I am new here so please be gentle It’s my first post so I hope the category is correct.
Here’s something I’ve been thinking about today, while struggling to do something quite complicated for most people that normally would really be a piece of cake for me: does our mood affect how smart we are?
I decided to test this out. Premise: I have bipolar disorder; long story, the TL;DR version is that I have more frequent periods of hypomania characterized by extreme productivity, than depressive episodes.
Feeling quite a bit down since yesterday, I took the Mensa challenge out of curiosity. I felt definitely slower than I usual am with this kind of things and couldn’t concentrate fully, so I got a score of “only” 125.
Not bad per se, I think, but it’s quite a drop from the 142 I scored last time on a day when I was feeling really good and super productive.
That’s a pretty big difference. It makes me wonder if our emotions really do impact our brainpower that much. It’s not the first time I notice this. Generally speaking, on a good day when my mood is great I am typically able to be very productive and achieve a lot, usually in much less time than most others given the same conditions. I can solve problems efficiently, and I feel like nothing can stop me - those familiar with the topic may know that this is a common trait of people with bipolar disorder. Whenever I feel sad or worse, instead, I have little to no energy and can’t concentrate much on pretty anything. I am slow and feel like a different person altogether, and that can als contribute to make my mood even worse.
Has anyone else noticed something similar? Like, do you feel sharper when you’re in a good mood? Or maybe you’ve had the opposite experience? I’m curious to hear what others think about this.
I think there’s a correlation between how we feel and “how smart we are” (or how well our brain is working at the time). But correlation is not necessarily causation. They could both be affected by things like our blood sugar level or how well rested we are.
Your mood can definitely affect your ability to do well on a test. That doesn’t mean you’re more or less smart in that moment. It means that a single test, with no other context, says very little about who you are or what you’re capable of.
Thanks for your insights, you both raise excellent points.
The distinction between correlation and causation is crucial, and factors like blood sugar and rest could I indeed be influencing bot mood and cognitive performance, I agree. It’s a complex interplay.
I’m also intrigued by the idea that test performance dosn’t necessarily equate to intelligence. Perhaps what we are really measuring is our ability to focus at the given moment, more than intelligence?
Other, related, things I wonder:
how much do our emotions impact our ability to access and use our knowledge?
are some cognitive skills more affected by mood than others?
could improving our ability to manage and control our emotions also ehance our cognitive performance? in other words… if we get better at handling our feelings, could that help us think more clearly and perform better on mental tasks?
Since I was diagnosed with bipolar I’ve been asking myself many of such questions.
Has anyone come across research on this topic or have personal experiences that might shed light on those questions?
I’ve been dealing with depression, on and off, for several years. When I’m in a “down” state, being able to concentrate on a mental task, as well as simply feeling motivated to do anything, can be very difficult.
I thought this might be related to Biden’s debate performance because of his cold, but I see that it’s a much more general question.
Sure, how we feel – being tired, depressed, or suffering from some painful ailment – affects our attitude and that can affect our performance on tasks that are correlated with intelligence. Conversely, feeling good tends to improve confidence and concentration and might tend to positively influence our performance.
Speaking of colds, I’ll also throw in my pet theory that ailments like that can affect brain biochemistry and thereby affect cognition. Most of those effects are negative, but I sometimes find when I have a bad cold, perhaps precisely because other cognitive functions are impaired, being lost inside my own head can actually make me more inventive at tasks like creative writing. Still, on balance I’d rather be healthy!
Also, not meaning to be critical, but I wouldn’t put much faith in the value of Mensa test results.
I think we all know we don’t think as well when we’re tired, so it makes sense that ailments affect us also. I can measure my tiredness, sickness by how well I do certain puzzles. And I didn’t feel great the second time I took the SATs, and my score was significantly lower than the first time.
It just makes sense that if part of your brain is focusing on internals you’re not going to focus as well on externals.
How we feel may not affect our raw IQ itself, but it can definitely affect how we perform. One person with high confidence may vastly outperform another person of the same IQ. A lot of sports coaches use the Pygmalion Effect; if you talk up a player and make him feel like his expectation to live up to is that he’s elite, he’ll push himself to fit that image.
