The second envelope from Mensa was waiting for me when I returned from work, poking out beneath a gas bill. I opened the gas bill first. Its numbers were higher than I expected. I hoped the same would be true of the letter that announced my new IQ.
It was. My cognitively enhanced score on the language test had crept up to 156, from 154 before. And on the Culture Fair test, the tough one with the symbols, it had soared to 137, from 128. That put me on the ninety-ninth percentile on both.
My IQ as measured by the symbols test – the one I had tried to improve on using the brain stimulation – was now 135, up from 125, and so well above the threshold required for Mensa membership. In the year and three months since the first test, or perhaps just in the week I had been stimulating my brain, my intelligence measured by that method had increased enough to overtake 3 per cent of the adult population, more than a million people in the UK.
Was the increase down to the neuroenhancement? It’s impossible to know for sure, but I think at least some of it was. As we saw already, a retest effect with IQ should see scores increase second time around. How much would still linger after a year? Scientists don’t know, though Mensa is happy for people to try to get in as many times as they like, as long as they wait a year between tests. (And they are, of course, also happy to take their money as they do so.)
Second time around, each question still takes working out and, although I suppose it’s possible my subconscious remembered the individual puzzles and chipped in with some help, it certainly felt like I had to start from scratch each time. I was definitely more prepared, and I knew going in I would have to be quick – but I learned that pretty rapidly the first time around too.
Perhaps the increase was down to mere statistical chance? All measurements of human performance come with natural variability and are influenced by how much we’ve slept, what we’ve had to eat and drink, whether we are a morning or an afternoon person, the temperature of the room, whether the person at the next desk is coughing or tapping their pencil against their teeth and numerous other sources of influence, on both a conscious and subconscious level. Certainly, my relatively slight increase on the language-based test could easily be attributed to that. Such a small rise could even be down to pure luck and me guessing the answer as B rather than D a couple of times.
The larger increase on the Culture Fair test seems harder to entirely explain that way, though it’s difficult to be too definitive. Most psychologists talk of IQ ranges and how confident they can be a score falls within a spread.
The most common of these is probably the 95 per cent confidence interval, which works out as an error margin of about five points both up and down. So, from my initial measured score of 125, we can conclude a 95 per cent chance my true IQ was between 120 and 130. And for the second, the measured IQ of 135, there is the same chance it is now between 130 and 140. It’s not that simple (the spread tends to bulge towards the lower scores) and of course, there is a 5 per cent chance in both cases my actual IQ will fall outside the ten point spread.
It’s worth remembering test scores – from IQ scores to exam grades – in the real world don’t come with error bars. Most of us get a single shot at most opportunities to prove ourselves, and we have to live with the results. If statistical clouds of variation essentially make scores of 69 per cent and 71 per cent on a three-hour exam the same, well, nobody tells university examiners that. Score above 70 per cent on my undergraduate exams and you were awarded one degree classification and below 70 per cent it was another. To find a way to perform better on the day, to nudge that score from 69 per cent to 70 per cent, can have a massive impact on someone’s life. And if it can be achieved with cognitive enhancement, then that means the technology and its effects are hugely significant for society.
To pick up easy money as a postgraduate I used to invigilate degree exams. On one boiling June day with pneumatic drills bashing away to dig up the road outside, I remember one distressed finalist putting his hand up halfway through a session and asking me, almost with tears in his eyes, if the stifling heat and noise would be taken into account when his paper was marked. Yes it would, I told him, knowing full well it wouldn’t. Somehow, I think telling him that, statistically speaking, overlapping error bars on a high-scoring lower second-class degree and a low-scoring upper second-class degree meant the outcomes were essentially the same, wouldn’t have reassured him much; especially not if a couple of dropped marks in that exam saw his life pivot on a lost opportunity.
There is always a cut-off point so people who fall on either side of it will be separated on some measure. That’s not fair, but we all go along with it – given two candidates for a job with everything else equal, who would not choose the one with the higher grades?
On my IQ tests, maybe I just got lucky second time around and that could explain the higher score. Or maybe the practice, drugs and brain stimulation put me in a position where I could make the most of that luck. This is a world, remember, where until recently an IQ score of 70 would see someone executed and a score of 69 would let them live. Try telling that person a rise of a single IQ point carries no statistical difference.
