Transcription
How's that look? It's all good. Good. Good. And we've started the recording, so you just go for it. Perfect. Perfect. Okay.
So, um, just to uh, let everybody know, this is probably like a combination of um, a couple lectures that I might give my introduction to introduction to psychology 1215 class on intelligence. And so I'm just going to try to cover three main topics for you guys because I know it's kind of towards whatever you know, essays or whatever you have to write. But the first topic would involve uh, how we go about defining intelligence, and then the second one being measuring it, and then finally evaluating intelligence tests that are out there.
So just to start off with a definition. Actually, years ago when I used to do this uh, lecture for LEAP, I I started off differently, but because it was so controversial, I try to actually define it in one particular way because so many different theorists have different ways of describing what intelligence is. Now, my intro to psychology textbook agrees that when you take the best out of all these different theories, we can agree on a specific sort of definition, and primarily it involves an individual's mental potential to do several different things. They would have the mental potential to learn from experience. And when we go talk about some of these different theories, we'll be touching on that. So, learning from experience, mental potential to solve problems, and finally to use knowledge to adapt to new adapt to new situations. Each of these together would, you know, contribute to uh, intelligent sort of behavior. And again, when I go through all these different kind of theories of intelligence, you're going to see these points coming up in the discussion.
So what I'm going to be covering in um, this part of the lecture is is discussing some of the main theories of intelligence that are out there. And I'm going to go through them chronologically, starting with uh, Spearman and what he thought about intelligence and then go to Thirst and Gardner and then Sternberg, one of uh, the most uh, recent ones, and then I'm going to touch on something at the very very end. But just going through their different ideas of intelligence, there's some overlap, but there's some differences as well.
So first of all, started off with Spearman's what he called one general intelligence um, theory. And for here, Spearman was actually a statistician, and how he went about trying to come up with a theory for intelligence was to do um, a statistical technique on the performance of people on different kind of tests of intelligence, and this particular technique is called factor analysis. And what factor analysis involves, it looks at basically the relationships between two different things. And in this case, the two different things that we might be considering would be the performances on different types of intelligence tests or uh, skill tests. So there's many different things that one could actually test for. You could test for spatial ability, math ability, word fluency, you know, and the list goes on and on.
So, what he did is he he gave a bunch of people a battery of different kind of tests like these and and wanted to see how similar the scores were for a particular person. That is, are they all very similar or are, you know, can they perform really high in one and low in another. And in general what he found is that people tended to perform the same across different kind of skill tests. That is, if they did really well in math, they tended to do really well at let's say in verbal comprehension; or if they on the other hand if they did poorly, they would perhaps do poorly on the other ones. And what he believed is that there was some sort of global factor, some sort of underlying skill that led to the uh, similar performances on these different skill tests. And this underlying skills he called the G factor of of intelligence, meaning that there's a general level to a person's intelligence. And this general level would be reflected on their performance on all different kinds of tests. So he said that there was one general type of type of intelligence.
Well, when this theory came out, it was actually quite controversial, and people kind of jumped on that idea and criticized it quite heavily. And one of the main criticizers was was Thirsten, and and thought that the theory, well Spearman's theory was not good enough. And what he decided to do was to improve on Spearman's work. Instead of only having the subjects kind of uh, do a small number of tests, he actually had them do a larger number of different tests. So testing more skills. So his battery of tests was larger. And he also tested a larger number of uh, subjects to make his results more robust. And when he did this, what he found was, yes, there was some sort of general level to intelligence, but he saw some similarities between um, the relationships on the on the performance on these different tests. He had his own version of factor analysis, which he also thought was better. And when he did this, he came up not with just one general level, but maybe seven different clusters of abilities. And these here are listed on the seven different clusters of what he found: all different kind of tests involving verbal comprehension; those involving an numerical ability; spatial relations; perceptual speed, which is very important underlying all different kind of skills; word fluency; memory; and inductive inductive reasoning; and and you know, it could be that people might have performed somewhat similarly, but you know, there could be differences between one skill set and another. So he didn't think that there was one general level. He emphasized that there were in fact seven. So he was the second theorist that came up with a a a theory of intelligence.
