Factors Influencing Intelligence and Cognitive Abilities

Cognitive tests can measure important abilities, and performance across different mental tasks often correlates. Yet no single number contains the whole person. Reasoning, knowledge, attention, memory, creativity, social understanding, practical judgement and motivation overlap without becoming identical.

Standardised tests are useful when they are valid for the question, administered fairly and interpreted with uncertainty. They can help identify learning needs, track some kinds of change and predict certain educational outcomes. They are less suited to declaring a permanent limit, ranking human worth or recognising every form of originality. Scores contain measurement error, depend on comparison groups and can be affected by language, familiarity, disability, anxiety and testing conditions.

Brilliance is often uneven

Real cognitive profiles are rarely flat. A person may combine extraordinary visual reasoning with slow reading, deep conceptual insight with weak short-term recall, or original ideas with difficulty organising routine tasks. Neurodevelopmental differences can bring genuine impairments, distinctive strengths or both. Good environments provide appropriate support without requiring the person to surrender the abilities and identity that make the profile valuable.

Measure what matters, but never confuse the measurement with the mind.

Most influences arrive in bundles. A safe neighbourhood may also bring cleaner air, quieter sleep, good schools and accessible healthcare. A nutrient-rich diet may travel with income, time, culture and overall health. Correlation is valuable evidence, but it is not a completed causal explanation.

Randomised trials can strengthen causal inference, but many lifelong exposures cannot ethically or practically be randomised. Researchers also use natural experiments, longitudinal cohorts, sibling comparisons, adoption and twin designs, genetic methods and triangulation across different study types. Each design answers a narrower question than a headline usually suggests.

There is no single “intelligence gene.” Large genome-wide studies find associations spread across many variants, each usually contributing a tiny amount. These signals implicate broad aspects of nervous-system development and function, but they do not offer a simple biological ranking of individuals.¹

Twin and family studies commonly find substantial heritability for cognitive-test performance, with estimates often increasing from childhood into adulthood in the populations studied.² Several mechanisms may contribute: people increasingly choose and shape environments compatible with their tendencies; accumulated experiences amplify small early differences; and measurement changes with age. None of this turns an estimate for population variance into a forecast for a newborn.

Families transmit environments as well as DNA

Parents provide genes, but they also provide language, routines, expectations, resources, stress exposure and access. Research on “genetic nurture” shows that parental genetic variants not inherited by a child can still be associated with the child’s outcomes through the environments parents help create.³ This is precisely why “nature versus nurture” is the wrong contest: biological and social pathways continually meet.

Polygenic prediction also carries an equity problem: genomic datasets have historically overrepresented people of European ancestry, so predictive performance and potential error are not evenly distributed.⁴ Race and ethnicity should not be treated as discrete genetic partitions or proxies for individual biology.³⁰ Genetic information should never be used to ration a child’s education, declare a person’s worth or replace direct observation of what support and opportunity help them learn.

Inheritance helps explain variation; it does not excuse deprivation, justify a ceiling or remove the possibility of growth.

The developing brain needs more than stimulation. It needs health, adequate nutrition, safety, responsive care and opportunities for early learning—the five connected elements in the WHO nurturing-care framework.⁶

Development begins before birth. Maternal health, nutrition, access to antenatal care, infection prevention and treatment, exposure to toxic substances, severe stress, birth conditions and prematurity can all influence developmental pathways. These are not grounds for blaming a pregnant person. They are reasons for making good food, clean environments, healthcare, rest, safety and practical support available to every family.

Security makes exploration possible

A young child learns regulation with other people before reliably doing it alone. Predictable care does not mean a perfectly quiet life or an adult preventing every frustration. It means that needs are noticed, distress is not routinely ignored or weaponised, boundaries are understandable and repair follows inevitable mistakes. A secure base gives a child somewhere to return before exploring again.

Challenge is also necessary. Children need opportunities to try, struggle safely, make choices, wait briefly, recover from errors and contribute to real tasks. If adults perform everything for them, ability has little room to form; if demands overwhelm them, effort can collapse into fear or withdrawal. The productive zone is support that makes the next step possible without taking the step away.

Care for the caregiver changes the child’s environment

Responsive care is harder under sleep deprivation, violence, isolation, untreated illness, food insecurity, impossible work schedules or constant financial threat. Supporting caregivers with healthcare, parental leave, safe housing, income stability, childcare and community is not separate from developing children’s intelligence. It is part of the mechanism.

