Speaker 1: In this video, Dr. Jordan Peterson explains what are the results of having a high IQ and how to know if you have a high IQ. An IQ is a very good predictor of health, it's a predictor of longevity, it's a predictor of resistance to post-traumatic stress disorder, it's a predictor of obviously occupational status, it's a predictor of educational success, it's a predictor of income, it's a very powerful predictor. And here's another way of conceptualizing its effect. So imagine that you could choose how you were going to be when you were born. This is in North America because it's going to vary by society, at least to some degree. You get to be born into a family that's at the 95th percentile for wealth or you get to be born at the 95th percentile for intelligence. Who's better off at the age of 40? And the answer is the person who picks being born with an IQ in the 95th percentile at birth. It's a more powerful predictor of long-term life outcome than familial wealth. And it shows up everywhere. Like, one of the things we did recently was look at disgust sensitivity. And we're going to talk a little bit about that when we talk about conscientiousness, because orderly people seem to be more sensitive to disgust than disorderly people. That seems to be why they're orderly. But the higher you are in IQ, the less disgust sensitive you are. Now, we don't know exactly why that is. Maybe it's because, you know, maybe you could make the inference that IQ is related in some way to the physiological integrity of the cortex, you know, rather than the limbic system, which, you know, is the source of, say, emotions and motivations. And the more powerful it is, the more inhibitory capacity it has over the more fundamental motivations and emotions. You could make that case. The problem is that intelligent people don't necessarily seem to be any less impulsive. And you can have a pretty vicious personality disorder that's characterized by extremely disorganized behavior and a complete inability to put long-term plans into operation and still have a high IQ. So, what are the things we really can't figure out? The hell of a thing to try to figure out is, like, the relationship between IQ and industriousness is zero. And that just makes no sense to me, because most of the brain models are predicated on the idea that your ability to engage in long-term planning is a factor that's associated with intelligence. But then, industrious people seem to not only engage in long-term planning, they seem to do it right, so that if they're more industrious, they put their plans into operation, then the plans actually work. But it's not correlated with IQ. So, then I can't figure out, well, obviously the industrious person, in some way, is able to regulate their own behavior. You know, they're not procrastinating, for example. And you'd think that the ability to not procrastinate would be a cognitive feature, but it doesn't seem to be. And we have no idea what makes people industrious, and we can't figure it out. So, it's this incredibly potent predictor. It's just about as powerful as IQ. And we have no idea what it is. So, if you have a smart idea about that, and you want to pursue it, feel free, because there's a big mystery there that no one's been able to crack, and we've been at it for a long time, and have had almost no success. You know, we had people do things like, we'd give them sentences of N's, M's, and U's, sort of randomly distributed, and then we'd have them count the U's. You know, like a whole page of sentences. They're not sentences, they're just strings of letters. Count the U's. How useless. You know, you'd think that someone industrious would do that better. It's like, they don't. That's an IQ test. The people who can count the U's faster have higher IQs. Almost everything that you would do that would... where it has to do with manipulation of abstractions of any sort, even something that basic seems to be fundamentally associated with IQ. People with higher IQs have slightly bigger heads, if you control for body size. They have slightly bigger brains, if you control for body size. The axons on their neurons are a bit thicker, so the electrical messages seem to travel a little bit more efficiently. They are slightly faster in simple reflex tests, so it goes right down to the level of... because they're simple reflex. Light goes on, push a button. There's not many neurons mediating that response. You know, chains of neurons. There's only a few neurons communicating so that you can do that. But even at that relatively simple processing level, IQ is associated with speed. So there's a physiological component. You're less likely to develop Alzheimer's disease if you have a high IQ. And maybe that's because your brain is just more robust, you know. So you could sustain damage, say, of up to 50% of your brain, and you wouldn't even show it if you have a sufficiently high IQ. Whereas if you're on the bottom end of the IQ distribution, you're much more... you seem to be much more susceptible to physiological damage. Nutrition is a big predictor of IQ variation. And a lot of that's been hammered out of modern societies, you know. So 150 years ago, people's IQ was pretty tightly associated with their nutritional status. But now, you know, there are very few people in North America who don't have enough to eat, even though there's some variation in quality of diet. And that's flattened out a lot of the cultural variability in intelligence.