A year after my first test, I decided to use a combination of neuroenhancement methods to cheat my way back into Mensa – to use smart drugs and brain stimulation together for the maximum effect. The bad news with this strategy was that, should my IQ increase, I wouldn’t be able to say with any certainty whether it was the modafinil or the electrical stimulation that gave the most help. But I would hopefully get a useful answer on the effectiveness of neuroenhancement – on my brain at least.
I had plenty of modafinil pills left so that side was easy: I would get up early on the day of the test and take one with breakfast. That should give the drug three to four hours to work its way into my system. The electrical brain stimulation was more of a challenge. I toyed with the idea of wearing my Spiderman hat to the test to conceal the electrodes, and flicking the switch to light up my brain at the start of each set of questions. That seemed a risky strategy, partly because it would be pretty obvious what I was up to, and partly because it would mean nipping out now and then to rewet the sponges.
Not all brain stimulation studies need the electric current to flow when the desired task is being completed. Many of the psychiatric experiments stimulate the brain separately to the therapy sessions, for example, to prepare it or soften it up. They do it every day, or every other day, as part of the treatment routine. That seemed a decent compromise, and would at least save me from sitting my Mensa retest in a strange hat while warm salty water dripped down my face. In the week leading up to the test, I would use my internet-bought kit to stimulate my brain at home for twenty minutes each day.
But which part of the brain to target? Certainly not the motor cortex I had aimed for in my rowing experiment, as I wasn’t seeking improvement in the muscles and other bits of the body it controls. Better to stimulate a part of the brain more involved with cognition and processing. I found studies that seemed the most useful and applicable to the Mensa test. They were carried out by a neuroscientist called Allan Snyder at the University of Sydney in Australia.
Snyder divides opinions among other scientists, and not just because he likes to wear a curious cap at a jaunty angle in all of his television interviews. He calls his brain stimulator a ‘thinking cap’ and is not shy about making strong claims for what he believes it can do, including boosting human creativity.
In a series of tests, Snyder has used low-frequency magnetic stimulation to inhibit the left anterior temporal lobe, to try to release dormant savant skills he argues are present in everybody’s brain. And he has obtained some interesting results. After his brain stimulation, several volunteers were better able to proof-read and find the mistake in the following text:
A bird in the
the hand is worth
two in the bush
Drawing skills also improved, with a similar change in emphasis, from abstract to concrete, to the dementia patients who suffered damage to the same site in the brain. Sketches were judged as more life-like and complex.
Some people also showed an improvement in numerosity: a savant skill that enables rapid counting of a large number of objects. It’s immortalized in Rain Man when Raymond counts cocktail sticks from a box dropped by a waitress. In The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks reported that George and Charles – the New York calendar-counting twins – could do it as well. (He changed their names in the book.)
A box of matches on their table fell, and discharged its contents on the floor: ‘111’, they both cried simultaneously; and then, in a murmur, John said ‘37’. Michael repeated this, John said it a third time and stopped. I counted the matches – it took me some time – and there were 111. ‘How could you count the matches so quickly?’ I asked.
‘We didn’t count,’ they said. ‘We saw the 111’. Similar tales are told of Zacharias Dase, the number prodigy, who would instantly call out ‘183’ or ‘79’ if a pile of peas was poured out, and indicate as best he could – he was also a dullard – that he did not count the peas, but just ‘saw’ their number, as a whole, in a flash.
‘And why did you murmur “37”, and repeat it three times?’ I asked the twins. They said in unison, ‘37, 37, 37, 111’.
In Snyder’s magnet experiments, a computer flashed up repeated images of between fifty and 150 dots for a second and a half, and people were asked to guess how many appeared each time. Ten of the twelve volunteers improved after stimulation.
In 2012, Snyder turned to electrical stimulation, and this time he used the different electrodes to both inhibit the left side and activate the right side of the volunteer brains. He reported a similar improvement – this time in the ability of people to solve a classic puzzle that requires a bit of lateral thinking. It’s called the nine dot problem, and it asks simply that you connect all nine dots using just four straight lines, without lifting your pen up or retracing a line.
Try it:
(SPOILER ALERT. The solution is at the top of the next page.)
The only way to solve the puzzle is to extend the lines beyond the boundary of the square. Like so:
In Snyder’s tests, only the people who had the electrical brain stimulation realized that.
