9 ms·

High IQ linked to drug use

111 points by orky56 15y ago

hayeah 15y ago
I can't take a newsflash seriously if they don't even link to the original study. Are the socioeconomic levels of these higher IQ individuals controlled? How exactly did they select their sample for the study? And they mentioned marijuana, cocaine, heroine in one breath, as though those are the same drug. Surely different population groups use those drugs to different extents.
- waterlesscloud 15y ago
  Also, "A high IQ is defined as a score between 107 and 158." Is that standard? Isn't that about 1/2 to 4 standard deviations on IQ charts? Seems like a wide range.
gcanyon 15y ago
Here's a reasonable-seeming argument why we should expect smarter people to be more likely to use drugs: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/201010/why-intelligent-people-use-more-drugs http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundament...
- daemin 15y ago
  Could it be that the smarter/brighter individuals are bored (not stimulated/challenged enough) by the average education system and so they find a release elsewhere with drugs, as something that will make the boredom less painful?
  - skore 15y ago
    I have also heard, a number of times now, that a lot of smart people use drugs because it "makes people more interesting", which is probably code for "I numb my own brain to be able to strike a casual conversation". (My primary example would be having this as a direct quote by Christopher Hitchens. I seem to also recall that there was a House MD episode of a genius putting himself on a controlled substance to be a little more numb because he would otherwise scare away the girlfriend that he loved with his rambling mind.) So yes, some people might be searching for a thrill because what they are supposed to do does not deliver that. But others just really want to "be normal" and drugs are a quick way to get there, strangely.
fourk 15y ago
This link seems to have much more specific data from the original study: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/11/111114221018.htm http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/11/111114221018.ht... EDIT: The abstract is available from the publishing journal in the following link. The full text was unfortunately not available without a subscription of some form. http://jech.bmj.com/content/early/2011/10/28/jech-2011-200252.abstract http://jech.bmj.com/content/early/2011/10/28/jech-2011-20025...
buff-a 15y ago
FTA:It's not clear why people with high childhood IQs are more likely to use illegal drugs. "We suspect they may be more open to new experiences and are more sensation seeking," says White. The articles shy away from the elephant in the room which is that the UK and US gvts have a massive legal and propaganda effort to prevent drug use. Indeed the idea that only stupid people do drugs is part of this propaganda. So maybe its because a higher IQ allows one to realize that the War on Drugs is fucking irrational bullshit and magical thinking and act accordingly (i.e. to choose for oneself). In a world where broccoli is illegal because its "evil", the headline could have been "High IQ linked to broccoli eating". Here's a question: is a high IQ linked to smoking? How about alcohol? Update: So alcohol is also correlated with iq too.
- bambax 15y ago
  > How about alcohol? From the article: > The lead researcher says he isn't surprised by the findings. "Previous research found for the most part people with high IQs lead a healthy life, but that they are more likely to drink to excess as adults," says James White a psychologist at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom. What the article doesn't explore is the fact that drugs are expensive; isn't it possible that drug use is correlated with revenue? The study apparently didn't make a difference between addicts and occasional users. IQ is also correlated with revenue (probably because that's what it actually measures: socio-economic class), and so that may be a part of the explanation, at least for "recreational" drugs.
  - porfirio 15y ago
    "IQ is also correlated with revenue (probably because that's what it actually measures: socio-economic class)" False. Charles Murray compared brothers of the same household of different intelligence levels, and found significant disparities in income. http://www.eugenics.net/papers/murray.html http://www.eugenics.net/papers/murray.html (article originally appeared in The Telegraph) It's more accurate to say socioeconomic class measures IQ, rather than the other way around. To oversimplify, high IQ people are more productive, IQ at adulthood is heritable to a great extent (~80% of variation in IQ is due to genetic variation), so 1 + 1 = rich families have higher IQ children. Imagine if people were paid based on how tall they are, and replace IQ with height, and it'd be the same -> Tall parents + high heritability for height -> rich families have taller offspring. People don't recognize this with regards to IQ because they ultimately don't believe IQ is highly heritable, which it is. Links: IQ and productivity: http://www.onetest.com.au/awms/Upload/documents/whitepapers/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%20Summary%20-%20Onetest.pdf http://www.onetest.com.au/awms/Upload/documents/whitepapers/... IQ and heritability: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ (first paragraph)
porfirio 15y ago
