The Bigger The Head, The Smarter The Baby, Says Science

Chances are good at least some mothers out there know about having to shove their kid’s giant cranium out during childbirth. Chances are also good that those kids are now doing quite well in life, so they can pay their moms back for that trouble.

But how does that actually add up? Turns out, if your little one has a bigger than normal skull, they’ll actually be quite smart and have successful careers in the future.

A charity group called UK Biobank did some research, and found a very strong link between intelligence and having a larger-than-average head — probably because of all that extra room for your brain to stretch out and make itself at home. So if you got picked on in school for having a large head, or you’re the source of your mother’s woeful cries of how difficult labor was, you’re probably smart and successful enough to wipe your tears with spare money you use as tissues now.

Currently, UK Biobank is monitoring around half a million British people to determine clearer links between their genes, physical and mental health, and how their lives end up, which will give them even greater insight into how genes play a role in your success in life. They’ve used this data to prove their hypothesis about cranium size and intelligence, and thus far, the information has been very effective.

According to researchers in a paper published by the Molecular Psychiatry Journal, “Highly significant associations were observed between the cognitive test scores in the UK Biobank sample and many polygenic profile scores, including... intracranial volume, infant head circumference, and childhood cognitive ability.”

Which basically means that kids with larger heads had a strong correlation between the size of their brain and its functionality. In even more basic terms? Bigger brain, bigger smarts.

The evidence was so accurate that they were even able to determine which children would go to university based on the size of their heads. Yes, they could actually judge how successful specific big-headed kids would be, and they were right.

At this point, I kind of suspect that some of those researchers may themselves have been overly blessed in the cranium department, and made the entire study in order to give a proper salute to all the people who used to make fun of them for it.

So next time you see someone with a really large head on their shoulders, don’t pick on them; they’re probably off to their private yacht to spend some of the money they earned at the awesome job they got by being naturally smarter than everyone else.