Watch development without demanding sameness

Children differ in pace, temperament, communication, sensory needs and patterns of strength. Developmental screening and professional assessment can identify hearing, vision, language, motor or other needs early, but support should be individualised. The aim is access, communication and growth—not erasing harmless difference or training a child to appear typical at the cost of distress.

Good brain health is usually built through ordinary foundations repeated over time—not a rare food, a punishing routine or a supplement marketed as a shortcut.

Nutrition: adequacy before optimisation

Severe undernutrition and deficiencies in nutrients such as iodine or iron during sensitive periods can impair development. Iodine supports thyroid-hormone production, which is essential to fetal and early brain development; both too little and too much can be harmful.⁹ Iron is needed for oxygen transport and many neural processes, and WHO emphasises early detection of iron deficiency in pregnancy and young children.¹⁰ A 2026 umbrella review found that supplementation effects were most evident among children with anaemia, reinforcing the distinction between correcting deficiency and enhancing an already adequate system.³⁵

Dietary patterns rich in minimally processed plant foods, appropriate protein and unsaturated fats support overall cardiovascular and metabolic health. Some trials in older adults at elevated cardiovascular risk have reported cognitive benefits from Mediterranean-style patterns,⁸ while a three-year trial of the MIND diet found no significant cognitive advantage over an active control that also received weight-loss guidance.³³ Results do not justify a precise universal reduction in dementia risk or a promise that one menu will prevent decline. Food also carries family, culture, pleasure and social connection; a sustainable pattern is more useful than a theoretically perfect one that cannot be lived.

Sleep: part of learning, not time stolen from it

Learning is affected on both sides of sleep. Adequate rest helps a person attend and encode new information; sleep after learning participates in stabilising and reorganising memories. Insufficient or disrupted sleep can impair attention, decision-making, creativity and emotional control.¹¹ Experimental sleep-restriction studies support a causal effect on new memory formation, although the average effect is modest and not a measure of permanent intelligence.³⁴

There is no single bedtime routine that fits infants, adolescents, shift workers and older adults. Useful signals include regularity, sufficient opportunity to sleep, daytime alertness and whether breathing or movement repeatedly interrupts rest. Persistent insomnia, loud snoring with pauses, severe daytime sleepiness or an abrupt change in sleep deserves clinical attention. “Trying harder” is not an adequate treatment for a sleep disorder.

Movement: broad benefits, no single magic protocol

WHO recommends regular aerobic and muscle-strengthening activity, adapted to age, health and ability, while emphasising that some activity is better than none.¹² A large 2025 synthesis of randomised-trial reviews reported improvements in general cognition, memory and executive function across varied populations, though effect sizes, study quality and ideal programmes differed.¹³

Walking, cycling, active work, swimming, dance, resistance exercise, sport and movement adapted for disability can all contribute. Enjoyment, access, safety and gradual progression help activity persist. High-intensity intervals are not inherently superior, and a rigid step count is not a biological threshold. Someone with pain, illness, pregnancy, disability or prolonged inactivity may need individual guidance and a gentler starting point.

Health and sensory access

A person cannot learn from information they cannot reliably see, hear, access or remain awake for. Hearing and vision support, treatment of medical conditions, accessible materials and pain-aware pacing may improve apparent cognition without “boosting IQ” at all—they remove obstacles between the mind and the task. Sudden confusion, weakness, speech difficulty or acute cognitive change is a medical concern, not a self-improvement problem.

Stress is not one thing. A brief, manageable challenge with support can sharpen effort and build confidence. Severe, prolonged or uncontrollable stress without adequate support can disrupt sleep, attention, memory, emotion regulation and development.¹⁴

The distinction matters because not every low-performance period calls for more discipline. Sometimes the task is poorly taught. Sometimes the body needs care. Sometimes a harmful environment is consuming capacity. If a person is being intimidated, isolated, deprived of sleep, denied access to information, pressured into harmful decisions or repeatedly told that their perceptions do not matter, improving concentration alone does not resolve the underlying problem.

