A forum for discussion ideas
Yes, personality differences can make a significant difference in performance on an IQ test, because even IQ tests involve test-taking skills. When faced with a challenging item such as found on the Raven’s progressive matrices, one person, will spend 10 or 15 seconds and then give up and move on to the next item. Another …
Can two people of equal intelligence have a different score on an IQ test? Read More »
Books such as, Ultimate IQ Tests: 1000 Practice Test Questions to Boost Your Brain Power (2012) by Philip Carter & Ken Russell 2012) present test items that resemble the kinds of questions that a person encounters on standard IQ tests such as the Wechsler WAIS IV and the Stanford-Binet. Working through these tests can be …
This question will be answered in two parts. What US President had the Highest IQ? In 2006, psychologist Dean Keith Simonton conducted what is called a historiometric study of the 42 US presidents from George Washington to George W. Bush in an attempt to estimate their IQs. He entered data from biographies detailing their educational …
Which US President had the Highest IQ and how did it compare to Einstein’s? Read More »
Autopsies on prominent humans have enabled the investigation of human intelligence relative to brain size. Though some highly intelligent people were found to have possessed significantly larger than average brains, there were many who did not. Gauss, regarded by historians of mathematics as one of the three greatest mathematicians of all time, weighed in at …
Yes, value can be created without people. For example, nature produces fruit trees and vegetables as well as fish that people harvest for food. These are intrinsic values that enable our survival and can be produced without human intervention. Automation generally creates value and that is why we have access to many more goods than …
You raise an important question. This week, AP News reported that “CEOs made nearly 200 times what their workers got paid last year.” In an extreme case, Tim Cook, CEO of Apple made just over $60M last year which is about 672 times the median annual salary of an Apple employee. Is this fair? Many …
My answer would depend upon the person asking the question. If I felt the person were fragile and insecure, I might answer, “You could be right, we’re all intelligent in different ways.” There’s no point in hurting someone who is lashing out because they feel inferior. In most cases, I would just smile, because time …
This is an interesting question, and one that I’ve been exploring for the past three years. We do know from the research of Bouchard and others* on the studies of identical twins separated at birth that a significant part of our intelligence is determined by our genetics. We also know that intellectual stimulation and early …
Is intelligence determined by genetics or early exposure to learning? Read More »
This answer depends upon what we mean by “intelligence”. We humans have used our ingenuity to harness the electronic properties of inorganic elements like silicon, to simulate human intelligence. Computer chips, operating on the simple rules of logic that humans implement in the deductive process, are able to execute mathematical algorithms much faster than we …
Your brain grew rapidly throughout early childhood, when the neuron connections or “synapses” were generated at a prodigious rate and then pruned to adapt to the environment–deleting the synapses that were stimulated the least and increasing those that supported cognitive demands. The next dramatic phase in your brain growth occurred just before puberty when a …
