Old-old fairy tales in a modern presentation would begin like this: "… and he had three sons: two smart, and the third - with a low IQ …", So with the light hand of Hans Eysenck, who wrote in the forties of the XX century a test for measuring the IQ, the world, when characterizing smart and stupid people, has been enriched by another neologism, synonym and euphemism in one term - IQ - the amount of intelligence.
The beginning of all beginnings
The first tests to measure intelligence were written by Hans Eysenck as part of a Nazi project that involved the creation of a race of impeccable people - beautiful, intelligent and genetically perfect. At that time, biologists and chemists in Germany, Italy and Japan had already begun genetic experiments on humans. In several anatomical laboratories, he conducted experiments with the human brain and Ay-Zenk, wanting to understand whether the size and weight of the brain affects the mental abilities of a person. He believed that each age has its own norms of intellectual development, and this idea became the basis for the development of the test. Astrological knowledge, which Eysenck began to "absorb" back in the thirties, also came in handy. Few people know that Eysenck corresponded with famous astrologers of Europe and America,he compiled horoscopes for the elite of the Third Reich with his own hand and, just before the outbreak of World War II, sent letters to Goebbels and Himmler with their individual astrological charts to the Reichstag.
For persistent search for an "intelligent meter" colleagues nicknamed Eysenck "human thermometer." And after 10 years, the IQ test has become wildly popular in Europe, and its author has become a celebrity. Everything was measured by intelligence: both in offices and in a friendly circle.
Eysenck's test, which allows people to be divided into groups as possible to perceive, remember, think logically and quickly respond to an event, contains several sections, each of which "scans" thinking abstract, verbal, figurative, etc. The results of the subtests are summed up, and as a result the average value of the amount of intelligence is returned. This means that a person with phenomenal imaginative thinking and not at all outstanding logical, according to the general characteristic of IQ, is a completely ordinary person.
Among famous people, the highest IQ of the great Albert Einstein - 200 points (according to other sources - 160).
Experts have calculated the IQ of great people of the past. Goethe - 200, Newton and Voltaire - 190, Galileo - 185, Franklin - 160, Leonardo da Vinci - 150, Bach and Darwin - 140, Copernicus - 130. Our contemporaries - chess player Garry Kasparov - 190, programmer, businessman Bill Gates - 160, and former US President George W. Bush - 91.
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A normal level of 10, which ranges from 86 to 114, is possessed by 50% of people. IQ from 115 to 124 units. - intelligence above the norm, 125-134 units. - high level, more than 135 - genius. For example, the average IQ of Nobel laureates is 155-165 units.
IQ countdown from 0 units to 19 indicates dullness, 20-36 units. - lack of reason, 69 - 85 units. - close to normal. In world legal practice, there is a case when, by a court decision on custody, a resident of Britain is officially prohibited from having sex. The reason for the ban was the fact that a man's IQ is only 48 points. The court found that the man has too high sexual desire, but he does not understand the nature of sex and does not understand the consequences of having sex. So, according to Alan, children are brought by a stork or they are found under a bush, and sex can lead to the appearance of acne and a rash on the body. Initially, the defense offered to assign Alan a course of sex lessons,however, the judge refused the initiative and ordered to teach him only a course in sexual knowledge (that is, without a practical guide). Given the spirit of the Anglo-Saxon legal system, this verdict should raise concerns among 4 million Britons. An IQ of less than 50 points is recorded in about 10% of the world's population, and in the UK - in 4 million out of 61 million citizens. The precedent created by the British court can be applied by other courts.
What is intelligence?
Many scientists have tried to answer this question, but there is still no definite answer. To put it simply; intellect is the ability of a person, on the basis of the knowledge and capabilities inherent in him, to cognize and solve a problem in the shortest possible time. Eysenck, for example, identified three types of intelligence: biological, which is understood as the physical superiority of one person over another; psychometric, which is determined by standard tests measuring intelligence quotient (IQ), and social (or practical) - the ability to correctly understand human behavior.