The next person was Gardner, and he also agreed with the idea that there were multiple different types of intelligences. But you know, he had a different perspective of what he was looking at and how he was going to go about testing it, very different from the two previous theorists that I just talked about. Primarily he thought that human behavior was rich in many many different kind of talents, not just looking at verbal ability or math ability or stuff like that, but there are so many people who are very talented in many different ways. So what he did to look at this is he engaged in a case study approach. Study approach. What we mean by case study approach is that he would go and look at one individual in depth, get as much information about that individual. And so he would go out and find somebody who had an amazing skill in a particular area, and you know, just interviewed them, found out more information. And he kept on doing this throughout the well not the whole population but many many different kind of people. And when he'd finished with his work, he actually believed that we are rich in many talents and not just one, not just seven, but possibly nine different types of intelligence. And you can see from uh, this diagram here that some of these skills overlap with the two previous researchers. Things like verbal ability and linguistic ability, visual spatial or the mathematical skills. Now those are overlap. But he came across um, other skills that need to be noted: bodily kinesthetic skills, you know, having a talent in that. That could be, you know, an an athlete of some sort who's, you know, great in the area; someone like a Michael Jordan, a basketball; or a naturalist, someone like Charles Darwin who would like describe what's going on in our world in our nature; or people with um, you know, interpersonal skills. I love Oprah Winfrey; she's so interpersonal and you know, can get along with others and you know, interact really really well, so the list kind of goes on and on, so it's much larger than previously previously thought, and also I I want to emphasize possibly nine because this last skill right here, existential sort of intelligence, this is referring to a spiritual intelligence. He has most recently considered this one and hasn't officially added this type of intelligence, but he's definitely think that you know there are some people who whose strong suit is in the area of spiritual nature, you know, why are we born, what happens when we die, what's the meaning of life—these are all very very deep kind of questions, and some people out there, you know, spiritual leaders, you know, they will have this kind of intelligence to share with others. So, he's considering that one. So, all of a sudden, we're already up to nine different types of intelligence.
One last thing about Gardner's theory is that he believes these different types can be autonomous, independent from each other. You know, whereas Spearman thought people performed all the same way in the different skill set areas, here he believed that someone might have a just a huge strength in one area and maybe not at all in the other areas. One example I'd like to kind of describe for you to demonstrate this involves the uh, example of a person by the name of Kim Peak. Ever heard of the movie Rainman, which describes a gentleman on the autism spectrum? That's based on the the real life person Kim Peak. His strength was verbal linguistic in the sense that um, he had read thousands and thousands of books and in fact memorized them, including like the Bible and Shakespeare and all this kind of stuff. And you know, most of us don't have this ability, but his ability was absolutely amazing in this one skill set, but he was not um, a high-functioning individual. His he had to live with his parents even as an older adult because he could not take care of himself. He didn't have the self uh, help skills to take care of himself. And and even in the verbal language ability, his skill set was very specialized to like this memorization and being able to give it back. Whereas maybe he didn't understand the nuances of language because there was a story out there that he was at a restaurant with his father and Kim was speaking too loud. So his father told him, "Lower your voice." So, we all know that that means just to be quieter. But when he heard lower my voice, Kim slouched down in his in his chair to be physically lower. So again, he was missing out that sort of nuance. So it's an amazing skill set, but it was autonomous or different or independent from other from other skills. So that was the last thing I wanted to mention about Gardner.
