General Intellegence on the Rise

Every once in a while, I’ll grab and old issue of WIRED Magazine and thumb through just to gander at what got our attention only five or eight years ago, what cell phones were hot, how much memory we lusted for, and even a few ads for Apple Newton PDAs.

Yesterday I reached back only a year and a half to be reminded of an article that I merely mentioned, then, in this blog.  It concerned IQ tests, and evidence that we are getting smarter.  U.S. born, New Zealand philosophy professor, James Flynn has been the principal researcher behind this trend, that for decades IQ scores in industrial countries have been on the rise.

The trend Flynn discovered in the mid-’80s has been investigated extensively, and there is little doubt he’s right.  In fact, the Flynn Effect is accelerating.  US test takers gained 17 IQ points between 1947 and 2001.  The annual gain from 1947 through 1972 was 0.31 IQ points, but by the ’90s it had crept up to 0.36. (Johnson 100-105)

A rise in IQ raises many questions, such as, “Why?”  Classic research indicates that IQ is inherited. 

Look at IQ scores for thousands of individuals with various forms of shared genes and environments, and hunt for correlations. This is the sort of chart you get, with 100 being a perfect match and 0 pure randomness (see chart)

So, if intelligence is a matter of genes, does this mean we are evolving?  Well, perhaps, but probably not that fast.  So what is it about  our supposedly dumbed-down environment that’s making people smarter?  The WIRED article suggests that it isn’t schools, “..since the tests that measure education-driven skills haven’t shown the same steady gains.”

Flynn has his theories, though they are speculative.  He says,

I realized that society has priorities. Let’s say we’re too cheap to hire good high school math teachers. So while we may want to improve arithmetical reasoning skills, we just don’t. On the other hand, with smaller families, more leisure, and more energy to use leisure for cognitively demanding pursuits, we may improve – without realizing it – on-the-spot problem-solving…

…Over the last 50 years, we’ve had to cope with an explosion of media, technologies, and interfaces, from the TV clicker to the World Wide Web. And every new form of visual media – interactive visual media in particular – poses an implicit challenge to our brains: We have to work through the logic of the new interface, follow clues, sense relationships. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these are the very skills that (IQ) tests measure – you survey a field of visual icons and look for unusual patterns.

I wonder if we might see, in the next few years, another acceleration of general intelligence, as people who have grown up on hypertext and massively complex game worlds start taking adult IQ tests.

This is a generation of kids who, in many cases, learned to puzzle through the visual patterns of graphic interfaces before they learned to read. Their fundamental intellectual powers weren’t shaped only by coping with words on a page. They acquired an intuitive understanding of shapes and environments, all of them laced with patterns that can be detected if you think hard enough. Their parents may have enhanced their fluid intelligence by playing Tetris or learning the visual grammar of TV advertising. But that’s child’s play compared with Pok�mon.

You can read the article online at:

        http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.05/flynn_pr.html

Johnson, Steven. “Dome Improvement.” WIRED Magazine May 2005: 100-105.


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8 thoughts on “General Intellegence on the Rise”

  1. Goodness, you don’t really believe that IQ is inherited, do you?

    I’m almost speechless that you would say such a thing – surely you know *something* about the research into intelligence. Don’t you?

    Hell, if IQ is inherited, why do we bother teaching people (you have seen the contents of an IQ test, right)? Why do we even bother feeding them?

    Dave, when you’re getting material outside your areas of expertise from sources like Wired, please apply the basic rule of journalism: verify it from two sources.

  2. Stephen,

    Thanks for reading this entry and for your comment. In response, I don’t think I said anything about personally believing or knowing where IQ comes from. I simply think that the WIRED Article posed some interesting questions, and suggested some intriguing outcomes of learning to live with our evolving information landscape, and to cope with interfaces to that information environment, and I wanted to share that with my readers.

    As for schooling, I suspect that most of the readers of this blog are educators or educated, and know the difference between IQ and academic achievement.

  3. The very concept of IQ is a construct based on a very old schema of what “intelligence” is. Although there are various measurement tools for IQ, they all are derived from some underlying set of “things that people do to show intelligence.” It happens that some of the things people do to show intelligence on a WISC, for example, include manipulating visual-spatial shapes or explaining vocabulary words. The tests measure what a theorist said intelligent people do and therefore measure intelligence, supposedly. Yes, there was significant effort put into validation and standardization of these tests, but what they measure is the consrtuct they set out to measure, not something that is truly measureable.

