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This (.......) statement is taken from Quora. Any reactions would be welcome.

Quora makes money via provocation. It's equally rousing to unsubscribe from that site.

What/who is Quora? Never heard. Is there any scientific evidence that proves the statement is correct? What is the average IQ of a classical musician?

42 (src: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

Why is it that people who ask questions like "Why is it that classical musicians have much higher IQs" have lower IQs?

Quora

IQ and musical ability in children


In this forum I have been asking and answering questions about music for over four years; and met many infantile questions that can hardly be called provocative; often the questioners are from other cultures. However, such sites are definitely meant for such people, aren't they?
Anyway, my answer was:

Absolute nonsense! If science recognizes the correlation between IQ and a sense of humor; then jazzers are more intelligent than classical musicians; they have a more developed sense of humor, which is expressed verbally and in improvisation. As you know, classical performers are prohibited from improvising from the first days when they learn to read music. Based on many years of personal experience in both fields.

They're also suspect, I started receiving emails from them only after visiting the site. I don't think that's how it's supposed to be.

People who answer on Quora are wrong as often as they are right. They are just folks like you and I, not necessarily experts in anything.

Hi

Nothing wrong with Quora in my view. I've found it useful on occasions. But as trooplewis says it's only as good as the people contributing.

As to the question raised, I don't know whether it's true or not. I think you have to assume we are talking about professional classical musicians here, not average musicians. And in that case I could believe it's possible. High level playing of classical music and an ability to read music well, could equate to a high IQ.

As to why, no idea, that's just the way people's brains are wired. To be a professional classical musician you have to pass a lot of exams (Grades/diplomas etc). Taking an IQ test is just another exam.

But I suspect (so just my opinion) that it's likely that anyone who has studied any form of music at a high level successfully will have a high IQ. Higher than those that failed I'd have thought!

Likewise I'd have thought a successful Physicist is very likely to have a higher IQ than someone like me who failed Physics at school. But would he or she have a higher IQ than a successful chemist?

However my Dad, as far as I know never passed an exam at school, he never played a musical instrument in his life and couldn't read music. Yet he did the Mensa test in the UK and scored 149 (1 below the entry level for Mensa).

Maybe he could have been a very good musician!

Cheers

I don't know about IQ but I found another very funny and probably a quite true statement.
The most people think they're better than average, ha ha :-)

And vice versa: a person who thinks that he is a fool is no longer a fool. This is what I think of myself ...

On the Association Between Musical Training, Intelligence and Executive Functions in Adulthood

"- Musicians show higher general intelligence (FSIQ), verbal intelligence (VIQ), working memory (WMI) and attention skills than non-musicians. Amateurs score in between.

- Significant positive correlations between years of musical playing and cognitive abilities support the hypothesis that long-term musical practice is associated with intelligence and executive functions."

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01704/full

Correlation is not causation! It's not that playing music makes you smarter; it's that smarter people know to play music!

...,which makes them even smarter.

I'd be interested to see/hear/read about a study comparing classical pianists who only READ music vs. pianists who've learned to play by EAR. Although there are varying levels of skill in both, I'm thinking that hearing, perceiving and putting together harmonies are vastly different than playing a Beethoven sonata or a Chopin etude.

Differences in brain activity during reading music, playing by ear and improvisation was in the focus of research by Charles Limb.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0001679
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0088665

This type of research is BS.

It's like testing people who were trained to pass the test, by letting them take a test.

Studying music is like studying any other bookish endeavor, of course many general cognitive tactics transfer to these prescreened intelligence questions..


The association is merely a prejudiced choosing of people on different sides of the socio-economic divide, Those who had the excess time value to ditz about an instrument, and those who had to work macdonalds to afford a crappy walmart TV.

What about a test about pouring concrete. lifting boxes, washing dishes, how to work an amazon Dro, mopping, flip burgers, mix pancake batter, clean fryers, (none of which are on the intelligence test).

Thanks, Jeffcat - your post made me feel nostalgic about the course of Marxism-Leninism at the Academy of Music!

Don't let the bourgeois fairies get away with their snobbery, it diminishes us all.