Via Business Insider:
Intelligence Quotient, or IQ, has been used to sort people, whether job candidates or schoolchildren, for decades. Now, a century after psychologists first came up with the idea of “general intelligence”, the world’s biggest study of its kind has put paid to the simplistic idea that we can use an IQ figure to describe the astonishing abilities of the human brain.
It Takes More Than An IQ Number To Describe How Our Brains Work – Business Insider
Points:
- “…variations in performance [in cognitive tests]…could be accounted for by three key factors: short-term memory; reasoning; and, finally, a verbal component. No single factor, or “Intelligence Quotient”, could explain all the variations revealed by the tests.”
- “Regular brain training didn’t aid performance at all, yet people who often played other types of computer games did significantly better in terms of both reasoning and short-term memory.”
- “…age diminished short-term memory and logical reasoning, with performance peaking in the late teens and declining rapidly thereafter.”
- “…verbal intelligence held up well in the elderly.”
- “Physical exercise, weekly alcohol consumption, and the number of hours slept each night seemed to have negligible effects on performance.”
- “…amount of cigarettes smoked. Forty-a-day puffers had significantly lower scores in terms both of short-term memory and verbal intelligence.”
- “…right or left-handedness, number of siblings and month of birth all made little impact.”
- “Gender…showed little overall difference in performance, although men did do slightly better than women in terms of spatial short-term memory.”