“Check out the big brain on Brad!” – Pulp Fiction
Okay, my dog ate my hard drive, so I’m stuck using memes tonight. Let all of your memes be dank, my friends! And, yes, that’s Charlie Sheen pretending to be Patrick Swayze’s brother. Thankfully, no C. Thomas Howell was injured during the writing of this post.
So, there’s a very strong correlation between health and IQ. It’s even stronger than the correlation between living in California and being forced to have a statue of Karl Marx™ in your front yard. Really!
The short version is this: if you’re smarter, you’ll live longer. And not only will you live longer, but you’ll enjoy your life more. It’s like winning the lottery twice, though I’m reliably informed that smart people don’t play the lottery – they own the lottery, just like Elon Musk gets a bright new penny every time someone plugs a toaster into the wall.
But the smarter you are? The longer you’ll live.
Bright people live longer than average people. Geniuses live longer than bright people. And people like me? Maybe I’ll live forever, if the beer holds out.
And the correlation is so very strong, that people actually wrote papers that said that we should increase educational funding. Why? To make people smarter. This is similar to exercising to make yourself blonde, but, hey, there’s lots of government money in stupid ideas. Justin Bieber® is actually a cyborg made from spare Justin Timberlake© parts and genes from a mutant chicken in a government lab in Kentucky.
But education can’t help ensmarten yourself.
IQ is baked into the baby from the start – the top number is almost all genetics. Can you mess a baby’s IQ up? Sure! If Mom loves Margaritas, well, that’s a good way to bake a few brain cells while the baby is cooking. Likewise, youthful malnutrition can hurt intellect – but this type of malnutrition isn’t “eating Big Macs® instead of “vegan free range kale,” no, this is starvation-level malnutrition.
Extra study, extra education can’t make you smarter. You are as smart as you is. You are as smart as you ever will be.
But there is a limit – once you reach the age of 80? All the life expectancy logic changes. The measure then is how much IQ you’ve lost. If you went from 160 IQ to loving Two and a Half Men, well, your days are numbered. Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but the truth is if you love Charlie Sheen you’re halfway to dementia. Except it’s okay for you to like Red Dawn. Which is just awesome.
WOLVERINES!
There’s another limit. If you’re one of the 100,000 to 140,000 people on Earth with an IQ of 163 or more? Yeah, that’s the limit. More IQ than 163 won’t help you live any longer, so thankfully Bill Gates won’t be around in the year 2573. But I’ve heard his clones will, so there’s that.
So what else do the statistics say about being smart and your likelihood of death?
If you’re smart, your mortality against cancer is better, but only if that cancer is from smoking. All other cancers are the same between normies and eggheads. What about suicide? Yeah, smarter people do that a bit more often.
But high IQ people take MUCH less sick leave than lower IQ folks. (Coincidentally, I haven’t taken a sick day since 2002, and that day was because I was shot while saving Emilia Earhart from being cooked and eaten by Kevin Spacey.)
But let’s look at how being smart impacts health. If you’re smart, you have a:
- Lower risk of heart disease.
- Lower level of obesity.
- Lower blood pressure.
- Lower risk of post-traumatic stress disorder, and this was correlated to people who had stressful events in their life, like being forced to watch a movie starring Amy Schumer.
- Lower risk of stroke.
- Lower risk of schizophrenia.
- Lower risk of schizophrenia.
- Hey, I said that first.
- No you didn’t.
- Yes I did.
- Lower chance of being bipolar, which I think refers to having houses at the North Pole and the South Pole. But not being a bear. Or belonging to a homeowner’s association.
Oddly, if you have a high IQ? Your risk of skin cancer goes up. I have my theories there, but they mainly relate to our naked smart people sunbathing parties global warming.
Downsides of being smart? You drink more. Sometimes a lot more. Oh, wait, that was a downside?
Also? You smoke a LOT more weed. Which makes me think that you’d be ready for some dank memes. What are they, really?
Dunno. But the fifth image for “dank meme” on my Google® search led me to this:
