Gardening makes you smarter

Chris Beytes

If you thought you gardened because you're smart, you're wrong. You're smart because you garden! At least that’s what DIYS.com postulates after conducting a six-month survey to find out how hobbies impact IQ.

With so many people taking up hobbies during the pandemic, DIYS.com was curious: Do any particular hobbies boost intelligence or make the brain more nimble or anything like that? So they asked 4,694 volunteers to take an IQ test, then start a new hobby, then take a second IQ test six months later to see if they’d added any gray matter.

The results?

Gardening does, indeed, boost your IQ—by an average of about 5 points, says their study, from 98 to 103, or 5.1%.

However, gardening isn’t the best hobby for boosting brain power. That goes to learning a new musical instrument, which boosted IQs by 9.71% from 103 to 113. Knitting was a close second at 9.68%, followed by exercising (7.37%), reading (7.07%), practicing meditation (6.38%) and learning a new language (5.88%).

If gardening boosts your smarts by 5%, imagine how extra-smart you are running a greenhouse, nursery or garden center full time! GP