Scarcity can consume the planning system

Food insecurity, debt, displacement, unpredictable work, inaccessible healthcare and caregiving overload create real problems that must be solved repeatedly. This can leave less time and attention for long-horizon learning. Describing that burden as poor motivation reverses cause and effect. Practical stability—reliable food, shelter, transport, healthcare, time and a workable income floor—can be cognitive policy as surely as a school curriculum.

Regulation helps, but should not be used to normalise harm

Slow breathing, meditation, prayer, time in nature, movement, music, sleep routines and writing can help some people settle arousal and regain direction. Their value is personal and context-dependent. These practices should never become instructions to tolerate violence, coercion or preventable deprivation more quietly. Inner strength and external protection are complements.

Mental health and cognitive performance

Depression, anxiety, grief, post-traumatic symptoms and other mental-health conditions can affect attention, processing speed, motivation, memory and confidence. Those effects do not establish low intelligence, moral failure or permanent decline. Good assessment considers sleep, medication, physical illness, substance effects, life circumstances and safety as well as psychological symptoms. Sudden or severe changes deserve timely professional evaluation.

Before asking why a person is not performing, ask what their mind is being required to survive.

The choice is not independence or connection. Mature intelligence includes the ability to think alone, learn from others, resist harmful pressure and cooperate without disappearing into the group.

Help should increase agency

Useful support makes more action possible: explaining, translating, creating access, sharing a tool, offering protection, making an introduction or temporarily carrying a burden. Unhealthy “help” may replace the person’s goals with the helper’s, organise major harmful decisions behind their back, control their contacts or make support conditional on obedience. The cognitive test of help is not whether another person became more manageable; it is whether they became safer, better informed and more capable of meaningful choice.

Disagreement can improve thinking without degrading the thinker

Strong intellectual communities permit claims to be challenged firmly while protecting people from ridicule and retaliation. They separate “this evidence does not support the conclusion” from “you are incapable.” They also make room for dissent: consensus is information, not infallibility. Original work often begins when someone is allowed to hold a question open longer than the group finds comfortable.

Recognise unusual ability without ranking human dignity

Some people learn faster, reason further in a domain or create work that is exceptionally rare. Honest recognition can bring suitable challenge, peers, mentorship, protection and resources. It does not make anyone else less deserving of rights or care. Equality of dignity and variation in ability can both be true.

Gifted learners may be overlooked when they are poor, disabled, neurodivergent, learning in a second language, from an underrepresented group, quiet, traumatised or unwilling to display ability on demand. Multiple routes to identification—work samples, sustained observation, local norms, dynamic assessment and opportunities to learn—are fairer than a single gatekeeping score.

Social connection across adulthood

Friends, family, colleagues, clubs, faith communities, neighbours and intergenerational relationships can provide conversation, purpose, practical help and cognitive challenge. Yet social quantity is not the same as safety or depth. A few trustworthy connections may protect thought better than constant exposure to hostile or exhausting company.

A capable mind needs material to think with. Knowledge is not the enemy of creativity or reasoning; organised knowledge makes deeper reasoning possible by reducing how much must be reconstructed in working memory.

Natural and quasi-experimental studies suggest that additional education can produce lasting gains on cognitive tests, although estimates vary by design, setting and outcome.⁵ Schooling can expand vocabulary, numerical understanding, abstract reasoning, knowledge of the world and familiarity with formal problems. Its effect depends on access, attendance, instructional quality, safety, language, expectations and whether the learner is genuinely required to think.

Active learning is not constant entertainment

Active learning means that learners generate an answer, prediction, explanation, design, comparison or decision and receive information that helps them revise it. It can happen during a quiet reading session or a lively laboratory. In university STEM courses, a major meta-analysis found that active-learning approaches improved examination performance and reduced failure compared with traditional lecturing on average.²³ That does not mean every group activity is effective or that clear explanation has no place. Direct instruction and active use work together.

Difficulty must be desirable, not destructive

Some effort supports learning: retrieval, delayed practice and unfamiliar examples can feel harder than passive review precisely because the learner is doing more work. But unnecessary confusion, inaccessible language, sensory barriers, humiliation and demands far beyond prerequisite knowledge do not become educational merely because they are difficult. Strong teaching locates the next reachable challenge.

Motivation is designed through experience

People persist more readily when a task has meaning, progress is visible, expectations are high but believable, and help does not remove ownership. Interest sometimes precedes competence, but it can also follow it: understanding enough to see a subject’s structure often makes the subject more interesting. Rewards may start an action; they cannot substitute indefinitely for belonging, autonomy, mastery and purpose.