Just moving on to one last person here, Sternberg. And he kind of took a step back and wanted to focus on three main types of types of intelligence. And the first type of intelligence would involve what's called analytical intelligence. And that means performing well on traditional tests. You know, US students, you you know this kind of type of intelligence. You know those classmates who always do well on tests in school. Some people, you know, this is their strong point. This is their type of intelligence. But for others, maybe they're not so great at doing school tests and those sort of things. Maybe their strengths lay elsewhere. For example, the second type of intelligence that Sternberg talks about is creative intelligence. And by definition, he refers to creative intelligence as the ability to cope with novelty. And here with coping with novelty, it it it's talking about maybe how well people adapt to new situations. You know, some people are can maybe be very good and excel in their comfort zone, but put them in a totally new uh, situation and maybe they don't have that ability, or this would involve somebody who could uh, come up with new ideas, you know, like adventures or something like that. And so you have to be creative. It's not just kind of like learning and memorizing and regurgitating it on a test test like analytical intelligence, but here you know, coping with novelty. And I just want to try to connect the two to give you an example, and I could take this from my own personal experience uh, thinking that you know when someone gets u you know their PhD in psychology, you have to go through your your just BA and then your master's and then your PhD, well there was a large group of us who got our, you know, our our bachelor's kind of thing because we know we all did well in school and all that kind of stuff. But then when we got into the master's area, we were had to be quite independent. It was a new situation and a new type of learning. And especially we had to come up with ourselves the idea of some sort of research project, some project that has never been done before. And I had some classmates who really struggled with this. Like they were getting all A's and A+es on all their exams previously, but here when it came up to trying to come up with a research idea, they were struggling. So they didn't have this creative pro uh, process. So that would be the second type of intelligence according to Sternberg. And finally his third type is practical intelligence. And practical intelligence refers to fitting into your into one's into one's environment. And what I mean by fitting into your environment is involves, excuse me, it involves solving problems and being successful in your own unique own unique environment. And you know, one example I would like to kind of mention here is based on a study, and the the environment here was the horse racetrack, and the subjects were men who were regularly out there every day and betting on the horses. Well, these gentlemen, they didn't have jobs. They perhaps didn't finish school. In fact, they had actually measured their IQs, and their IQs were very low, on the verge of maybe being labeled as having a cognitive disability. So, they wouldn't have done well, you know, perhaps in school or in particular kind of jobs, but this is their environment and they excelled. They knew all the information about uh, betting on horses, knowing how the odds work, knowing which horses were fast horses, whi, you know, could they run well in the rain, for example, because some horses do well on muddy tracks, others don't, who does well kind of at the end, and you know, who, you know, who might start off strong and who might kind of kind of fade away. And they had information about the trainers and the jockeys and all this information caused them to you know, place bets and win money. This was their way of succeeding in life. This is their way to put you know, you know, make money, you know, pay for food, pay for where they live, and and so in fact they fit into this very unique environment. They were very strong; they have the smarts for this particular environment, whereas other people have no clue what they're doing. So this would be an example of practical intelligence.
So in the end, you know, as I was going through all these different kind of theories, you know, that initial mental potential definition about you know, learning from experience, uh, coping with novelty, uh, and you know, adapting to your environment, all these things all you know, that all this theme is throughout these different theories, and that's where we come up with that one definition that we use today. So that's my uh, closure with regard to defining intelligence. I am moving on to the topic of measuring intelligence. Actually, this is one of my favorite parts of the lecture because it's like telling a story. It's kind of like an historical approach of where we started off and where we are today. Because believe it or not, uh, way back when uh, we could focus on where is it back in the late 1800s, there was the first person who had the idea of measuring intelligence, and this was Sir Francis Galton. He was an English scientist, and actually his cousin was Charles Darwin, you know, the guy with survival of the fittest and you know, you have these uh, sort of strengths that you pass down to your offspring. Well, he was Galton was kind of wondering, well, you know, maybe intelligence is some sort of natural ability. It's in maybe in your genes and it's something that you could be passing down to your offspring. So he wanted to in fact measure what he considered to be a natural ability, and he was you know, thinking way ahead of himself, you know, if we can identify these people, you know, males and females who are intelligent and you know, we could you know, see if they're intelligent, see if they have their kids and you know, are they intelligence, and it would prove his whole idea. Well, we'll credit him with first of all thinking about measuring intelligence, but the way he did it was in fact all wrong. So, if you're taking any kind of notes, don't worry about this part because what he did was back in um, 1884, there was a big exposition in London where there was thousands and thousands of people coming to see rides and displays and having fun and all that kind of stuff. So he thought this is a great place to try to measure intelligence. And so him and his researchers would stop people and talk to them and and just based on interacting with them, they thought, "Oh, you know, this person sounds pretty intelligent. So we're going to consider them to be the intelligent group." And then when talking with others, maybe they didn't seem as so bright, so they considered them to be the quote non-intelligent group. And so what they did is they wanted to see if they were different on different kind of abilities. And the whole thing here is that the things he they were he was measuring weren't in fact intellectual abilities. They were measuring body proportions, um, you know, how fast you might have responded to a loud noise. They were measuring a bunch of weird things. And when it came to intelligent behaviors, they couldn't distinguish between the intelligent group and the non-intelligent group. You know, it didn't make a difference, you know, what group you belong to. You could be high or low in any of these abilities because really they had nothing to do with intelligent intelligent behavior. But let's give him the credit that he was the first one to think about trying to measure it.
