Are We Getting Smarter?

ID: 050531.1312

In the May 2005 issue of Wired magazine, Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, has an article titled Dome Improvement. In it, he relates the story of University of Otago, New Zealand, Philosophy Professor James R. Flynn's, dscovery that human intelligence is increasing worldwide. The author of a 1980 book, Race, IQ, and Jensen, Professor Flynn has long been an advocate that environment can influence intelligence test results.

When Flynn looked at standardized tests, especially when the same students took both an older and newer version of the same test, he noted students consistently did better on the old tests, resulting in, for example, a 14-point gain between 1932 and 1978. On tests like the Raven Progressive Matrices where effects of education level are minimized, the differences were even greater.

Accepting the observation as true, the question is why? IQ is thought to have a large genetic component. It's hard to imagine conventional evolution taking place so rapidly. It's even more difficult to imagine Lamarckian inheritance — environment causing heritable modifications of an organism during its lifetime. (Nothing that happens to a creature after birth, except mutation of its sex cells, or other extraordinary events, changes the genetic information it passes to its offspring.)

With economist William Dickens, Flynn proposed a scenario whereby a very small inherited difference could result in an enriched environment that would ultimately result in that individual being a superior performer. (If a child, or identical twin of the superior performer was not exposed to the enriched environment, their performance would probably not be superior.) Using height as an example, Dickens says the "gene is making him 1 percent better, and the other 99 percent is that because he's slightly taller, he got all this environmental support." (I imagine it could work the other way, too. A slightly shorter individual would be less likely to receive a lot of environmental support, and not become a great basketballl player like Larry Byrd.)

This still begs the question: "What part of our allegedly dumbed-down environment is making us smarter?" Flynn noticed that educational level-neutral IQ tests like the Ravens Progressive Matrices measure the ability to visually notice similarities and differences. Steven Johnson notes this is "precisely the kind of mental work you do when you, say, struggle to program a VCR or master the interface on your new cell phone. … every new form of visual media — interactive visual media in particular — poses an implicit challenge to our brains: We have to work through the logic of the new interface, follow clues, sense relationships. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these are the very skills that the Ravens tests measure." In short, we're getting smarter because we play video games (and other things.)

This seems contrary to such recent findings as there being "a greater loss in IQ among heavy users of email, text messaging, and other diversions, than among marijuana smokers." (See my April 24, 2005 blog, Email Intoxication.) Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, in their new book, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, marshall evidence to show the effects of environment on academic test scores are more related to "things parents are [rather than] things that parents do." Contrary to conventional wisdom, frequently watching television has no impact on test scores, but as common wisdom suggests, having books in the home does. Having highly educated parents of high socioeconomic status positively impacts academic performance, but having an intact family does not. The point being, environmental effects, if they exist, are complex.

An article in the current issue (June 2005) of Scientific American, The Morning of the Modern Mind by Kate Wong, suggests not only that the roots of modern human intellect go back much further — perhaps four times further — than the accepted 50,000 years, but provides some reasons for its appearance at all. First, early humans may have had no reason to express these capabilities until the human population grew to a size where people were bumping into each other with sufficient regularity that they needed to use this unused capability to form complex social interactions, and long-distance relationships. Perhaps humans always had the capacity to do better at Ravens type tests, but it wasn't until the advent of the modern, more visually interactive environment that these capabilities were implemented. (This reminds me of the joke about the little boy who never spoke until one day he said, "Soup's cold." When asked why he'd never spoken before, he replied, "Up to now, everything's been OK.")

Another explanation is environemntal disaster, specifically, the eruption of Sumatra's Mount Toba about 70,000 years ago that may have brought on a six-year volcanic winter and subsequent 1,000-year ice age. These envonmental stresses acted as a cauldron to select for new kinds of intelligence. This is the theme of William Calvin's 1990 book, The Ascent of the Mind: Ice Age Climates and the Evolution of Intelligence. But again, the period of change — tens of thousands of years — is much longer than Flynn observed.

Perhaps more germane might be another Calvin book, his 1983 The Throwing Madonna: Essays on the Mind. In a chapter titled Did Throwing Stones Lead to Bigger Brains?, Calvin suggests spear-throwing provided the stimulus for the subsequent evolution of the cerebral cortex and greater encephalization of the human brain. Again, the period of change is much longer than observed with human IQ scores. It does however, envisage a process by which what we do ultimately effects who we are.

So: Is playing Grand Theft Auto making us smarter? Here's a thought: How did human intellect change after Gutenberg, or after some time in history when we changed from getting most of our information about the world from direct observation and literally, word-of-mouth, to getting it visually second-hand, from reading? How did processing the written word — a linear, one thing happens after another process — change how we think? Are we smarter than the heros of The Illiad? (See Julian Jaynes' 1976 book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.)

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