Creativity needs both freedom and constraint

Original ideas rarely come from “thinking outside the box” without first learning what the box contains. Creativity draws on stored knowledge, analogies across domains, tolerance for ambiguity, time for incubation and permission to make provisional work. Constraints can focus invention; excessive surveillance and fear of ridicule can make safe imitation rational.

Do not make advanced learners wait for everyone else

Fairness does not require withholding challenge from a learner who is ready. Acceleration, subject-level advancement, deeper problems, mentorship, access to equipment and intellectual peers can protect engagement. Enrichment should add genuine complexity, not merely a larger quantity of the same exercise. At the same time, advanced performance in one area does not remove a child’s emotional, social or accessibility needs.

Assessment should improve the next decision

A useful assessment shows what a learner can do independently, where support changes performance and which misconception blocks progress. Combine low-stakes checks, authentic work, observation and—when appropriate—standardised measures. Repeated high-stakes testing can narrow what is taught, while no assessment at all can hide exclusion and failed instruction. The balance is evidence without reductionism.

Environmental harms are often invisible in an individual score and highly visible across a map. The people with the fewest resources to avoid exposure may carry the greatest cognitive burden.

Lead: prevention is the intervention

Lead can harm the developing nervous system, and no safe blood lead concentration in children has been identified. Exposure may come from legacy paint and dust, contaminated soil, some pipes and plumbing, batteries, certain occupations and industries, pottery glazes, spices, cosmetics, toys or traditional products depending on region.¹⁷

The old article’s claim that one specific blood concentration “cuts IQ by about three points” is too tidy. Risk is shaped by dose, timing, duration, co-exposures, nutrition, measurement and individual vulnerability; population associations do not forecast one child’s score. Suspected exposure calls for source control and guidance from local public-health or medical services, not home detoxification products.

Mercury: distinguish forms, sources and nutritional trade-offs

Mercury exists in different forms with different exposure routes and effects. Methylmercury can accumulate in fish, especially some large predatory species, and fetal and early-life development is particularly vulnerable to neurotoxicity.¹⁸ Fish can also provide valuable protein and nutrients. Advice therefore varies by species, origin, local contamination, pregnancy and age. Follow current local fish advisories rather than avoiding all seafood or treating every fish as equivalent.

Air pollution reaches beyond the lungs

Fine particulate matter and other pollutants are associated with adverse cardiovascular, respiratory and neurological outcomes. A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis found that greater prenatal or childhood PM_2.5 exposure was associated with lower cognitive-test performance, while also noting a limited evidence base and heterogeneity across studies.¹⁹ In later life, air pollution is also treated as a potentially modifiable dementia risk at the population level.

Noise, heat, crowding and light

Learning becomes harder when speech cannot be heard, sleep is repeatedly interrupted, rooms are dangerously hot or cold, or there is no place to focus. These conditions can also raise stress and worsen health. Solutions include quieter zones, acoustic treatment, shade and cooling plans, safe heating, daylight with glare control, predictable access to a desk or library and schedules that protect concentrated work.

Silence is not universally ideal. Some people regulate attention better with steady background sound, movement or a less visually sterile room. The aim is not one aesthetic; it is control over avoidable distraction and access to the conditions the task requires.

The environment also determines what is discoverable

A child cannot develop an interest in microscopy without encountering a microscope, a language without speakers or materials, or a scientific career without some visible route into it. Libraries, laboratories, workshops, museums, music rooms, sports spaces, broadband and public transport expand the set of futures a person can imagine and practise.

The central questions are what the person is doing, with whom, under whose control, and what the activity replaces. Duration matters, but content, design, context and displacement often explain more than a raw screen-time total.

The American Academy of Pediatrics’ 2026 policy moves beyond universal time limits for older children and adolescents toward the wider digital ecosystem: product design, content, safety, developmental stage, family conversation and structural responsibility.²⁶ For very young children, direct interaction, physical exploration, sleep and responsive conversation remain especially important.

