The IQ Booster

by Erwin Brecher PhD

Intelligence: the esoteric concept

It is universally accepted that knowledge and intelligence are the two most important elements for success in any field of human endeavour. There is no mystery about the former. The more you learn and retain in memory, the more you will know. Intelligence, in the widest sense, is an emotive issue. It is not only a highly controversial subject, but it is very little understood by the public at large.

Published material, under the heading of IQ or Intelligence is, in most cases, misleading, giving rise to the muddled thinking which pervades this particular discipline of psychology, leading to confusion in the reader’s mind between knowledge, memory and cognitive ability.

On the 27th.August 2007, the BBC televised a programme called Test the Nation with the subtitle The National IQ Test. This programme is another case of failure to understand the concept of Intelligence and its measurements. As an example of its shortcomings, the programme included a whole battery of test questions, expecting you to remember the sequence of colours in a geometrical design.

What is tested here is Memory, not Cognitive Ability which is another name for Intelligence. While memory is an important faculty, it is not correlated to Intelligence in any meaningful way. Indeed, individuals with exceptional powers of memory are often of very low intelligence. They are referred to as ‘Idiots Savants’. They can perform remarkable feats of memory. One blind man, with an IQ of 40, was able to play Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto after hearing it for the first time. Others can multiply two five-digit numbers in their heads and pronounce the product correctly after a few minutes. The most celebrated example is the identical twins George and Charles who could answer calendar questions spanning several millennia. Idiots Savants’ faculties are more prevalent in the autistic population and, apart from their signal - often bizarre -accomplishments, they do not help those who possess them in the taking of IQ tests. As a matter of fact, Idiots Savants generally perform very badly in such tests.

What then is the faculty generally referred to as Intelligence, which is one of the most researched concepts in Psychology? There are about as many definitions as researchers who have tried to define it, although the one proposed by Cyril Burt (1955) is probably the most concise: “Innate, general cognitive ability”. There is, however, a school of psychology that rejects the idea of an innate, that is genetic, element to Intelligence. According to its view, this intellectual faculty is wholly the product of the environment, including education and culture. The most prominent of these Environmentalists are Leon Kamin and Richard Lewontin, both eminent psychologists. They attack anyone who even suggests that there may be a genetic element in individual differences of cognitive ability. They maintain that such differences that do exist are primarily due to environmental factors. This is to deny Darwin’s theory of evolution which postulates that the transmission and evolution of inherited intelligence was the key to Man’s progress, that propelled humanity from Stone Age man who hunted with spears to Homo Sapiens who put men on the moon. Or do Kamin and Lewontin suggest that the environment for early man changed first, to be followed by intellectual progress? Indeed the heredity-environment, also referred to as nature-nurture, issue is at the heart of the controversy. The two most eminent proponents of the diametrically opposed views on intelligence are Professor H. J. Eysenck and Professor Leon Kamin. The forum of this debate is a book titled Intelligence: The Battle For The Mind. I have permission from both to quote freely from their book (which I do periphrastically, below), as part of offering my own contribution to the debate, which puts me firmly on Professor Eysenck’s side of the net.

In searching for evidence that genes play an important part in cognitive ability, it may be instructive to consider the concept of talent. Talented individuals are endowed with a special gift that few researchers will deny has a heritable component. Isn’t intelligence a kind of talent, the argument can be made, not that different from its more practical or creative kin?

Since the second half of the twentieth century, the heritability of cognitive talent has been accepted by the overwhelming majority of researchers. This is not to imply that performance in IQ tests depends solely on inherited ability. Environment certainly plays a part, though it seems easier to make that statement as a generality than it is to put numbers to the ratio between environment and genetics. There is no general agreement on the subject, although attempts have been made to find a scientific basis for such a ratio.

Historically, research into the relative contribution to cognitive performance of environment and genetic endowment has focused mainly on monozygotic (identical) twins who, for one reason or another, were reared apart in very different environments. Following IQ tests, the correlation was found to vary between 0.62 (Juel-Nielsen) and 0.75 (Jarvik and Jensen). Such research has tended to indicate that cognitive ability is substantially heritable, and that environmental conditions have relatively little influence on intellectual performance. However, don’t let us lose sight of the fact that Intelligence is a psychological concept, while IQ test scores are merely statistical constructs and as such are not infallible.