Where we more officially kind of go on the uh, chronology of measuring intelligence, we would go to France next, where Alfred Binet was given the task to create tests of intelligence because in France at the time, and this was in the 1920s, what was happening is that they uh, the government there said every child has to go to school now, and they realize some children are going to struggle. So Binet was given the task to come up with a way to measure certain skills for a certain age and to identify what kids might not uh, perform as well as others that they'd be struggling on these p particular tasks, and and they would identify them and be able to help them when they're in school. So Alfred Binet came up with this notion that we now refer to as the mental age. And mental age refers to the cognitions, the thinking ability. And his definition of mental age is based on, excuse me, what most people of a chronological age, what they can do. So if you had, you know, let's say a six-year-old, you know, these would be sort of the tasks that a six-year-old could do. Whereas maybe with a 10-year-old, they're going to be different, and a 13-year-old, they'd be different. So just to kind of explain this further, let's say you have a six-year-old. He came up with a number of different tasks that were deemed age appropriate for a child at the age of six. And this six-year-old boy was able to do all these different sort of tasks. He was right on par. His chronological age was on par with his thinking age of passing these different kind of tasks. However, those tasks that were kind of uh, deemed relevant to children aged seven, he wasn't able to do. But that's okay because if he's six and you know, performing at a six-year-old mental age level, that's all fine. So back then with France, this child wouldn't need the support. However, if he was failing all these, maybe he would need the support once in school. But this was a great idea. It actually came up with an idea that okay, chronologically they're this age, but mentally this is important. And that's the way he assessed measuring the intelligence of different kids coming up with all these different tasks that belong to different sort of age groups.
Now that notion of mental age went even further. Um, if we now chronologically move to the uh, United States where Terman had actually um, improved on Binet's work. Binet had developed a certain number of tasks for um, children, but he didn't he stopped there because that was his job, that was what he was assigned to do. What Terman did was that he actually expanded the age range. He included uh, tests or tasks for teenagers as well as adults. So he expanded on the age range, and of course he also included a lot more tasks at the different age sort of levels, and his final product was actually what we now know as the Stanford-Binet test of intelligence. And you know, they gave Binet his credit because it was based on his original work, and because Terman worked at Stanford, it
was called the Stanford-Binet test. But this was just a more, uh, complex way to assess mental age for, um, a much larger age group. Now, group. Now, finally ending off with William Stern in Germany. He was a cognitive psychologist, and he built on that notion of mental age, and he developed that equation we now know as the IQ equation, where one will do all those tasks and get, um, a result of what their mental age is. But we can actually kind of quantify this into a number. We take that mental age, divide it by one's chronological age, and multiply that by 100. So, if we go back to that six-year-old boy I was talking about, remember he passed all those tests at the six-year-old level. His mental age was six. His chronological age was 6. So 6 / 6 * 100 is 100. So he's right where he should be. He's typical. He's average for his age. Not any better, not any worse.
And so what we find with these IQ tests and and the performance in the population is that we get this very, uh, distinct bell curve distribution, what we call the normal distribution. And the score of 100 is the most popular score because most people perform about where they should be, uh, uh, cognitively. And most people kind of fall within a a certain range, but of some they're of course are going to be on the gifted side. You know, maybe their chronological age is six, but maybe they could perform at a 10-year-old mental age. So, they'll be a score on this high gifted side. And then, of course, there's going to be those on the lower end where there they don't pass the tests of their me, uh, at the mental age of their chronological age. So they're on, you know, the cognitive deficit side of things. But most people kind of score around where they should be.
And one thing I just wanted to make note of and and I like to, uh, kind of bring these kind of comments is that sometimes, you know, we come up with this research, these ideas, but sometimes it leads us to make bad decisions. When Binet was actually coming up with this idea of mental age, he was worried about the repercussions that maybe people will get labeled and treated differently because of their scores on the mental age side of things. And in fact, this has come true in so many different ways. Even here in Canada, we have a bit of a black mark in our history because we treated people who had lower levels, uh, on these IQ tests. Um, and one example here would be in I think it was back in the 1960s. This was not all that long ago where women who were below the the normal range of cognition. So they probably had scores of like, let's say 80 or lower. Um, what they were they were forced to be sterilized. You know, they they didn't volunteer to, but because they scored so low, they were forced to be sterilized, so they couldn't have any children. And whether people thought maybe they're they they couldn't perform well enough and look after their children well enough, or whether they were, oh my goodness, afraid that they were passing on these deficient genes to their children. Whatever the reasons, they were treated differently just because of their test score. And the thing is, you know, Binet's, uh, worries did come true in this particular example. So just something to kind of keep in, uh, you know, in the back of your minds about, you know, some of these scores. It's not the end all. People can succeed in many other ways in life. It's not just how well you might do on an intelligence. And I'm going to, uh, intelligence test, and I'm going to come back to this at the very end.
