What walking speed reveals about your IQ
What your walking pace says about your life expectancy
How you go says more about you than was previously known. The gait apparently reveals, for example, how much you have aged biologically – or how your own intelligence is doing. WELT editor Paula Pleiss tried it out.
How you walk says more about you than you think. Your gait reveals, for example, how much you have aged biologically – but also how your intelligence is doing.
When you observe people on the street, you can certainly intuitively gain a lot of information from their walk: Is the person relaxed or in a hurry, is he happy or rather depressed? But that’s not all that the gang reveals about a person. This is shown by a study by researchers at Duke University.
The starting point for the research of the team around the molecular biomedical scientist Line Jee Hartmann Rasmussen was a phenomenon that has been known in medicine for a long time. Co-author Terrie E. Moffitt explains in a statement:
Doctors know that slow runners in their seventies and eighties tend to die earlier than fast runners of the same age.
Now the researchers wanted to know whether the walk also allows knowledge about younger people. They took a data set that included about 1,000 people. The researchers were able to include a good 900 of them in their study. The subjects were all born in the New Zealand city of Dunedin in the same year and were 45 years old at the time of the study. Since the age of three, the people had regularly participated in tests.
All subjects in the current study come from the city of Dunedin.
Source: Infographic WORLD / Beate Nowak
In order to study their gait, the researchers set them three tasks. First, you should run at normal speed on a treadmill. Then they should solve a brain teaser, more precisely: reproduce letters of the alphabet. And finally, they should run as fast as they could without running. In all three tasks, the researchers measured the walking speed.
In addition, the scientists recorded the IQ, made brain scans and collected other biological data – from blood values to the condition of the teeth. This data can provide information about the physical age, which can differ from the calendar age.
Quelle: Getty Images/500px Plus/Sawitree LYaon/500px
And indeed! People who walk slowly are biologically older than people who were born in the same year and who walk faster.
Your health tends to be worse. The study also suggests that fast and slow runners differ in their ability to think: The slowest test subject was 16 IQ points below the fastest.
And not only that: A look at the data from the subjects’ childhood reveals that it is apparently possible to use IQ and other tests to predict walking speed at the age of 45. The first test results of the then three-year-old test persons seem to be informative for this.
Study author Rasmussen comments:
We may have a chance here to see who will be better off later in life.
Investigating walking speed is a cheap, safe and easy way to find out. The knowledge can be used to prevent age-related damage. Prevention is easier than reversing problems that have already arisen.
The gerontologist Stephanie Studenski objects:
We should not assume that poor three-year-old children’s cognitive test results will condemn them to lifelong problems.
Studenski responded in a comment to the study by Rasmussen and her team. She recommends that researchers should take a look at what contributes to poor performance and how these factors can be improved.
The authors of the study also see that research needs to further decipher the link between thinking skills in childhood and walking pace in adulthood. Researcher Rasmussen particularly regrets that the running tests and brain scans were not carried out when the test subjects were children. Scientists are lacking data that might have been informative.
In principle, however, Rasmussen, Studenski and Co. are in agreement: walking speed is an important indicator of biological age.
This article was first published in 2019.
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