Ticks to make your IQ higher

people too often forget that IQ tests haven’t been around that long. Indeed, such psychological measures are only about a century old. Early versions appeared in France with the work of Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon in 1905. However, these tests didn’t become associated with genius until the measure moved from the Sorbonne in Paris to Stanford University in Northern California. There Professor Lewis M. Terman had it translated from French into English, and then standardized on sufficient numbers of children, to create what became known as the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale. That happened in 1916. The original motive behind these tests was to get a diagnostic to select children at the lower ends of the intelligence scale who might need special education to keep up with the school curriculum. But then Terman got a brilliant idea: Why not study a large sample of children who score at the top end of the scale? Better yet, why not keep track of these children as they pass into adolescence and adulthood? Would these intellectually gifted children grow up to become genius adults?

Terman subjected hundreds of school kids to his newfangled IQ test. Obviously, he didn’t want a sample so large that it would be impractical to follow their intellectual development. Taking the top 2 percent of the population would clearly yield a group twice as large as the top 1 percent. Moreover, a less select group might be less prone to become geniuses. So why not catch the crème de la crème?

The result was a group of 1,528 extremely bright boys and girls who averaged around 11 years old. And to say they were “bright” is a very big understatement. Their average IQ was 151, with 77 claiming IQs between 177 and 200. These children were subjected to all sorts of additional tests and measures, repeatedly so, until they reached middle age. The result was the monumental Genetic Studies of Genius, five volumes appearing between 1925 and 1959, although Terman died before the last volume came out. These highly intelligent people are still being studied today, or at least the small number still alive. They have also become affectionately known as “Termites”—a clear contraction of “Termanites.”

Now comes the bad news: None of them grew up to become what many people would consider unambiguous exemplars of genius. Their extraordinary intelligence was channeled into somewhat more ordinary endeavors as professors, doctors, lawyers, scientists, engineers, and other professionals. Two Termites actually became distinguished professors at Stanford University, eventually taking over the longitudinal study that included themselves as participants. Their names are Robert R. Sears and Lee Cronbach—and

nowhere are they as well-known as Ivan Pavlov, Sigmund Freud, or Jean Piaget, three obvious geniuses in the history of psychology.

Furthermore, many Termites failed to become highly successful in any intellectual capacity. These comparative failures were far less likely to graduate from college or to attain professional or graduate degrees, and far more likely to enter occupations that required no higher education whatsoever. We’re talking only of the males here, too. It would be unfair to consider the females who were born at a time in which all women were expected to become homemakers, no matter how bright. (Even among those women with IQs exceeding 180, not all pursued careers.) Strikingly, the IQs of the successful men did not substantially differ from the IQs of the unsuccessful men. Whatever their differences, intelligence was not a determining factor in those who made it and those who didn’t.

Why not pick a group of obvious adult geniuses, and then try to assess their childhood and adolescent IQs retrospectively from their biographies?

The story goes from bad to worse. Of the many rejects—the children with tested IQs not high enough to make it into the Terman sample—at least two attained higher levels of acclaim than those who had the “test smarts” to become Termites. Here are their stories:

Luis Walter (Luie) Alvarez was born in San Francisco, just up the peninsula from Stanford. He was around 10 years old when he took Terman’s test but scored too low to enter the sample. Yet that rejection did not prevent him from getting his Ph.D. at age 25 from the University of Chicago. Even as a graduate student he began to make important contributions to physics, eventually becoming “one of the most brilliant and productive experimental physicists of the 20th century.” One manifestation of this brilliance was his work on hydrogen bubble chambers for studying elementary particles, which led to his receiving the 1968 Nobel Prize in Physics. No Termite received the Nobel, in physics or otherwise. Oops!

William (Bill) Shockley is the second Termite reject who went on to attain the Nobel Prize in Physics, which he shared with two colleagues in 1956. Born just one year before Alvarez, he grew up in Palo Alto near Stanford, the university his mother had graduated from. Despite his sub-genius score on Terman’s IQ test, he managed to get his B.S. from Cal Tech and his Ph.D. from MIT, both prestigious technical institutions. He then joined Bell Labs and began to publish extensively in solid-state physics, getting his first patent at age 28. Like Luie, Bill got involved in the World War II effort, especially with respect to radar (in his case, bomb sights). After the war, he returned to Bell Labs, where the goal was to find a solid-state substitute for the old glass vacuum tubes that then dominated electronics. The upshot was the transistor.

So there we have it: Little Luie and Bill could have skipped taking the Stanford-Binet and still claim achievements that surpassed Terman’s IQ-certified “geniuses.” But they are not unique among Nobel laureates. Both James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA’s structure, and Richard Feynman, who worked on the path integral of quantum mechanics, had scores too low to gain membership in Mensa.

Some years after Terman had begun his study of 1,528 high-IQ boys and girls, he acquired a new graduate student named Catharine Cox. Because her mentor’s investigation was already well in progress, she found it difficult to carve out a portion that might serve as her doctoral dissertation. So she tried a bold alternative. If Terman was going to see if high-IQ kids grew up to become adult geniuses, why not do the opposite? In particular, why not pick a group of obvious adult geniuses, and then try to assess their childhood and adolescent IQs retrospectively from their biographies?

Coming up with a list of geniuses is the easy part. For example, nowadays we would just google “famous scientists” or “famous artists” (try it). In Cox’s pre-Internet era, the equivalent would be to compile a list from biographical dictionaries and other (paper) reference works. Fortunately, she found an already published list, from which she extracted the most famous names. She ended up with 301 historic creators and leaders (192 and 109, respectively). No doubt that her sample included some of the top figures in the history of modern Western civilization. Besides the eight mentioned above, she would study big-time creators like Isaac Newton, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Miguel de Cervantes, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Michelangelo (as well as leaders like Napoleon Bonaparte, Horatio Nelson, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther)—all of them folks who can boast extensive Wikipedia biographies.

The hard part was estimating IQ scores for all 301 geniuses. How is that even possible?

Happily, Terman had already shown, just one year after devising the Stanford-Binet test, how IQs could be estimated from biographies. Back in those days IQ was defined as a literal “intelligence quotient,” namely a child’s mental age divided by his or her chronological age, the arithmetic result then multiplied by 100. The mental age is determined by performance on intellectual tasks that are age graded. Accordingly, if a 5-year-old could do well on tasks more suitable for 10-year-olds, the IQ quotient would become 200 (= 10/5 × 100). Pretty straightforward, no?