I know a fair amount about IQ, having studied it a bit, and I'm surprised. IQ correlates pretty strongly, with law abiding behavior, at the very least, not going to jail. High IQ people are less socially dysfunctional than average and low IQ people, eg see the table here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve As for the sex difference between men and women of high IQ, fewer women in general do drugs, so it's easier for high IQ women to rack up a higher multiple of drug use over their average IQ female counterparts. I looked at the Psychology Today/Kanazawa link, and it says that the relationship is insignificant in America. I.e., the relationship between childhood IQ and drug use is a British phenomenon. Maybe the intelligent are more decadent in Britain? If Kanazawa represents the data accurately, this whole IQ-drugs relationship is BS, in the American setting. Bye bye grand social theorizing.
- jbooth 15y ago
  "Not going to jail" != "law abiding behavior". Especially when you get class issues involved. Getting picked up for smoking pot or petty vandalism in the suburbs often ends in a trip home to mom and dad after a very stern scare. In the city, it's another statistic for this month's arrests.
guard-of-terra 15y ago
I think it might be because, as Wil Shipley pointed out http://blog.wilshipley.com/2007/12/on-saying-goodbye.html http://blog.wilshipley.com/2007/12/on-saying-goodbye.html (some) smart people tend to be miserable because their wits let them skip the mechanisms put in place in human mind to prevent it from feeling miserable despite actually being so. Also http://blog.wilshipley.com/2007/03/crazy-talk.html http://blog.wilshipley.com/2007/03/crazy-talk.html
shin_lao 15y ago
Correlation isn't causation. What's the next study? People with brown eyes do more drugs? Seriously.
- Jach 15y ago
  I don't think anyone here is arguing that smoking pot (or in general "doing drugs") raises IQ scores... Nor do I see arguing that high IQ scores cause pot use, just that the presence of a high IQ seems to, if the study is to be believed, increase the probability of pot use. Correlations and probabilities are interesting for themselves, and can in fact be used to imply causation. http://www.amazon.com/Causality-Reasoning-Inference-Judea-Pearl/dp/052189560X/ http://www.amazon.com/Causality-Reasoning-Inference-Judea-Pe...
- Daniel_Newby 15y ago
  > What's the next study? People with brown eyes do more drugs? Actually, that needs to be studied! Mutations in the melanocortin-1 receptor (the "red head" gene) affect eye color and also affect sensitivity to opioids (painkillers).
sev 15y ago
Boredom has probably something to do with it.
keys1234 15y ago
If you have a high IQ then it is that much easy for you, 1)to find what you want (age<20), like drugs 2)and be richer(age>30) than many folks , so you can drink a lot.
- steve-howard 15y ago
  Dunno about finding what you want. I have a reasonably high IQ, but I couldn't tell you the first thing about where to find a dealer. I didn't even drink before I turned 21, not for lack of wanting.
itmag 15y ago
High IQ people are probably more in their head and thus seeking out the sensory connectedness that "normal" people take for granted.
robinhouston 15y ago
It’s a shame the article itself is not freely available, but even the published abstract gives some interesting details that the CNN report didn’t mention. http://jech.bmj.com/content/early/2011/10/28/jech-2011-200252.abstract?sid=5d54347e-ce5e-4d55-ace4-b96e00a76727 http://jech.bmj.com/content/early/2011/10/28/jech-2011-20025... In particular the abstract makes it clear that the measured associated is independent of life-course socioeconomic position. Actually a quick search of Google Scholar throws up a number of papers on this topic, most of which seem to confirm the association reported here. This one http://personal.lse.ac.uk/KANAZAWA/pdfs/RGP2010.pdf http://personal.lse.ac.uk/KANAZAWA/pdfs/RGP2010.pdf looks quite interesting: “The Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis suggests that more intelligent individuals may be more likely to acquire and espouse evolutionarily novel values than less intelligent individuals. Consumption of alcohol, tobacco, and drugs is evolutionarily novel, so the Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis would predict that more intelligent individuals are more likely to consume these substances.”
super_mario 15y ago
Nothing is said about adult IQ. It only says that kids with higher IQ end up using drugs (I can see that, it's depressing being intelligent). But somehow I doubt that adult drug users have higher IQ as well.
schrijver 15y ago
It’s kind of odd that the article doesn’t look at the social aspects. Different social groups have different patterns in and attitudes towards drug consumption. These patterns change over time. Note, research is based on findings from 1970. In 1970, drugs might still be tied to counterculture, and thus to people with on avarage higher education (and on avarage higher iq), while in 2011 drug use seems to appear in much more diverse layers of society…
csomar 15y ago
A new British study finds children with high IQs are more likely to use drugs as adults than people who score low on IQ tests as children. I stopped here. The title should be "Drug use linked to High IQ". That's completely different.
adamtmca 15y ago
Higher IQ = go to college/ university = experimentation.
- davidcuddeback 15y ago
  That was my first thought when reading the article. There's probably a correlation between high IQ and college attendance, just as there's probably a correlation between college attendance and drug use.
mqqq 15y ago
You guys are full of shi*t. You actually believe that high IQ means more intelligent. And now you find an excuse to your drug use and say, "see, I use drugs because I'm smart". why don't you guys just admit that you guys are too weak minded and the only reason you use drugs is because you are too weak to a avoid peer presure.
- S_A_P 15y ago
