You Ask Questions Even When You Think You Know the Answer
Curiosity might be one of the most underrated signs of intelligence, yet a meta-analysis of roughly 50,000 students revealed that curiosity had about the same effect on academic performance as conscientiousness. Combined, conscientiousness and curiosity had as big an effect on performance as intelligence. Smart people don’t just collect information, they hunt for it.
Here’s the thing though. Research published in the Journal of Individual Differences found that high dispositional curiosity is related to greater general knowledge. The smartest individuals in any room are often the ones constantly refining their understanding by questioning what they already believe they know. They’re comfortable looking foolish for a moment because they value accuracy over appearing right.
You Talk to Yourself More Than You’d Like to Admit
Scientists at Bangor University in the UK found talking to yourself out loud is not only helpful but may indicate a higher level of intelligence, with participants who read instructions out loud showing more concentration and better absorption of what they read. Honestly, if you’ve ever caught yourself having a full conversation with yourself while solving a problem, you’re in good company.
Research shows that self-talk improves cognitive performance, such as concentration and visual processing, and those who engage in self-talk display more confidence and experience less anxiety. Self-directed speech aided people to find objects faster, by 50 to 100 milliseconds, compared to those who remained silent. Let’s be real, talking yourself through complex tasks isn’t a quirk, it’s your brain organizing itself out loud.
You’re a Night Owl Who Comes Alive After Dark
A study investigating sleep patterns and brain function found that self-declared night owls generally tend to have higher cognitive scores, with owls performing better in tests compared to those who were morning-oriented and scoring about 13.5% higher than morning types in one group. If your brain doesn’t start firing on all cylinders until well past sunset, there might be an evolutionary reason for that.
A study from the London School of Economics and Political Science found that people who tend to go to bed later have higher IQs, with the study authors believing the root lies in our evolution because nighttime was a more dangerous place and ancestors who ventured into it needed to be more intelligent. Belgian neuroscientists found that after ten hours awake, night owls outperformed early risers moderately by 6% at a mental awareness test. The world may belong to early birds, but the complex problems? Those get solved at midnight.
You Change Your Mind When Evidence Demands It
Cognitive flexibility encourages learning from mistakes, as a flexible thinker is more open to changing their opinion and admitting when they might be wrong. Most people treat their opinions like possessions they need to defend. Smarter individuals treat them like hypotheses worth testing.
Research from the University of Bath’s School of Management found that individuals with a higher IQ are significantly better at forecasting, making fewer errors and showing more consistent judgement compared to those with a lower IQ. People who are cognitively flexible are better at recognising potential faults in themselves and using strategies to overcome these faults. The ability to pivot isn’t weakness, it’s one of the clearest markers of intellectual strength.
You Swear More Than Your Parents Would Appreciate
A study by renowned expert in cursing Timothy Jay found that people who could come up with more curse words had a larger vocabulary in general, with taboo or swear word fluency being positively correlated with overall verbal fluency. If your vocabulary includes a colorful array of expletives, you’re not crude, you’re linguistically versatile.
The common assumption that swearing reflects limited intelligence is backwards. It’s commonly thought that swearing is a reflection of low education and intelligence, the theory being that when people can’t think of the right adjective they resort to slang including curses. Yet the research tells a different story entirely. Smart people know when and how to use strong language for emphasis without it losing impact.
You Doodle During Meetings and Lectures
A study from the United Kingdom found that people were able to recall 29 percent more information if they were doodling. Those margin sketches during boring presentations aren’t signs of distraction, they’re your brain staying engaged.
According to Sunni Brown, author of The Doodle Revolution, doodling is a thinking tool that can affect the processing of information and problem-solving, and scribbling mindlessly has a benefit for memory while giving the brain a visual way to express concepts and emotions. I think what makes doodling so valuable is that it occupies just enough mental bandwidth to prevent your mind from wandering completely while allowing deeper processing of what you’re hearing.
You Keep a Messy Workspace That Would Horrify Minimalists
In an experiment from the University of Minnesota, people in a messy setting came up with more creative ideas than those in a neat space, with disorderly environments seeming to inspire breaking free of tradition and producing fresh insights. That chaotic desk isn’t laziness, it might be the physical manifestation of a mind making unexpected connections.
There’s something about controlled chaos that sparks innovation. While organized people follow established patterns efficiently, those comfortable with disorder often find novel solutions precisely because they’re not constrained by rigid systems. The mess is a feature, not a bug.
You Admit When You Don’t Know Something
Really smart people have a strange relationship with knowledge. They’re acutely aware of how much they don’t know. Research from the University of Bath showed that smarter individuals tend to have more accurate beliefs about uncertain future events, with cognitive ability being linked to more realistic beliefs. They don’t fill gaps with guesses dressed up as certainty.
Saying “I don’t know” takes confidence that many people lack. It requires being comfortable with temporary uncertainty and valuing truth over the performance of expertise. Analysis controlling for health, lifestyle, and genetics indicates that cognitive ability is linked to more realistic beliefs about uncertain future events, while lower IQ is associated with greater forecasting errors and biased assessments. The smartest people in the room are often the ones most willing to admit ignorance.
You Spend Significant Time Alone and Actually Enjoy It
Solitude gets a bad reputation in our hyper-connected world. Yet intelligent people often crave it. They use alone time not to escape but to think deeply, process information, and recharge their mental batteries without the constant noise of social interaction.
Research has shown that solitude can boost creativity and improve memory and problem-solving skills, with solitude providing a break from chaos and a space to reflect on one’s thoughts, allowing intelligent individuals to engage in deep introspection. It’s hard to say for sure, but perhaps the smartest people understand that their best thinking happens in silence, not in crowds.
You Question Your Own Intelligence Regularly
Paradoxically, truly intelligent people often doubt themselves more than less capable individuals. They’re aware of cognitive biases, the limits of their knowledge, and the complexity of most problems. This metacognitive awareness keeps them humble and hungry to learn more.
The Dunning-Kruger effect works both ways. While incompetent people overestimate their abilities, highly competent people tend to underestimate theirs. If you regularly question whether you’re smart enough, that self-reflection might be the very thing that makes you smarter than most. Cognitive flexibility provides us with the ability to see that what we are doing is not leading to success and to make appropriate changes to achieve it, with more flexible people adapting to unexpected events and problem-solving to find solutions.
Intelligence isn’t just about test scores or academic credentials. It shows up in how you think, adapt, and engage with the world around you. These subtle behaviors reveal cognitive strengths that traditional measures often miss entirely. So what do you think, did any of these surprise you?
You Notice Patterns Others Miss Completely
Here’s something most people don’t realize about intelligence: it’s not about memorizing facts or solving equations faster than everyone else. Smart people have this almost eerie ability to spot connections between seemingly unrelated things. You might be watching a documentary about ancient Rome and suddenly connect it to modern corporate structures, or notice that your friend’s relationship problems mirror economic theories you read about last month. This pattern recognition happens automatically in your brain, like your mind is constantly running in the background looking for links and similarities. Research from MIT shows that people with higher fluid intelligence excel at recognizing abstract patterns and transferring knowledge across different domains. If you find yourself making these weird mental leaps that others think are random but actually make perfect sense to you, that’s your brain doing some seriously sophisticated processing. It’s like having a supercomputer running pattern-matching algorithms while everyone else is using a calculator. The best part? You probably don’t even realize you’re doing it most of the time.