The notion of devising a method for measuring intelligence was first considered in 1869 by Francis Galton, scientist and cousin of Charles Darwin. The challenge was then taken up by Alfred Binet, a French biologist, and others. Their efforts led to the development of the so-called Stanford-Binet tests.

As flawed as they are, IQ tests are nevertheless useful tools to measure relative cognitive ability among members of a particular group. They do not constitute a sound foundation for any theory of supposed superiority or inferiority among different groups. These can be abused for sinister causes, such as Eugenics, a term coined by Francis Galton, suggesting that mankind could be improved by selective, state-controlled breeding, a theory used by the Nazis to justify and support their racist programme. Even less can IQ tests be used to differentiate between nations, as researchers from the University of Vienna alleged. It was reported in an article of the Sunday Times (21/12/03) that these academics compiled a league table of 50 countries, comparing their average IQ, listing Hong Kong as number one with an average IQ of 107, Japan as third (105), the UK as 11th (100) and the United States as 17th (98).

While a representative sample of Japanese is conceivable, this is hardly possible for the UK on account of its ethnic mix which is constantly shifting due to immigration and the exodus of Britons who become expatriates. It would be all the more difficult for Americans who are even less of a homogenous community. This would require a very large and carefully selected representative sample, taking account of the ethnic composition of the U.S.

To make matters worse, the media seem to have a particular gift for confusing knowledge and intelligence. Take, just as one recent example, a series running currently on BBC2, which started on 28th July 2008, with the pretentious and misnomered title Battle of the Brains; misnomered because calling it that instead of Battle of the Minds Filled With Useless Trivia would be unlikely to attract an audience. In fact it is an inferior version of University Challenge, testing knowledge in a number of categories, including Science, Technology and Sport. A typical question was to name the 39 Wimbledon men’s singles winners between 1945 and 2008. Or how about the programme’s attempt to probe contestants’ deep understanding of music by asking them how many tickets were sold for a specific concert?

The bottom line is that the notion of an “average IQ” is somewhat meaningless, as an anecdote from one of my books will illustrate:

Problem:
In the city of Westminster, England, there are three schools for bright students. However the headmasters for the age group 13-14 were not satisfied with the average IQ scores achieved by their students. One of the headmasters suggested that the school hire a psychometrician to try and raise the IQ test performance of their classes. Professor Metcalfe answered their advertisement and the following terms were agreed: If the professor failed to raise the average IQ score of each class within three months, there would be no charge. If he succeeded, he would receive a fee of £10.000. After three days, he proved to the headmasters that he had succeeded. The schools paid as agreed, but felt cheated. Why?

Solution:
The professor found an easy solution. The average IQ in class “A” was 120, in class “B” 115 and in class “C” 110. Metcalfe’s recommendation was to transfer one student from class “A” with an IQ of 118 to class “B” and one student with an IQ of 113 from class “B” to class “C”. This simple arrangement raised the average IQ score in each class.

At any rate, a league table of the countries with the greatest achievements in Science and Technology would almost certainly not be in the order of average ratings. The movers and shakers in any society come from the upper IQ regions, which represent the intellectual elite.

Test sophistication

IQ tests, in a wide variety, have become an integral part of academic and professional competence assessment. Test sophistication is defined as the extent to which a person has had experience with IQ tests, therefore is aware of the general nature of these tests and has acquired a technique which will give such test-wise individuals an advantage over those who are unfamiliar with the practice.

Test sophistication is an important phenomenon, and at first glance seems to contradict our view that the innate element of intelligence cannot be enhanced by acquiring technique. It should not be thought of as a mental exercise, akin to training for a four-minute mile which actually improves your speed. Getting acquainted with problem-solving routines is more in the nature of acquiring improved dexterity in the use of a tool, without widening the range of applications for which it is designed.

Think of intelligence as a tool which, within its range of applications, can be used to perform either ineptly or conversely, efficiently. By way of analogy, assume that you would like to trim your hedge using ordinary garden shears. If you have never tried before you will do a mediocre job, probably taking longer than you should, and the edges will not be as straight as you would have hoped. If, on the other hand, you have been trained in the use of the tool, you will do a better job in half the time. However, and this is the relevant point, you will never be able to cut your fingernails with the shears.

The importance of acquiring test sophistication is shown statistically in the table below, which has been compiled from readers' replies to the book The IQ Booster published by Random House.

Readers’ results from using The IQ Booster:

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