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Having a baby comes with truckloads of information about your baby from complete strangers. If you want a heads-up of what’s coming for you, starting from your growing pregnant belly, people will tell you what to do, why things are the way they are, and tons of unsolicited advice. One of the most common ones is, ‘ah, your baby has a big head; they are going to be a genius!’ As good as it sounds, the moment you sit down to research the authenticity of the information, you are sure to get puzzled by the millions of contradicting results. To simplify, we are here to help you understand how the size of the head and a child’s IQ are related, and how it will affect your child. Read on to know it all.
Does Bigger Head Mean More Brains?
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Now to start with, a big brain gives you the image of a Megamind, and obviously, it seems ingenious. The studies that were previously done suggested that there is a link between the size of the brain and higher IQ (1). However, the circumference of the head has very little to do with a child’s intellect. When you give birth to a child, you pray that you are blessed with a healthy baby. Most people are thrilled when they see a child with a big head waiting for them in the nursery. It is almost stereotypical that a baby with a big head is interpreted to possess higher intelligence, good growth, and genes. So parents always link a more prominent sized head to a head full of brains. When the doctor checks the circumference of the head in terms of percentiles and metrics, having the 50th percentile can break some parents’ hearts. But guess what? If Einstein could figure out relativity in the 50th percentile, your child should have no problem doing great things too (2).
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A handful of preliminary studies suggest a link between brain size and intelligence. That brings us to the question if size does matter. Studies done with 1-year-old babies with bigger heads concluded that they scored better on the IQ tests later in life (3). So even though the size of the head depends on factors like the thickness of bone and muscularity of the head, the overall bigger size indicates that the brain size is more than average.
Why Do Doctors Measure The Child’s Head Circumference?
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Now to come back to the question, if bigger headed kids are more intelligent than average size heads. First of all, not every kid aspires to be a scientist, and intelligence is not just about IQ. There have also been tests if standard procedure IQ tests determine a kid’s intelligence level. So how we can measure intelligence is still a dizzying debate among neuroscientists. If the size of the brain alone was the factor, then animals like elephants and whales would have been corporate heads. Instead, neuroscientists rely on the encephalization quotient to determine how humans rule the animal kingdom (4). As long as your child’s growth is normal and the head’s circumference is average, there is nothing alarming about your baby.
Doctors obviously know this, and when they check your baby’s head size, they are not looking for a measurement of higher intelligence. They are simply tracking the circumference for early detection of any unexpected problems that can be easily detected by the growth record. For example, when the Zika epidemic peaked, doctors measured the baby’s heads to rule out microcephaly (5). The MRI reports suggest a weak correlation between intelligence and brain volume. This is the same as thinking taller people are more intelligent than shorter ones (6).
How Did Big Head Come To Be Preferred?
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The obsession with bigger heads goes back to phrenology, which determined a person’s intelligence based on the head’s size (7). The science obviously fell out of favor, but some of the premises lingered on to link the fruitfulness of the big-size brain. But, if the size was really what mattered in terms of the brain, then Albert Einstein’s brain was about 3 pounds, Jonathan Swift’s brain was 4.4 pounds, and Anatole France’s brain weight was 2 pounds (8) (9).
To sum up, science does not suggest that quick thinking and intelligence have anything to do with brain size. If the doctor measures the size of your child’s head, it is merely to determine their growth rate and not to pass judgments on their IQ. So by any chance, if you have a child with a lean head, it doesn’t mean that they will be left behind the others in terms of intelligence or anything to do with smartness. So, would you like to add your thoughts about linking intelligence to bigger head size? Let us know in the comments section.
