Grey power: Battle of the brains
By Dick Taylor BBC Horizon
Is David Beckham intelligent? Perhaps he is. Is he intelligent in the same way as Stephen Fry? Perhaps not.
The problem with intelligence has been to find ways of fairly assessing both types – and many others.
Try these two questions:
How do you define “fallacy”?
If I say to you a random series of 9 numbers, for example: 7, 4, 8, 7, 3, 6, 6, 2, 5, can you repeat them back to me in reverse order?
These are typical of questions found in an IQ test and for some experts your performance on questions like these says an awful lot about how intelligent you are.
Can this be right? Can intelligence really be measured by tests like these? Well, it has been for more than 100 hundred years, ever since Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon started testing French school children in 1905.
But some experts, like Professor Howard Gardner from Harvard University, are now suggesting that it is time to move on.
“The IQ tests a lot of old knowledge, academic knowledge and skills, but nothing about whether you will actually do anything in the world,” he observed.
Testing time
The Horizon programme took seven people who are all experts in their own field and put them through a range of “intelligence” tests.
We had Quantum physicist Seth Lloyd; ex-Wall Street Trader Nathan Haselbauer, who runs the International High IQ society; musical prodigy Alex Prior; artist Stella Vine; RAF fighter pilot Garry Stratford; international chess grandmaster Susan Polgar and dramatist/critic Bonnie Greer.
The IQ-type tests produced predictable results. The IQ expert and Quantum physicist came out on top.
But what about “creativity”? It is not really tested by an IQ test.
Robert Sternberg, from Tufts University, Boston, maintains it’s essential: “Creativity was a tool for the high flyers – the Einsteins, the Darwins, the Newtons. But now the world has changed so much that creativity is now a vital part of intelligence for everyone”
We assessed creativity by using a test developed in the 60s: “Name as many uses as you can for a sock in 10 minutes.”
The results were interesting. One of the high scorers on the IQ performed poorly; the other, extremely well. The creatives in our group also did very well, as you would expect.
The intriguing thing about this “alternative uses” test is that it is not just the number of alternative uses that count, it is the originality of them and the extravagance of the description that also count.
So a sock that could be used as a “bikini bottom, tied on with string – provided you were waxed – and that you were daring”, suggested by Bonnie Greer, gets a good score.
So the test is also looking for “playfulness”. Is that intelligence?
We also tested “emotional intelligence”. The results were very surprising.
Professor Jack Mayer, from the University of New Hampshire, and others maintain that our ability to recognise what other people are going through, why they change from one emotion to another and also to understand what we ourselves are feeling, are aspects of intelligence. If we are good at it we will prosper.
It is the oddness of the tests that put some people off. When shown a picture of pebbles on a beach how much happiness do you feel on a scale of one-to-five?
We thought we had picked some highly emotional intelligent people amongst our seven guinea pigs. According to the tests, we were wrong.
Is there a view of intelligence that would put Beckham and Fry on an equal footing? Howard Gardner’s controversial theory of multiple intelligences fits the bill.
According to Gardner we all have at least 8 types of intelligence – one of them being “bodily intelligence”.
Unfortunately, David Beckham was unavailable somewhere between Madrid and Hollywood. But in our test, the artist beat the fighter pilot!
Horizon: Battle of the Brains is on Tuesday 17 April at 2100 BST on BBC Two
Source: BBC
I can’t wait for them to show this in the US
Well, points for the loudest jacket, or has PT been on the Photoshop Sauce again 🙂
I’m sure that brain-ability, which may or may not be the same as ‘intelligence’, is multidimensional.
Abilities to imagine, champion, inspire, lead seem not to be the same as abilities to analyse, argue logically, quantify.
Also, people vary in their ability to think ‘under pressure’, in realtime like sportsmen, or in examinations. Some actually respond positively, others negatively.
It would also be unintelligent not to be comfortable with oneself, as ‘one’ is the only person ‘one’ cannot get away from. Therefore, it’s important to know what you know and what you do not know.
It will be an interesting program.
For anyone who is interested:
Kasparov accused of promoting extremism in radio broadcast
CHESS grandmaster Garry Kasparov now faces investigation by the Russian intelligence service, the FSB, for promoting “extremism” in a radio interview just before his arrest at a bloody weekend democracy protest in Moscow.
http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=586722007
I think what happened to him was just the INITIAL ARRREST – they will arrest him again and take away his passport – next time for much longer.
Do you want to know if you are smart or not? check this website:
http://www.iqtest.dk/main.swf and do the test!.I did IQ=144 just five minutes ago and It will be good for you to answer quickly the first questions,saving time,because the last ones are really difficult!
Just seen the program! Nice painting of a chess board, Susan 🙂
lsur
An interesting programme, and a novel way of investigating the very slippery subject of what ‘intelligence’ is. I’ve just had some fun with some students investigating what ‘commonsense’ is – perhaps the other side of the coin. Anyone who can should try to catch this programme.
SP, you did well to shut out the unhelpful input of the upside-down glasses quickly and you were on the podium on that one test.
But otherwise, I was surprised that you tackled the other challenges so literally, not searching for higher-power, more abstract ideas to approach the problems in different ways.
Bonnie, the co-‘winner’, the ‘most intelligent’ in that she adapted most readily to the range of challenges, said [in the follow-up discussion] that she succceeded best when she ‘set her mind free’, when she stopped trying to direct it consciously.
Maybe that unconscious ability is the best ability there is, and maybe that’s what you, SP, have at the chessboard.
There’s is or was an established view that there was a correlation between abilities in chess, mathematics and music – because of the abstract content.
The mind is an extraordinary thing, and works in mysterious ways [as events today have tragically demonstrated.]
Perhaps the most intelligent thing is to be self-aware, to know what one is good at, and what not.
I feel less confident that an ability in chess implies an ability in other fields.
However, there’s a message that if you are good at something, you should leverage that ability as much as you can. Which might mean in this case “Focus on chess, grow the chess market and sell more books and DVDs.”
Good luck – g
An extraordinarily bad programme designed to ‘prove’ the BBC’s half-baked theories about its own self-worth as a reservoir of highly gifted people, because they have ‘creativity’. They are in fact a bunch of ignorant, bigotted people who are too thick and unimaginative to be able to present any complex issue with clarity, objectivity, and depth. Null points.