So this is, um, my last thing I wanted to say about measuring intelligence. intelligence. The final topic I'm going to talk about here is the way we go about evaluating these intelligence tests. We can't just use them if they're not proper tests. So what has been done is that, um, criteria has been developed to actually come up with certain kind of standards that must be met for an intelligence test to be deemed, um, accurate or proper. And, you know, let's say the Canadian Psychosocial Society as well as many other organizations have come up with such standards, and a couple examples of these criteria would be reliability and validity. So I'm going to be talking about each of these. So first of all, we could see how good an intelligence test by looking at how reliable it is. This is referring to the the stability of the result because you would think about if a certain if a person has a certain level of intelligence, barring any significant changes in the environment, you would think that that level of intelligence would remain basically the same or stable. So they have gone about trying to see how stable a test could be. One example would be, um, even within a test itself, they might kind of see how similar scores are, uh, between let's say the odd number questions and the even numbers questions. Those should be similar. Um, or they could do, uh, time one and time two. This one would make a little bit more sense that you know if a a let's say a child has an intelligence test, uh, while they're eight years of age, their score should be fairly similar, let's say if they take a test at 13 years of age, we're expecting it to be stable. And so what they've done, uh, to kind of evaluate for these and then they've done this with the Wechsler and the the Stanford-Binet is that they looked at what we call correlations between scores. So, for example, for a particular subject, what was their score let's say when they were eight years old and what was their score when they are 13 years old? How similar are they? Is are they both similar or there's one high, one low? But that's what looking at correlations, uh, involves. And and I'm sorry, I wish I could talk a lot more about correlations because I basically lecture on this for about 40 minutes in my class. But trying to just cover the basics basics here. When we measure correlations, we could tell if a relationship is either strong or weak. And so let's say if a subject had a test score at age eight and one at 13, if they were both similar, that is they if they score really high on one and really high on the next, we would say there'd be a very strong positive strong positive correlation. Um, or let's say it could be the exact opposite. You know, could it be that someone did really really well on one time and very poorly the other time? It would be the ex a strong correlation but a negative one in the exact opposite thing for stability. We're looking for a positive correlation, that is the performance is similar. Perform high both ways, perform medium both times, or perform poorly both times. And in fact, this is what they had found when testing, uh, these main, uh, typically used intelligence tests. The correlations and they come up with the number for these tests is in the N zeros. zeros. That's right. That's right here indicating that this is the correlation between time 1 and time 2, for example, is very very strong, which means they are in fact very very stable, and so it, you know, Stanford-Binet, Wechsler, they have been demonstrated to have reliable scores, but we'd note that this this isn't one this isn't perfect, and so there are times that scores are not as stable. And this is where we talk about some sort of extraneous circumstances or psychological, uh, factors that might, uh, lead to variations in stability for a person. And just to discuss a couple examples here, you know, how about the motivation of someone writing these tests? What if the first time a a child writes one of these tests, they could they couldn't care less? So, they're kind of sitting there really, really bored, maybe write down a few answers every now and again. But if they're low motivated the first time, but let's say highly motivated the next time, of course, their scores are going to be very different. So, motivation levels could cause less stability for an individual. A second psychological factor would be anxiety. You know, some people get very, very anxious when writing a test. Maybe the first time a child comes across one of these tests and they think, "Oh my goodness, it's such a big test. It's so important. This is gonna kind of like, you know, if I do bad, it's going to ruin my life kind of things." And we know that too much anxiety on a test will decrease performance. So maybe they get a low test score the first time. Maybe the second time they said, "H, I've done this before. It doesn't affect my life or harm me or anything. Ah, nah, this is all good." And they're not anxious and they perform better. So yes, we do tend to have variations in scores, but in general, these major intelligence tests that we use today are known to be stable and thus they meet the reliability criteria.