Attention is shaped by task switching, not “screens” alone

Working memory is limited. Switching between a lesson, messages, video and social updates requires goals and context to be reloaded, and interruptions can leave unfinished material active in mind. A controlled classroom experiment found that unrelated laptop multitasking hindered immediate learning for users and nearby peers, but this narrow result does not prove permanent attention damage.³⁶ Evidence linking habitual media multitasking with attention is not perfectly consistent and much is observational, but disabling nonessential alerts and giving one demanding task an uninterrupted window are low-risk experiments.

For children, context changes the association

A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis of early-childhood screen contexts found different associations for background television, age-inappropriate content and caregiver co-use; co-use was positively associated with cognitive outcomes, while some other contexts were associated with poorer outcomes.²⁷ These studies do not make every co-viewed programme beneficial or prove that all observed relationships are causal. They do show why one total number hides important differences.

Protect sleep through a pattern, not a magic number

Late-night media can delay bedtime through time displacement, emotional arousal, social pressure, alerts and light exposure. A device-free wind-down helps many people, but “exactly sixty minutes” is not a universal biological threshold. More useful steps include protecting enough sleep opportunity, reducing late alerts, keeping the device from repeatedly waking the sleeper and noticing which content makes disengagement harder.

AI can scaffold thought or quietly replace it

An AI system may explain at a different level, generate practice, translate, support writing or widen access. It may also invent facts, flatten unusual ideas, conceal uncertainty or complete the very operation a learner needed to practise. Recent classroom experiments have found both strong learning gains from a carefully designed tutor and weaker independent performance after access to a less constrained assistant, showing that design and learning activity matter.⁴²⁴³ Decide whether the goal is production or learning. When learning matters, attempt first, ask for hints or critique, verify consequential claims and finish by explaining the result without the tool.

Access and protection must grow together

Removing technology can exclude learners who depend on captions, speech generation, translation, remote community or flexible pacing. Providing technology without connectivity, training, accessibility, privacy or evidence can deepen inequality. UNESCO recommends putting learners’ interests first and using technology to support human interaction rather than treating replacement as progress.²⁸

Families and schools need conversation, shared norms and graduated autonomy—not only surveillance. Platforms and policymakers also carry responsibility for child-appropriate design, data protection, safety reporting and business models that do not profit from compulsive use.

Processing speed, working memory, accumulated knowledge, emotional understanding and specialised expertise do not rise and fall together. Large studies show that different cognitive abilities reach their strongest average performance at different points from early adulthood into later life.²⁹

Plasticity persists, but learning conditions change

Adults can acquire languages, technical skills, musical abilities and new ways of reasoning. Prior knowledge makes some learning faster and can interfere with other learning when old assumptions must be replaced. Practice may need more spacing or recovery, and sensory or health barriers may need accommodation. None of this makes later learning merely symbolic.

Cognitive reserve is not a shield of invulnerability

Education, complex activity and accumulated knowledge may allow some people to function well despite age-related brain changes, but reserve is not a promise against disease. A highly educated person can develop dementia; a person with less formal schooling may remain cognitively strong. Clinical evaluation should compare change against the individual’s own history, language, education and daily function rather than stereotypes.

What remains worth protecting

Across the lifespan, brain health is connected with education, physical activity, cardiovascular and metabolic care, hearing and vision access, freedom from smoking, protection from head injury, treatment of depression, social connection and cleaner air. The 2024 Lancet Commission treats fourteen factors as potentially modifiable contributors to dementia risk across populations.¹⁶ Its population-attributable estimates should not be read as the percentage of one person’s dementia that could certainly have been prevented.

Know when ordinary variation becomes a health question

Occasionally forgetting a name, needing more time or relying on notes is not by itself dementia. Concern rises when there is a clear, persistent change that interferes with familiar tasks, judgement, communication, orientation, finances, medication management or safety. Sudden confusion is especially important to assess urgently because infection, medication effects, stroke and other acute conditions can cause it.

Compensation is intelligent. Calendars, labels, hearing devices, glasses, written routines, navigation, accessible interfaces and help from trusted people can preserve independence. Using support does not mean a mind has stopped working; good cognition includes arranging the environment so that important goals remain possible.

Commercial certainty should trigger better questions

When a product claims to “boost IQ,” “activate BDNF,” “rewire the brain” or “reverse cognitive age,” ask for the preregistered trial, comparison condition, sample, outcome, size of effect, independent replication, duration and adverse events. Then ask whether the benefit appears in an untrained real-world task. A biological explanation can make weak evidence sound complete without making it stronger.

