Are we more intelligent than we were 20 years ago?

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I think I was a smart kid when I was little (not just in academic terms, socially intelligent too, at least in the sense of usually being above whatever stupid phases my peers were going through) though I didn't especially think about it at the time. As the years went by everyone else seemed to catch up with me and now I don't think I'm extraordinary at all.

Does this strike a chord with anyone else? (obv. change the 20 in the title to whatever is appropriate, teenagers/old timers)

N., Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

It's getting close to the point where I *existed* 20 years ago.

Stop scaring me Nick.

Graham, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

academically i would automatically said yes to this - i was a bright child up until about 1992 (im 25) and then i started to tail off quite dramatically and become a fairly average student - during uni i blame large amounts of weed and a super comfy bed for this drop.

on a social intelligence level i believe that i have only ever grown in intelligence - that is what time gives you i believe the ability to rationalise, evaluate etc

but the one factor in life that made me realise i must be more intelligent now was that "Diamond lights" by chris waddle and glen hoddle was my favourite song back then

born clippy, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

yes Nick, absolutely, as a kid I was really good at general knowledge and this got me through most other lessons in the top few in the class, however as time wore on possibly the complexity of individual subjects and my ever-growing lazy streak saw me running backwards in the intellectual 10000 metres.

chris, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

I was a very lazy student until I was 16. As a kid I was more interested in going off into my own little world. At uni and college I was much brighter and more focused. Now, I am tailing off again, mainly because I don't have much to challenge me at work.

jel --, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

I was a very precosious child and I'd guess I'm one of the brightest people in my university class too, so that hasn't changed yet. However somewhere on the way I completely forgot to develop any new interests or try anything new, so on those terms (which I guess are different from N's social intelligence thing), everyone I know is way ahead of me.

Graham, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

I don't really see it in those terms Nick. Being clever as a child is something which was only ever going to be an issue when I was a child - and I was clever enough as a child to realise this and then not be surprised when I grew up that I was no longer cleverer than everyone else.

Though I suppose for having worked that out I rule.

I still think the so called stupid kids in class were just doing better things with their brains while I was swotting.

Pete, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

Ha ha Graham is not so precociously clever that he has learnt to spell (though I'm not sure I have either rendering my point somewhat pointless).

I think I am just lazier now more than anything.

Emma, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

I need a stiff drink.

Andrew Farrell, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

I am thick. I once thought I was clever, but am now too thick to determine whether or not I actually was.

RickyT, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

Well normally Emma my web browser underlines misspelled words, but just now it was randomly not working so I foolishly thought I'd spelt it correctly even though it looked wrong.

Now it is working: Precocious.

Graham, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

I know this feeling. It's not so much that I've gotten dumber, though, as it is that all these other really, really smart people seem to have just come out of nowhere. I think Pete has a point, that maybe all the very smartest kids seemed 'stupid' in grade school because they realized how utterly hebetudinous the whole extended ritual was and laughed behind their fists at us teachers' pets capering about like cute little servile monkeys while they engaged themselves independently. Shit, maybe I have just gotten dumber.

Dan I., Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

Oh dear Graham relying on the vagaries of so-called 'modern' technology = not very bright. I am about to go off on one about mammoths again. When is it pub time?

Emma, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

It's to do with your associations mostly being created for you when you're young i.e. children of ppl parents know, schoolkids, and then created by you the older you get. So by the time you get to University if you're a clever kid you're mixing with a bunch of ppl who are near your level of cleverness in one or other direction. I didn't feel like the cleverest person at University, I do feel like the cleverest person in my office, but in quite a useless way (i.e. useless to the business)

Tom, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

I definitely felt this when I went to school. I was leaving small local primary school to go to a pretty big private school where the standards were pretty high. To be honest having come to college, I expected this to happen again, I mean I didn't know anyone who wanted to do Journalism or something in that field in school, so I guess I expected people to be opinionated and I dunno, interesting. But in reality I think 3 quarters of the class aren't arsed about anything, and I mean I'm not criticising, fair enough for them, I just think school to college was a step down in this sense, I feel way more intelligent now in College than I ever did in School, where I was only ever good at my favourite subjects anyway, and very lazy.

I suppose the nature of succeeding at what I want to do for the next 10/20/who knows years of my life involves a belief that I can do it as well as anyone else. So at secondary school yes I felt this, not at college.

Ronan, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

I considered Tom's point about finding smarter associates for oneself in later years. I guess that might well cover the IQ side of it, but not the other stuff, which I haven't really explained very well. I mean I think I wouldn't have felt on a level with many of my current friends if I'd known them when they were 13 or whatever. I dunno. Just the way the talk about their childhood/teenage years in 'wasn't I young and silly' kind of boxes.

N., Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

Definitely; I went throught the motions of O & A Levels, passing with flying colours then on to polytechnic, where there was less parental pressure, so... & now I'm 36, working at Bristol University teaching HTML, which is fun, but it's taken me 14 years to finally get to move up a rung...& most of the people I work with are like brains on legs. In short, I'm either not as bright as people thought and worked far too hard at school to achive what I did, or I've become bloody lazy. I honestly haven't got a clue.

Jez, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

Sorry, the 'definitely' refers to Does this strike a chord?

Jez, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

I feel this very strongly. I'm sure it's something to with the ageing process but I don't know how it works. If you think of stereotypes of older people, phrases like 'silly old fool' start to crop up. Old people (not all obviously) seem to have more difficulties with logical thought. But whatever happens doesn't happen overnight when you turn 65..70..80 whatever, it must happen gradually. One thing I've experienced is a fear of intellectual engagement. For example if I was confronted with a new synthesiser or computer program I used to find it stimulating to learn how to use it. Now I find I just want to understand it straight away, with less effort, and get frustrated when I don't (although that's probably also related to a panic about diminishing available time - again to do with ageing, as well as committments in one's life).

David, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

i was a lot more imaginative back then, that's what i miss. these days i buy lego and the only thing that gets made out of it is the model on the box...

and these days i think my memory is going and i think memory is a big part of perceived intelligence, just being able to remember useful things. i struggle with learning things now. object oriented design? uh?

did well on the recent bbc iq test night though but that was heavily skewed towards the maths though so...

andy

koogydelbbog, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

I suspect that I was always of average intelligence and fairly lazy too, which meant that I scraped passes at most things at school, but then when things got harder at university I did the same amount of work (ie not very much) and got poorer results. Culminating in my shitty degree.

As a youngster I always considered myself more socially advanced than my peers in terms of realising that being purposely nasty and annoying (as most children are) was pointless, boring and just not RIGHT, but at the same time completely socially backward in that I was too shy to make proper friends or try anything new/risky at all.

Ally C, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

I was always the cleverest kid through my early years: youngest kid in the year, then I skipped ahead a year and it was still easy (despite always missing half the school days because of illness). Then they decided I couldn't take the 11-plus (another reminder of my age!) at 9 so they held me back. I lost interest and took ages to recover, eventually getting top A levels and doing maths at Cambridge. When I went back to university in my mid-30s it was still easy, and I was top of the class by a long way.

But through my childhood I was used to being the cleverest around, and from 14 on I started meeting others at least as clever. Since Cambridge particularly, I have sought out and socialised with very clever people (it's one of the things I love here) and am now used to thinking of myself as nothing remotely special intellectually - there are a bunch of people here whose brains impress the hell out of me. I think I always knew that I'd learn nothing and get bored with people much less clever. I find that the people I tend to become and stay friends with are always extremely intelligent and often brilliant in some respects.

So I reckon it's down to social selection rather than getting less clever, and to realising the breadth of value that there is in the mind, that scoring 200 on an IQ test or getting to Cambridge doesn't tell much of anyone's story at all. I realised that when I went to that university, and found that plenty of people there were fools who were really good at maths or whatever. And one other very educational moment, that made me appreciate this wider range...

There was an old foreman called Wally at the factory where I was in the accounts section. He'd left school at 14 or something 50 years before, and seemed an idiot. One day I was chatting to the head of R&D, and I asked him what the colourful graphs on his desk were about. He explained that they mapped variables in industrial steel rolling doors (which the company made): thickness of the steel, length of the roller, all sorts. He explained how you examined them and calculated things, and eventually derived the strength of spring you needed. "Or," he added, "you could just ask Wally, and he'll tell you. He's never wrong."

Martin Skidmore, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

The Social Selection Factor probably takes the most weight in the Issue? Also, I keep myself amazed in realizing every year again and again how much TIME and the inevitable passing of it has to say in the relative "intelligence" of any individual - that is, the experience of life accumulated, as in the example of Wally the foreman. Even a year more life can make you or the people you see around you jump up and widen their horizons in unexcpected measures? My claim is, that in cases where you guys really care about dwelling on how intelligent or capable you seem compared to the ones around you you should also be grading their age and apply the formula: younger and smarter: 2 pt. - older and smarter: doesn´t spell shit.

Disclaimer: works only with people sharing vaguely common paths (HS- university-employment) as people wasting away in day-jobs void of creative space, and that definition just might include some kinds of teaching as well as sweeping, quickly lose the grasp in the traditional scholarly ways of wisdom and take huge steps sideways from the NORM? When making comparisons you always have a norm, don't you? Wally escapes the norm. Specialized professionals escape the norm. Heed the seven or how many ever classes of intelligence that tell apart social, mathematical, visual, kinetical, sensual and so on types of intelligence, and please also tell apart intelligence from wisdom, and all this i guess just goes out to say that never try to write people off in being anything you happen to see or not to see in them.

still, the feeling is there.. in high school I placed myself in the "wimp" category and effectively felt myself to be nowhere near the apparently rockin' levels of social and mental development most my classmates shared between themselves. Of course the case was not so, twas' merely a separatist teenage fantasy that I was able to rid myself of by the time I hit art school and realized that I finally shared a common space with people I could genuinely relate to and understand and who understood me, and this was not because my new mates were wimps too but because almost everyone my age I'd met before had been uncomplicated and straightforward middle-people. To my eyes somethin unreachable and beautiful at the time. In my new surroundings I was happy to feel small, only this time knowing by heart that the world WAS really BIG, not just so in my own imagination.

