2 Misunderstood traits of high intelligence

In our modern society a highly intelligent person is usually someone who is perfectly composed, deeply articulate, and incredibly deliberate with their words. We easily gravitate toward the quiet intellectual who seemingly has everything figured out before they speak. However, a decade of psychological research into language, cognition, and verbal processing is actively dismantling this stereotype. Scientists have identified specific behaviors that strongly correlate with high cognitive ability, even though they are routinely mistaken for signs of low intelligence or eccentricity.

Society often looks askance at people who talk to themselves, viewing it as a strange habit or a lack of mental focus. It is the exact kind of behavior that draws sideways glances in public spaces or causes family members to worry.

A 2012 study by Gary Lupyan and Daniel Swingley, published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, turned this assumption on its head. People did an experiment where they had to find a thing, like a banana in a bunch of other pictures. The people who said the name of the thing loud found it a lot faster than the people who did not say anything. The people who did the experiment called this the "label feedback hypothesis." This means that words do not just tell us what we are looking at they actually change how our brain sees and understands the world.

When you say your thoughts loud you use the part of your brain that makes language and the part that hears things at the same time. This helps you focus and pay attention to what you're doing. Saying things out is like a reminder that helps your brain get ready for what you need to do.

There was a study in 2023 in Frontiers in Psychology that showed talking to yourself really does help your brain work better. They found that talking to yourself plays a role in important things like solving problems controlling your thoughts and feelings remembering things switching between tasks and managing complicated mental processes. This study in Frontiers in Psychology is pretty interesting because it shows that talking to yourself is actually helpful for your brain and for things like problem-solving and working memory and task-switching and managing ordinary mental processes, like the ones we use every day. Talking to yourself is not a sign of losing control; it is a highly efficient way to keep your thinking on track.

There is a deeply embedded piece of folk wisdom that says people who swear frequently do so because they lack the vocabulary to express themselves otherwise. We are taught to view profanity as a lazy linguistic shortcut used by those who cannot find better words.

Research completely inverts this myth. A landmark 2015 study by Kristin and Timothy Jay, published in Language Sciences, tested participants on two timed tasks: a standard verbal fluency task (naming as many words as possible starting with a specific letter) and a taboo fluency task (listing as many swear words as possible).

The results showed a clear, positive correlation. The individuals who scored highest on the general vocabulary test also generated the most swear words, while those with weaker vocabularies produced the fewest. A rich vocabulary simply extends into all areas, including taboo language.

Timothy Jay, who has spent more than forty years studying profanity, explains that swear words serve an irreplaceable function in communication. They have an emotional power that regular words just can't match. Using words well actually takes a lot of brain power. A person has to understand the situation they are in, know when to use certain kinds of language and make good choices about when to swear for it to have an impact. These are the kinds of things that someone who's good with words can do, not someone who's not.

The Perception Gap

There's a problem with all this. A study from 2018 in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology says that people do. Those who don't get upset about swear words. Tend to think people who swear are less smart and less honest.