Second, validity. By validity, this refers to these tests measuring what it's supposed to or predicting what it's supposed to. So that's validity, measuring and predicting what it's supposed to. And so the answer to this question is a qualified yes in that if you remember the story about Alfred Binet coming up with this whole concept of the mental age which we is key for these intelligence tests, it's the IQ, uh, uh, uh formula in the whole scheme of things, his job was to predict how well someone does in school. So that's what a lot of research has looked into, and again they use those correlational sort of studies looking at the similarity or the relationship between IQ score and certain other aspects about academic performance. So, for example, studies have looked at a person's IQ score and how similar their grades grades are. And what research has found, depending on the study, the correlations is between is in the range between 0.4 and and 0.5. So we're talking kind of right around around here. Now that's kind of halfway between strong and weak. This weak means that there's no relation. So it's in the middle. So we will actually call this a moderate correlation. By no means is it as strong as the reliability correlations, but here IQ is related to how well a person does in school on their grades. So it's between 0.4 and 0.5. And so there is validity to that, but it's a moderate validity. When we look at other measurements between IQ and academic performance, studies have looked at IQ score and the number of completed years of of school. When they've done, uh, looked at the correlation between these two different kind of behaviors, they have found that the the range is between 0.6 and 0.8 depending on the study. So here we're getting stronger. Again, it's a moderately strong correlation. And again, remember that's the whole purpose of the mental age to see how well someone did in school. So grades, how far they go in school, it kind of makes sense. So in general, these major intelligence tests have validity to them.
Now, one thing I kind of want to mention about this, and I touched on it before, is that, you know, having a high IQ score is not the end all. And where I'm just going to end off is talking about a different kind of intelligence, a theory that was brought up in the 1980s. And this is the notion of emotional intelligence that was, uh, thought of by Daniel Goldman. Emotional intelligence doesn't refer to, you know, how well you do on traditional tests or those kind of things. It refers to the ability to perceive, perceive, understand, manage, and use emotions. So the key thing here is emotions, perceiving others, understanding other people's emotions as well as your own, managing your own emotions and and using them in a in in an adaptive way. He thought this kind of behavior could help people, you know, succeed in various different kind of environments. And and just to demonstrate this, I'm going to talk about, uh, the study that is known, um, as the derailed executives study. And what I mean by executives is it focused the subjects in the study were people who had graduated from the MBA program, the masters of business. So a very very challenging sort of program. You know, you go through the university, you do all these tests, all that kind of stuff. And so and these were people who graduated at the top of their class. They did really really well. And so remember when it comes to school and doing well on on tests and stuff like that, they had measured their IQ and they found that their IQ's were actually really high as well. And so in a sense it was their IQ that got them hired into jobs into top companies and all that kind of stuff out in the business world. Well, what they did is that they followed these quote highly intelligent executives in their jobs and to see how well they ended up doing. Well, the thing is that many of them didn't do so well because even though they had the IQ, they didn't have the emotional intelligence. And this is known as EQ. There's actually a test that can measure your your EQ. They did they didn't do well in their environment. You know, maybe they were hired at a certain level of administration, but so and but what if, uh, treating people below them poorly, you know, too authoritarian, too bossy, um, or they kind of butted heads with the the the executives higher up on them. Uh, they were known not to return emails, and and they just didn't have the emotional skills to to have their job situation run smoothly. So even though their IQ got them hired, it was their lack of EQ that ended up getting them fired. So an interesting thought here that it's just not all about how well you do on tests. There are people who succeed in life in many different ways. Those with, uh, high EQs, those with let's say those racetrack, uh, betterers, you know, they adapt to their environments, they survive very well. So you know we have to consider intelligent behavior is what helps you make successful in the environment that you are in. So in my mind there's many different ways that one can be intelligent. So that's it. I'm done. Oh y thank you, Susan. Yeah. Cheers. I wanted to, um, open it up to maybe some questions. So are do you have a few minutes just in case any of the students have questions for you? Definitely. Definitely. Definitely. Definitely. So any questions from the audience? I got some weird lighting action happening here. Anything that you need, uh, clarified from the lecture or something else that I could try to answer for you? Uh, sorry, Karen. Uh, early, uh, I let Susan know that once the lecture is over, then I need to leave because I have to go downtown to pick up somebody. Right. Okay. It's been a pleasure, Susan. It was wonderful. Right. Okay. And one thing good about your lecture is that you make it so clear to everybody to understand it. Right. Okay. And even though, uh, both Karen and I, we attended your lecture quite a number of times, right? But I still very much enjoy it. Thank you. I would I would Okay, bye my students. I'll see you guys next year. Thanksgiving. See you. Bye. Bye. Take care. care. Okay, so it looks like Mustafa, you have your hand up. You want to go ahead? Yeah. Yeah. Uh, I have a question. Uh, I'm wondering about these two kind