Meetings Lowers The IQ And Ability To Think On Own

Scientists have found that attending meetings lowers the brain's IQ because a person's ability to think on their own gradually reduces.

Study shows the performance of women is more likely to decrease after attending a meeting compared to men. People who are left on their own performed better than the ones attending meetings. Researchers at the Virginia Tech Crilion Research institute in the U.S. said the performance of people after they attended meetings dropped when they were reviewed against their colleagues.

"You may joke about how committee meetings make you feel brain-dead, but our findings suggest that they may make you act brain-dead as well," study leader, Read Montague said.

A study conducted by Montague included two groups after matching their IQ's initially.

"We started with individuals who were matched for their IQ," he said. "Yet when we placed them in small groups, ranked their performance on cognitive tasks against their peers, and broadcast those rankings to them, we saw dramatic drops in the ability of some study subjects to solve problems. The social feedback had a significant effect."

The performance dropped significantly in most people when they were ranked against their peers. Women were affected more than men. Three out of 13 women continued to perform well, while the remaining 10 fell into the low performance group.

Lead author Kenneth Kishida, a research scientist at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute said the study through neuroimaging, highlighted the strong neural responses that those public clues could obtain.

"But given the potentially harmful effects of social-status assignments and the correlation with specific neural signals, future research should be devoted to what, exactly, society is selecting for in competitive learning and workplace environments," he said.

Co-author Steven Quartz, professor of philosophy in the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, said: "This study tells us the idea that IQ is something we can reliably measure in isolation without considering how it interacts with social context is essentially flawed."

It also suggests that the division between social and cognitive processing which takes place in the brain is ideal, Quartz said.