Well, almost. One volunteer who turned up at the lab, a man called Brian in his early twenties, was not allowed to participate, because in conversation it emerged that he had suffered a significant head injury as a child. Still, he was interested in the research and, as he was already there, asked to have a go at the puzzle.
He solved it – the only volunteer to do so without stimulation to inhibit the left anterior temporal lobe. After he did, Brian told the scientists how he saw the world in concrete terms:
I only focus on a particular thing, so if I walk into a room, I’d just take things methodically, each thing at the time, I don’t look at the whole picture . . . I notice everything by itself, as singular objects instead of the whole scene . . . even my writing . . . I’m only focused on one part . . . My long term memory is very very good . . . I can recall everything that happened in year 6 [when he was twelve years old].
Brian offered to dig out his medical records. His neurologist had noted that Brian had suffered multiple injuries to the left hemisphere, and a ‘fracture at the left temporal bone’ – the same spot the experiments were trying to turn down by simulating damage.
So, I would copy this study and aim my brain stimulator at the anterior temporal lobes.
My home-grown stimulation of the anterior temporal lobes began with a bang. I wet the electrodes and tucked them under the hat, one on each side of my head. And then as I turned the switch from off to 2mA an extraordinary thing happened. A flash of light shot across my vision, a tracer bullet passed through my brain. That hadn’t happened previously when I targeted the motor cortex. I gasped, and my wife – already nervous about my self-experimentation – leaned forward ready to pull the plug on it.
It was a phosphene, a pinprick of light not there and created only by the electrical stimulation of the retinas at the back of my eyes, or more likely my brain’s visual cortex. It’s a well-known effect and similar to the patterns that swim in your head should you press your eyes for too long, or the sprinkle of stars that appear when you stand too quickly. Phosphenes are thought to be responsible for the phenomena of Prisoner’s Cinema, in which people confined to darkness for a long time experience what they describe as a light show.
Phosphenes are harmless, but they do show that messing with the brain using electricity can have unexpected effects. At the moment, there is no evidence of harmful side effects, but electrical brain stimulation can certainly go wrong. This seems more to do with poorly assembled and used devices, rather than an inherent hazard with the technology itself, but some users have said they burnt themselves quite badly.
As such, I wouldn’t want to be seen in this book as encouraging people to try it for themselves, but then, I don’t need to. The reports of success, both in the scientific and consumer media, are doing that already. And as the technology is developed for medical and other uses, then demand will surely rise with awareness. Companies are selling the kit and volunteers are queuing to buy it. Some scientists have warned against DIY brain stimulation, and others say sale and use should be regulated. It’s a debate that has some way to run, but we can’t pretend that selfneuroenhancement is not happening. Better, in my view, to explore its power and limitations and gather the information we need to make an informed decision. And the public, surely, must play a role in that. If brain stimulation and other neuroenhancement technology does work, then plenty of them are going to want to use it. And that’s whether or not it’s regulated, controlled and risk-free.
My Mensa retest was at the same London university as the first, this time on a muggy Saturday morning the day after it was announced that Britain voted to leave the European Union. The rejection of expertise – and by extension, intelligence – had played a major role in the referendum. A string of smart people, from Stephen Hawking to the head of the Bank of England, had warned of the wide-ranging negative consequences. ‘I think people in this country have had enough of experts,’ responded Michael Gove, the newspaper-journalist-turned-politician who was chief among those pushing Britain to go it alone.
As a member, I didn’t think that Mensa would have allowed me to take the test again. So I assumed the identity of my brother for the day, I gave the Mensa man in charge some convincing ID and he found his name on the list.
We were relegated to the basement this time. There were more candidates too – twenty including me – with about the same mix of ages and, as far as I could tell, nationalities. The invigilator was from the same school of instruction and supervision as Charles, who I had met at the Glasgow meeting. He didn’t ask journalists to declare themselves, but he did explain the procedure in long and repetitive detail. He even drew multiple choice boxes on the white board to show us how to fill them in, and how to correct mistakes using the rubbers on the ends of the pencils he gave to each of us. Maybe he just thought we weren’t very bright.
The questions were the same, more or less. Certainly on the second of the two papers, the language test, I recognized some. On the first it was harder to know – one sequence of interlocked circles and triangles tends to look the same as the next.
