The good thing—or wait, is it the bad thing?—about taking an IQ test is that unlike with, say, trying to ace the Jeopardy! Daily Double or pass your driver’s test, studying will get you nowhere. Your cognitive capacity, say many researchers, is largely, though not entirely, determined early. If you’d only been thinking before you were born, you might have chosen different parents—from 40 to 80 percent of your intelligence is inherited. It’s not too late, however, to blame the mother and father you ended up with for raising you on Doritos, Velveeta, and Mountain Dew. Children, particularly males, who were breastfed until they were six months old and who dined on healthy foods as toddlers seem to have marginally higher IQs (as much as two points) at age eight.
Is it possible after the age of three to hike up your IQ? When I was a kid, one’s IQ was top secret—a God-given barometer of consequence that was known only to the authorities and inscribed on your Permanent Record. A few of my classmates claimed to have discovered their IQs—and guess what? Every one of them was genius material. (By the way, 140 is the cutoff for genius, but 160, reputed to be the IQ of Einstein, will qualify you to be a genius genius.) The rest of us worried that we were destined to be enduringly dumb, for back then, the conventional wisdom about wisdom was that your IQ was immutable—like your hair color (little did I know!). Today most scientists, though not all, believe that by regularly challenging yourself with a variety of novel and complex mental activities, and by living a drab life (exercise, meditation, ground flaxseed, etc.), it is possible to increase your IQ or at least improve your test-taking skills, if not your intelligence. Whether IQ is indeed a true measure of thinking ability and neural efficiency has stumped greater minds than mine. Bear this in mind, though: Cartoon celebrity Lisa Simpson has an IQ of 156, one point higher than the Rembrandts and Jonathan Swifts. I rest my case. Oh, wait—I unrest my case so that I can present one more item: My microwave is a Genius. I’m not bragging—that is Panasonic’s name for it, and anyway, yesterday it broke. I am replacing it with an LG LMH2016, which is probably a moron.
Another way to raise your IQ is to be born in the future. According to data collected since the test has been documented, the average IQ around the world has been increasing by about three points every decade, a phenomenon called the Flynn effect. Nobody knows for sure why this is so, though theories abound—healthier diets, more widespread schooling, greater familiarity with tests, smaller families, earlier maturation of children, etc. The explanation that James Flynn favors—and after all, it’s his effect—posits that society nowadays encourages more abstract problem-solving than in the past; to a great extent, this is the very facility that IQ tests measure. Take, for instance, the word similarities sub-test on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale. Flynn gives this example to demonstrate how our thought processes have changed over the years. To the question “What do dogs and rabbits have in common?” most respondents today would answer (correctly) that they are both mammals. Someone who lives in a less complicated world, however, might answer: “We use dogs to hunt for rabbits.” “The right answer,” Flynn writes in Are We Getting Smarter?: Rising IQ in the Twenty-First Century, “assumes that you are conditioned to look at the world in a certain way: through scientific spectacles—as something to be understood by classification; and not through utilitarian spectacles—as something to be manipulated to advantage.” Um, maybe. Still, don’t you think that second guy is a little stupid?
In any case, cramming for the Wechsler the night before will not give you an IQ higher than your cholesterol. But how could I resist? As a rehearsal for my psychometric ordeal, I decided to take my neurons on some trial runs by sampling several free online IQ tests. By free I mean that they cost money—not the tests per se, but the results (anywhere from $9.95 to fifty dollars, sometimes with bonus personality test included). A handful of outfits online offer the kit and caboodle without charge—and I completed as many of those questionnaires as I could tolerate. The items range from simple analogies (head is to hat as hand is to glove) to spatial puzzles that invite you to imagine reconstructing deconstructed polyhedra and then rotating them in order to determine which plane ends up next to which other plane, a task that makes my brain stand up and scream.
Please, whatever you do, don’t make me tell you again how I scored. If you’d like to revisit my humiliation, see the second page of the prologue.