But the famous American science fiction writer Isaac Asimov described his understanding of intelligence in his autobiography:
“When I was in the army, I was given a test that all other soldiers received, and I scored 160 points against the usual 100. No one had ever scored such indicators at the base before, and they made a fuss around me for a couple of hours, (But that's okay The next day I continued to be an ordinary private).
All my life, I kept scoring points that gave me a smug feeling that I was very smart and, as I expected, other people had to think so too.
While it may be that these metrics simply mean that I'm only good at answering academic questions that the people who wrote the assignments saw fit to include in the tests, people with intellectual inclinations similar to mine?
For example, I had a familiar car mechanic who, according to my estimates, in intelligence tests, would not have scored even eighty. I've always taken it for granted that I am much smarter than him.
Nevertheless, when something was wrong with my car, I drove to him, fascinatedly watched him digging into the insides of my car, and listened to his advice, as if it were the revelations of an oracle, and he always brought my car in order.
Then I thought this car mechanic might come up with his own intelligence test.
Or, say, a carpenter, or a farmer, or anyone other than an academic. And I would fail on every test they developed.
In a world where I could not apply my academic education and my talents of eloquence, and where I would have to work with my hands, in this world, I think I would be capable of little.
Thus, my intellect is not an absolute, but a function of the society in which I live, and a given that a small part of society has imposed a model on everyone, where they are the arbiter of the definition of intellectuality.
However, back to our auto mechanic. He had a habit, every time he sees me, to tell me jokes and joke. One day, he raised his head from the depths of the car, and said: “Doc, listen, the deaf and dumb guy went to the hardware store to buy nails. He put two fingers on the counter and made a movement with the other hand, as if hammering. The salesman brought him a hammer. He shook his head and pointed to two fingers, which he hit like a hammer. The salesman brought him nails. He took nails of the right size and left. Well, the next guy who walked into the store was blind. He needed scissors. How do you think he showed what he needed?"
Looking bored, I showed the cutting motion of the scissors with two fingers.
Then my auto repairman laughed hoarsely and said: “What are you, doc, stupid. He just asked for them in a voice."
Then he said with a satisfied look: "I am telling this joke today to all my clients." “Well, have you got anyone?” I asked. "Just a few," he replied, "but I knew for sure that you would be caught."
“Why is that?” I asked. Because you, Doc, are bloody educated, and I knew you couldn't be too smart.
I remember at that moment I felt uncomfortable."
Both geniuses and outcasts
How self-critical the great science fiction writer is, the scientists are so categorical: they believe: the higher the IQ, the smarter its owner. But there is a joke about this: high scores on Eysenck's test do not indicate a person's intelligence, but only about his ability to pass IQ tests well. The test has nothing to do with practical intelligence or creativity. And if we talk about career growth, then even more so. The world's highest IQ scores on standard tests belong to two women. One of them, a resident of Great Britain, a displaced person from Bulgaria and a mother of three children Daniela Simidcheva in 2004 was recognized as the smartest … unemployed planet! Her IQ (about 200) is comparable to that of the Nobel laureate Marie Curie. She is qualified as Electrical Engineer, Manufacturing Engineer and English Teacher,plus five master's degrees, but could not find a job either in her native Bulgaria or abroad. Employers were horrified at the sight of her resume. The arrogant British did not even trust the Bulgarian emigrant to clean the apartment. “Bosses don't like smart subordinates. Even in those days when I had a job, the biggest salary I received did not exceed $ 150 a month,”Daniela complained about her life.
At the same time, experts from Ohio University tried to find out the relationship between mental abilities and the well-being of American citizens, and that's what they did. So, for example, the financial assets of people with IQ 105 turned out to be more than those of those with IQ 110-115 points, credit card debt for people with an average IQ (90-115 points) is often several times higher than for those whose indicators do not exceed 75 units. The group with especially large debts also included those with a high level of intelligence - more than 120 points.
However, although IQ points cannot be converted and money, they still affect the size of the owner's salary, each extra point allows Americans to earn several hundred dollars more. So, according to experts, one unit of the IQ scale "above the norm" brings its owner from $ 202 to $ 616 per year, and thus the annual income of intellectuals (those with IQs over 130 points - this, by the way, is only 2% of the population USA) is 6-18 thousand dollars higher than the salaries of the owners of average IQ indicators.