I had taken the modafinil after breakfast and by mid-morning when the test began, the drug was moving through the gears in my brain. The sense of alert and focused concentration it had given me the first time was back. I whizzed through the early easy questions, but as time ticked on and the puzzles got tricky, a curious thing happened. The modafinil – at least I think it was the modafinil – dragged me fully into each question, and made it more difficult to take an educated guess and move on. Where I could see the answer early on, the drug acted as an accelerator. But when some effort was required, it was almost a brake. I was sucked into the problem, the way it was phrased and posed, and, if I was taking too long, I found it harder to walk away from the intellectual challenge and move on to the next question.
For example, one question towards the end described the circumstances around the fate of a lost explorer, and asked us to work out whether it was thirst, cannibals or prowling lions that did for him in the end. It was a full paragraph of text and a test of logic, memory and reason and was worth just a single mark, the same as dozens of previous questions, but I found that I couldn’t move on from it. I read each word and as I did so, I saw the man’s plight, recorded in the final desperate pages of his diary. He was hungry, thirsty, scared – hunted. What happened to him? The possible sequences of events played out in my head and each time I needed to get to the climax (always the same for the unfortunate explorer) before I could consider the next. I was lost in the abstract. I was wasting valuable time considering his motives, his fear of wild animals and how I would react in that situation. I couldn’t easily extract and work with the concrete information, the facts and the sequence of events.
(In January 2017 scientists in Germany reported what looks like a similar effect of modafinil on expert chess players. Those given the drug made better moves, but actually lost more games on time penalties because they took so long to choose them.)
In the end, I’m pretty sure I got the question about the dead explorer right (the key was to consider the threat the lions posed to the cannibals) but as I filled out the relevant box to record my victory, the man from Mensa said time was up, and I had left four questions unanswered. I was still thinking about the lions as he whisked the answer paper off my desk, and did not even think this time to tick box A for the rest.
The results, he said, would be posted within a week.
Smart drugs and electric brain stimulators are the current focus of research in neuroenhancement but that isn’t where the story begins and ends. A few years before scientists started doping students and playing with currents, they looked to classical music as a way to increase intelligence.
When General Augusto Pinochet established a military dictatorship in Chile, following a violent coup in 1973, political opponents turned to an unlikely weapon of resistance. Crowds would gather outside detention centres and sing a familiar song. The words were in Spanish. The tune, unmistakably, was Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’.
Considered by many to be the composer’s masterpiece, ‘Ode to Joy’ features at the climax of his ninth symphony. The lyrics are taken from a German poem, with lines that celebrate brotherhood and the unity of mankind. As such, it has also been played at protests to signal disapproval with other totalitarian regimes, such as in apartheid South Africa and by the students who squatted in Tiananmen Square.
On 14 January 1998, an American politician called Zell Miller played ‘Ode to Joy’ at the Georgia state house on a portable tape recorder, as part of annual budget negotiations. ‘Now,’ he asked his colleagues, ‘don’t you feel smarter already?’
Miller, state governor, wanted them to approve his plan to spend taxpayer dollars on CDs and cassettes of classical music, which he would then give to new parents to play to their babies. Tens of thousands of infants each year, he argued, would have their brains stimulated and their intelligence enhanced. Miller grew up in the mountains of north Georgia, where he had witnessed for himself the intellectual benefits of music. ‘Musicians were folks that not only could play a fiddle but they were also good mechanics. They could fix your car.’
Not to be outsmarted, the neighbouring state of Florida passed its own law to harness the same effect. State-funded day-care centres, the law insisted, must play classical music to the children for at least one hour every day.
Florida and Georgia were acting on a scientific study that suggested, yes, hearing classical music could boost intelligence. A 1993 experiment got college students to listen to verbal relaxation exercises, or nothing, or to the first movement ‘Allegro con Spirito’ from Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major, and then asked each group to answer some simple questions to test spatial awareness. The students who listened to Mozart experienced a temporary, but significant, increase in scores.
Christened the Mozart effect, the results of the study made headlines around the world. But in doing so, the conclusions and implications came unglued from the actual results. Nobody is sure how, but a limited study of a narrow cognitive test in young adults morphed into the promise of a general lift in intelligence for children and babies. And why just Mozart? Surely any classical music would do, right?
