From time to time, people have reasoned that if there is a correlation between brain size and intelligence, then larger cranial size (including a large forehead) should be correlated with greater intelligence. In the early 1820s, Samuel George Morton, an American natural scientist and physician began collecting human skulls and by 1851 his collection exceeded …
Does forehead size say anything about intelligence? Read More »
When we humans learn, we are gathering information that we add to our memory bank, changing incrementally our knowledge, skills, or attitudes. Programs that enable a computer to gather data to further advance its capabilities are said to produce “machine learning.” In this sense, machine learning is a reality. For example, in the May 1997 …
Is machine learning even a thing yet, or is it simply advertising? Read More »
IQ tests, like all tests, are approximate measures of knowledge or ability. The score of 92 was an outlier since it was the only score that was below the “normed” average of 100, and was probably taken on a day when you were not functioning at your best. The scores of 112 and 113 are …
It’s very difficult to assess someone’s intelligence over a short period of time, but the longer you observe that person, the more accurate will be your assessment. Here are some characteristics I have found in the very high IQ people I’ve met although these are, of course, generalizations that will have some counterexamples. High IQ …
In the 1940’s, psychologist Raymond B. Cattell attempted to create “culture-free” tests of intelligence. Believing that IQ tests contain implicit biases in favor of particular cultures, he sought to partition intelligence into two components–fluid and crystallized. He described fluid intelligence as “a capacity to perceive relations and educe correlates.” In essence, this is the capacity …
In 1904, Alfred Binet was the director of the psychology laboratory at the Sorbonne in Paris. The Minister of Public Education commissioned Binet to develop tests to identify less capable students who should be provided some form of special education. To this purpose, Binet set out to develop a series of tests connected to everyday …
English psychologist, Charles Spearman, tested 23 boys in a preparatory school near Oxford on a variety of achievement tests in each of: classics, French, English, mathematics, discrimination of pitch, and music. On analyzing the test results, he asked, “What pervasive cognitive faculty accounts for the fact that a student who does well on any of …
In 2005, Professor Larry Summers, President of Harvard University, stated, “The physicists in the top 25 universities in the US are probably 3.5 standard deviations above the mean IQ.” This equates to an IQ of 100 + 3.5 x 15 or 152.5. IQ is a reasonably good measure of the ability to think in abstract …
Can you become a brilliant theoretical physicist with an average IQ (95-105)? Read More »