of, uh, intelligence. So it's comes, uh, or come with, uh, people from porn or can achieve this intelligence, this intelligence, people coming from burning with with people, uh, burning with this not born born with this IQ or can achieve this. Yeah. So so the nurture versus nature I think is where he's going, right? Oh yeah. Yeah. that that's a big topic and actually in in psychology we talk about, uh, a term called heritability and heritability refers to, um, kind of looking at individual differences between people and let's say intelligence, high intelligence versus low intelligence, and they are able to kind of go about to measure how much of the differences amongst people is due to their genes, due to what they're born with, and the the score, you actually come up with a number for heritability. And the scores for heritability for intelligence, I think, oh, I'm trying to remember, I think they're it's between, um, 0.5 and 0.7 or something like that. Basically saying that it it's it's more than half of what we believe intelligence is is due to one's genes. But it's not just genes. We definitely know that environment does play a role. um, it can't make, uh, mountains out of molehills. You know, someone was born with a severe intellectual diff disabilities. They're not going to be able to kind of get on the high end, but in general, they do believe there's a significant portion due to genes, but environment can change that some. Thank you. That has to do with the term heritability. heritability. [Music] [Music] Any other questions from the group that you have for Susan? Oh yeah, go ahead. Hi, thank you for sharing your information. This is so exciting. Some information maybe we I can miss, but generally thank you for, uh, all of them, and my question is about praying. uh, I heard, uh, and I read all of, uh, from all of area we you we are using our brain only 20% or 30 30%. Is it right? Our brain have more, uh, ability than, uh, than than, uh, normally. That's a hard question to answer. Yeah, I I've heard that before. Like that that that's knowledge that's out there that, you know, we're only tapping into a small percentage of our potential. And and to me that makes a lot of sense, uh, you know, that, um, you know, because our brain is so intricate, we don't realize all that we have. They used to think that whatever we have to learn we learned it in childhood, and our brain is static. It's not malleable, and we can improve. But now we know that's very wrong that people could learn much later in life. You could actually gain more connections between the neurons and actually gain neurons even later on in life. It's harder, but it still can be done. So, uh, when it comes to tapping one's potential, I I very much agree that there's a lot more out there that people just don't realize. Maybe just because they're not engaging in into it yet. uh, they're not, you know, you know, you I see so many senior citizens, you know, involve themselves in programs, let's say, and you know, they they learn new skills, and and it's quite amazing, so it's just taking on the challenge and trying to tap into new things, but but the there's probably a lot more out there, and I I don't want to kind of digress into a very long thing, but you know the people have some amazing abilities up there that, you know, we just maybe don't know that much about, and I'm not going to get into the whole thing of SP and all that kind of stuff. That's a whole other lecture, but, uh, you're right on that point. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Maybe our brain, uh, getting, uh, getting more improve, uh, in the same time. Uh, it can be, um, develop again and again, maybe. Yeah. Just tapping into what we're able to. Yes, for sure. Thank you. Thank you for answer. answer. Okay, nice questions. Anybody else? Before we let Susan go, is there any other questions that you might have? Yeah, go ahead, Cindy. Yeah, I'm just curious. This is, uh, there are lots of research about the intelligence. There are many intelligence is are composed by many facts. But is there any, um, study about how to improve the, um, weekend such as, um, or is there any suggestion to the, um, uh, education BSB to merge this solution to the curriculum that help the students to include their weakness? So yeah, is there any kind of such a kind of study? I I'm I'm sure there definitely is, but I am not I have to be very honest, I'm not too, uh, well-versed in that whole area. The only thing I could think of and it it's related to a topic that I do, uh, you know, talk about in my own psychology classes is that they talk about some, um, what we call adoption studies where they might be taking individuals from let's say, uh, you know, poor environments, poor conditions, and a lot of these might have been from, uh, orphanages, uh, where children don't have the parents and they're raised in these large settings and they're not getting the proper stimulation, and you would assume that these children because they're not being read to, interacted with properly that their brains aren't developing as well, and so you know you would assume that their cognitions would be lower, but when they are adopted out and and and a lot of these studies focus on those who are adopted to let's say a middle-class environment, you know, many let's say Canadians and US, uh, parents might have adopted Romanian children, this was a big focus of study when they brought brought these kids over here and raised them. It it it got it well they didn't measure their IQ previously, but they
knew they there were some deficiencies, but they were in the normal IQ level. There was improvement in their uh levels of intelligence. So yes, we do know that having proper stimulation is important, you know, but this was a very focused sort of study, but you know, I'm sure it depending on the um individual because we have to take into account individual differences. Maybe you have a visual learner or you have an auditory learner, you have to kind of capitalize on their strengths to help them improve. So it's not like a kind of a blanket approach for everybody. for everybody. So I think that's the best I can answer for that question without really knowing too much about what is really out there. So my apologies on that.
