A new study has found that people with high IQs are better able to block out background distractions because their brains naturally filter out information that is not considered to be important or relevant.









The Test


Current Biology



“Because intelligence is such a broad construct, you can’t really track it back to one part of the brain. But since this task is so simple and so closely linked to IQ, it may give us clues about what makes a brain more efficient, and, consequently, more intelligent.”





people with the highest IQs were slower at detecting movement.



“From previous research, we expected that all participants would be worse at detecting the movement of large images, but high IQ individuals were much, much worse.”

being unable to perceive the large moving image shows the brain’s ability to suppress background motion.





“this new link to intelligence provides a good target for looking at what is different about the neural processing

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)







general intelligence depends on a person’s brain’s ability to pull together several different types of processing



four ‘rules of intelligence’ that go into information processing

individuals with high IQ test scores were also good at keeping time