Forgetfulness and Intelligence: Is Being Forgetful a Sign of High IQ?
Forgetfulness and intelligence are largely unrelated: self-rated forgetfulness barely tracks tested memory, and it tracks anxiety and low mood more closely.
Dr. Russell T. WarneChief Scientist
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Forgetfulness is not a sign of high intelligence. In a study of 839 adults, how forgetful people rated themselves was unrelated to how well they actually learned and recalled a word list, while it correlated moderately with anxiety and low mood (standardized links of about .4 to .5).
Lab research also points away from the "forgetful genius" idea: people with larger working memory capacity, a skill closely tied to reasoning ability, tend to keep their minds on demanding tasks better. This article covers how researchers measure everyday forgetfulness, what the studies show about forgetfulness and IQ, why the myth persists, and what else drives memory lapses.
How researchers measure everyday forgetfulness
The standard tool is the "Cognitive Failures Questionnaire", or CFQ, published by the British psychologist Donald Broadbent and colleagues in 1982. It is a 25-item questionnaire about minor slips of perception, memory and action. Typical items ask "Do you find you forget why you went from one part of the house to the other?" and "Do you find you forget people's names?"
Broadbent's team found that CFQ scores were fairly stable over long periods, behaving more like a trait than a passing state, and that they agreed with ratings made by the person's spouse. Scores also tended to rise with the number of psychiatric symptoms a person reported, a pattern later research has confirmed.
A second approach uses diaries. Unsworth and colleagues had undergraduates record their memory failures for a week. The most common were forgetting information about exams and homework, forgetting names, and forgetting login and ID details. Diaries capture real lapses as they happen, but they still depend on people noticing and writing them down.
What the research shows about forgetfulness and IQ
I could not find a large study reporting a direct correlation between self-rated forgetfulness and full-scale IQ. The closest evidence comes from studies comparing everyday lapses with objective tests, and it points in one direction.
• Self-ratings versus memory tests: Goodman and colleagues (2022) gave the CFQ and a battery of neuropsychological tests to 839 people aged 16 to 85. CFQ scores were unrelated to learning and recalling a word list, and unrelated to digit span, a basic test of holding numbers in mind. The only significant simple correlation was a slight positive one with a card-sorting task (r = .11). That is far too small to make forgetfulness a marker of ability; it amounts to about 1% of shared variance.
• What self-ratings do track: in the same sample, CFQ scores were moderately related to depressive symptoms (β = .41) and somewhat more strongly to trait anxiety (β = .51). A standardized β of that size behaves much like a correlation of the same value.
• A systematic review: Carrigan and Barkus (2016) reviewed 45 studies of cognitive failures in healthy people and concluded that proneness to everyday failures was not consistently associated with objective cognitive performance.
• Diary studies with ability tests: in Unsworth's diary studies, students who also completed lab tests of working memory capacity showed links to some, but not all, everyday failures. The number of everyday failures also predicted SAT scores and partly explained why lab-measured abilities relate to those scores.
The working memory link matters because working memory, the ability to hold and use information over a few seconds, is closely tied to reasoning. A reanalysis of 14 data sets with more than 3,100 young adults found a median correlation of .72 between working memory capacity and fluid reasoning, meaning the two share roughly half their variance. In an experience-sampling study of 124 students, Kane and colleagues (2007) found that during challenging activities requiring concentration, students with higher working memory capacity kept their thoughts on task better and mind-wandered less.
Taken together: how forgetful you feel says little about your tested memory, and the lapses people log in diaries are, if anything, linked to lower working memory capacity.
Why people link forgetfulness to brilliance
The idea has a long cultural history and a few modern boosts.
• The absent-minded professor: the stereotype of the brilliant scholar who forgets his umbrella is memorable precisely because it is unusual. Nobody tells stories about the forgetful person of average ability, so the examples people remember are skewed.
• A misread neuroscience paper: in 2017, Richards and Frankland argued in Neuron that forgetting is a useful feature of memory. In their account, letting old details fade helps the brain discard outdated information and generalize from experience, which supports better decisions. The paper describes how memory systems in general work. It did not compare forgetful and less forgetful people, and it did not measure IQ.
• Self-report bias: because CFQ scores follow anxiety and low mood, people who are stressed or self-critical notice and report more lapses. A conscientious, anxious high achiever may describe themselves as very forgetful without performing any worse on memory tests.
Several factors shape how forgetful people are, or feel, and they can masquerade as differences in ability.
