Intelligence Theories XI

 It's a category error to lump all these together and to call them intelligence. Professor Gardner is convinced we have at least eight relatively separate intelligences. This is completely opposite to IQ which assumes that we all have just one general intelligence. So you might be wonderful at understanding other people but a disaster at doing crossword puzzles or flying an airplane. So we do know that an individual's high-performance in one area simply doesn't predict high performance in other areas.
 Horizon put its line-up of high-flyers through Professor Gardner's new intelligence tests to see if the outcome would be any different to the standard IQ tests. But there's no agreed system for measuring them.

This could be a drawback for Professor Gardner's approach but he still defends the value of non-academic intelligences. Wow this collapsed. Football players may well not be scholastically intelligent and so they don't do well in a school with reading and writing and so on. If we lived in a non-literate society the people who do well in school would not emerge at all and perhaps people who are good at football would be better hunters and better strategists about survival and then we'd be calling them smart.
 And the people who had the potential to read and write would be irrelevant because there'd been no reading and writing there. Based on the combined outcomes of the IQ tests and the newer intelligence tests the results should reveal who has the most mental flexibility and all-round intelligence. Tied equal in third place fighter pilot Gary and musical prodigy Alex.
In second place IQ specialist Nathan. And in first place an interesting tie. One of the winners did fantastically well on the standard IQ test but the other one wasn't even in the IQ test top three. Taken across all the tests quantum physicist Seth Lloyd shared higher scores with dramatist Bonnie Greer. Horizon's assessment of the experts show that the IQ test only identifies a very particular type of intelligence. It couldn't predict how good someone would be at a wider ranging set of skills. But the IQ test hasn't been consigned to the history books just yet. It might not pinpoint everyone's unique intelligence type but it has turned out to be useful in a way no-one could have predicted. You have minutes to do the test OK? OK. Write the three letters between A and E. And cross out of the middle one. Bill and Davina are years old. This is the second time they've done this test. If H comes before K write X unless S comes before Q...
 The first time was in when every -year-old in Scotland was put through an intelligence test. The results were rediscovered recently in an Edinburgh basement. If you want to know how our intelligence changes as we get older these results are a potential goldmine. We've brought hundreds of people back and we got them to sit the exact same test they had sat when they were aged . Now these people were now or years old. We gave the same instructions we gave the same test and we gave the same time limit.

It was a little stickier than I thought it would be. I walked through it quite happily quite honestly. I felt I must have been very bright at if I sat that exam and passed. There were some intriguing results. Almost everyone had a better score at than they did at . But some had gone from being just averagely intelligent to a much higher level. Now that's what really drives our research. Why are those people who've gone from IQ at age up to or ? What have they done right? What can be the recipe for successful ageing?
We're finding that the person with more education even though they had the same IQ in childhood is doing slightly better in old age on average. The person who had a more professional job in old age is doing slightly better on average than the person who had a manual job despite the fact that they started at the same level. The people who smoked have got slightly less good mental ability than you would expect. What's even more remarkable is that the kids who had higher IQ scores at are the very ones still alive today. So it seems high IQ in childhood is good for survival. Maybe an IQ score is a record of how well wired together your brain is and that might highly speculative that might be associated with how well wired up the rest of your body is. But if our intelligence can increase as we grow older can we go one step further and boost it artificially? Marcus du Sautoy investigated one technique.