Even as the politicians were pouncing on the study results, other scientists were starting to pick holes in them. Most importantly, despite dozens of attempts, other scientific labs couldn’t get Mozart’s music to boost the test scores of their own volunteers in the same way. The idea still has some defenders, but the attitude of most researchers to this twenty-year-old controversy can be summed up by the title of a 2010 summary and analysis of all the various trials published in the journal Intelligence: ‘Mozart effect – Shmozart effect’.
Equal disagreement surrounds another widely acclaimed method that promises to boost and protect cognitive ability. So-called brain training – a series of repetitive tasks usually done on a computer – is now a multibillion pound industry, but every now and then a group of esteemed neuroscientists will pipe up to say people who sign up for it are wasting their time and money.
The disagreement is usually not over whether brain training tasks can have an effect, but whether or not that effect is transferable to everyday activities. One task, for example, gets people to remember and repeat endless strings of numbers for several hours each week. The evidence is pretty strong that, yes, these people do improve their ability to remember and repeat strings of numbers. But it’s much less clear whether that benefit will endure and, more importantly, if these people could apply it to something more useful – remembering to pick up a pint of milk on their way back from work perhaps.
In one of the largest efforts to test the benefits of brain training, scientists asked viewers of the BBC science television show Bang Goes the Theory to try it for themselves as part of a rigorous experiment. More than 50,000 people registered for the tests, and 11,430 went as far as carrying out the minimum two online training sessions a week for the requested six weeks.
As well as the strings of numbers to memorize, some of the volunteers were trained in a test of grammatical reasoning, which is known to reflect someone’s general intelligence. They were shown pictures and as quickly as possible had to say whether simple statements were true or false: for example, ‘the circle is larger than the square.’ Another task addressed spatial memory; finding and remembering the location of stars hidden in boxes. And a related game asked volunteers to remember what objects (hat, ball, etc) were concealed in a series of shuttered windows. Each game was geared so that, the more correct responses, the harder and faster it got.
Practice, it seems, does (help) make perfect. After six weeks, plenty of people were scoring higher on the specific test they had been asked to train on. But only on those. When the tasks were switched, those who had been trained at finding stars showed no significant improvement at finding hats (all volunteers had tried each of the different tests at the start so the scientists had something to compare). This was true even when the different tests should have tested the same cognitive function, such as abstract reasoning.
This is a problem for the popular claim that these cognitive tests somehow ‘train’ the brain and can increase ‘mental fitness’. While increased physical fitness, from regular running for example, would be expected to help people better perform other exercises, like cycling, the benefit from the brain training was less useful, and less versatile. Bang goes the theory.
Things get slightly more positive when the volunteers are grouped by age. If cognition and intelligence can be improved then the most important societal use of such a tool would probably not be to improve the thinking skills of the young and healthy, but to prevent their loss in the elderly. As more people live well into their seventies and eighties, dementia is becoming a huge burden in developed countries and soaking up an increasing share of healthcare costs. Indeed, some brain training games are explicitly marketed as one way for older players to stave off the ravages of degenerative conditions like Alzheimer’s disease.
When treated as a separate group, the thousands of silver-haired viewers of Bang Goes the Theory who trained every day on online tests did seem to show some useful improvements in mental ability. Volunteers aged sixty and above scored higher on a scale used to assess independence. Called the instrumental activities of daily living scale, it measures how well people say they can get around and do stuff – using the telephone, shopping, cooking, washing clothes, keeping on top of personal finances and other tasks that people start to struggle with as their mental faculties decline with age.
It’s pushing it a little to say this study backs up the clinical claims that brain training could ease the impacts of dementia, but it does suggest something that deserves more investigation.
Despite the often trenchant criticism made of brain training and the lack of evidence for useful and transferable effects, there doesn’t seem to be a massive downside, even if the benefit is marginal. These tests are games after all, and people pay to play games all the time. Hype of brain training seems different to the dangerous claims that are made for some untested medicines, because those are too often presented as an alternative to evidence-backed mainstream therapies.
At present, there are no reliable techniques to try to avoid the misery of Alzheimer’s, so nothing to distract people from. If the brain training games don’t work then that’s a shame – and yes, some people have become rich off the back of us trying – but it seems a reasonable and sensible position for people to have a go and see. It takes years to accumulate the kind of evidence that will convince the most robust of sceptics and some of the people who are trying to train their brains, frankly, don’t have years.