  What does my Karma need to be to get a down vote link? People use drugs for a lot of reasons, Correlation != Causation comes to mind here.
- mqqq 15y ago
  I meant to say that IQ is a bad measurement of intelligence. If you want to get high and legally try epazote. It has many uses but few know that it can also be smoked. You can even plant it on your back yard and it will grow back every year.
tomlin 15y ago
As someone who suffers from ADHD-PI, I can't help but wonder a possible co-relation here. Before my occasional marijuana use a few years ago, I wasn't aware of my concentration issues. Like many others, I thought I was just lazy or unmotivated. When smoking marijuana for the first time, my friends lay around unmotivated and relaxed while I couldn't stop thinking about working on one of my many "one day" projects. This eventually lead me to getting tested for ADHD. Now I am on pharma, but the benefits appear the same. I feel like drugs helped me realize a lot about myself. While I am not so sure IQ is a reliable measurement, I can definitely say I can handle a lot more information and make good use of that information much better than I had ever before. I've done some research on brain wave activity and dopamine receptors/activity. It seems that people with ADHD tend to have misaligned brain wave activity and stimulants manage to align this activity up to a point. My theory, from my own experiences, is that there is an optimal brain wave frequency and people with ADHD are suffering from dopamine deficiency that skews below optimal frequency, and too much dopamine activity skews above optimal frequency. Further, I've noted that those who experience drugs as a depressant tend to have normal dopamine activity whereas those who experience drugs as a stimulant appear to have low dopamine activity. It's just a wild theory with no medical evidence - I'm just trying to understand the pattern. I would love to hear others chime in here and adjust my theory as necessary. I've been told that alcohol or marijuana makes one drowsy or lazy. For me, it stimulates - until a point - then I also become drowsy and lazy. This is where I believe I've gone past optimal dopamine activity. For the average person with normal dopamine activity, passing this threshold seems to happen much sooner.
- zafka 15y ago
  I think there is some validity to your hypothesis.
- pnathan 15y ago
  That is an interesting hypothesis. I have no medical citations to wave around, but it Makes Sense To Me, An Ignorant Layman(tm).
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  I've noted that those who experience drugs as a depressant tend to have normal dopamine activity whereas those who experience drugs as a stimulant appear to have low dopamine activity I think in general you are going to find depressants will act like depressants, and stimulants will act as stimulants. In your theory, focus on the inflection point where (e.g. alcohol) a depressant acts as a stimulant. It is a stimulant for all people when consumed in the right amount, though it also depends on other factors. Some days alcohol will make me stay up all night, some days it will put me to sleep in 15 minutes.
Darmani 15y ago
high IQ is defined as a score between 107 and 158. That means around 70% of the high IQ people in this study had an IQ between 107 and 120. Over 90% had an IQ less than 130. Don't go out and assume that smoking a joint will help you get into Mensa.
porfirio 15y ago
This article doesn't tell us what we think it does. In America, the relationship between drug use and high IQ is small or non-existent: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/201010/why-intelligent-people-use-more-drugs http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundament... (Someone else linked this earlier) Despite the UK being very similar to the US, on a global scale, the relationship between IQ and drug use is not the same across the herring pond. There are relationships between IQ and social indicators that are consistent across time and nations, and this isn't one of those. Whatever is causing this relationship in Britain is cultural - I doubt it's a feature of high intelligence, rather than just Brits who have high IQ.
signalsignal 15y ago
...and thus IQ is a poor indicator of success. People should get over the high scores others can get on tests and focus on something more substantial.
dubya 15y ago
Interesting, but this part is pretty weasily: "...told by parents and teachers that intelligent people didn't use drugs. Turns out, the adults _may_ have been wrong." As an unqualified statement, it is definitely wrong, and was demonstrably wrong at the time: Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Paul Erdos...
tryitnow 15y ago
My guess is that this phenomenon has something to do with boredom (as mentioned in the article). I have never studied IQ, but when I reflect on the IQ tests that I take I realize that a big part of my problem solving process involves rapidly imagining potential solutions and mentally "testing" them to see if they make sense. Does anyone know what this type of thinking is called? Anyways, that's how I think when I'm trying to solve a puzzle. I notice that the hard part is not in testing my imagined hypotheses, but in hypothesis generation. Where am I going with this? Imagination. I've noticed that my ability to rapidly imagine different scenarios is a key part of my ability to solve difficult problems. There are other components, like working memory, logic, etc, but imagination plays a big role. At least for me. If what is true for me is true in general it could mean that people who are more inclined to imagine complex alternative worlds in their heads are also more likely to enjoy the "out of the ordinary" mental states provided by drugs and alcohol.