Wow, thanks everyone for your thoughtful responses! It’s really interesting to see how many of us have noticed this connection between our mood and mental performance.
@kenobi_65 and @F.U.Shakespeare, I totally get what you’re saying about depression. It’s like our brains are working through mud, right? Everything just feels harder.
@wolfpup, I love your take on colds potentially boosting creativity! That’s a silver lining I hadn’t considered. And fair point about Mensa tests - I was just using them as a rough gauge.
@Measure_for_Measure and @Voyager, you both touched on physical factors like hunger and tiredness. It makes me wonder how much of our ‘intelligence’ is actually just our ability to focus and concentrate in the moment based on how much “energy” we feel we have.
@Velocity, that’s a great point about confidence! I hadn’t thought about how our expectations of ourselves might influence our performance.
All of this makes me curious - do you guys think there are ways we can ‘hack’ our brains to perform better even when we’re not feeling our best? Or is it better to just accept that we’ll have ups and downs and work with what we’ve got on any given day?
Also, for those of you who’ve noticed these mood-related changes in yourselves, how do you handle it when you need to perform at your best but you’re not feeling great? Any tips or tricks? Asking because I am still not feeling great and today I had to take the day off because I wasn’t really feeling able to work. When this happens it worsens my mood even more because I feel like I am unable to do anything… I wish there was something I could do to take control and get out of this state…
I wish I had something useful to share. It seems like, if I do have an important presentation or project, and I’m not feeling awesome, I somehow rise to the occasion, and get through it. It doesn’t feel like something I could coach another person on how to do it, however.
I’ve fought with depression and anxiety my whole life, and I can tell you that when I’m particularly depressed it’s like the problem solving part of my brain shuts down. The simplest task leaves me paralyzed in befuddled dismay. On rare days when my depression lifts it feels like my IQ has gone up 40 points.
About fifteen years ago, I was flying back from the UK. I was suffering from a monster of a head cold and sore throat. I could only whisper, and could barely hear anything.
The plane had screens on the back of the seats in front of us. One choice among the movie and music channels was a map showing our plane’s flight route, and our position and velocity. The display showed these numbers in both miles/hour and kilometers/hour (they switched every 10 seconds or so).
Since I could barely communicate with anyone, I lost myself in that display, and gradually realized that the conversion between miles and kilometers was wrong: they were dividing kilometers by 1.609 when they should have been multiplying. Not exactly higher math. But I didn’t have a calculator, so I had to scribble everything out on a cocktail napkin. I doubt I would have noticed this, or bothered to solve it, if I hadn’t been so sick.
This is why I don’t like the cultural stereotype of the “depression-tormented genius,” whose “depression” leads them to compose deep works of somber music or paint masterpiece art or write heartwrenching novels. That’s not depression. They wouldn’t have that problem-solving function.
Someone who is truly depressed might not even be able to shower or make a cup of coffee.
So first of all we really don’t have a meaningful metric for “smart”, but let’s accept it means some generalizable problem solving ability.
Generalizable still has to be applied to specific tasks and performance at those specific tasks at different times.
Using the same generic brain power thinking about several things at the same time, with divided attention, the classic way to visualize ADD, leads to better creative performance. Big ideas. Humor. But less performance on solving one very specific problem.
Using the same generic brain power in a very narrow focus of attention is less likely to lead to the creative out of the box solution, but will help on very specific performance tasks.
The overall intelligence, whatever that may be, can be the same, yet performance vary greatly dependent on the need.
And of course how we feel, our moods, impact the nature of our focus.
No, it’s not. Do not trust any I.Q. test given by anyone except a psychologist who’s trained to give I.Q. tests. The average I.Q. test that you’re going to find online is worthless. Even one like those that Mensa uses isn’t very good. Your scores on something like an I.Q. test could easily be affected by how you feel at the time. Your brain power isn’t changed by this. What’s changed is how much you can do on a bad day.
It’s my first post so I hope the category is correct.