Do you fancy yourself an intelligent person? Certainly nobody wants to admit the contrary. But when talking about individual intellect, a person's IQ is usually one of the first things to be brought up. It's a divisive subject, however, because a person's IQ is just one facet in determining intelligence. Because ultimately... we're talking about just one test. And how definitive can one test really be?

WHAT IS AN IQ TEST?

In its simplest definition, an IQ test measures cognitive abilities against a person's age and provides a score meant to represent their intellectual potential. And when you're able to collect large numbers of these scores, it can reveal some pretty interesting things.

The website worldpopulationreview.com was able to use these numbers to look at the average IQ by state:

You may be wondering how the IQ scores were calculated. How could anyone possibly collect every resident's IQ score in each of the 50 states and then take the average of each population's total value? Researchers took a look at the average IQ test scores of anyone in the state who had previously sat through an IQ test in 2015.

The state with the highest IQ test scores was New Hampshire, with average IQ of 103.2, followed closely by Massachusetts at 103.1. The state with the lowest average IQ was New Mexico at 95.

SO WHERE DOES NEW YORK RANK?

To put it mildly, we don't exactly have a score to brag about. New York's average IQ is 98.4, which is #36 out of 50. This is somewhat surprising, considering the number of great colleges we have.

The cynics will probably look at this number and say something to the effect of "you'd have to be pretty dumb to live in a state with taxes this high." And, really... maybe they're not wrong?

You can see a more detailed breakdown of the study on worldpopulationreview.com.