5 Unexpected Downsides of High
Intelligence
You know that phrase,
"Ignorance is bliss"? There's a reason it's stuck around all these
years. Because having the upper hand in intelligence might give you an
advantage in some areas, like crossword puzzle solving and quantum physics-ing,
but it also might just screw up your life forever.
Note: Stephen Hawking can talk
about how dangerous AI will be in the future, but we're not worried.
Because, as this Cracked Classic shows, the more dangerous dangerous robotsgather, the more they'll sabotage their
own well being, until all the Terminators work themselves to death while the
ED-209s drown their inadequacy issues in robo-whiskey. So enjoy
this article, and be less scared of robots. -Cracked
For instance, if you're smart ...
5
You're Probably a Night Owl -- And That's a Bad
Thing
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Recently, scientists discovered a
quirky side effect to having a high IQ: You tend to stay up until later hours
and get up later in the morning. That's right -- the more intelligent are also
much more likely to be night owls. Which isn't such a surprise when you
consider that intelligent people are infamous for burning the midnight oil to
cram for tests, write papers, touch up those earnings reports, etc.
It appears to just be evolution -- the more intelligent members of
a species are, in general, the first to change habits (their big brains are
wired to seek out novelty). Since humans have been day-dwellers during most of
their existence, it's primarily the smarties who prefer to habitually stay up
until the wee hours and to do the types of tasks that are easier to accomplish
when you don't have the day-dwellers hanging around and distracting you. Stuff
that requires concentration, in other words.
So let the early birds keep their measly worms. The nights owls
get to feast on the juicy field mice of accomplishment!
So What's the Problem?
Well, being a night owl does have some negative side effects. And
by "some" we mean, "You're pretty much screwed."
For starters, studies
have found that "eveningness" is associated with a
high degree of emotional instability. That means you tend to be less agreeable
and conscientious than the average Joe. Oh, and you don't just make others'
lives miserable. Thanks to your late-night habits, likely brought on by high
intelligence, you're also three times more likely to
suffer symptoms of depression.
And the fun doesn't end
there, geniuses! Turns out that, short of becoming a competitive asbestos
eater, staying up late at night is about the worst thing you could do for your
physical health. According
to a number of studies, night owls are at higher risk for heart
disease and suffer more arterial stiffness than those who go to bed early.
The direct cause might have less to do with the fact that you stay
up than with some of the other things you're doing while your eyes get all nice
and bloodshot. You see, people who tend to stay up late also tend to do other
unhealthy things at night, such as overeating. Then, once they do eventually
hit the hay, they experience more sleep interruptions when those pesky morning
larks get up and start noisying about.
All this adds up to some
nasty artery stress and whacked-out circadian rhythms, a nice recipe for a
massive coronary. So be sure to thank those dumbass early risers and your high intelligence for your inevitable
heart attack.
Photos.comCauses of
death: Morning-type wife and a 155 IQ.
4
You're Less Likely to Pass On Your Genes
Another unfortunate
stereotype of smart people is that they're socially awkward nerds who are
doomed to lives of celibacy until they get out of high school hell.
Unfortunately, that one turns
out to be totally true.
But it's not all bad news. There's
evidence that the highly educated get more enjoyment out of sex than the dumb
jocks and that really, all the lovin' you need to be happy
comes from having sex with just one partner per year. So even the nerdlingers
among us can find one person to get along with, then have highly enjoyable
loser-geek sex, eventually leading to populating the planet with loser-geek
children, right?
So What's the Problem?
Smart boy, please. Those genes you're carrying aren't going
any-goddamn-where. Unbeknownst to the smarties, their education levels and IQ
are conspiring to keep them childless and perhaps leading them to adopt 30 cats
when they're in their late 70s.
It all starts with the
smart ladies. A
2008 national census reported that women who had dropped out of
high school had the most children on average. And the more education women
achieved, the fewer children they were likely to have, with the fewest children
being born to women who had finished graduate school.
The explanation, according
to the Census Bureau, is simple: Women wanted to finish school before they were
saddled with nine months of fetus-carrying. Then, for smart people of both
sexes, there's the career to think about, and promotions, and who has time for
a needy mini-human during all that? And of course, IQ plays a direct role here,
since it has also been found that women with lower IQs are
less likely to know how to use birth control properly, leading to
more unplanned pregnancies.
But that's just the ladies.
The smart fellas must be picking up the slack somehow, right? Maybe by getting
a little dumb-girl nookie on the side? Not so. Research shows that countries
with high national IQs tend to have lower childbirth rates in general compared
with countries that can't collectively tie their shoelaces together. That's
right -- entire nations are missing the evolutionary point
of fucking as their IQs rise.
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3
You're More Likely to Lie
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The problem with being the
smartest guy in the room is that you usually know you're the
smartest guy in the room. For some people, that's not a big deal. They can
relate to others just fine and know how to navigate around everyone else's
deficiencies without being complete pricks. Others, however, know they have an
intellectual edge and can't help but abuse it.