• Age: most research on memory complaints focuses on older adults. A 2016 meta-analysis by Burmester and colleagues found a small but significant association between older adults' memory complaints and their objective cognitive performance, with large differences between studies and signs of publication bias. Studies with fuller complaint measures found that complaints tracked both objective performance and depressive symptoms. Our article on measuring cognitive aging with memory and processing speed tasks explains what normal age-related change looks like on tests.
• Mood and stress: as the Goodman study shows, anxiety and depressive symptoms are among the strongest correlates of feeling forgetful. Broadbent's team suggested that people prone to cognitive failures may be more vulnerable to the effects of stress.
• Attention: some everyday "memory" failures begin as lapses of attention. In Unsworth's diary study of attention failures, most were episodes of distraction or mind-wandering in class or while studying.
If forgetfulness is new, clearly getting worse, or interfering with daily life, the right first step is a GP or family doctor, who can check for treatable causes and refer to a neurologist or memory clinic if needed. A single forgotten name or misplaced key is not a reason for alarm.
Frequently asked questions
Is forgetfulness a sign of intelligence?
No. Self-rated forgetfulness is largely unrelated to performance on memory tests, and no study I found shows that forgetful people score higher on IQ tests.
Is a bad memory a sign of low IQ?
Not on its own. Feeling forgetful tracks anxiety and mood more than tested memory, although lower working memory capacity, which is closely tied to reasoning, does go with slightly more everyday lapses.
Do smart people forget things more often?
There is no evidence that they do. People with higher working memory capacity tend to mind-wander less during demanding tasks, which should mean fewer lapses.
Why do I forget things so easily?
Frequent lapses tend to go with mind-wandering and with anxiety or low mood. Persistent or worsening problems are worth raising with a doctor.
Is forgetting good for the brain?
Some forgetting is normal and useful. Neuroscientists argue that letting outdated details fade helps memory generalize, but that applies to everyone and says nothing about individual IQ.
The takeaway
Forgetfulness is a poor guide to intelligence in either direction. How forgetful you feel tracks anxiety and mood more closely than tested memory, and the small links that do exist pair better working memory with fewer lapses. If you want a measure of reasoning ability that does not depend on how many times you have lost your keys, try a professionally developed IQ test.
References
1. Broadbent, D. E., Cooper, P. F., FitzGerald, P., & Parkes, K. R. (1982). The Cognitive Failures Questionnaire (CFQ) and its correlates. British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 21(1), 1-16. [doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8260.1982.tb01421.x](. doi.org
2. Goodman, Z. T., Timpano, K. R., Llabre, M. M., & Bainter, S. A. (2022). Revisiting the factor structure and construct validity of the Cognitive Failures Questionnaire. Psychological Assessment, 34(7), 671-683. [doi.org/10.1037/pas0001127](. doi.org
3. Carrigan, N., & Barkus, E. (2016). A systematic review of cognitive failures in daily life: Healthy populations. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 63, 29-42. [doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2016.01.010](. doi.org
4. Unsworth, N., McMillan, B. D., Brewer, G. A., & Spillers, G. J. (2013). Individual differences in everyday retrospective memory failures. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 2(1), 7-13. [doi.org/10.1016/j.jarmac.2012.11.003](. doi.org
5. Unsworth, N., McMillan, B. D., Brewer, G. A., & Spillers, G. J. (2012). Everyday attention failures: An individual differences investigation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 38(6), 1765-1772. [doi.org/10.1037/a0028075](. doi.org
6. Kane, M. J., Hambrick, D. Z., & Conway, A. R. A. (2005). Working memory capacity and fluid intelligence are strongly related constructs: Comment on Ackerman, Beier, and Boyle (2005). Psychological Bulletin, 131(1), 66-71. [doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.131.1.66](. doi.org
7. Kane, M. J., Brown, L. H., McVay, J. C., Silvia, P. J., Myin-Germeys, I., & Kwapil, T. R. (2007). For whom the mind wanders, and when: An experience-sampling study of working memory and executive control in daily life. Psychological Science, 18(7), 614-621. [doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01948.x](. doi.org
8. Richards, B. A., & Frankland, P. W. (2017). The persistence and transience of memory. Neuron, 94(6), 1071-1084. [doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2017.04.037](. doi.org
9. Burmester, B., Leathem, J., & Merrick, P. (2016). Subjective cognitive complaints and objective cognitive function in aging: A systematic review and meta-analysis of recent cross-sectional findings. Neuropsychology Review, 26(4), 376-393. [doi.org/10.1007/s11065-016-9332-2](. doi.org
Hero image: Lost key in Hiroo, by Syced, CC0. Via Wikimedia Commons.
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