Besides, the sceptics who argue it’s all a waste of time have a natural human failing on their side: laziness. Brain training is a huge effort. Based on the (almost zero) amount of transferable improvement the younger people showed in the simple tasks of memory, scientists estimated it would take four years of brain training for someone to be able to remember a single extra digit. The over-sixties who showed the benefit above only did so after they fiddled with the online tasks for at least ten minutes a day, every day for six months.
All studies like this lose a huge proportion of their volunteers as they proceed because people just can’t be bothered to keep it up. It’s the same with physical training as well, as anyone who has pledged to do simple stuff like a few dozen sit-ups or ten minutes’ brisk walking a day knows full well. Just like the real thing, plenty of people pay to join these brain gyms, try it for a couple of weeks and then fail to trouble the equipment again.
The sad truth is that as it stands, most of us will see most of our cognitive functions decline and fall as we age. Vocabulary and general knowledge – classic types of crystallized intelligence – are robust and can keep gradually increasing well past someone’s seventieth birthday. But even without disease and dementia, fluid intelligence, reasoning and problem-solving usually rises quickly with schooling and teenage development and peaks in early adulthood.
For pre-schoolers, don’t be fooled into paying for DVDs that promise to make babies smarter. In 2009, Disney was forced to offer refunds to millions of parents who bought ‘Baby Einstein’ videos – containing music, puppets, and bright colours – because the company had claimed they were educational. They’re not. But then maybe we don’t need to go in search of cognitive enhancement, for ourselves or our children. Maybe we can just sit back and let cognitive enhancement come to us.
Old houses with their lower door frames are tough on modern visitors. Doors were made shorter in those days because the people were shorter – figures show that in developed countries people are now a full four inches higher on average than they were 150 years ago.
This creep upwards poses problems beyond not being able to fit in old houses – modern footballers find it harder to kick the ball past the now-giant goalkeepers that block their path. In 1996, officials at the global governing body of the sport, FIFA, even floated the idea that the size of the goalposts should be increased, to create more empty space for the strikers to shoot at.
Nobody is sure why we are getting taller. And here’s the striking thing – it’s not just height that is increasing in this way. So is intelligence. Across the developed world, each generation consistently scores better on IQ tests. Even as we focus on cognitive skills, argue about the best way to educate, and struggle to define intelligence, the ground is shifting beneath our feet. For decades, children have been consistently turning out smarter than their parents and grandparents. The dream of the eugenicists for a future race of superior humans is being realized. Millions, perhaps billions of people, are being cognitively enhanced. Something is shifting the goalposts. But what?
The steady rise in IQ across the citizens of developed nations is called the Flynn effect, after the New Zealand political scientist James Flynn, who was among the first to report it. Flynn had noticed a curious thing: people seemed to find older IQ tests easier. The questions looked the same, but a volunteer’s IQ measured on a test given in 1940, say, was significantly higher than if they took a newer test, published in 1980. Because IQ is measured relative to the average score of a population, and the person taking both tests was the same, the change in score could mean only one thing: the average score of the population in 1940 and 1980 was different. Specifically, the average score for the 1940 test must have been significantly lower to allow the same ability to appear relatively superior on that test.
It works the other way around, too. Get different groups to sit the same test, or compare the number of right answers from groups who took the same test in the past, and the younger generation always does better. Significantly better – the average Flynn effect is about three full IQ points a decade. So people born in Britain in 1990 have, on average, IQ scores a massive fifteen points higher than the generation born during the Second World War. The US saw the average IQ rise by fourteen points from 1932 to 1978, and Japan witnessed a nineteen point rise between 1940 and 1965. All of these people, and the societies they lived in and contributed to, were cognitively enhanced by birthday. The change is visible on other forms of intelligence test too.
There are some tentative signs that these IQ increases are manifesting themselves in the real world. The average age of the top international chess players declined from about thirty-five to twenty-five over the last decades of the twentieth century. Scientific productivity, measured by research papers and patents published, has increased massively. And the number of children in US schools diagnosed as suffering from mild mental retardation has seen a decrease. None of this is conclusive of course – these things could all be changing due to reasons other than increasing average IQ – but it does appear to be in line with what we might expect.