In this regard, a somewhat paradoxical situation is created: while receiving more money, intellectually developed Americans do not put it in a piggy bank and remain at the same financial level as everyone else. Perhaps this is due to the ability to manage money.
Intelligence and money
Eysenck wrote that in order to achieve success in life, perseverance and high motivation must be applied to high IQ. A person with high intelligence, but devoid of perseverance, runs the risk of spending his whole life waiting for "his hour".
To be successful, you need to know your business well and be a great expert in solving a certain type of problem, without throwing your all-round intelligence to other areas. Here are some examples. Bill Gates is an expert in solving the problem of marketing software. He is such a good specialist that even the federal government is inferior to him. Donald Trump is a real estate specialist, Warren Buffet is on business and stock markets, Rupert Murdoch is on the global television network, and George Soros is unmatched when it comes to the challenges of changing the market.
It is curious that not every person makes every effort, even during routine IQ tests, Angela Lee Duckworthyz at the University of Pennsylvania (USA) were interested in studies in which people were offered monetary rewards for taking the test. The size of the prize was very different - from a few cents to tens of dollars. The result of the impact of monetary rewards on IQ was almost 10 points more than usual, not premium. Moreover, the IQ increased according to the size of the reward: if the participants in the experiment were offered more than $ 10, the increase in IQ was approximately 20 points.
Then the scientists took up the analysis of a study conducted in the late eighties among more than five hundred boys from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The average age of the group was 12.5 years. The experiment was filmed, so that the signs of boredom on the faces and in the behavior of the participants in the experiment were easy to notice (children yawned, put their heads on the table, looked around). When the average age of the participants in the experiment reached 24 years old, the organizers asked about half of them about education and career. These data allowed Ms. Duckworth and her colleagues to show the relationship between motivation and the accuracy of predicting the success of the future life of boys. It turned out that the IQ results obtained 12 years ago, and the behavior of the children recorded during testing on video, speak not only about the level of intelligence development, but also about howhow badly a person wants to be successful. “It is important to judge a child not only by his mind, but also by the desire to do this or that work,” emphasizes Ms. Duckworth.
How to get smarter
A person uses only 10 percent of the brain. Research shows that we use almost the entire brain, but this is not always the case.
A group of American scientists from Vanderbilt University stated that both hemispheres of the brain are used more often by musicians than by people of other professions. The researchers selected 20 students who had studied classical music for at least eight years, and 20 students in a psychology course who had never studied music. As a result, it turned out that musicians performed better on assignments than psychologists. In addition, in musicians both hemispheres of the brain were more often active, and in non-musicians - the activity of the left hemisphere, which is responsible for abstract and logical thinking, prevailed. This phenomenon is possibly due to the fact that musicians use both hands at once when playing musical instruments and read notes, which requires the work of not only the left, but also the right hemisphere, which is responsible for spatial, imaginative thinking and creative processes. In addition, measurements of general IQ have shown that musicians have a higher IQ (10) than non-musicians.
Scientists have noticed that the less a person implements the capabilities of the brain, the faster, especially after 40 years, memory fading occurs. Moreover, its loss is inevitable. However, by training the brain, this process can be slowed down or stopped. And if you believe the scientists from the Center for Neuroimaging at University College London, who argue that the development of human intelligence continues throughout life and your mental abilities can be significantly improved, then your soul will become quite easy and you just have to follow their advice: constantly exercise your brain. The best situation is for children and adolescents, whose brain is in a state of constant training thanks to school. If they continue to engage in mental work further, their intelligence will only improve, scientists say. As for teenagers,which in the course of IQ tests showed not very good results, then they may simply not have reached the peak of their development. As the head of this scientific project, Professor Katie Price, said, a failed test of 10 is not yet a reason to register as losers, although there are plenty of obstacles to increasing the intelligence of adolescents.
