How often have you heard or said particularly to a child or young person, "Oh, You're so smart, you're a genius!" And thus we equate smart and genius. But as we're trying to determine here, what is genius and a related question, what does it mean to be smart? The notion of both smart and genius are deeply embedded in our modern culture. During the last 100 years, they have both been equated with a very high IQ. Here are just two examples. In 2006, the film The Genius Club presented a terrorist who had hidden a nuclear bomb in Washington DC and forces the President of the United States to round up seven geniuses, each with an IQ of over 200-- the average IQ is 100-- to disarm the bomb and save the world. In the public mind geniuses are brainiacs, those with exceptionally high IQs. In this film, we have an imaginary genius club. But there is one in reality, Mensa. Mensa which means roughly top shelf in Latin, is a real, albeit self-proclaimed, genius club. It requires as a condition of membership of a verified intelligent quotient of 132, roughly the top two percent of the world's population. A standard Chinese dictionary, the Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Chinese Language, asks for a higher score than Mensa, equating genius with an IQ of 140 or more and defining it as only one percent of the world's population. How smart you have to be to be a genius, to be an Einstein? How high was Einstein's IQ? One hundred, 150, 200? Well, it was said to be between 150 and 170. But in truth, that's just a guess. We don't really know because he never took an IQ test. Another question. What does an IQ test test? An IQ test judges aptitudes for solving quantitative and verbal problems, expression symbolic languages, as well as problems involving spatial, temporal reasoning. It requires analysis and convergent or deductive thinking leading to one correct solution. Today, anyone can take a free IQ test on the Internet, one sponsored by Mensa or any of those sponsored by many other groups. But test-takers beware: That provider of the test is usually trying to sell you something, a dental implant, a mortgage, or a medicine. As you can see, here's one for a diabetes medicine. Let's look at this online site and the kinds of questions it asks. Look at the screen for a moment and see if you can come up with the answer to the question above. What is one-quarter of one-half of one-fifth of 200? This is a test of quantitative reasoning. I think the answer is five. Next question. Please take a moment to read it. It's a test of verbal acumen and cognitive, perhaps visual skill. I think the answer is twig, spatial, temporal reasoning. Please read the question and look at the figures. This will take some time and we can go back to it later. But I think the answer is the third of the three figures. Do you know what your IQ score is? What's an average IQ score? Well, again, it's about 100. How is it calculated? Well, we'll get to that in just a moment. How long have these IQ tests that measure general intelligence been around? How old are they? IQ tests were started by Alfred Binet in France around 1903 as a way to measure the potential for learning of public school students. The aim was to provide each student with an education appropriate for their perceived intellectual capacity. Soon, the Binet test spread among other places to the United States and into Germany, where the result of mental testing would come to be called in German, "Intelligenzquotient," whence IQ. During World War I, the US military used a standardized IQ test as a way to measure aptitude for leadership and the rank of Officer. Already, the test is beginning to acquire an elitist aura. The officers were drawn from those with the highest scores. The most famous association of an IQ test and genius took place at Stanford University from the 1920s through the 1990s under the direction of psychologists Lewis Terman and later his colleagues. Here we see a photo of Terman. A quick explanation as to how an IQ test is tabulated. You take your mental age or score and divide by your chronological age and then multiply by 10. But what is this Terman's study? In the 1920s, psychologist Lewis Terman began to study young people in California whom he thought it might be geniuses. To be considered and admitted to his genius club, a person had to have an IQ of at least 135. However, after decades of tracking potential geniuses by using IQ scores, the results were disappointing in the extreme. Of the 1,500 high IQ participants studied, not a single genius could be identified. That's hard to do. Not a single genius. There were many, many successful people, but nobody who changed the world. No one that we would remember today. As a final report, the project said, "There wasn't a Nobel Laureate. There wasn't a Pulitzer Prize. We didn't have a "Picasso." In fact, at least two Nobel winning scientists had been rejected from the Terman study because their IQs weren't high enough. It turns out that Terman with his choice of IQ had chosen the wrong metric. As we will see, maybe he should have chosen a curiosity quotient or a persistence quotient or a hard work quotient. To demonstrate how an IQ score might be the wrong metric for genius, let's watch a video. The subject is Christopher Langan, who at one point was a game show star and whose claimed fame was that he was reputed to have scored the highest score ever recorded on an IQ test: 210. "I was working construction during the day and I was working in a bar at night and I happen to see a copy of Omni Magazine. It said the world's most difficult IQ test consists of 48 problems, some of which are extremely difficult. I thought, gee, that's interesting. I always wanted to know what my IQ was. The verbal problems were all pretty easy, so I just breezed through them. I happen to have a larger than average vocabulary. The really difficult ones where some of the spatial problems and the number sequences, actually highly difficult. As it turned out, I ended up setting a record score on that test. The Guinness Book was actually going to switch the world's highest IQ title to me, but then they dropped the highest IQ listing. IQ is not really a PC concept anymore and the Guinness Book fell victim to PC. My IQ would be somewhere between 190 and 210. 210 seems very, very high. Does seem that way. I don't know. Albert Einstein was estimated at between 180 and 190. Charles Darwin was way down there in the toilet at 135. Are you a genius? Well, you putting me on the spot here, aren't you? Yeah. You're forcing me to either say no. In which case it's all hype. Or you're forcing me to say yes: I'll say probably, yes, I am a genius by most of the definitive criteria of genius, I think you'd have to consider me a genius." Langan has worked as a bouncer, a ranch hand, and more recently has been involved in conspiracy theories. But as far as I can tell, he hasn't changed the world in the least. What's the problem with using an IQ test as the sole metric for genius? An IQ test involves logic and employs the rules of math and language. Nowhere on an IQ test, however, are points given for creative answers or for expanding the possibility of responses. Nowhere are points given for thinking outside the box or thinking outside the test-- the process from which creativity usually comes about. Only are points given for logical thinking INSIDE the box. This point was driven home by Thomas Edison back in 1903, when an apprentice had failed to come up with a solution to a problem despite having tried all logical possibilities, said Edison, "That's just where your trouble has been, you have tried only reasonable things. Reasonable things never work. Thank God you can't come up with any more reasonable things so you'll have to begin thinking up some unreasonable things to try, and now you'll hit the solution in no time." Clearly the problem with having an IQ test as the gold standard of genius is that the IQ test is too limited in nature. How well would Shakespeare, Abraham Lincoln, or Marie Curie had done on a standardized IQ test? Valedictorian Curie probably would have done quite well. But what about Beethoven? who couldn't multiply or divide, or Picasso? who couldn't pass a 4th-grade math test. The questions asked on an IQ test and those that creative people like Beethoven or Picasso face in real life, maybe two very different things. The problem with the IQ test is again, that it is too limited in terms of the mental acumen it requires and too limited in the subject areas that it explores to be a satisfactory, holistic measure of anyone's intellectual capacity. Why do we keep the standardized IQ test and similarly, the SAT and ACT and GRE tests, because they are just that---standardized-- a common set of questions that can be used to evaluate and compare the cognitive aptitude of millions of students, an advantage in countries such as the United States and China with large populations. Although the current standardized tests are efficient, they are likely too narrow in both intent and content to be predictors of success in life, let alone predictors of genius. Let's go on to see what other tests might be better.
