|
According to the ancient Greeks, Zeus had 3 daughters who were known as the three Fates.
One spun the thread of life, the second measured its length, and the
third snipped it off. In our attempt to understand some of the rules of
science, researchers have tried to offer a more plausible explanation
for why some of us live longer than others. Researchers from the
Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow in Scotland have made a discovery
even the Greeks couldn't have imagined - reaction time may be a core
indicator of long life. They measured both the IQs and the reaction
times of middle-aged subjects and conclude that both tests of mental
ability were associated with life span, but reaction time was the
stronger indicator.
These findings appear in Psychological Science, a journal of the American Psychological Society.
This study builds upon earlier studies that show that individuals with
lower IQs tend to die at younger ages than those with higher IQs.
Investigators built upon this idea by adding what they define as a more
fundamental measure of mental ability - efficiency in processing
information. They believe that IQ tests might relate to physical health
because people with higher IQs typically are more likely to be in
occupations with safer environments. Reaction time is moderately
related to IQ, but is a simpler assessment of the brain's
information-processing ability - one that doesn't bear so much on
other, possibly confounding factors like knowledge, education, or
background.
They evaluted 412 male and 486 female 54- to 58-year-olds who took
both an IQ test measuring their verbal and numeric cognitive abilities
and a reaction-time test that measured how quickly they pressed a
button after seeing a number on a screen. The researchers also recorded
the participants' gender, employment, education, and smoking status.
Over a 14 year period 185 participants died, and researchers compared
their test results to see if the IQ or reaction-time responses
predicted their mortality.
Results showed that those with higher IQ scores lived longer, a
result consistent with other studies. The study also showed that
characteristics significantly related to death included male gender and
smoking. But they also found something new - faster reaction times
seemed an even better predictor of long life than IQ.
There are different ways the results could be interpreted. Slow
reaction times could reflect a degeneration of the brain, which in turn
could reflect degenerating physical health (an obvious possible cause
of earlier mortality). But in another study the IQs of 11-year-old
subjects also were found to predict life span length, just as
accurately as it did for the middle-aged participants in this 14-year
study. Future studies of reaction times in younger-aged people may shed
more light on the IQ-mortality connection.
Article PDF
11:11:45 PM 
|