Not everybody accepts that society is getting smarter. A hard core of intelligence researchers is reluctant to give up the concerns of the eugenicists that the modern world is doomed to idiocy. Despite the IQ increases observed in many places, this group makes the case that there has in fact been a decline in general intelligence since the Victorian days. They even use the results of all those reaction time measurements conducted by Francis Galton on the prime minister and the rest to try to prove it. Average reaction times in western countries, they say, are slower these days, which shows that less intelligent people (some of whom are immigrants) have been having too many kids and spoiling it for everyone else. Per capita rates of ‘innovation and genius appear to have declined subsequently’.
If anything, it’s the opposite conclusion that deserves serious consideration. If IQ in Britain and the US and other industrialized countries has been rising steadily, then when did that rise begin? And just how low was average intelligence before? Clearly there were always some high achievers who caught the eye (and built bridges, cracked trigonometry, predicted celestial mechanics, wrote the US constitution, invented the bicycle) but were our great-grandparents and people further back generally, well, just a bit thick?
Intelligence, recall, is using what you’ve got to do what you want. Or to get what you need. And 150 years ago, before remote controls and tube lines and having to go to school and having to work in the knowledge economy and having other people want to know what you know and how much, people wanted and needed different things from their brains. James Flynn has looked at all the records he can find from as many places as kept them and suggests that, prior to industrialization, humans focused on concrete objects and as modernity shaped their lives, so their brains learned to grapple with abstract concepts. That type of abstract thinking, the memory and visualization and spatial awareness and the ability to make connections beyond the surface, are the bits of intelligence that an IQ test tends to pick up.
Flynn describes it like this:
The industrial revolution demands a better educated work force, not just to fill new elite positions but to upgrade the average working person, progressing from literacy to grade school to high school to university. Women enter the work force. Better standards of living nourish better brains. Family size drops so that adults dominate the home’s vocabulary and modern parenting develops (encouraging the child’s potential for education). People’s professions exercise their minds rather than asking for physically-demanding repetitive work. Leisure at least allows cognitively demanding activity rather than mere recuperation from work. The world’s new visual environment develops so that abstract images dominate our minds and we can ‘picture’ the world and its possibilities rather than merely describe it.
This process gives nations as they develop about 100–150 years of IQ gains, until both the social and intellectual transformation levels off. At some point, universal education is established and family size is as low as it will go. Leisure time becomes saturated with hobbies.
National IQ scores do suggest that some countries have reached this plateau phase, and their populations have hit the brain-power ceiling. The Scandinavian countries in particular seem to have compressed the development cycle and peaked, perhaps aided by heavy state investment in education and welfare. Countries in East Asia such as Japan and Korea, alongside Britain, Germany and the US, are approaching the plateau, while late starters such as Brazil, Argentina, Kenya and Turkey are just hitting the sweet spot and witnessing massive IQ gains. Other low income and developing countries have yet to get going, which can perhaps explain why average IQ measured in those places is typically on the low side.
Flynn says:
Modernity means breaking from simply manipulating the concrete world for use. It means classifying, using logic on the abstract, pictorial reasoning and more vocabulary. The IQ test items that have risen over time make the same cognitive demands. The enormous score gains are a symptom of the radically new habits of mind that distinguish us from our immediate ancestors.
Exactly how modern life raises IQ remains undetermined. There are plenty of suggestions, which range from kids and adults getting wise to how to sit and pass tests – guessing at multiple choice questions when time is running out, for example – and better nutrition, maternal and pre-natal care, to larger brains inside the larger heads on all those bigger bodies. Some have even suggested the brighter minds are down to brighter houses and the spread of artificial light.
None of these seem as likely as the cognitive impact of education, and how it has developed, and the teaching of mathematics especially. Sophisticated geometry, algebra and multi-step problems have replaced rote learning, and are presented earlier in the curriculum to younger and younger kids. A 2005 analysis by education experts concluded: ‘Currently, young children regularly engage in visual-spatial problem-solving associated with prefrontal based working memory functions their grandparents’ generation would not have been exposed to until [aged eleven and twelve] and their great-grandparents’ generation may not have been introduced to at all’.
Whatever the exact cause of the Flynn effect, its IQ rise is almost certainly not down to genetics. A few generations within a century or so is too short a time and too large a change to be down to nature – especially as modern studies of the genetics of intelligence show the impact of genes on g and IQ is much more subtle than a couple of pieces of DNA to be altered. Still, that does not mean that deliberate modification of genes – genetic engineering of humans – could not raise IQ even further.
