Intelligence

Intelligence is associated with coming up with more convincing bullshit and with being a better liar, but not associated with a better ability to recognize one’s own bias.Photograph by ArTono / Shutterstock Manipulative communication surrounds us. With misinformation and disinformation about the pandemic, “cheap” and “deep” fakes of elected officials, and targeted ads and emotionally […]

The most intelligent two percent of people in the world. These are the people who qualify for membership in Mensa, an exclusive international society open only to people who score at or above the 98th percentile on an IQ or other standardized intelligence test. Mensa’s mission remains the same as when it was founded in […]

Hill Street Studios/Getty Images When children grow up in poverty, their brains can take a different shape. That’s one of the stark and uncomfortable findings from the lab of Kimberly Noble, a pediatrician and cognitive neuroscientist at Teachers College, Columbia University. Noble has used MRI scans to study the brains of children and found that […]

Have you ever been walking in a dark alley and seen something that you thought was a crouching person, but it turned out to be a garbage bag or something similarly innocuous? Me too.Have you ever seen a person crouching in a dark alley and mistaken it for a garbage bag? Me neither. Why does […]

Let’s consider the fear that once surrounded another powerful technology: recombinant DNA.