#geniusiq

#geniusiq

Liam Delap has an interesting party trick that you wouldn't really expect a footballer to pull out of the bag. The Chelsea forward has gone on video a few times showing off his bizarre mathematical ability to quickly calculate the cube roots of large numbers.

In 2013, when Meredith O'Connor was 16, the music video for her debut single "Celebrity" went viral. Afterward, she channeled her own stardom into championing childhood mental health: As a hyperactive kid, O'Connor says she was often the subject of bullying, and when her music career gave her a platform, she was eager to use it to advocate on behalf of other victims. "I knew my fan base was younger, but I didn't know how many people would resonate with mental health challenges," she says. "I realized there were millions of gifted people that are being marginalized, and that's when I really wanted to start the mental health study."

You may have a leg up on the child prodigies who made you feel inadequate as a school kid. Despite outliers like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, a new analysis based on 19 studies involving 34,000 high achievers across multiple disciplines - including Nobel laureates, top chess players, Olympic champions, and elite musicians - found that individuals who achieved peak performance early in life were not always the same people to reach high success in adulthood.

Picture this: last weekend, while everyone was posting Instagram stories from crowded bars and house parties, I was curled up with a book about behavioral economics, completely absorbed. A friend texted asking if I was coming out, and when I said I was staying in to read, she replied with "You're such a nerd!" followed by a laughing emoji. But here's the thing-according to psychology research, my preference for books over parties might actually come with some serious intellectual perks.

Called the Cognitive Reflection Test ( CRT), it has been around since 2005 but recently gained popularity on social media, with one TikTok user's breakdown of the three questions getting 14million views. The test was created by psychologist Shane Frederick, now at the Yale School of Management, to help predict whether people are likely to make common mistakes in thinking and decision-making.

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger believed that human knowledge, at its most foundational and meaningful, is ineffable. Moreover, it requires stepping beyond what one sees as the established rules and into the realm of the unknown. Think of a master jazz musician or an elite athlete who, after facing an unpredictable moment, would find it impossible to convey precisely how and why they did what they did to deliver a peak performance.

Ever feel like you're stuck in this weird paradox where everyone thinks you're brilliant, but inside you feel like you're constantly falling short? I've been there. Actually, I'm still there some days. After getting laid off during media industry cuts in my late twenties, I spent months wondering if maybe I wasn't as smart as I thought I was, or if being smart even mattered when I couldn't seem to get my life together.