The first time I was evaluated by a psychologist, I was about six. My parents were concerned because I still wet my bed. The psychologist watched me play with blocks and showed me some inkblots. He came to a conclusion: “In my judgment,” my parents say he said, “your daughter is lazy and will never get into a good college.”
This time an affable young woman in charge of psychological assessment at NYU School of Medicine at Bellevue Hospital would superintend. The process, she warned me in an e-mail, could last five hours. “Try not to worry too much,” she wrote after I sent her a worried note. “We will make it fun!” This made me more worried.
It was a four-hour undertaking, and not as agonizing as I’d expected, but what is? I wish I could disclose the test questions, but because the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale is copyright-protected, it was requested that I not reveal this information. Also, letting you in on what to expect would thereafter skew the average IQ upward, which would make me seem even more dim-witted (is it possible to have a negative IQ?), and that is something I need like a hole in my head. Another reason I can’t divulge the exact questions is that I forget what they are.
As long as you don’t tell on me I guess I won’t get in too much trouble by advising you to bone up on your block design. Also, it wouldn’t hurt to practice repeating series of numbers in reverse order—but you probably already do that. There’s also a mathematical game that looks like a Fisher-Price toy for eighteen-month-olds and involves strategically moving doughnut-shaped disks from one peg to another. In addition to these sorts of merriments, there is a seven-page personality test consisting of statements, a few of them startlingly kooky, to which one must respond (1) very true, (2) true, (3) somewhat true, (4) not very true, or (5) false. If you answer “very true” to the statement “Most people look forward to a trip to the dentist,” it means you are (1) high on nitrous oxide, (2) a dentist with a child in college, or (3) deliberately trying to foil the results. (The answer is 3, and this is typical of the sort of question planted in the IQ test to make sure you’re not answering honestly and to the best of your ability. So watch it.)
My apologies for this chapter’s anticlimax, but, just as I chose not to find out the results of my brain scans until undergoing the follow-up test, I will, no matter what my editor says, put off knowing my score as long as possible, or at least until my brain is wised up. In the meantime you might be interested to know that just now, when I took an online quiz in order to find out “what your name should be,” I was informed, “Tiffany is the best name for you. You’re charming and you rock those heels, girl!”
ANSWER:
Ethylene gas is what causes a banana to ripen. Bananas produce their own ethylene, but adding more causes them to ripen faster. Thus, after shipment, green bananas are often gassed with ethylene. Tomatoes, apples, and pears produce the hydrocarbon, which is why putting bananas in a bag with any of these fruits accelerates the ripening process. Thus the banana that hung out with the tomato is the ripest.
Killer Quiz
It’s time to test your assassination literacy. If you can’t figure out the directions to this quiz, deduct twenty-five points from your IQ.
ASSASSINATEE: Julius Caesar
ASSASSINATOR: (Two answers accepted)
ASSASSINATEE:
ASSASSINATOR: Charlotte Corday
ASSASSINATEE:
ASSASSINATOR: Gavrilo Princip
ASSASSINATEE:
ASSASSINATOR: Ramón Mercader
ASSASSINATEE: Lee Harvey Oswald
ASSASSINATOR:
ASSASSINATEE: Robert F. Kennedy
ASSASSINATOR:
ASSASSINATEE: Martin Luther King
ASSASSINATOR: (Alleged; two answers accepted)
ASSASSINATEE: John Lennon
ASSASSINATOR:
ASSASSINATEE:
ASSASSINATOR: Dan White
ASSASSINATEE:
ASSASSINATOR: Kristin Shepard (played by Mary Crosby)
Bonus question: Who didn’t kill Gerald Ford?
