a shit about it.
Yes. Take the.extreme low IQ side,which is a mental disability. That shows you it exists to some level.
Also, there are distributions of height, weight, strength, speed, flexibility, and all sorts of other things within humans.
Why not believe that there could be differences in brain function or capacity as well? Or why not believe that there are certain brains that work different with respect to how they process information?
Now, with that said, I believe the brain can be trained. Take a guy with a 110 IQ and give them a good education and love and care vs. a 130 IQ in an abusive single parent home with shit education and I take the 110 to perform better. Same as I’ll take a well trained middle aged marathoner to perform better than the son of a pro marathoner who was raised on donuts and video games.
Some people are capable of learning more quickly and more easily than others. Some people are also better in particular areas than others. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re more intelligent. I tend to pick up some subjects quickly, and I’m good in math and logic, which also made me good with computers. And I was very good at technical support. But I’m weak in other areas. I think IQ tests are a scam.
The better question is, and always will be, what makes people so inclined to think IQ is indicative of anything but the quality of education they receive? Why do people think a person’s nature/their genetics plays an observable role in anything but the most extreme of cases of hyper intelligence and unintelligence? IQ doesn’t matter, education does, because even in the extreme cases of naturally predisposed levels of intelligence, it should be accommodated for! The hyper intelligent and the impaired are failed by education, as are the most of us, and even more so the socially disadvantaged
Yes. You’re going to get a lot of responses about how “icky” it feels to quantify it, but the truth is there people who will never be able to think abstractly enough to understand things like calculus.
My IQ is self taught. A wide reader. I’m bright enough but a slow learner.Its how you use what you have I’d say. My parents were not at all intelligent so I’d plump for a mixture of having an active mind and a genetic lottery.- Maybe my grandparents were clever.
There were twins that were adopted as babies. When they grew up, they met and there was research done on them. It was discovered that their personalities and temperaments were very similar. But their IQs were vastly different. Basically, intelligence is fluid, and not genetic. You can easily become more intelligent if you put in the time and effort.