So What's the Problem?
In addition to giving you an advantage in brainpower, IQ
apparently also bestows the gift of deception.
After all, in order to lie and get away with it, you also have to
keep the truth in mind and manipulate it, and you might even have to cover up
your lies upon further questioning. All of this involves integrating several
brain processes in much the same way that you would solve a complex calculus
problem. This means that the age at which you start lying, and the
effectiveness with which you do it throughout your life, are controlled by how
smart you are.
In
one study, scientists put people in brain-imaging machines and found
that the regions of the brain that light up when a person metaphorically sets
his pants on fire are the same that control "executive functioning."
These are high-order thinking and reasoning abilities that include working
memory, which, you guessed it, is
the single biggest component of your IQ.
Another study simply tracked the tendency of children to lie as
they got older (that is, as that aforementioned part of their brains
developed). The researchers simply placed young kids in a room with a toy
Barney under a cloth and told the kids not to peek at the toy when the researchers
left the room.
Of course, 9 out of 10 kids
totally peeked, but the percentage of kids who lied about whether they peeked grew
as the kids got older. At age 2, 25 percent of the kids lied about
peeking; at age 3, half lied; and by age 4, 90 percent of the kids who peeked
at the purple dinosaur refused to admit their guilt. That would also seem to
imply that the 25 percent of kids who fibbed at age 2 possessed higher
cognitive abilities than their peers.
In other words, if you want to know whether your kid is gifted,
simply track the specific age at which he starts trying to bullshit you.
Speaking of which ...
2
You're More Likely to
Believe Bullshit
We're sure that at some
point, someone has told you that you can't get anywhere without an education,
and for the most part, they're right. And you're much more likely to pursue
that education if you're starting out with a high IQ. According to renowned
intelligenceologists who painstakingly measured every goddamn
thing that you can associate with IQ, test scores were "the best single
predictor of an individual's years of education."
Why? Well, their theory goes that smarter students do better in
school (Cracked breaks new ground yet again!), which leads to more
encouragement from teachers and parents, which in turn leads to more motivation
to stay in school, then yadda yadda yadda, bingo-bango, master's degree in
economics!
So What's the Problem?
It turns out that all this book learnin' is teaching you more than
just the Pythagorean theorem -- it's also making it easier for you to believe
some laughably wrong and even seriously weird stuff.
One problem is that
education leads to one overall inaccurate belief: You think you're smarter than
you are. Three
studies have found that people who fall for investment scams
are better-educated than the average person but don't seek advice because they
think they're immune to making mistakes. In one study, researchers found that
94 percent of college professors think their work is superior to their peers'.
These fellows fail to realize that intelligence doesn't always translate to
real-world ability, and thus they tend to overestimate the quality of their
work.
It seems to go back to the
old saying about how the wisest man is the one who realizes he knows nothing.
Or, as Michael
Shermer, the author of Why People Believe Weird Things,
puts it: "Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at
defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons."
That's why the more
education you get, the more likely you are to believe in, say, ghosts and the
supernatural. One
study found that 23 percent of college freshman believed in the
paranormal, compared with 31 percent of seniors and 34 percent of graduate
students. Which leads us to wonder ... what the fuck are schools
teaching these days?
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1
You're More Likely to Be
Self-Destructive
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On one hand, it seems like the smarter you are, the greater your
ability to know the dangers of, say, shooting heroin. So self-destructive
habits are traits of the low-class and stupid, right? Eh, not really...
The thing is, the great
minds have something in common with proverbial death-prone kitties: curiosity.
Researchers have finally begun to understand the link between curiosity and
intelligence on the molecular level, thanks to scientists from the University
of Toronto and Mount Sinai Hospital who discovered a protein in
an under-explored part of the brain that controls both traits.
Makes sense. Weird shit like monkey-powered time machines can be
invented only by people with enough brain smarts to make them work and enough
curiosity to want to see such awesomeness in the first place.
So What's the Problem?
Extra-curious people are also extra-likely to be substance
abusers.
British scientists
published the results of a long-term study showing
that smart people were more likely to be drunks. People who fell
into the "very bright" category (IQs of 125 or greater) were not only
more likely to experiment with alcohol but also were more likely to drink
excessively and binge drink than their dimwitted counterparts.
And yeah, they pretty much found
the same link between high intelligence and psychoactive drug use.
It also turns out that intelligent people are much more likely to indulge in
illicit substances such as marijuana, Ecstasy, cocaine and heroin. The smarter
you are, the more likely you are to be tripping balls at any given moment.
As for why, remember when we said earlier that smart people's
brains seek out novelty and thus are the first to experiment with any new
habit? Well, one theory explaining the link between substance abuse and
intelligence is that both alcohol and drugs are novel substances, in
evolutionary terms. Humans have been consuming alcohol for only about 10,000
years, and the earliest recorded drug was only 5,000 years ago. So when
something is novel, the curiouser and most intelligent among us are more likely
to want to try it out.
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