“Some years ago, I was lucky enough invited to a gathering of great and good people: artists and scientists, writers and discoverers of things. And I felt that at any moment they would realise that I didn’t qualify to be there, among these people who had really done things. On my second or third night […]

I’ve been wondering something, and I’d love to genuinely hear some perspectives on this matter. It seems as though the ones who most vigorously defend the importance of IQ (outside the educational psychology realm) are those who study the genetic and biological foundations of IQ. But why is this the case? Certainly it’s possible to […]

On December 13, 1994, a group of fifty-two experts in the scientific study of intelligence and allied fields provided the following unified definition of intelligence in the Wall Street Journal: Intelligence is a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn […]

For the past decade, I’ve had the privilege of writing the Beautiful Minds blog, starting with Psychology Today in 2008 and moving the blog over to Scientific Americanin 2013. The blog has given me the opportunity to write about a wide range of topics that fascinate me– including intelligence, creativity, cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, narcissism, introversion, […]

A new paper by Izzy Gainsburg and Allison Earl at the University of Michican dives deeper into the trigger warning phenomenon increasingly prevalent on college campuses (see the new book The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt). The researchers define trigger warnings as “statements that warn of a negative emotional response […]

In recent years, the field of behavioral genetics has made some important strides in unearthing some of the thousands of genes that are likely associated with IQ. While the association of any particular gene with IQ is minuscule, the more we discover their combined influence on the development of brain networks that support cognition (such […]

Over 100 years ago, Charles Spearman made two monumental discoveries about human intelligence. First, a general factor of intelligence (g) exists: people who score high on one test of intelligence also tend to score high on other tests of intelligence. Second, Spearman found that the g-factor conforms to the principle of the “indifference of the […]