Are you feeling smarter today?

Not really!

But research actually proves you might be, whether you realise it or not.

Is that so?

In a new study, published in the journal Intelligence, researchers looked at IQ test data from more than 2,00,000 participants taken over 64 years from 48 countries and found that human beings are getting smarter and smarter. And guess what, people in developing countries are catching up with the developed ones when it comes to intelligence as proved by an IQ test.

What kind of intelligence are they talking about?

The mega study focuses on a non-verbal portion of common IQ tests called Raven’s Progressive Matrices. This section of an IQ test usually gives the test-taker a set of shapes with patterns and then asks you to fill in the missing element.

And we’re getting better at guessing what comes next?

Apparently. These tests are usually structured for 100 to be the average score – and researchers found a 20-point jump in average IQ scores since the 1950s, of which the biggest leaps were found in India and China.

Do test-takers thumb through old tests for practice?

Usually, the standard tests are revised every 25 years or so and made harder every single time, so practice doesn’t explain why people have improved IQs now. Nothing explains it, actually, except for a few possible theories.

Which are?

That maybe our modern education system, which spread from the developed to the developing world, trains us to be better test-takers. Students are used to the pressure of writing tests and loads of practice helps them perform better on standard tests than students 64 years ago could have done. Plus, we’re trained from an early age now to use logic and understand a hypothesis – which is how a test works. Try running a scientific hypothesis by your great-grandmother.

Okay, any other theories?

Industrialisation and a more competitive job market has forced parents to push their kids to be smarter, to learn more, at earlier ages. So children now naturally are exposed to a lot more information and intelligent thinking than their counterparts half a century ago.

Is that why India and China are catching up?

Exactly. It might also explain why IQ scores have stabilised in the highly-industrialised Scandinavian countries, leaving the rest of the world to catch up with them.

Better standards of living might explain it then?

Along with a reduction in poverty and improved nutrition right from birth. For instance, fewer instances of iodine deficiency in China have been linked to better test scores. There’s also the fact that we live differently these days. We’re exposed to much more visual world – think television, internet, outdoor advertising – all of which use patterns extensively, exactly what the Raven’s Matrices measure. And then there’s another possibility.

What’s that?

The light bulb. Artificial lighting is supposed to stimulate growth in chickens. Does it do the same with our brains?

Does it?

The link hasn’t been proven yet.

Or maybe the definition of intelligence itself has changed…

That seems to be the most reasonable explanation, and one that doesn’t insult our ancestors. A century ago, no one really needed to sit down and take a test that made them fill in blank boxes. But this did not make them any less intelligent farmers, inventors, and philosophers or just ordinary people who could live their lives completely and pragmatically. The demands on their intelligence were different than on ours.

I wouldn’t know these demands, I’ve never taken an IQ test.

Ah well, first rule of science – account for exceptions.

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