All posts tagged: Intelligent

Ask Ethan: If intelligent alien life exists, will we make contact?

Ask Ethan: If intelligent alien life exists, will we make contact?

Published by Jenni Sidey

For countless generations, humanity has gazed at the stars, planets, and great canopy of the Milky Way in the night sky, wondering who else or what else may be out there. Here in 2026, we’ve searched tens of thousands of star systems for signs of life, for signals of potentially intelligent extraterrestrial origin, including through radio waves, other forms of light, and even cosmic particle signatures. While we’ve discovered thousands of planets around those stars, including some that may be candidates for housing life on their surface or in their atmospheres, we have yet to find a single planet beyond Earth with any forms of life on it at all. But the Universe is vast, and the number of chances for some type of success in the great cosmic lottery is a profoundly large number. That leads to Brian George Melville’s question, as he asks: “I fully believe there is intelligent life in the Universe in addition to life on Earth. Do you think we will ever contact other intelligent life, given the vast distances …

1 Habit Most Intelligent People Have In Common

1 Habit Most Intelligent People Have In Common

Published by Jenni Sidey

Across decades of research into how people think, one behavioral pattern keeps emerging in the data as a reliable marker of high cognitive ability, and that habit has nothing to do with how quickly someone reaches a conclusion. In a landmark 1997 study published in the Journal of Educational Psychology, psychologists Keith Stanovich and Richard West found that the single strongest thinking disposition associated with higher intelligence was what they called actively open-minded thinking: the habitual tendency to seek out evidence that challenges one’s existing beliefs, to sit with uncertainty, and to revise one’s conclusions when the data demands it. Over the last three decades, that finding has been replicated so consistently across different populations and methodologies that a 2023 comprehensive review in the Journal of Intelligence, one of the field’s most authoritative journals, confirmed it still stands as one of the most robust links between a cognitive disposition and measured intellectual ability. How This Habit Compounds Your Intelligence Actively open-minded thinking reflects the extent to which someone habitually weighs new evidence against a favored …

2 Frustrating Habits of the Most Intelligent People

2 Frustrating Habits of the Most Intelligent People

Published by Jenni Sidey

We tend to picture intelligence as exemplary mental organization: crisp opinions, sharp delivery, and confident stances held firmly. The “smart person” in the room isn’t the one who hedges or backtracks. It’s the one who walks in already knowing the answer, delivers it cleanly, and moves on. But that picture, research increasingly suggests, has it backwards. Highly intelligent people are not always faster, calmer, or more decisive. Sometimes, their minds are busier, slower, and more conflicted. In my work as a psychological researcher, I’ve noticed that people with higher cognitive ability are often misunderstood simply because their mental habits don’t always look the way we expect intelligence to look. Two habits in particular tend to get them misread, and both are far more cognitively sophisticated than they appear. 1. Changing Their Mind Mid-Argument Few things irritate people more in conversation than someone who contradicts themselves. Someone who states a position with apparent confidence, then stops mid-thought and says, “Actually, I think I was wrong about that.” It reads as wishy-washy, underprepared, or lacking conviction. In …

You Can Usually Tell How Intelligent Someone Is By These 10 Things That Come Easily To Them

You Can Usually Tell How Intelligent Someone Is By These 10 Things That Come Easily To Them

Published by Jenni Sidey

Feelings are incredibly subjective. What one person experiences is different than what others go through. While we have no real way to quantify our emotions — or do we? — we can compare and see the differences, especially when it comes to intelligence. Intelligent people often perceive life in a deeper sense than others. They are less likely to disconnect and protect themselves from the magnitude of emotion. They don’t dial down their feelings, and a few skills come effortlessly to them that others may find exceedingly difficult. You can usually tell how intelligent someone is by these 10 things that come easily to them: 1. They feel things deeply They feel everything more deeply than others. They don’t have a way to disconnect, so what others can just shrug off and not take personally, highly intelligent people take straight to their core. This makes everything very intense for them and the people close to them. Pay attention and respect their feelings. 2. They notice slight changes in energy Highly intelligent people prefer to be …

3 Reasons Intelligent People Can Be More Indecisive Than Others

3 Reasons Intelligent People Can Be More Indecisive Than Others

Published by Jenni Sidey

In a world overflowing with options, from careers and investments to streaming choices and dating apps, making decisions should theoretically be easier than ever. More information and more choices ought to help us pick better outcomes. Yet psychology suggests the opposite often proves to be true, especially for smart people, with their highly analytical disposition. A landmark study by Barry Schwartz and colleagues found that people who strive to make the best possible choice, known as maximizers, often experience greater decisional paralysis and regret, and lower life satisfaction compared to those who settle for an option that is simply “good enough,” known as satisficers. The research, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, showed that maximizers tend to be less satisfied with their decisions and report lower levels of happiness, optimism, and self-esteem. In other words, the pursuit of the perfect choice can quietly undermine well-being. Here are three psychology-backed reasons why highly intelligent or analytical people often struggle the most when it comes to making decisions. 1. Smart People Can Fall Into …

Intelligent people are better judges of the intelligence of others

Intelligent people are better judges of the intelligence of others

Published by José Betancourt

A study in Germany found that intelligent individuals tend to be more accurate judges of other people’s intelligence. Better judges of the intelligence of others also included people with stronger emotion perception abilities and those who were more satisfied with their lives. The paper was published in the journal Intelligence. Intelligence is the ability to learn, understand, reason, and solve problems. It involves using knowledge effectively in new situations and includes the capacity to adapt to changing circumstances. Psychologists view it as a combination of abilities such as memory, attention, verbal skill, and logical thinking. Some theories describe intelligence as a single general ability, while others see it as a set of multiple distinct abilities. On average, people are able to estimate the intelligence of others even after very short encounters. This ability is important because intelligence plays a critical role in a person’s ability to adapt to their environment and navigate social exchanges. However, individuals differ in their ability to accurately judge the intelligence of others. While some can recognize the intelligence level of …

Remembering Ai, a remarkably intelligent chimpanzee

Remembering Ai, a remarkably intelligent chimpanzee

Published by Sam Flores

23-year-old chimpanzee Ai, known for her ability to recognize some letters and numbers, holds her 35-centimetre-tall newborn male chimp Ayumu, 25 April 2000, at the Primate Research Institute of Kyoto University in Inuyama, central Japan. AFP via Getty Images/AFP hide caption toggle caption AFP via Getty Images/AFP The death of a possible genius was reported this week. Ai, a chimpanzee who was born in West Africa and came to the Primate Research Institute of Kyoto University in Japan when she was a year old, has died of natural causes at the age of 49. They say she was surrounded by the staff who have known her. Ai, by the way, means love in Japanese. She was remarkable. “She was the first chimpanzee to successfully label numbers,” Tetsuro Matsuzawa, a primatologist and former director of the Primate Research Institute of Kyoto, wrote in 2021 for the international journal Inference. That was when she was five. At six and a half, she began learning the alphabet, and soon, Matsuzawa says, she “was able to discriminate between all 26 uppercase …