One problem with this futuristic idea is that several massive studies of intelligence have failed to find any specific genes responsible for IQ differences, at least in the normal and high range (many genes have been identified that seem to play an important role in mental retardation). That doesn’t mean the genes are not there. It means they are not obvious, which means there are probably an awful lot of them, each of which has a small effect on its own.
While many geneticists might see this huge number of genes that direct intelligence as an obstacle to tinkering with DNA to boost IQ, Stephen Hsu views it as an opportunity. Hsu is a physicist at Michigan State University and he likes to think big. In 2014, he wrote an article for the online magazine Nautilus as big as it comes. It was titled: ‘Super-intelligent humans are coming. Genetic engineering will one day create the smartest humans who have ever lived.’
Confusingly for those planning to pop by, in 2007 the Beijing Genomics Institute moved its headquarters to Shenzhen, some 1,300 miles from the Chinese capital. Bill Gates visited a few years later and left dumbstruck by what he had seen. The building hummed with electronics, but not the kind that made Gates his fortune. The machines he saw were crunching human capital. They were analysing, measuring, sequencing and recording the secrets of DNA sourced from thousands of people.
The institute goes by the less geographically misleading (if more opaque) corporate abbreviation BGI these days, but its purpose remains much the same – to work out what, genetically, makes us tick. And in 2012, news started to leak from Shenzhen that the company was turning its DNA sequencers to investigate the genetics of intelligence. It was asking for high achievers, including top scientists and people with high scores on IQ tests, to volunteer a sample for analysis. One of its advisers is Stephen Hsu.
If the individual genes (or the version of the genes) with a (minimal) positive effect on IQ can be identified, Hsu says, the precise genetic requirements of the super-intelligent human could be mapped – and produced in a living embryo. Natural genes could be changed. Each of the ‘off’ bulbs in the string of lights could be twisted to ‘on’. And the result would be dazzling.
In his article, Hsu claimed: ‘Given that there are many thousands of potential positive variants, the implication is clear: if a person could be engineered to have the positive version of each causal variant, they might exhibit cognitive ability which is roughly 100 standard deviations above average. This corresponds to more than 1,000 IQ points’.
An IQ of over a thousand? ‘It is not at all clear that IQ scores have any meaning in this range,’ Hsu admitted.
However, we can be confident that, whatever it means, ability of this kind would far exceed the maximum ability among the approximately 100 billion total individuals who have ever lived. We can imagine savant-like capabilities that, in a maximal type, might be present all at once: nearly perfect recall of images and language; super-fast thinking and calculation; powerful geometric visualization, even in higher dimensions, the ability to execute multiple analyses or trains of thought in parallel at the same time; the list goes on.
That would be the ideal, but, Hsu continued, plenty of intellectual gains could still be obtained with more modest genetic tweaks. Switching 100 gene variants from ‘off’ to ‘on’, for example, could produce a gain of 15 IQ points – easily the difference between a child struggling at school and sailing through college.
It sounds far-fetched, but then the future usually does. The first part of Hsu’s plan, the identification of the thousands of genetic variants implicated in intelligence, is largely a numbers game. We know the genetic influence is there. Throw enough DNA from enough smart people through enough sequencing machines, and build computers powerful enough to analyse the data that spews from the other end, and they will probably be found – or at least enough of them to try to make a difference.
The editing of the genes into shape is more technically demanding and probably not possible yet, but progress is racing ahead. Even in the eighteen months or so I have been writing this book, the scientific world has been turned upside down by the rapid rise of a new gene editing technology called Crispr-Cas9. It allows scientists to make precise and accurate genetic modifications, and puts the ability to do so in the hands of even non-expert researchers. Chinese scientists stunned everybody in biology in 2015 when they announced they had already used the tool to modify the DNA of a human embryo*, but virtually all the work so far has been in animals.
A few months after the work with the human embryo, scientists edited the embryonic DNA of Bama pigs – about half the size of regular farm pigs – to turn off genes involved in growth. The modified pig embryos, when implanted into a surrogate sow and grown to term, produced mini-pigs. These pinched porcines, when full grown, were just a sixth of the size of a farmyard pig – about the same as a dog. The scientists knew exactly what to do with them. They sold them as pets. The same team are now working to customize the colour and pattern of the pigs’ coats, which they say they will then be able to customize on demand. The research was done, incidentally, at BGI Shenzhen.
* This was a research project only, and the embryo was never intended to be developed into a person.