ANSWERS:
ASSASSINATEE: Julius Caesar
ASSASSINATOR: Marcus Junius Brutus, Gaius Cassius Longinus
ASSASSINATEE: Jean-Paul Marat
ASSASSINATOR: Charlotte Corday
ASSASSINATEE: Archduke Franz Ferdinand
ASSASSINATOR: Gavrilo Princip
ASSASSINATEE: Leon Trotsky
ASSASSINATOR: Ramón Mercader
ASSASSINATEE: Lee Harvey Oswald
ASSASSINATOR: Jack Ruby
ASSASSINATEE: Robert F. Kennedy
ASSASSINATOR: Sirhan Sirhan
ASSASSINATEE: Martin Luther King
ASSASSINATOR: Thought to be James Earl Ray or Loyd Jowers
ASSASSINATEE: John Lennon
ASSASSINATOR: Mark David Chapman
ASSASSINATEE: Harvey Milk
ASSASSINATOR: Dan White
ASSASSINATEE: J.R.
ASSASSINATOR: Kristin Shepard (played by Mary Crosby)
ANSWER TO BONUS QUESTION:
Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme
Chapter Six
My Brain Goes to Gym Class (But at Least It Doesn’t Have to Play Dodgeball)
Do I seem smarter than I did in chapter five? Since then I’ve spent untellable hours in front of my computer, challenged by earth-shattering problems like which tiles on the matrix were momentarily highlighted, how to maneuver a penguin through a constantly rotating maze, and how many more drills I must complete before I am smart enough to date Harold Bloom. If it were not for these distractions, dumb ol’ me could have finished writing chapter eleven by now.
Remember when video games were considered the pastimes of sketchy children, whose addiction, if left unchecked, could lead to a life of crime and poor eyesight? Now we call these games brain exercises and hope and trust that our digital exertions will make us as mentally agile as preteens wielding M27 assault rifles in Call of Duty: Black Ops II. They—the games, not the guns—are to mental health what kale and juice cleanses are to nutrition.
“Improve your brain performance,” beckons one online cognitive training website, “and live a better life.” “Achieve up to 1500% increase in brain function,” is the come-on from a “learning enhancement” outfit. Let’s be honest: Wouldn’t it be great if I could prescribe a regimen of computer workouts I’d devised and guarantee that if you played them ten minutes a day, you’d never ever have any mental boo-boos as long as you live and that you’d always remember the name of that lady you keep running into on the elevator? With more baby boomers reported to be afraid of losing their minds than of dying, the worried well—and also a few who aren’t doing so hot—spend more than a billion dollars a year on brain fitness. I’d be so rich! Er, what I mean is that helping others turn back their cognitive clocks would bring me immense joy.
Do these programs really work? Define work. Never mind. Nobody can agree on that anyway. What is beyond arguing about is that these games make you better at these games. Keep practicing Leap Froggies, and sooner or later you will become a pro at getting all the brown frogs to the rocks on the right side of the screen and all the green frogs to the rocks on the left side. OK, but what if your ambitions are loftier than successfully regrouping a bunch of animated amphibians? Will becoming super-duper at playing computer games translate to sharper overall cognitive performance? Will it enable you to differentiate Emma Watson from Emma Stone from Emma Roberts from Emma Woodhouse? Help you remember where you parked the car? Help you remember you don’t own a car? Provide you with the mental capacity to understand why there is more matter than antimatter in the observable universe? (See me if you know the answer. We can share the Nobel.) Moreover, will those benefits be long-lasting? Such is the hallowed mission of all brain game designers. You can answer either yes or no to these questions, and either way you will be in the company of reputable scientists.
There are studies that conclude exercising your brain makes you a more logical problem-solver and more capable multitasker, improves your short-term memory, boosts your IQ, delays mental decline by ten years, lowers your risk of an automobile crash, revs up skills that would make you a more reliable air traffic controller, tunes up your motor coordination so that you can perform laparoscopic surgery optimally, helps you manage physical pain, and makes you happier—and also sexier. (Not really about that last one.) Controlled studies have shown that after just ten hours of cognitive conditioning, gains can persist for as long as ten years. I have also read studies—and meta-studies—that dispute each of these studies, followed by critiques of those critiques.
