Your intelligence may not always manifest itself with straight A’s or knowing all the answers; sometimes, it shows up as quirky little habits that you almost overlook.
After everyone goes to bed
Some people happen to be more alert at a time when everyone else is preparing for bed. Research has shown correlations between delayed sleep times and some metrics of intelligence. However, staying up late doesn’t automatically make you smarter.
Nighttime also allows for uninterrupted hours of reading, writing, creating, or contemplating. However, you shouldn’t mistake intelligence for a lack of sleep. Chronic sleep deprivation actually affects your ability to concentrate, remember, and make decisions.
When nobody’s listening
Sometimes when you’re alone, you find yourself muttering away to yourself. Self-talk isn’t necessarily strange or bad; in fact, it can help you think more clearly, stay focused, and understand complex problems. It can externalize the steps you need to take to solve a problem and make information easier to digest than if you only used your internal voice.
Talking to yourself doesn’t always mean you’re smart, but if you do it with intention, it can be a useful tool to help you think things through.
No company required
To some people, a free weekend with no social plans sounds awful. To others, it sounds perfect. Spending time alone can allow you to pursue your interests without interruption, contemplate life’s events, or dive headfirst into a task.
Research has also shown that intelligence and enjoyment of regular social interaction are linked in fascinating ways. Though that doesn’t imply smart people hate others. It just means that craving companionship all the time is not necessarily the only indicator of a vital, sharp mind.
Order isn’t always necessary
You may feel like your desk is a mess to everyone else, but you know where everything is. Studies have shown that messy desks can actually lead people to make more unconventional or creative decisions.
If you’re really focused on writing, designing, researching or figuring something out, you may just not care about being super organized.
Never taking it at face value
You listen to someone give an explanation that everyone else seems content with. But something inside you rebels, and you instantly want to learn more. Where did they get that information? Does the evidence support it? Is there another explanation? Curiosity is intimately tied to learning.
Curious people keep searching where everyone else is content with accepting answers. Questioning everything can sometimes irritate those around you. But refusing to believe something automatically is also critical thinking.
Three difficult words
Saying “I was wrong” can be incredibly hard to do. But admitting an error and revising your stance when new evidence shows you’re mistaken demands intellectual flexibility.
Smart people don’t always stick up for an argument just because they once believed in it. They can divorce their ego from the facts presented to them. Acknowledging when you don’t know something also demonstrates that you know the limits of your knowledge and allows you to find out the answer.
When your mind wanders off
You look out the window one minute, and suddenly you’re mentally outlining a business plan, replaying last week’s fight with your friend, or creating a wholly fabricated situation. Daydreaming might seem like purposeless time-wasting, but research suggests that mind-wandering can give your brain time to form links between ideas, contemplate the future, and rethink unsolved problems.
Mind wandering has even been associated with creativity in some studies. Useful daydreaming isn’t just spacing out all the time. It involves giving your mind enough leeway to stumble upon the occasional surprise.
Down the rabbit hole
You look up one tiny bit of information and two hours later you know vastly more about Renaissance Fairs, extinct dialects, exotic seafood or electromagnetism than you ever wanted to know. Curious people often learn new things just for the sake of learning them. It doesn’t always have to have a clearly defined purpose.
Ask one question, and it leads to another question. Finding the answer is the reward. Random hobbies like these can also open your mind to concepts you may never have learned in fields unrelated to whatever you’re looking into.
Laughing at the uncomfortable
When you laugh at a dark joke, there might be more going on in your head than just appreciating an inappropriate joke. Research shows that participants who understood and appreciated black humor scored higher on certain verbal and nonverbal intelligence measures.
Dark humor often makes the brain work to identify contradiction, emotional conflict, and double meanings all at once. That doesn’t mean someone who enjoys gallows humor is automatically smart, but appreciating complex humor can take some high-level mental gymnastics.
Creating shortcuts
You might make up your own method of performing normal tasks rather than doing them the standard way. Maybe you develop a quicker method of organizing items for work, find an easier way to do a math problem, or merge a couple steps together.
Looking for shortcuts can be a sign of flexible problem solving. Instead of memorizing how something is always done, you question if there is a better way to achieve that outcome.
Knowing how to say it differently
You may describe a complex concept to your coworker one way and to your child another. Simplifying a complicated explanation without changing its meaning necessitates flexibility. You must know what information is necessary, gauge what your listener knows, and then reinterpret the concept using familiar terms. Mental flexibility can be hard to see because sometimes the truest test of understanding something is simplifying it.
Your own toughest opponent
Sometimes before you reach a decision, you’ll find yourself mentally debating against your own position. You get ready to make up your mind, and your brain comes up with another reason why you could be wrong. Taken to extremes, this becomes negative overanalysis. Moderately, however, listing reasons against your potential decision is a useful reasoning technique.
Rather than seeking only evidence that supports what you already think, you’re challenging your own beliefs, and sometimes finding that the case against your initial position is much more convincing.
Waiting before you begin
Sometimes waiting to jump into something right away is the wisest thing to do. Taking a break from working on a problem can allow other options to percolate up to the surface before you decide to go with the easy answer. Studies into creative problem solving have even indicated that some procrastination can buy you an incubation period where your brain works on a problem behind the scenes.
There is a difference between delaying wisely and just plain blowing something off. If you’re waiting because you know there are better options out there for you to explore, that can be beneficial. If you wait until ten minutes before it’s due because you spent all afternoon watching YouTube videos, then that’s just plain procrastination.
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.
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