    Having taught gifted kids (and designed IEPs based on IQ reports and loads of other data) for over a dozen years –often using technology before anybody else knew it existed –I can see where some of the things computers ask/allow kids to do may give them extra practice in some of the same things intelligence tests ask them to do, such as playing Tetris or seeing that a word entered into Google can be “read” many different ways. Since divergent responses yield more “points,” even Google’s “openmindedness” benefits IQ.

    When it comes right down to it, IQ tests are about as inexact as any single measure. We should be studying longitudinal changes in problem-solving fluency and flexibility if we really want to see where people’s “intelligence” is or is not improving.

  4. You do such a great job, I hate to … disagree and worry about things you write. I am a former gifted and talented teacher. I don’t think IQ is inherited. I used to hear that a lot when they talked about minorities and the lack of .. progress for many students. The problem is that many students are not exposed to good teachers, not exposed to the kind of learning that can stretch their thinking and prompt them to get involved in pathways to
    knowledge, and I could go on.

    We know that individual testing immediately raises the IQ, we know that children who are told that they are not gifted and talented , or accomplished might really believe it.
    When I was working in the office of my high school, the reports came in about the IQ tests we as students had taken in the school. I saw that they said I had not been challenged and that I came in third in the whole state of Virginia . They never shared this with me. But I kept that infomation in my heart and soul and when people told me I could not do this, or when things were seemingly too hard, or when what I thought was different from others, I could bring up that piece of paper to decide to go on, to work harder, or to be different. Many children have been relegated to the educational trash bin because we think because they don’t learn in the ways in which we teach or currently test that they are not able to achieve.

    My first computer was given to me as a result of a contest that a student won. He was 4th grade and when I first met him they wanted to put him in special ed. He was unable to write well and so his essay tests were zero . But his articulation of ideas
    was excellent to me. He was a very frustrated child because he thought way above the level of many and kids often made fun of him and so he was , a bit testy.
    With the use of the computer, he blossomed, and began to write, to create essays and to enter contests. He won in a field of 4000 students a Prodigy contest on the environment.. and it was a stunning essay. I know he did it all himslef because I was
    there when he wrote the essay. I actually thought myself that it was .. well
    a bit heavy .. but I let him mail it. I shudder to think that this child who was not
    of color was being treated based on one deficit that was used as the ultimate measurement.

    When I taught G and T I taught all of the kids using the same methodology and did not label any of them. I know that there are students who have abilities which I might not be able to magnify or enlarge, but I did well. When technology entered as it did with that student, I decided that it was easy enough to individualize and to teach all students in the ways that we can with technology integration. Visualization and modeling and spatial thinking are important to this discussion.

    I am sure that you did not mean that IQ is inherited in the ways that it seemed from
    reflection. That’s an old tag that was given to populations based on misunderstandings.

    There are so many variables that are a part of helping students and engaging them
    in meaningful education that I worry that others will misunderstand . A helpful
    white paper is that of Henry Jenkins from MIT, but it is a very long reflection on the use of media in learning.

    As we move forward into learning , lets not assume that children can’t be taught and
    therefore increase their knowledge. Let’s examine the new ways in which we can meet their needs based on who they individually are. It is a hard job to do.

    A mentor of mine who might have been passed over, was George Lucas.
    Neither he or Einstein was a NCLB kind of student.

    Bonnie

  5. Don’t worry! I do not blog because I think I am always write, or because I am necessarily an expert in everything that I write about, and I do not always practice high journalist standards. I blog because I learn. I learn from people who agree with me, and I learn from people who do not. If it was all said in my blog, then there wouldn’t be the helpful and civil discussions that happened here yesterday.

    I blog to start conversations.

    Thanks everyone!

    — dave —

  6. Thanks for putting it out there and allowing those who are passionate to voice their ideas.

    I actually haven’t thought about this much and likely wont’ but know where there is a good conversation allows me to point other to places like this.

    As my wife reminds me and I’m learning, “you don’t have to have an opinion about everything!”

    Merry Christmas.

  7. I’m a Neuroscience PhD student at the Univ. of Michigan and thought i’d chime in. Intelligence is a very complicated issue, which most people agree IQ tests don’t measure very well. And, no child is ‘un-teachable’ (well, with exceptions for some extreme cases perhaps). That said, what we consider intelligence as measured by IQ is highly correlated to a person’s relations, suggesting a portion of it is genetic. However, a large portion of it is also environmental–that is, the type and quality of education a child receives. This type of research is rather taboo and rarely funded anymore due to the politics behind it–perhaps it is for the best this way. If you are interested in learning about the studies done, go to http://www.pubmed.com and search for IQ studies.

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