Okay. Thank you. Anyway, because I just received a survey from VSB. They ask us to prevent present some suggestion for the future education plan. So I'm thinking yeah this is a very interesting and intelligent study. So probably it can be applied to their the VSB as the as a one of the solution then they can adapted to their current.
Right. Right. Yeah. Good great question. Sorry I just couldn't give you some more specifics though.
Yeah. And there's a a question from Camilo also. Go ahead Camilo.
Yeah thank you. I have two question. The first one is what has been the higher score in the IQ in the IQ and this person has helped humanity with his or her intelligence. I actually have no idea. Anyone want to quickly Google it?
Okay. So the another one that I have is okay. I have heard that most of the intelligent people around the world has some level of outings. Is is true or not? Um I I would tend to agree disagree with that just because u that's my area of specialty and I the one I it's coming from a misconception. It's misinterpreting something that's out there. And I think maybe where this idea had kind of come across was that, you know, down in California, down in the Silicon Valley where they had brought in all these highly intelligent engineers and stuff like that to kind of get the whole business flowing there. So there was all these very high high intelligent individuals. The number of their children uh who were on the autism spectrum was huge. it was like maybe like I can't even remember what the numbers were like but just in comparison to the general population it was significantly higher here and they were thinking oh it's it's it's related to these highly intelligent individuals. Well the thing is one thing that they have noted with uh individuals on the autism spectrum is that they have what's known as a specific cognitive phenotype. It's a strength in what we call knowing about how things work. So jobs that are very demanding like let's say engineers, uh computer program where where you have to be highly intelligent to know what you're doing. Um you actually have some individuals of autism who have those genes in their um family tree, their fathers, their grandfathers. This is their strength. And so it's kind of like a cognitive phenotype that's been passed down in these uh families kind of thing. So there is known to be something about intelligence being related to autism, but that doesn't necessarily mean that all intelligent people like the reverse that all intelligent people have something to do with on the spectrum.
Okay, thank you.
Okay, Camo, here you go. The most intelligent, the highest IQ on record ever is inan a nan Celeste Collie from Singapore. Uh, born in 1999, so age 21 at the moment, and he has an IQ score of 263. Woo. At the age of six years old, he gave a public lecture to a group of students at a university and at age seven, he passed his G CE chemistry. So, this is a highlevel chemistry exam. And so, this guy is crazy, crazy intelligent. So, there you go.
Okay, I'm giving up my day job. I shouldn't be teaching. Isn't that crazy? 263. Oh my gosh, that's like off the rails.
Okay. Um, any other questions for the group before we let Susan go and she can begin her Thanksgiving weekend?
Uh, thank you very much, Susan. Really appreciate your time.
My absolute pleasure. And it's great to see faces and I appreciate having so seeing so many faces. My students when I do Zoom things, I might see one face. It might be of my own. So, thank you for having your cameras on. It was great to actually see you guys. And I think I recognize some names and and faces from before. So, it's great to see you again. Yes. So, happy Thanksgiving to you. For my students, you can take a little break. We'll come back together at quarter after 5. Farad students, thanks for joining us. We have a bunch of overseas students. So really appreciate you being with us at 4:00 in the afternoon so that they're not waking up in the middle of the night for this lecture. So thank you so much to all of you. Happy Thanksgiving. Uh good luck with your essays and uh I'll see my group in a different Zoom room in about 13 minutes. All right.