Psychology of Intelligence: How To Become Smarter Than 99% Of People

0:00To be smarter than 99% of people on paper, you would need an IQ of about 135. And almost everyone who hears that number believes the same thing about it. It was decided before they could read. Some people got the fast mind, most people didn't. And nothing you do as an adult will move you from one group to the other. That one belief does more damage than any lack of talent ever could. Because the moment you accept it, you stop trying to become smarter at all. Usually somewhere in your early 20s, and you never noticed the day you stopped. So the people who still want to increase their intelligence reach for

0:34the standard advice. Download a brain training app, do a puzzle every morning. And if that fails, accept it that you either have it or you don't. But the psychology of intelligence tells a much stranger story. The people who end up sharper than almost everyone around them at 50 were very often ordinary at 20. They simply kept feeding a slow, patient kind of intelligence long after everyone else stopped. And that kind keeps growing for most of your life. Today on Psych Tunes, we're going to break down the psychology of intelligence. The two kinds you actually have, why most people stop getting smarter right after school, and how to keep becoming smarter for the

1:10rest of your life. Let's get started. In the 1940s, a psychologist named Raymond Cattell proposed that what we call intelligence is really two abilities sharing one name. The first he called fluid intelligence. Your raw ability to reason through something new, spot a pattern you've never seen, and hold several pieces in your head at once. Think of it as speed. The second

1:33he called crystallized intelligence. Everything that raw ability has built up over the years. Your knowledge, your vocabulary, and the methods you've learned for thinking a problem through. Cattell believed the second grows out of the first. You invest your fluid ability in things worth knowing, and what you build stays with you. Then he made a prediction that sounded almost too hopeful. The crystallized kind could hold steady or even keep rising long after the fluid kind started to slow

2:01down. In 2015, researchers Joshua Hartshorne and Laura Germine put that idea to the test with results from tens of thousands of people online, mapping when each mental ability reaches its peak. Raw processing speed, measured with a simple symbol matching task, peaked at around 18. Some kinds of short-term memory peaked in the mid-20s and early 30s. But, vocabulary, one of the purest measures of crystallized intelligence, kept climbing until the late 60s and early 70s. There may be no single age

2:34when you're at your best at most things. The psychologist Philip Ackerman pushed this further. Adult intelligence, he pointed out, gets judged with tests built for students. Abstract patterns, timed puzzles, quick reasoning. Those mostly measure the fast kind. So, he tested adults between 21 and 62 on what they actually knew across a wide range of real subjects and found a whole layer the standard tests were missing. He called it the dark matter of adult intelligence. It's invisible on a pattern puzzle, yet it does much of the work whenever an experienced adult is genuinely good at something. And one thing that predicted how much of it a person had, beyond their test scores,

3:13was curiosity. Now, here's the part that should change how you see all of this. In the 1980s, a political philosopher working in New Zealand named James Flynn noticed that across the 20th century, in country after country, average IQ scores had been rising by roughly three points every decade. Scored against today's tests, your great-grandparents would look well below average. Nobody's genes

3:36changed that fast. So, what happened? Part of Flynn's answer goes back to the early 1930s, when the Soviet psychologist Alexander Luria gave villagers in remote Uzbekistan a simple logic puzzle. In the far north, where there is snow, all bears are white. Novaya Zemlya is in the far north. What color are the bears there? Most of them wouldn't answer. They had never been to Novaya Zemlya, they said. So, how could they know? These were capable, practical people who knew their land in fine

4:06detail. What they had never been taught was the habit of following a hypothetical to its conclusion simply because the premises said so. Flynn argued that this habit is a big part of what changed. School, office work, and modern life trained whole populations to think in categories, hypotheticals, and logic. He even suggested it's more accurate to call us more modern than smarter. Modern people, in his phrase, see the world through scientific spectacles. Hold on to that image. A large part of your intelligence was handed to you, like your height. But another large part is something you put on, and you can keep putting on new pairs for as long as you

4:42live. So, if intelligence can keep growing, why does it stop for most people? Almost always it's one of three traps. Trap one, the verdict. Somewhere in school you got a number. Maybe an actual IQ test, maybe a math grade, a spot in the slower reading group, or a teacher who had already decided who the bright kids were. It felt like a measurement of something permanent, and quietly you organized your adult life around it. You let other people handle the complicated stuff. You skip the long article. You leave the hard books for people you assume are smarter. But that number was always more movable than it felt. In 2018, psychologists Stuart