One of them - "drancorexia" - a new adolescent disease. 16% of adolescents limit their intake of calories from food for the sake of "alcoholic" calories. According to young people, this helps them lose weight, and, of course, girls most often use this tactic. Depriving the brain of adequate nutrition and drinking a lot of alcohol can lead to both short-term and long-term problems, including difficulty concentrating, learning and making decisions, according to scientists from the University of Missouri.
Another type of Drancorexia was reported in a 14-year-old Chinese teenager from Yibin City, Sichuan Province. To “accumulate energy and become a valiant warrior”, like the heroes of the Transformers saga, the boy drank petrol every day from the age of nine. Initially, he consumed fuel from lighters, which he stole from a store owned by the family. Over time, I switched to a family motorcycle. Upon learning of the son's addictions, the parents locked the motorcycle, but the boy secretly began to drain gas from a neighboring vehicle. The teenager drank two or three bottles of gasoline a day. The parents went to the doctors. Experts found a teenager's strong dependence on gasoline, which not only physically undermined the body, but also became the cause of mental illness. Ever since the boy started using gasolinehis IQ has dropped significantly and today he is unable to perform simple computational operations. He used to be a very smart child, he could even fix the TV in the house, and now he cannot add 7 and 17 in his mind.
When wisdom comes
As you know, the human brain, as well as its activity, are fraught with many mysteries that scientists have been trying to solve for quite a long time and have achieved some success.
So, scientists from the University of Montreal found that the human brain begins to work most productively and efficiently after the age of 55. To find a way out of a difficult situation, the brain of young people goes through all possible options, which often leads to confusion in the head. In older people, it works in a special mode - in a difficult situation it returns to the starting point and acts very accurately. From this, scientists concluded that it is from the moment a person reaches 55 years of age that the human brain begins to work more efficiently, and it is from this age that wisdom comes to us.
The century matters
However, the level of intelligence is directly related to the size of the brain. The greater its mass and size, the higher the IQ and the better spatial thinking, say Canadian scientists. The brain of an average adult male weighs 1424 g, by old age, the brain mass decreases to 1395 g. The record weight of a male brain is 2049 g. The largest female brain by weight is 1565 g. Turgenev weighed in 2012.
Old age is a joy
The link between IQ and aging was identified by experts from the British Council for Medical Research. The mortality rate of people who were associated with mental work throughout their lives was, in their opinion, four times lower compared to those whose brains were not under severe stress. The researchers emphasize that it is the constant intellectual load that plays a role here, and not just a high IQ.
Appearance: the path to success
The widespread myth of stupid beauties and handsome men was dispelled by specialists from the London School of Economics. They found that people with more attractive appearance, more often than their less attractive relatives, achieve academic success and climb the career ladder faster. Moreover, according to experts, the IQ of a handsome male half of the British population is 13.6% higher than that of his less attractive brother. And the IQ of an attractive representative of the fair half of the British is 11.4% higher than that of the average resident of this country. Trying to find an explanation for such strange statistics, scientists suggested that the whole point is that beautiful and intellectually developed people are more likely to attract others like themselves. Moreover, children in such couples usually inherit from their parents and mind,and a brilliant appearance.
The secret connection between IQ and hip size
The female figure can tell about intelligence, American scientists are sure. They studied the mental abilities of more than 16 thousand of the fair sex. It turned out that a good figure - with a narrow waist and wide hips - is associated with good intelligence. “The more a woman has a difference between her hips and waist, the higher her IQ,” the researchers say. And they associate this with acids from the omega-3 family, which accumulate in the thighs and have a positive effect on intelligence - not only of a woman, but also of her unborn child.
Irish professor Richard Linnprofessor has proved that women’s IQ level is, on average, 5 points lower than that of men. Such a statement caused a lot of gossip, because it turns out that a man, albeit not much, is smarter than a woman. However, stories are known for several women whose intelligence was many times greater than that of men. For example, one of the highest IQ levels was demonstrated by Marilyn Mach Voe Savant from Missouri, who at the age of ten already had an average IQ for 23-year-olds. The officially confirmed IQ level was recorded at 228 units. She manages to pass the most difficult test for joining the privileged Mega Society, which includes only about three dozen people who have such a high IQ that only 1 person in a million has!
