Some people really do win the genetic lottery.

For the first time, scientists have shown that intelligence is linked to good health, so those blessed with brains are also less likely to become sick, develop disease or die early.

The reason is down to genes. An international team, led by the University of Edinburgh, have discovered that the same gene variants which make people smart, also protect them against illness.

The only conditions that intelligence appeared to increase were schizophrenia, autism and bipolar disorder.

“The study supports an existing theory which says that those with better overall health are likely to have higher levels of intelligence,” said Dr Saskia Hagenaars, of Edinburgh University.

Dr Stuart Ritchie, also of Edinburgh added: “This study tests whether genes that are linked to mental abilities and educational attainment are also genes that are related to some disorders.

“We found that there are many overlaps: to take one example, genes related to being taller are also related to obtaining a college or university degree.

“We also asked whether the sets of genes associated with many disorders and traits predicted people’s actual levels of cognitive abilities. We found many overlaps there, too. To take one example, people with more genes linked to cardiovascular disease tended to have lower reasoning ability.”

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Hell might actually be other people — at least if you're really smart.

That's the implication of fascinating new research published in February 2016 in the British Journal of Psychology. Evolutionary psychologists Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics and Norman Li of Singapore Management University dig in to the question of what makes a life
well-lived.

They use what they call "the savanna theory of happiness" to explain two main findings from an analysis of a large national survey (15,000 respondents) of adults aged 18 to 28.

First, they find that people who live in more densely populated areas tend to report less satisfaction with their life overall. "The higher the population density of the immediate environment, the less happy" the survey respondents said they were. Second, they find that the more social interactions with close friends a person has, the greater their self-reported happiness.

[Yes, money really can buy happiness]

But there was one big exception. For more intelligent people, these correlations were diminished or even reversed.

"The effect of population density on life satisfaction was therefore more than twice as large for low-IQ individuals than for high-IQ individuals," they found. And "more intelligent individuals were actually less satisfied with life if they socialized with their friends more frequently."

Let me repeat that last one: When smart people spend more time with their friends, it makes them less happy.

Kanazawa and Li explain: "Residents of rural areas and small towns are happier than those in suburbs, who in turn are happier than those in small central cities, who in turn are happier than those in large central cities."

Why would high population density cause a person to be less happy? There's a whole body of sociological research addressing this question. But for the most visceral demonstration of the effect, simply take a 45-minute ride on a crowded rush-hour Bus Line train and tell me how you feel afterward.

Kanazawa and Li's second finding is a little more interesting. It's no surprise that friend and family connections are generally seen as a foundational component of happiness and well-being. But why would this relationship get turned on its head for really smart people?

"The findings in here suggest (and it is no surprise) that those with more intelligence and the capacity to use it ... are less likely to spend so much time socializing because they are focused on some other longer term objective," she said.

Think of the really smart people you know. They may include a doctor trying to cure cancer or a writer working on the great novel or a human rights lawyer working to protect the most vulnerable people in society. To the extent that frequent social interaction detracts from the pursuit of these goals, it may negatively affect their overall satisfaction with life.

Smarter people may be better equipped to deal with the new (at least from an evolutionary perspective) challenges present-day life throws at us. "More intelligent individuals, who possess higher levels of general intelligence and thus greater ability to solve evolutionary novel problems, may face less difficulty in comprehending and dealing with evolutionary novel entities and situations," they write.

If you're smarter and more able to adapt to things, you may have an easier time reconciling your evolutionary predispositions with the modern world. So living in a high-population area may have a smaller effect on your overall well-being — that's what Kanazawa and Li found in their survey analysis. Similarly, smarter people may be better-equipped to jettison that whole hunter-gatherer social network — especially if they're pursuing some loftier ambition.

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“The trouble with the world,” Bertrand Russell, a scientist quipped, “is that the stupid are very sure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” This statement is not always true though.

In fact, the more education people have, the more ignorant they may be. Ignoring our ignorance and assuming we know much more than we actually do seems to be a universal human tendency.

Quick: Are you at all familiar with ultralipids, cholarine, or plates of parallax? All of them? One of them? None?

Thing is intelligent people think they know too much. They feel they have an idea to everything but in fact they do not know anything, for example translating the above word 'cholarine' as combination of chlorine and urine but the word is entirely made up, DOESN'T EXIST. Their brain ticks them into thinking they know, whereas research has proved that “In many areas of life, incompetent people do not recognize — scratch that, cannot recognize — just how incompetent they are.”

We tend to resist recognizing when we have a vacuum of knowledge. We think we know a lot more than we do. And we make stuff up, often without realizing it, just to assure our egos that we are good enough and smart enough. “People who don’t know much about a given set of cognitive, technical, or social skills,” Cornell psychologist Dunning writes, “tend to grossly overestimate their prowess and performance, whether it’s grammar, emotional intelligence, logical reasoning, firearm care and safety, debating, or financial knowledge.”

Dunning’s most intriguing idea is that we don’t even have a grasp on what “ignorance” really is. Most people think of ignorance as a lack of information, gaps in our knowledge that could be filled in with appropriate training or education. That’s too hopeful:

"The way we traditionally conceive of ignorance — as an absence of knowledge — leads us to think of education as its natural antidote. But education, even when done skillfully, can produce illusory confidence."

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