Like it or not, most of our intelligence is genetic – but there's one part of our brain power that we can count on improving with age
Intelligence has always been tricky to quantify, not least because it seems to involve most of the brain and so is almost certainly not one "thing". Even so, scores across different kinds of IQ tests have long shown that people who do particularly well – or badly – on one seem to do similarly on all. This can be crunched into a single general intelligence factor, or "g", which correlates pretty well with academic success, income, health and lifespan.
So more intelligence is clearly a good thing, but where does it come from? A large part of the answer seems to be genetics. In 1990, the first twin studies showed that the IQ scores of identical twins raised ...
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