5:18Ritchie and Elliot Tucker-Drob combined 42 data sets covering more than 600,000 people using designs built to separate cause from coincidence, like comparing people born just before and just after a country raised its school leaving age. Each extra year of education raised intelligence scores by roughly one to five points, and the effect lasted into later life. On a scale where most people land between 85 and 115, that's a real shift. A degree won't add 20 points, but the authors called education the most consistent and durable way yet found to raise intelligence. And the number can move in either direction. In Norway, scores rose for decades, then started

5:58falling for men born after the mid-1970s, and researchers comparing brothers within the same families traced both the rise and the fall to the environment. So, the verdict proves itself. You stop investing in a mind you believe is finished, and a mind that gets no investment really does stand still. Trap two, the treadmill. People who escape the first trap often walk straight into the second. They decide to get smarter and reach for the most obvious product on the market, brain training. 10 minutes a day of memory games and speed drills on your phone. And it feels like it's working because your scores climb every week. In 2010, a team led by

6:37neuroscientist Adrian Owen tested that feeling in one of the largest brain training experiments ever run. More than 11,000 adults trained several times a week for 6 weeks on tasks built to sharpen reasoning, memory, planning, and attention. They got steadily better at the training tasks, but on separate tests of those same abilities, the gains barely showed up. The trained groups did no better than a comparison group that had simply spent the time answering

7:04general knowledge questions online. Critics argued 6 weeks was too short, and that's a fair point. But, the pattern is hard to ignore. Mostly, you get better at the game. That's the treadmill. You can run on it for an hour and end up exactly where you started, only more tired. And the real cost is

7:20the conclusion people draw afterward. They tried, it didn't work, so the verdict must have been right. Trap three, the easy chair. This one feels like success. You found a job, learned it, and got good at it. You know exactly what tomorrow will ask of you because it's what today asked and what last year asked. Your evenings have settled into shows, scrolling, and conversations you could have in your sleep. Nothing is wrong. Nothing is hard. And that's precisely the problem. In the 1960s and 70s, sociologists Melvin Kohn and Carmi Schooler followed a national sample of working American men for 10 years, measuring how much thought and independent judgment each man's job

8:00demanded and how flexible his thinking was. Jobs that demanded more thought made men's thinking more flexible over the following decade, even after accounting for where they started. This research is old. It only studied men and a later cross-check found weaker support. So, treat it as a strong hint. But, the hint points somewhere uncomfortable. So, here's the hardest thing I'll say in this video. If you feel like you stopped getting smarter years ago, you're probably right. Look honestly at what you've asked your mind to do lately. You arranged a life that asks nothing new of it, and then you blamed it for not growing. Every routine you perfected,

8:39every challenge you quietly stepped around, every Sunday you spent consuming instead of figuring something out, was a decision about how intelligent you'd be at 40. Nobody made those decisions for you, and nobody is going to make the next ones, either. That's the cruel paradox under all three traps. Getting good at your life is exactly what ends your learning. The better you know your job, your city, and your routine, the

9:03less any of them has left to teach you. And from the inside, a mind that has stopped growing feels exactly like a mind that has finally arrived. So, how do you get out? First, let go of the idea that you can force it. You can't will your raw speed upward any more than you can make yourself taller by standing up straight. What you control is what that speed gets to work with, the tools you hand it, the questions you feed it, and how hard your days ask it to

9:29stretch. Here are three ways to do that. Principle one, collect tools that travel. For most of the 20th century, psychologists believed that training your reasoning in one area did almost nothing for any other. Then, in 1986, Jeffrey Fong, David Krantz, and Richard Nisbett tested that belief with one idea from statistics, the law of large numbers. Small samples are unreliable,

9:56and bigger ones deserve more trust. After brief lab sessions learning the rule with examples, people reasoned better about everyday problems. The kind where you judge a restaurant by one meal or a new coworker by one bad day. In one experiment, the effect held up even in a setting with no visible connection to the training. Two years later, Darrin Lehman, Richard Lempert, and Nisbett tested graduate students at different stages of their training. Psychology and medicine, fields that drill you in judging evidence, made students much better at statistical reasoning about everyday life. Law sharpened their if-then logic, and chemistry, one of the most demanding subjects on campus, improved none of

