Psychologist Mark Travers argues casual reading, not chess or brain-training apps, shows the strongest link to measured intelligence.
A psychologist writing for Forbes has identified reading for pleasure as the hobby most consistently associated with highly intelligent people, in an article published August 15, 2026. Mark Travers, Ph.D., a regular Forbes contributor on intelligence and personality research, argues that the everyday habit of reading purely for enjoyment—not for school, work, or obligation—correlates more reliably with high intelligence scores than popular activities like brain-training games or chess. The piece appears in Forbes' Innovation and Technology section and forms part of Travers' ongoing series examining the habits and traits of highly intelligent people.
According to the article, the pastime in question is notable for what it is not: it is not academic reading undertaken for grades, nor professional reading done for work tasks. Instead, Travers points to self-chosen, non-obligatory reading as the behavior that shows up again and again in psychological research on cognitive ability. He also notes an irony in the finding—this is a habit many people abandon as they move from childhood into adulthood, even though its cognitive benefits appear to persist.
Why Casual Reading Outperforms Brain Games and Chess
The Forbes Innovation section frames the story with a pointed contrast: "Brain games and chess don't build intelligence the way people assume." This framing suggests that activities widely marketed as cognitive enhancers, such as puzzle apps and strategy games, may not deliver the broad cognitive benefits many assume they do.
Supporting explainer content cited alongside the Forbes piece suggests that brain-training apps tend to improve performance on the specific tasks they train without producing meaningful improvement in general intelligence measures, a limitation researchers often describe as poor "transfer" of skill. Chess, meanwhile, may simply attract people who already have high cognitive ability rather than building it from scratch, and its benefits tend to stay confined to chess-specific skills rather than spreading to broader reasoning ability.
Reading for pleasure, by contrast, is described as a more everyday, accessible behavior that trains multiple cognitive systems simultaneously, including attention, memory, and inference-making, while also being far easier to sustain across a lifetime than a niche game or app-based regimen.
The Cognitive Mechanisms Behind the Reading-Intelligence Link
Several mechanisms are offered to explain why casual reading tracks so closely with intelligence. Reading exposes the brain to continuous, structured information that demands sustained attention, working memory, and constant inference-making about what a text means, mechanisms tied to both fluid and crystallized intelligence.
Frequent reading also expands vocabulary and builds richer semantic networks, which closely mirror the kinds of verbal reasoning, comprehension, and analogy-based tasks that appear on many intelligence assessments. Narrative and expository texts additionally require readers to simulate scenarios, track complex plotlines, and engage with abstract ideas, exercises that strengthen abstract reasoning and cognitive flexibility over time.
Travers connects this to a broader personality trait: intellectual curiosity, a component of the openness-to-experience dimension in personality psychology. A 2023 meta-analysis published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, cited in an earlier Travers article from June 2026, found that intellectual curiosity carries the strongest and most reliable positive correlation with measured intelligence among personality traits studied. Reading for pleasure, in this framing, functions as a concrete, observable expression of that underlying curiosity rather than a separate, unrelated behavior.
Part of a Broader Forbes Series on Intelligent Habits
The August 15 article does not stand alone. It extends a recurring Forbes series by Travers exploring behaviors and dispositions tied to high intelligence, including a June 3, 2026 piece identifying "actively open-minded thinking"—the tendency to seek out disconfirming evidence and update beliefs based on new information—as the top habit associated with intelligence, based on a 1997 study by psychologists Keith Stanovich and Richard West.
Other entries in the series have examined traits described as "flaky," "indecisive," "absent-minded," and "scatterbrained" habits that Travers argues actually signal higher cognitive ability, such as dropping low-value commitments, resisting oversimplified answers, or juggling multiple unfinished projects. Within that body of work, the reading article adds a concrete, everyday leisure activity to a list otherwise dominated by abstract cognitive dispositions.
Independent Corroboration and Caveats on the Claim
The idea that reading ranks among the top hobbies of intellectually able people also surfaces outside Forbes. A separate psychology explainer listing nine activities associated with high cognitive ability places "Reading for Pure Enjoyment" first on its list, lending independent support to Travers' framing. Reporting in Russian- and Ukrainian-language outlets on hobbies favored by people with high IQ similarly names reading alongside playing musical instruments and solving logical puzzles, though these sources rank music learning above reading rather than treating reading as the singular top choice.
It is worth noting that Travers' description of reading as the "No. 1 hobby" is an interpretive framing built from converging research findings rather than a formal ranking derived from one controlled study. The underlying evidence—on vocabulary, curiosity, and cognitive engagement—is grounded in published psychological research, but the headline claim itself reflects Travers' synthesis and editorial judgment rather than a single definitive ranking study.
