What exactly tipped the Brexit referendum in the favour of the Leave campaign on voting day – June 23, 2016 – may never been clear cut. But a new study suggests the intelligence of voters – and their susceptibility to being duped by misinformation – played a part. From a sample of Brits, researchers looked at how exactly they voted, as well as their intelligence, as determined by performance in cognitive tasks. They found a link between high performance in the tasks and voting Remain, which suggests people who wanted to stay in the EU have higher intelligence. However, the study method only looked at data from just over 6,000 referendum voters – a far cry from the 33.5 million who cast their ballot that day.

Scientists have identified an immune brain cell unique to humans that gives us higher cognitive abilities over other animals, but what makes us specials also leaves us vulnerable to neurological disorders like schizophrenia, autism and epilepsy, a new study finds. A team of neuroscientists from Yale analyzed cells found in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the region involved in executive control functions, which is shared among humans and primates and narrowed it down to just five found only in the human brain, including an immune cell called microglia. Microglia helps maintain the brain rather than warding off diseases and includes a gene, not present in primates, associated with neuropsychiatric diseases. Lead author Nenad Sestan stated that we can'view the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex as the core component of human identity, but still we don't know what makes this unique in humans and distinguishes us from other primate species.' Scientists have been on a long quest to find what in the brain gives humans higher cognitive abilities over other animals.

People who are better at making up'bulls**t' explanations for things tend to have a higher cognitive ability than their peers, a study has concluded. Experts from Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada, conducted tests to explore the link between people's willingness and skill at lying and their cognitive abilities. Fortunately, even though smarter people are better at making up nonsense, the team found that they were less likely to do so than their less-intelligent counterparts. The researchers also found that people who are more willing to make things up are also more susceptible themselves to believing profound-sounding twaddle. Similar results -- that liars are more vulnerable to misinformation -- were reported back in March by researchers from the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, Canada.

People with higher cognitive abilities are often better able to spot patterns in the world around them, allowing them to excel in a wide range of tasks, from learning languages to recognizing faces. But, in some situations, even being intelligent has its drawbacks. A new study has found that these people are more likely to stereotype others based on the patterns they detect, potentially leading to negative consequences as they perpetuate social biases. A new study found that people with higher cognitive abilities are more likely to stereotype others. In the study, the researchers manipulated image-description pairings so that the faces with particular features were linked to negative stereotypes.