111 points by orky56 15y ago

I can't take a newsflash seriously if they don't even link to the original study. Are the socioeconomic levels of these higher IQ individuals controlled? How exactly did they select their sample for the study? And they mentioned marijuana, cocaine, heroine in one breath, as though those are the same drug. Surely different population groups use those drugs to different extents.

waterlesscloud 15y ago
Also, "A high IQ is defined as a score between 107 and 158." Is that standard? Isn't that about 1/2 to 4 standard deviations on IQ charts? Seems like a wide range.

gcanyon 15y ago

Here's a reasonable-seeming argument why we should expect smarter people to be more likely to use drugs: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/201010/why-intelligent-people-use-more-drugs http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundament...

daemin 15y ago
Could it be that the smarter/brighter individuals are bored (not stimulated/challenged enough) by the average education system and so they find a release elsewhere with drugs, as something that will make the boredom less painful?
- skore 15y ago
  I have also heard, a number of times now, that a lot of smart people use drugs because it "makes people more interesting", which is probably code for "I numb my own brain to be able to strike a casual conversation". (My primary example would be having this as a direct quote by Christopher Hitchens. I seem to also recall that there was a House MD episode of a genius putting himself on a controlled substance to be a little more numb because he would otherwise scare away the girlfriend that he loved with his rambling mind.) So yes, some people might be searching for a thrill because what they are supposed to do does not deliver that. But others just really want to "be normal" and drugs are a quick way to get there, strangely.

fourk 15y ago

This link seems to have much more specific data from the original study: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/11/111114221018.htm http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/11/111114221018.ht... EDIT: The abstract is available from the publishing journal in the following link. The full text was unfortunately not available without a subscription of some form. http://jech.bmj.com/content/early/2011/10/28/jech-2011-200252.abstract http://jech.bmj.com/content/early/2011/10/28/jech-2011-20025...

