Petersburg scientists have found a link between the level of intelligence and enthusiasm for memes.
A team of scientists from St Petersburg University, headed by Olga Shcherbakova, Associate Professor of the Department of General Psychology, conducted an interesting study. Human intelligence was studied on the basis of the subjects' understanding of ambiguous texts - verbal jokes, dual images, parables and memes.
The subjects were over 300 healthy or mentally ill people. The mechanisms of intelligence were studied at once at four levels: phenomenological, behavioral, psychophysiological and genetic.
As expected, the mentally ill subjects demonstrated difficulty understanding humor and other types of figurative meaning. For example, they overly sympathized with the hero of the anecdote, or, on the contrary, perceived the joke completely mechanically.
But the study authors were surprised by something else. Healthy subjects between the ages of 18 and 29 also showed inconsistency with the norm in the psychology of intelligence. In particular, the subjects had difficulties with empathy and the search for additional meanings.
“For many people now it is really difficult to perform some intellectual operations that were previously considered basic for a secondary school student, and not the most successful one,” explains Olga Shcherbakova. - Now there are several generations on the planet who grew up in fundamentally different informational conditions and therefore use various intellectual practices.
So, funny stories told orally are perceived by young people as an anachronism, and therefore the meaning of even simple jokes becomes incomprehensible to many young people. Humor "went online": people send each other funny pictures with signatures on social networks or show them on their phones. In other words, "memchiki in the treadmill". Other features of modern jokes are brevity and situational awareness.
The reason, scientists say, is the multiplying flow of information. In a day, a modern person processes so much data that his ancestors spent a week on "digesting". At the same time, most of this information is deliberate rubbish, but organized so brightly and emotionally that it is very difficult for a young psyche to resist it.
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- Information itself guides a person: a bright heading, main thoughts in bold, - Shcherbakova notes. - As a result, the reader is gradually unlearning how to sift through the text on his own, deciding which idea deserves a deep study, and which is secondary. If this is not specifically taught, thinking can remain at the adolescent level.
ANNA POSLYANOVA