One of the most influential studies (and one that has been both proven and disproven too many times for my little hippocampus to keep track of) was done in 2008 by Susanne Jaeggi and Martin Buschkuehl, who demonstrated that playing a certain memory game enhanced the player’s intelligence. The game in question was based on the n-back task. Subjects were shown a sequence of rapidly changing screens on which a blue square appeared in various positions. At the same time, a series of letters was recited to the group. The subjects were then asked whether the screen and/or letter matched the corresponding items from two cycles ago. Depending on the subject’s performance as the game progressed, the number of cycles he or she was asked to remember increased or decreased—hence the n in n-back. And you thought charades was hard to follow. Doesn’t this game sound like a barrel of laughs? Fun or otherwise, the longer the subjects played, claimed Jaeggi and Buschkuehl, the better they scored on tests that measured general intelligence.
A few years earlier, a researcher in Sweden, Torkel Klingberg, showed that children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) could become smarter if they played memory-augmenting computer games. I am mentioning Torkel Klingberg here because I love his name. Also, as you will see if you consult Google Images, he is very cute.
It was partly as a result of the n-back findings that many scientists started to believe that the wrinkly guck inside our skulls might be trainable. Given that supposition, we were a mere metaphor away from the proposal that we can have hunky brains if we just do a few exercises—not unlike the way you lift weights and do abdominal crunches to stay as buff and adorable as ever. This is not an unreasonable theory.
How come you can’t just do crosswords? To everyone who has solved today’s puzzle: Sorry, but this is no guarantee you will end up less nutty than the rest of us. Says Alvaro Fernandez, CEO of SharpBrains (the market research firm concerned with brain health, in case you’ve forgotten), “Once someone has done hundreds or thousands of puzzles, the marginal benefit tends toward zero because it becomes just another routine, easy activity—probably a bit more stimulating and effortful than watching TV, but not enough to bring benefits other than becoming a master at crossword puzzles.” If you’re practiced enough to know that auk is a diving seabird, it’s time to learn sign language or take up the tuba. The key to staying sharp, says Fernandez, is to challenge your brain continually with a variety of novel activities—in other words, become a serious dilettante.
Clues:
ACROSS:
1. Hey, you!
3. Up in the sky, look: It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s a bear.
6. Approximately when I’ll get there
8. The side of the ship you want to be on if you don’t want your hair to get messed up
11. You should have bought an apartment here a long time ago when all the artists lived here. Now you can’t afford even a latte in this district.
12. Ew! Gross! What happened to your eye? (And why are you spelling the disease with an e at the end?)
13. Where you are when y
ou’re puking from all that rolling, pitching, and yawing
DOWN:
2. A dagger from Ye Olden Days. One letter different from another word you don’t know (11 down).
4. Goddess whose children were swallowed by Cronus, who was her brother and husband. Awkward!
5. No matter how bad your memory is, this is something to remember
7. Nest for eagles who don’t have a fear of heights
9. Son of Seth; grandson of Adam. What, you don’t read the Bible? Then: The Dukes of Hazzard spin-off.
10. Holy moly!
11. Pirate in Peter Pan (see 2 down, if you feel like it)
ANSWERS:
Instead of games, then, why not invigorate your brain by playing bridge, becoming a chess master, curing a disease, or untangling your earphone cords? Because: Isn’t it easier just to pay $9.95 a month and push some buttons on the electronic device of your choice?
Yes.
Enter the entrepreneurs. Within the last few years, enough brain fitness products have been developed by neuroscience companies to give each of your synapses its very own personal training program. Here is a partial list of companies and programs: MindSparke, MyBrainSolutions, Brain Spa, brainTivity, Brainiversity, Brain Metrix, BrainHQ, Mind Quiz: Your Brain Coach, Brain Exercise with Dr. Kawashima, Nintendo’s Brain Age, Advanced Brain Technologies, Cogmed, Lumosity, MindHabits, NeuroNation, and HAPPYneuron. I predict that as long as there is a thesaurus, this list will grow.
Let's Be Less Stupid: An Attempt to Maintain My Mental Faculties Page 6