10:38these kinds of reasoning. Difficulty alone did nothing. What changed people was a specific tool used again and again. That's what a second pair of spectacles looks like. A brain game trains a skill that stays inside the game. A thinking tool goes with you everywhere. So, pick one tool a month and use it on your own life. Base rates. Before judging how likely something is,

11:01ask how often it happens in general. Regression to the mean. After an unusually great or terrible day, expect the next one to be closer to normal, and be slow to credit or blame whatever you did differently. Write the tool down, then catch yourself using it or forgetting to, 10 times that month. That's how a rule you learned becomes a

11:22way you see. Principle two. Follow one question past the point of comfort. Remember what predicted how much of Akerman's dark matter a person carried: curiosity. In 2011, Sophie von Stumm and her colleagues combined research on what predicts how well students perform. Intelligence was the strongest single predictor, but curiosity and effort together rivaled it. Other researchers have challenged parts of that analysis, and it only covered academic results. Still, it fits Cattell's idea exactly. Curiosity decides where your fluid ability gets invested. The problem is that curiosity today is easy to satisfy and hard to deepen. You wonder why sunsets turn orange. You read a two-line answer, and the itch is gone. Nothing got built, so

12:08the next time a question really grabs you, refuse the two-line answer. Ask why one level deeper, then one level deeper again. Read one long thing instead of 10 short ones. Stay with it until it gets confusing, because that confusing edge is where you start building something you didn't have before. Principle three, keep one hard new thing in your week. In 2014, psychologist Denise Park and her team at the University of Texas at Dallas ran what they called the Synapse Project. They asked 221 adults between 60 and 90 to spend more than 15 hours a

12:43week for 3 months on a new activity. Some learned digital photography, cameras, settings, and editing software included. Some learned quilting. Others joined a friendly social group or did easy familiar things at home like word games and listening to classical music. Only the groups learning something demanding showed real gains in memory. The pleasant, easy activities, even the social one, did very little. These were older adults, so be careful about stretching the result too far, but the lesson travels. What helped was sustained unfamiliar difficulty, being a little out of your depth week after week. So, pick one thing you're

13:23currently bad at and give it real hours. A language, an instrument, code, drawing, a sport with real technique. You'll be visibly clumsy at first. That clumsiness is a good sign. It means your mind is being asked for something it doesn't already have. Do this long enough and your intelligence starts to age differently. The fast edge will fade on its usual schedule. That happens to everyone. But the slow kind keeps climbing and does more and more of the work. You recognize patterns because you've met them before. You find the right question while others are still sorting through the wrong ones. You see more because you're wearing more pairs

13:59of spectacles than you were at 20. James Flynn is the proof. He spent most of his career as a political philosopher and only broke into psychology in his 50s. That's when he documented the effect that now carries his name. And this is the honest answer to the title. Beating 99% of people on a timed puzzle test mostly comes down to the hand you were dealt. But being smarter than 99% of people in the way that shows up in a life, in how well you understand, judge, and figure things out is a race most people quietly stop running when they leave school. I can't give you a

14:32statistic for this one. Just count how many adults you know who are still deliberately learning something hard. The top of that field is far emptier than it looks. The way in is to still be building when almost everyone else has stopped. About 2,600 years ago, the Athenian lawmaker Solon wrote a line that the historian Plutarch preserved, noting that Solon still said it when he was well on in years. In the old translation, it reads, "But I grow old ever learning many things." Cattell would have called it crystallized intelligence. Hartshorne and Jermaine would have recognized their vocabulary curve. For Solon, it was simpler than any theory. It was a choice he kept

15:09making year after year. Every one of us was handed a mind we didn't choose. What it becomes is the part of the story we get to keep writing. So, out of the three traps we covered today, the verdict, the treadmill, and the easy chair. Which one has been holding you in place? Tell me in the comments. I'm curious which one shows up the most, and if you saw yourself in this video,

15:31you're not alone, and you're not behind. Most people stopped building years ago. You just noticed. If this gave you something to think about, hit like and share it with someone who decided back in school that they weren't one of the smart ones. This might be the first time anyone tells them the story isn't finished. Subscribe and turn on notifications so we can keep the hidden corners of the mind together. Thank you

15:54for staying with me until the end. Goodbye, and see you next time.