Less sleep lowers IQ scores and grades According to Coren, scores on intelligence tests decline cumulatively on each successive day that you sleep less than you normally sleep. The daily decline is approximately one IQ point for the first hour of sleep loss, two for the next, and four for the next.
“Sleep is absolutely instrumental in cognitive function, mental acuity and the ability to concentrate and learn new things,” said Marie-Pierre St-Onge, an associate professor at Columbia University in New York City. During sleep, your brain deals with information received during the day.
Sleep deprivation affects your ability to learn in two ways. Because you can't focus as well, it's more difficult to pick up information, so you can't learn efficiently. It also affects memory, which is essential to learning.
Did you know that insomnia is more common for those who have a high IQ. Intelligent people have a harder time switching off their brain.
Like, is Elon Musk a genius? It answered, Elon Musk's IQ is reported to be 155, which is very high compared to the average of 100.
But genetics can explain the wide range of possible IQs too because so many different genes are involved in developing and running a brain. It is possible, for example, to inherit all the higher IQ genes from each parent and leave the lower IQ ones behind. Now the child will be brighter than the parent.
Albert Einstein
Einstein's sleep habits were said to include 10 hour nightly sleeps, significantly above the average duration for most people, along with daytime naps. All of which effectively means that the world's favourite genius was also a genius sleeper!
A study published in the journal Sleep found that sleep is important for cognitive performance and that individuals who have better sleep quality tend to have higher intelligence scores.
Albert Einstein is said to have slept 10 hours per night, plus regular daytime naps. Other great achievers, inventors, and thinkers – such as Nikola Tesla, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Edison, Winston Churchill, Leonardo da Vinci, and Sir Isaac Newton – are said to have slept between two and four hours per day.
The daily decline is approximately one IQ point for the first hour of sleep loss, two for the next, and four for the next. After five successive days of sleeping less than you need, your IQ can be lowered by up to 15 points.
In his blog "A Geek With A Hat," Swizec Teller — a programmer — explains why you can actually concentrate better when your brain is exhausted. He says it's because your brain is so tired, it has to focus. In other words, "there isn't enough left-over brainpower to afford losing concentration."
For most of us, five hours of sleep is not OK. Most adults need about eight hours of sleep. And while some people need five hours, it's extremely rare. For most of us, five hours of sleep can lead to sleep deprivation, low energy, poor focus, and long-term health issues.
The score range is 10-100. We consider scores between 60-85 (green) to be pretty great. Scores over 85 (navy blue) are extraordinary. Anything under 60 (yellow) might mean your sleep needs a little attention.
Most people have an average IQ between 85 and 115. Overall, about 98% of people have a score below 130. Only 2% of the population score above that and are considered above average. But your IQ score isn't simply about bragging rights.
Albert Einstein, a household name that has inspired many a crazy hair day and who is most famous for his theory of General Relativity, was a huge fan of catching some Z's. He would sleep an average of 10 hours a night as well as taking daytime naps.
There is an impressive, staircase-like correlation between IQ score and risk of death. The people with higher IQ scores were less likely to be dead at the follow-up. One million people of the same gender and the same age, and an almost perfect correlation between IQ and risk of death.
Elon Musk says he's upped his sleep to 6 hours per night—and that his old routine hurt his brain. Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, speaks with CNBC on May 16th, 2023. Elon Musk says his days of trying to sleep less and work more are over — at least, relatively speaking.
Psychology Today reported that intelligent people are likely to be nocturnal beings, with those with a higher IQ going bed later on both weeknights and weekends.
Inventor Nikola Tesla never slept for more than two hours a day. Tesla got more out of the day with his limited sleep schedule. Like Da Vinci, Telsa also followed the Uberman sleep cycle and claimed to never sleep for more than two hours a day and reportedly once worked for 84 hours in a lab without any rest or sleep.
Research reflects that giftedness does “run in families”: for a gifted child, their genetically-related relatives — siblings and/or parents — are likely to also be gifted, though there are plenty of exceptions.
Intelligence depends partly on environmental factors but genes have an influence. Research on twins has suggested that 50-80% of the variation in general intelligence between people could be down to genes but the gene variants responsible for intelligence haven't yet been identified.
Empirical evidence suggests that especially parental education, parental income, and maternal IQ are important predictors of intelligence. Parental education together with maternal IQ and the child's sex were found to account for 24% of the variance in IQ at age 5 [6].