buff-a 15y ago

FTA:It's not clear why people with high childhood IQs are more likely to use illegal drugs. "We suspect they may be more open to new experiences and are more sensation seeking," says White. The articles shy away from the elephant in the room which is that the UK and US gvts have a massive legal and propaganda effort to prevent drug use. Indeed the idea that only stupid people do drugs is part of this propaganda. So maybe its because a higher IQ allows one to realize that the War on Drugs is fucking irrational bullshit and magical thinking and act accordingly (i.e. to choose for oneself). In a world where broccoli is illegal because its "evil", the headline could have been "High IQ linked to broccoli eating". Here's a question: is a high IQ linked to smoking? How about alcohol? Update: So alcohol is also correlated with iq too.

bambax 15y ago
> How about alcohol? From the article: > The lead researcher says he isn't surprised by the findings. "Previous research found for the most part people with high IQs lead a healthy life, but that they are more likely to drink to excess as adults," says James White a psychologist at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom. What the article doesn't explore is the fact that drugs are expensive; isn't it possible that drug use is correlated with revenue? The study apparently didn't make a difference between addicts and occasional users. IQ is also correlated with revenue (probably because that's what it actually measures: socio-economic class), and so that may be a part of the explanation, at least for "recreational" drugs.
- porfirio 15y ago
  "IQ is also correlated with revenue (probably because that's what it actually measures: socio-economic class)" False. Charles Murray compared brothers of the same household of different intelligence levels, and found significant disparities in income. http://www.eugenics.net/papers/murray.html http://www.eugenics.net/papers/murray.html (article originally appeared in The Telegraph) It's more accurate to say socioeconomic class measures IQ, rather than the other way around. To oversimplify, high IQ people are more productive, IQ at adulthood is heritable to a great extent (~80% of variation in IQ is due to genetic variation), so 1 + 1 = rich families have higher IQ children. Imagine if people were paid based on how tall they are, and replace IQ with height, and it'd be the same -> Tall parents + high heritability for height -> rich families have taller offspring. People don't recognize this with regards to IQ because they ultimately don't believe IQ is highly heritable, which it is. Links: IQ and productivity: http://www.onetest.com.au/awms/Upload/documents/whitepapers/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%20Summary%20-%20Onetest.pdf http://www.onetest.com.au/awms/Upload/documents/whitepapers/... IQ and heritability: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ (first paragraph)

porfirio 15y ago

I know a fair amount about IQ, having studied it a bit, and I'm surprised. IQ correlates pretty strongly, with law abiding behavior, at the very least, not going to jail. High IQ people are less socially dysfunctional than average and low IQ people, eg see the table here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve As for the sex difference between men and women of high IQ, fewer women in general do drugs, so it's easier for high IQ women to rack up a higher multiple of drug use over their average IQ female counterparts. I looked at the Psychology Today/Kanazawa link, and it says that the relationship is insignificant in America. I.e., the relationship between childhood IQ and drug use is a British phenomenon. Maybe the intelligent are more decadent in Britain? If Kanazawa represents the data accurately, this whole IQ-drugs relationship is BS, in the American setting. Bye bye grand social theorizing.

jbooth 15y ago
"Not going to jail" != "law abiding behavior". Especially when you get class issues involved. Getting picked up for smoking pot or petty vandalism in the suburbs often ends in a trip home to mom and dad after a very stern scare. In the city, it's another statistic for this month's arrests.

guard-of-terra 15y ago

I think it might be because, as Wil Shipley pointed out http://blog.wilshipley.com/2007/12/on-saying-goodbye.html http://blog.wilshipley.com/2007/12/on-saying-goodbye.html (some) smart people tend to be miserable because their wits let them skip the mechanisms put in place in human mind to prevent it from feeling miserable despite actually being so. Also http://blog.wilshipley.com/2007/03/crazy-talk.html http://blog.wilshipley.com/2007/03/crazy-talk.html

shin_lao 15y ago

Correlation isn't causation. What's the next study? People with brown eyes do more drugs? Seriously.

