As suspected, low intelligence in childhood corresponded with racism in adulthood. But the factor that explained the relationship between these two variables was political: When researchers included social conservatism in the analysis, those ideologies accounted for much of the link between brains and bias.

People with lower cognitive abilities also had less contact with people of other races.

“This finding is consistent with recent research demonstrating that intergroup contact is mentally challenging and cognitively draining, and consistent with findings that contact reduces prejudice,” said Hodson, who along with his colleagues published these results online Jan. 5 in the journal Psychological Science.

I believe this study because it agrees with me. I will not check the details. I know it to be true because it resonates with me. I’ve been proven right once again. Vindication is mine. Rejoice.

No, but seriously, did they do this study just for me?

Gum is an effective booster of mental performance, conferring all sorts of benefits without any side effects. The latest investigation of gum chewing comes from a team of psychologists at St. Lawrence University. The experiment went like this: 159 students were given a battery of demanding cognitive tasks, such as repeating random numbers backward and solving difficult logic puzzles. Half of the subjects chewed gum (sugar-free and sugar-added) while the other half were given nothing. Here’s where things get peculiar: Those randomly assigned to the gum-chewing condition significantly outperformed those in the control condition on five out of six tests. (The one exception was verbal fluency, in which subjects were asked to name as many words as possible from a given category, such as “animals.”) The sugar content of the gum had no effect on test performance.

While previous studies achieved similar results — chewing gum is often a better test aid than caffeine — this latest research investigated the time course of the gum advantage. It turns out to be rather short lived, as gum chewers only showed an increase in performance during the first 20 minutes of testing. After that, they performed identically to non-chewers.

What’s responsible for this mental boost? Nobody really knows. It doesn’t appear to depend on glucose, since sugar-free gum generated the same benefits. Instead, the researchers propose that gum enhances performance due to “mastication-induced arousal.” The act of chewing, in other words, wakes us up, ensuring that we are fully focused on the task at hand. Unfortunately, this boost is fleeting. The takeaway of this research is straightforward: When taking a test, save the gum for the hardest part, or for those questions when you feel your focus flagging. The gum will help you concentrate, but the help won’t last long.

Good to know…

The Hypothesis about the effect of general intelligence on individual preferences and values may also have implications for national differences in their characters, institutions, and laws.  More intelligent populations may hold different collective preferences and values than less intelligent populations.

If more intelligent individuals are more likely to be liberal and atheistic, and if more intelligent men are more likely to value sexual exclusivity, then it follows that, at the societal level, populations with higher average intelligence are more likely to be liberal, to be atheistic, and to practice monogamy than populations with lower average intelligence.  Data indeed do confirm these macrolevel implications of the Hypothesis.

By pure coincidence, the correlation between physical attractiveness and intelligence in NCDS is exactly the same, down to the third decimal point, as the correlation between intelligence and education.  Both correlations are .381.  Everybody knows that intelligence and education are very highly correlated.  What they don’t know is that physical attractiveness is equally highly correlated with intelligence as education is.  If you want to estimate someone’s intelligence without giving them an IQ test, you would do just as well to base your estimate on their physical attractiveness as you would to base it on their years of education.

This is fascinating, but it’s setting off my “do more research” alert.

So—taking all of this into account, I have come up with five primary elements involved in increasing your fluid intelligence, or cognitive ability. Like I said, it would be impractical to constantly practice the dual n-back task or variations thereof every day for the rest of your life to reap cognitive benefits. But it isn’t impractical to adopt lifestyle changes that will have the same—and even greater cognitive benefits. These can be implemented every day, to get you the benefits of intense entire-brain training, and should transfer to gains in overall cognitive functioning as well.

These five primary principles are:

1. Seek Novelty

2. Challenge Yourself

3. Think Creatively

4. Do Things The Hard Way

5. Network

Worth the time to read the whole piece.

Abstract

There is growing evidence for the relationship between working memory and academic attainment. The aim of the current study was to investigate whether working memory is simply a proxy for IQ or whether there is a unique contribution to learning outcomes. The findings indicate that children’s working memory skills at 5 years of age were the best predictor of literacy and numeracy 6 years later. IQ, in contrast, accounted for a smaller portion of unique variance to these learning outcomes. The results demonstrate that working memory is not a proxy for IQ but rather represents a dissociable cognitive skill with unique links to academic attainment. Critically, we find that working memory at the start of formal education is a more powerful predictor of subsequent academic success than IQ. This result has important implications for education, particularly with respect to intervention.

Fascinating.

In this study, the authors examined whether the number of languages a person speaks predicts performance on 2 cognitive-screening tests. Data were drawn from a representative sample of the oldest Israeli Jewish population (N = 814, M age = 83.0 years; SD = 5.4) that was interviewed first in 1989 and then twice more within the following 12 years. Cognitive state differed significantly among groups of self-reported bilingual, trilingual, and multilingual individuals at each of the 3 interview waves. Regression analyses showed that the number of languages spoken contributed to the prediction of cognitive test scores beyond the effect of other demographic variables, such as age, gender, place of birth, age at immigration, or education. Multilingualism was also found to be a significant predictor of cognitive state in a group of individuals who acquired no formal education at all. Those who reported being most fluent in a language other than their mother tongue scored higher on average than did those whose mother tongue was their best language, but the effect of number of languages on cognitive state was significant in both groups, with no significant interaction. Results are discussed in the context of theories of cognitive reserve.

Source: “Multilingualism and cognitive state in the oldest old.” from Psychology and Aging, Vol 23(1), Mar 2008, 70-78.

Across the board, it really pays to keep living like you’re young. Just your attitude toward aging can affect how you age. Even better is to literally think and behave like your younger self.

Essential stuff.