The higher your IQ coefficient is, the more drinks you take daily. These are the results of a research made by the Medical Research Council and published in the "American Journal of Public Health," which points that women are particularly prone to drink heavily in their thirties, if they have an over-the-average intelligence.
It seems that being smart enough to know the bad effects
of alcohol is not enough and the stressful jobs of high-skilled professionals push them to the alcohol relief. This is especially true if women attempt to ascend in male-dominated professions.
"An explanation might be that success in the workplace requires, in some circumstances, a willingness to drink frequently and to excess in social situations," wrote the authors led by David Batty of the MRC's social and public health sciences unit at Glasgow University.
The team investigated a pool of 8,170 men and women born in the UK during one week in 1970. Their IQ scores at age 10 was compared with data on their alcohol consumption and drink issues at age 30.
It appeared that the men and women who scored higher for childhood mental ability tests displayed higher rates of problem drinking in adulthood, and the likelihood of drink issue was increased for intelligent women compared to men.
It appeared that men and women who drank most days scored the best in childhood mental ability tests, whereas individuals totally abstinent had the lowest marks at the mental ability tests. The largest percentage of women with a history of alcohol issues was amongst those with professional and managerial jobs.
Overall 47% of men and 22% of women had drinking issues, consuming over the recommended upper limits of 21 units weekly for men and 14 units weekly for women, in the conditions that alcohol-related death rate in the UK has the tendency to rise, from 12.9 deaths per 100,000 in 2005 to 13.4 in 2006.
IQ is for suckers!!!
The study included more than 100,000 participants from around the globe, asking them to complete 12 cognitive tests looking at their memory, reasoning, attention and planning abilities. It found a simple IQ score is misleading when assessing one's intellectual capacity.
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"In the past, when people tried to examine how intelligence is related to the brain, they generally approached it with an assumption that there is one dominant form of intelligence which is sub-served by a specific system in the brain. What we found is that the brain regions associated with whatever the 'G Factor' is – what general intelligence is – actually housed more specialized systems, not just one," he explained.
"What we did in our study, that's been different than what's been done before, is to try and understand what the structure of intelligence is by considering the way in which the brain is organized into specialized functional systems – that is, when you look at the brain and you see there are different areas that form networks and support different types of functions," he explained.
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Results from the study found that given a broader range of cognitive tasks, the differences in ability relate to at least three components of intelligence – short-term memory, reasoning and verbal aptitude. These three components combined create an intelligence, or "cognitive profile."
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