Jach 15y ago
I don't think anyone here is arguing that smoking pot (or in general "doing drugs") raises IQ scores... Nor do I see arguing that high IQ scores cause pot use, just that the presence of a high IQ seems to, if the study is to be believed, increase the probability of pot use. Correlations and probabilities are interesting for themselves, and can in fact be used to imply causation. http://www.amazon.com/Causality-Reasoning-Inference-Judea-Pearl/dp/052189560X/ http://www.amazon.com/Causality-Reasoning-Inference-Judea-Pe...
Daniel_Newby 15y ago
> What's the next study? People with brown eyes do more drugs? Actually, that needs to be studied! Mutations in the melanocortin-1 receptor (the "red head" gene) affect eye color and also affect sensitivity to opioids (painkillers).

sev 15y ago

Boredom has probably something to do with it.

keys1234 15y ago

If you have a high IQ then it is that much easy for you, 1)to find what you want (age<20), like drugs 2)and be richer(age>30) than many folks , so you can drink a lot.

steve-howard 15y ago
Dunno about finding what you want. I have a reasonably high IQ, but I couldn't tell you the first thing about where to find a dealer. I didn't even drink before I turned 21, not for lack of wanting.

itmag 15y ago

High IQ people are probably more in their head and thus seeking out the sensory connectedness that "normal" people take for granted.

robinhouston 15y ago

It’s a shame the article itself is not freely available, but even the published abstract gives some interesting details that the CNN report didn’t mention. http://jech.bmj.com/content/early/2011/10/28/jech-2011-200252.abstract?sid=5d54347e-ce5e-4d55-ace4-b96e00a76727 http://jech.bmj.com/content/early/2011/10/28/jech-2011-20025... In particular the abstract makes it clear that the measured associated is independent of life-course socioeconomic position. Actually a quick search of Google Scholar throws up a number of papers on this topic, most of which seem to confirm the association reported here. This one http://personal.lse.ac.uk/KANAZAWA/pdfs/RGP2010.pdf http://personal.lse.ac.uk/KANAZAWA/pdfs/RGP2010.pdf looks quite interesting: “The Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis suggests that more intelligent individuals may be more likely to acquire and espouse evolutionarily novel values than less intelligent individuals. Consumption of alcohol, tobacco, and drugs is evolutionarily novel, so the Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis would predict that more intelligent individuals are more likely to consume these substances.”

super_mario 15y ago

Nothing is said about adult IQ. It only says that kids with higher IQ end up using drugs (I can see that, it's depressing being intelligent). But somehow I doubt that adult drug users have higher IQ as well.

schrijver 15y ago

It’s kind of odd that the article doesn’t look at the social aspects. Different social groups have different patterns in and attitudes towards drug consumption. These patterns change over time. Note, research is based on findings from 1970. In 1970, drugs might still be tied to counterculture, and thus to people with on avarage higher education (and on avarage higher iq), while in 2011 drug use seems to appear in much more diverse layers of society…

csomar 15y ago

A new British study finds children with high IQs are more likely to use drugs as adults than people who score low on IQ tests as children. I stopped here. The title should be "Drug use linked to High IQ". That's completely different.

adamtmca 15y ago

Higher IQ = go to college/ university = experimentation.

davidcuddeback 15y ago
That was my first thought when reading the article. There's probably a correlation between high IQ and college attendance, just as there's probably a correlation between college attendance and drug use.

mqqq 15y ago

You guys are full of shi*t. You actually believe that high IQ means more intelligent. And now you find an excuse to your drug use and say, "see, I use drugs because I'm smart". why don't you guys just admit that you guys are too weak minded and the only reason you use drugs is because you are too weak to a avoid peer presure.