<--Memories

back to the topic in my final point: What you seem to understand and appreciate in other people could be a reflection of yourself in their image, no more. There is no truly objective understanding of minds. When you meet people more intelligent, more competent, more social and faster than you, the fact that it is possible to think about them as being so comes from your OWN ability to recognize and define intelligence, competency, sociality and speed. My suggestion is: be happy when you can tell someone's being more something than you. This is a sign of your own understanding and intelligence. It takes one to know one. Be very suspicious about people with whom you have absolutely NO clue about where to place them in your scale

And people with good imagination tend to rate their company very high. In some cases what you see in people and the things you read in their appearances is more about your worst-case approximation (worst- case as in very much more intelligent than the person making the approximation) than the actual reality. Sometimes. When it's not, be happy about it. When you spend your time swimming in swarms of super- pumped mind-androids and social majesties you just might be learning a thing or two about life and yourself

at least in my experience actually, when I feel the need to RATE people I do so by their ethics, attitude and achievements not by their efficiency or their IQ

I'm sure this thread spawns a lot of commentary, since when we're still bustling through school it's fairly easy to think you're something special if you're hitting good grades. Then you do the statistics and realize there are a few hundred millions hitting good grades in the western world and you might be one of them but the other 199,999,999 could also be posting at ILE and ILM while the rest dropped into politics or whatnot

teenage professional, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

When we are little sprouts, we have a superabundance of under-utilized neural capacity. We're information sponges. Every 3 year old is effing brilliant, if brilliance is, let's say, learning 20 new words every day! As we age, this form of brilliance tapers off fairly dramatically.

It is as if we spend our first twenty years building the house we will live in, the next twenty decorating it and adding the odd extension, and the balance of our lives doing the steady maintenance required to keep the roof from leaking and the pipes from clogging -- while casting sidelong and occasionallly envious, glances at the new houses under construction in the neighborhood.

Little Nipper, Saturday, 3 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

I think that's because people settle for what they have, and figure routine maintenance is enough. Or none at all, if the signs of deterioration aren't dramatic. I am still learning and still challenging my mind, I think, and I plan to keep doing so. I want to keep getting cleverer until the physical deterioration of my brain puts a stop to that, if I live long enough.

Martin Skidmore, Saturday, 3 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

I want to keep getting cleverer until the physical deterioration of my brain puts a stop to that, if I live long enough.

Martin, do you think you *are* getting cleverer? You haven't felt any loss of patience of the kind I mentioned when your brain is challenged?

David, Saturday, 3 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

I have never been patient. No, I am more keen on challenges now. I am 43. I graduated with a First three years ago, top of my class throughout. This year I've joined various boards and groups, and the standard of knowledge and intelligence here, and in private correspondence, does challenge me. So does my job. So do the books I choose to read - I hope to eventually feel up to the challenge of Finnegan's Wake. I read books on Japanese Zen art and emergent complexity and Postmodernism in literature. I try to write about some of these things here and there. I crave challenge and novelty, and I am most entertained by rising to debate with brilliant people in person and on boards like this.

Yeah, I think I'm more intelligent now than I was 10 or 20 years ago. I don't know if I'd score higher on an IQ test now, but I don't believe them anyway - I do think I have a broader intelligence through having seen and read and thought about things that keep making me reassess how I do things and link things up. I do believe that your mind doesn't have to decline early if you keep exercising it. I don't know how soon physical matters will overtake any effect from mental exercise - probably soon, given the standard of care and diet I achieve - but I don't plan to help nature along by stopping trying. I couldn't, in fact. This isn't like going to the gym to keep fit, it's like playing football because you love it, and keeping fit as a side effect.

Martin Skidmore, Saturday, 3 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

I think you're right. It must be that I'm allowing myself to become an intellectual couch potato that's giving me the perceptions I mentioned.

David, Saturday, 3 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

I was a smart kid. I think I have stayed about exactly the same but the things I have to do now are more challenging, so I don't appear as smart.

I think this change, ie between school and post grad, is more important than the stuff about yr peers becoming smarter through selection, mostly because I don't think I was aware of how smart my classmates were for quite a while.

isadora, Saturday, 3 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

was never very smart myself but I didn't work hard, so i didn't get good grades at GCSE and A levels but I worked much harder in my degree and I did very well and I'm now I'm working at something pretty 'challenging' at the moment but I've never felt 'smarter', I just worked harder.

Julio Desouza, Saturday, 3 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link


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