A useful plan moves in four directions: protect the foundation, support access, teach durable skills and connect ability to meaningful work.

Step 1: choose the human outcome

“Become smarter” is too vague to guide action. Choose something observable and worthwhile: understand a difficult chapter, remember names at work, solve a class of equations, write with greater clarity, return to study after illness, learn a language, design a product or stay independent in a daily task.

Step 2: separate skill from obstruction

Ask whether the difficulty comes from missing prerequisite knowledge, unclear instruction, limited practice, inaccessible material, exhaustion, pain, fear, interruption, sensory loss or an unrealistic workload. Several may coexist. Practising harder will not repair every category.

Step 3: select the smallest useful change

Protect one focus period. Add one retrieval session. Move a demanding task to a more alert hour. Request captions. Correct a broken pair of glasses. Turn off nonessential notifications. Find a worked example. Ask a mentor to identify the most important error. Small changes reveal mechanisms and are easier to keep.

Step 4: test without the support when independence is the goal

A calculator, search engine, tutor or AI may improve supported performance. After a delay, try a fresh problem or explanation without it. If performance disappears, the tool may still be useful—but it supported the task rather than teaching the skill. That distinction determines what to do next.

Step 5: measure function, not only feelings

Effortful learning can feel worse while producing better retention. An attractive dashboard can feel precise while measuring the wrong thing. Use a small set of relevant outcomes: accuracy, explanation, delayed recall, time, errors, fatigue, transfer and the effect on daily life.

Know the limits of self-experimentation

Do not deliberately restrict sleep, stop prescribed medicine, take high-dose supplements, expose yourself to toxins or use dangerous exertion to test cognition. Health conditions, pregnancy, childhood development and sudden cognitive changes deserve appropriate professional care. Safe experiments adjust ordinary routines; they do not manufacture risk.

The strongest policy raises both the floor and the ceiling: protect everyone from preventable harm, then give different minds enough freedom, challenge and support to develop as far as they can.

Early-years policy must support the relationship

Advice to talk, read and respond is easier to follow when caregivers have time, food, healthcare, safe housing and relief from impossible stress. Paid leave, accessible childcare, caregiver mental-health support and services that respect culture strengthen the environment in which early learning occurs.

Schools should measure access as well as scores

A falling score may indicate ineffective instruction; it may also reflect absence, hunger, poor ventilation, hearing difficulty, inaccessible language, bullying or frequent displacement. Schools need enough information to find barriers without turning children into permanent risk profiles. Assessment data should trigger resources, not stigma.

Workplaces can either use intelligence or exhaust it

Clear priorities, protected concentration, reasonable workloads, accessible tools, autonomy appropriate to responsibility and the ability to report error without retaliation improve decision quality. Constant surveillance, arbitrary interruption and rewarding speed while hiding mistakes create the appearance of productivity at the expense of judgement.

Do not use prediction to ration possibility

Genetic scores, early tests, neighbourhood data and algorithms may identify statistical associations; none should become a private ceiling that withholds education or opportunity. Prediction systems can reproduce the unequal world that generated their training data. High-stakes use requires validity for the actual population, transparency, appeal, monitoring for unequal harm and a decision-maker with the power to change the outcome.

Protect cognition without governing every private choice

Public systems should control lead, pollution, unsafe products, exploitative digital design and inaccessible services. They should not use “brain health” as a pretext for coercive surveillance or compulsory optimisation. People need accurate information, meaningful options and protection from harm while retaining freedom over ordinary differences in how they live, learn and think.

A society serious about intelligence does not merely admire the people who succeeded despite deprivation. It removes preventable deprivation, teaches well, protects freedom of thought and helps unusual ability find the people and resources needed to become useful.

For an individual, the next step may be small: sleep, a hearing test, a quieter hour, a better explanation, a safe relationship, a harder problem or permission to recover. For institutions, the next step may be structural: clean air, stable housing, accessible schools, protected research time, advanced opportunity or a digital product that respects human agency.

None of these actions guarantees brilliance. That is not the standard. The standard is whether we have created conditions in which capability can emerge, remain healthy, be recognised accurately and continue growing without being owned or suppressed by those around it.

Potential is inherited in possibilities, developed through experience, protected by humane conditions and realised through meaningful freedom.