There are legends about the actress Sharon Stone, whose IQ is considered one of the highest among celebrities (according to various sources, it ranges from 140 to 160 points). And the top models from Slovenia managed to debunk the myth about the stupidity of beautiful women. Local television invited Iris Mulej, finalist of the Slovenia 2002 competition, to participate in a talk show that was about the stupidity of models. However, during the filming, it turned out that the girl's IQ is higher than that of the famous nuclear physicist, scientific consultant of the program, and is 156 points.
Yet scientists continue to insist on the mental superiority of men.
Who is the smartest?
Korean resident Kim Ung-Yong has an IQ of 210 and is officially recognized as the smartest person on the planet. Kim Ung-Yong is listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the smartest person in the world. His extraordinary abilities began to manifest themselves in early childhood. At six months he began to speak, at one year he could already communicate freely, at three years old he already read fluently not only in his native language, but also in English, German, Japanese. As a child, he began to write poetry and proved himself to be a great artist.
At the age of three, Kim Ung-Yong gave his first interview, and from the age of four to seven he attended classes at the university as a free listener. At the age of seven, the boy and his family, at the invitation of the American Space Agency, moved to the United States, where, after graduating from the University in Colorado, he received a Ph. D. in physics and began working at NASA.
The list of the smartest people on the planet also includes Judith Polgar (IQ 170) - chess grandmaster, Stephen Hawking (IQ 160) world famous theoretical physicist, Garry Kasparov (IQ 190) - world chess champion, Philip Emegwapi (IQ 190) - inventor, engineer and geologist.
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The most intelligent child in the world, the Guinness Book of Records recognized the nine-year-old Egyptian Mahmoud Wail Mahmoud, who has the highest absolute IQ among his peers and is able to perform complex arithmetic operations with multi-digit numbers in his mind at the speed of a computer. As the experiment showed, the young genius has already surpassed all famous Egyptian scientists in terms of quick wits and speed of solving complex mathematical problems.
And in 2011, 11-year-old British Victoria Covey was admitted to the international organization Mensa (the most famous organization for people with a high IQ), having passed an IQ test with a score of 162 points - more than Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates! This result puts her on the first place in the list of the smartest people in Britain.
In 2006, Professor Richard Lynn published in The Times the results of his global research on intellectual intelligence (IQ) among Europeans. According to the indicators, the first place was shared by the Germans and the Dutch (107). This was followed by Poles (106), Swedes (104) and Italians (102). The Serbs are at the bottom of the list, gaining only 89 "intellectual points".
If we consider all the inhabitants of the globe, then the Japanese will be the winners. They have the highest national average IQ in the world at -111. 10 percent of Japanese have a score above 130.
A quarter of a century ago, the scientific world was shocked by the sensational discovery of the New Zealand sociologist James Flynn, who recorded a progressive increase in the average statistical indicators of intelligence throughout the world over the previous half century. Humanity literally grows smarter every year - today's young people are smarter than their fathers and much smarter than grandfathers. Over the past 50 years, the average IQ of the inhabitants of the Earth has grown by 12 points.
It should be noted that the IQ level significantly in the process of evolution is influenced by the climate: the northern peoples were often forced to overcome difficult climatic conditions in order to survive. In addition, the location of the countries suggests that the northerners have always ate more animal food, which consists entirely of protein - and this also significantly influenced the development of their intelligence in the process of evolution. Residents of Southeast Europe consume fewer proteins, minerals and vitamins, which are necessary for brain development.
Lynn's research has shown that, for example, metropolitan residents are somewhat smarter than their provincial fellow citizens. This is due not at all to differences in ecology or the pace of life, but to the fact that urbanization, which is gaining every year, attracts the best minds to the capitals. It turns out that the number of geniuses per square meter is higher there.
However, recent research by scientists warns: the power of the human mind has reached its peak and we can no longer physically become smarter. In order to become smarter, any human brain needs a huge amount of additional energy and oxygen, which we simply cannot provide it. It is quite risky to make predictions for the distant future, but it is clear that intelligence has severe limitations.
V. Kopytkov. “Interesting newspaper. The world of the unknown"