S_A_P 15y ago
What does my Karma need to be to get a down vote link? People use drugs for a lot of reasons, Correlation != Causation comes to mind here.
mqqq 15y ago
I meant to say that IQ is a bad measurement of intelligence. If you want to get high and legally try epazote. It has many uses but few know that it can also be smoked. You can even plant it on your back yard and it will grow back every year.

tomlin 15y ago

As someone who suffers from ADHD-PI, I can't help but wonder a possible co-relation here. Before my occasional marijuana use a few years ago, I wasn't aware of my concentration issues. Like many others, I thought I was just lazy or unmotivated. When smoking marijuana for the first time, my friends lay around unmotivated and relaxed while I couldn't stop thinking about working on one of my many "one day" projects. This eventually lead me to getting tested for ADHD. Now I am on pharma, but the benefits appear the same. I feel like drugs helped me realize a lot about myself. While I am not so sure IQ is a reliable measurement, I can definitely say I can handle a lot more information and make good use of that information much better than I had ever before. I've done some research on brain wave activity and dopamine receptors/activity. It seems that people with ADHD tend to have misaligned brain wave activity and stimulants manage to align this activity up to a point. My theory, from my own experiences, is that there is an optimal brain wave frequency and people with ADHD are suffering from dopamine deficiency that skews below optimal frequency, and too much dopamine activity skews above optimal frequency. Further, I've noted that those who experience drugs as a depressant tend to have normal dopamine activity whereas those who experience drugs as a stimulant appear to have low dopamine activity. It's just a wild theory with no medical evidence - I'm just trying to understand the pattern. I would love to hear others chime in here and adjust my theory as necessary. I've been told that alcohol or marijuana makes one drowsy or lazy. For me, it stimulates - until a point - then I also become drowsy and lazy. This is where I believe I've gone past optimal dopamine activity. For the average person with normal dopamine activity, passing this threshold seems to happen much sooner.

zafka 15y ago
I think there is some validity to your hypothesis.
pnathan 15y ago
That is an interesting hypothesis. I have no medical citations to wave around, but it Makes Sense To Me, An Ignorant Layman(tm).
sliverstorm 15y ago
I've noted that those who experience drugs as a depressant tend to have normal dopamine activity whereas those who experience drugs as a stimulant appear to have low dopamine activity I think in general you are going to find depressants will act like depressants, and stimulants will act as stimulants. In your theory, focus on the inflection point where (e.g. alcohol) a depressant acts as a stimulant. It is a stimulant for all people when consumed in the right amount, though it also depends on other factors. Some days alcohol will make me stay up all night, some days it will put me to sleep in 15 minutes.

Darmani 15y ago

high IQ is defined as a score between 107 and 158. That means around 70% of the high IQ people in this study had an IQ between 107 and 120. Over 90% had an IQ less than 130. Don't go out and assume that smoking a joint will help you get into Mensa.

porfirio 15y ago

This article doesn't tell us what we think it does. In America, the relationship between drug use and high IQ is small or non-existent: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/201010/why-intelligent-people-use-more-drugs http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundament... (Someone else linked this earlier) Despite the UK being very similar to the US, on a global scale, the relationship between IQ and drug use is not the same across the herring pond. There are relationships between IQ and social indicators that are consistent across time and nations, and this isn't one of those. Whatever is causing this relationship in Britain is cultural - I doubt it's a feature of high intelligence, rather than just Brits who have high IQ.

signalsignal 15y ago

...and thus IQ is a poor indicator of success. People should get over the high scores others can get on tests and focus on something more substantial.

dubya 15y ago

Interesting, but this part is pretty weasily: "...told by parents and teachers that intelligent people didn't use drugs. Turns out, the adults _may_ have been wrong." As an unqualified statement, it is definitely wrong, and was demonstrably wrong at the time: Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Paul Erdos...

tryitnow 15y ago

My guess is that this phenomenon has something to do with boredom (as mentioned in the article). I have never studied IQ, but when I reflect on the IQ tests that I take I realize that a big part of my problem solving process involves rapidly imagining potential solutions and mentally "testing" them to see if they make sense. Does anyone know what this type of thinking is called? Anyways, that's how I think when I'm trying to solve a puzzle. I notice that the hard part is not in testing my imagined hypotheses, but in hypothesis generation. Where am I going with this? Imagination. I've noticed that my ability to rapidly imagine different scenarios is a key part of my ability to solve difficult problems. There are other components, like working memory, logic, etc, but imagination plays a big role. At least for me. If what is true for me is true in general it could mean that people who are more inclined to imagine complex alternative worlds in their heads are also more likely to enjoy the "out of the ordinary" mental states provided by drugs and alcohol.