Then there’s the placebo effect. I knew I was taking genuine modafinil and I knew the current was flowing through the electrode sponges squeezed against my head. More, I knew they might increase my IQ, and, for the sake of having a decent ending for this book, I wanted them to. Maybe I subconsciously tried harder in the second test (I don’t think I did so deliberately) or maybe I had more confidence because I believed my efforts at cognitive enhancement had made me more intelligent.
It’s hard to disentangle all of the confounding factors, which is why science and medicine don’t take one-off results in such uncontrolled trials seriously as hard evidence. My experiment was not scientific and I generated no reliable data. Even if the cognitive enhancement effect is genuine we can’t tell if one of the methods worked better than the other. I’m only a case study. But case studies can still be useful. They can identify effects that require attention, exploration and, eventually, explanation.
One explanation for the rise in my measured IQ is a combination of the retest and placebo effect with statistical chance. Another is the modafinil and brain stimulation between them had a genuine effect. (Another is Mensa simply marked either the first or second test incorrectly.) To find out, to explore and explain, the only way is to pay attention and to carry out larger and more controlled trials.
Should we? I think we should, if for no other reason than to give society the evidence it needs to decide what to do about cognitive enhancement.
Of all of the questions raised in this book, the medical and technical and neurological, the most important – and the most difficult to answer – seem to be those around ethics. Opinions on the impact of cognitive enhancement and the need for scrutiny and regulation, for example, will probably come down to how realistic and powerful we think the impacts on society could be.
At its most far-reaching, the stakes are huge. The impacts of the silicon chip revolution continue to claim more jobs each year: improved communications and automation have already hollowed out blue-collar jobs. Now technological progress is coming for careers of the middle classes; those for which school tests and exam grades are considered a reliable way to pick the most able – the most intelligent – applicants. The population is growing and opportunities are shrinking. Something will have to give. In that market, cognitive enhancement could be a vital and fought-over tool to help people get on.
Even if we don’t get that far – if the mental phase transition remains a difficult and fragile effect to conjure on demand, and the promising results of experiments in the lab are hard to replicate in the real world – then the investigation and discussion about the principle are still useful. Intelligence has been on the scientific black list for too long. The topic deserves more than embarrassed looks and half-truths and the whiff of scandal when someone brings it up. If a new focus on the promise of techniques to increase intelligence forces broader contemplation of how we think about and relate to one of our oldest and most significant human abilities, then neuroenhancement and the neuroscience revolution will undoubtedly help more of us reach our full potential.
Charles Spearman’s discovery of the positive manifold and his work on general intelligence created a great schism, and one that still runs through society like words through a stick of rock. How much is our mental ability given to us, and how much do we have to earn it?
Unearned privilege can be uncomfortable to associate with human value, for it carries too many reminders of the straitjacket of social stratification and the entitlement of the aristocracy. We prefer people to work for what they have, and expect rewards and status for those who do so.
(Ironically, it is often the people who believe intelligence is a natural gift, given more to some and less to others, who argue the most vociferously that it reveals something about the value of an individual.)
Cognitive enhancement offers a new twist on this century-old argument. If intelligence, in whatever form, is something people have to work for, if cognitive ability can be trained and improved and released with effort, then it’s pretty simple to make the case that neuroenhancement undermines this effort and is cheating. If one person has access to a short-cut others do not, then the playing field is tilted in their favour.
Yet if intelligence is an immutable quality spread across the population, with some landing more in the heads of a fortunate minority, then the playing field is already biased against the rest. Why shouldn’t those who lose out in the lottery of life have the chance to turn to technology to close the gap? Only when all have the identical chance and the baseline is levelled, can the performance of any human ability be truly said to reflect value, or more accurately, can the difference in performance be said to reflect higher or lower value.
I don’t have the answers to all of these ethical questions. I don’t know if anybody does. But I know the search for them will shape the way we allow and encourage cosmetic neuroscience to change society. They will set the boundaries and parameters of the world that we and our children and grandchildren live in. And, in all honesty, when it comes to the treatment of intelligence and the differences in intelligence, we can’t do much worse than the generations of our parents and grandparents, who made a bit of a hash of it. We have an opportunity to do things in a better and fairer way, and cognitive enhancement – and discussions of cognitive enhancement – offers one tool to do that.
The drumbeat of the neuroscience revolution is growing louder. We should listen and prepare, consider and reflect on the choices available. We must acknowledge the clamour for change. And we must let the possibilities, risks and opportunities into our society on our own terms. Because, like it or not, they are coming in anyway – even if they have to smash down the gates.