Mensa is Mexican slang for a stupid woman. Most people know it as the name of the international high IQ society. Mensa offers membership to people with IQ in the top 2 per cent of the population. On the mostly commonly used scale, that’s an IQ of 130. Not that Mensa would say so. They prefer the more Mensa-sounding criteria that a member must prove they are on the ninety-eighth percentile. For every two members of Mensa, the organization judges there are another ninety-eight people not intelligent enough to join.
There are well over a million people in the UK with an IQ of 130 or above. The membership of Mensa UK in 2016 is about 21,000. So clearly, not everybody with a high IQ wants to join a high IQ society. That made the dozen or so people I met at a London university one Saturday morning in 2015 something of a rarity, for they did want to join. Indeed, some were desperate to do so.
We were all there to sit the Mensa entrance tests, held at one of dozens of supervised sessions the society offers up and down the country each month. The others were there to join. I was there to get my baseline IQ score, before I started a self-experiment in cognitive enhancement.
Waiting outside to be called in to begin the test, we were quiet, partly because the exam conditions were seeping through the closed door ahead of us, where a middle-aged man and woman were setting out papers on rows of separated desks. But mainly it was the large SILENCE PLEASE EXAMS IN PROGRESS signs. Peering into nearby rooms, I saw other students sitting other written tests. I assumed these were more important than ours, until in whispered conversations with my fellow would-be Mensans, I realized ours was pretty important to some of them too.
One, a nervous-looking school student, wanted to put Mensa membership on his CV when he applied to university. Another said she was accepting a challenge from her family: her father and mother and older siblings were all members and now it was her time to prove herself equally worthy.
Once we sat down, we were given two separate papers, each a series of timed sets of multiple choice questions. There were more questions than time – thirty to be answered in three or four minutes, that kind of thing. It didn’t pay to hang around and ponder them for too long. But on the other hand, they got progressively more difficult, so skipping and moving on didn’t seem a good idea either.
The tests of the first paper were symbols and shapes: the odd one out, next in a series, what does it look like if you rotate in this direction – the style of puzzles I had assumed we would be given. But they were hard. I got barely two-thirds of the way through the first set of questions before the blonde-haired woman in charge told us to stop writing. When she wasn’t watching, I ticked A for the rest. Well, I justified to myself, I was going to use cognitive enhancement later to cheat anyway.
As the tests and the questions continued I got quicker, but I didn’t feel like I got better. The dots and dashes and squares and triangles and instructions on what do with them became a language I simply didn’t speak.
Then the first half was over. I couldn’t read the faces of those around me to judge whether my reaction – relief and shock – was typical. I knew from our talk before at least a couple of them had tried and failed the test already. To know what was coming would have definitely helped, I thought.
The second paper swapped the symbols for words. The format was the same – several sets of timed multiple choice questions of increasing difficulty – but the focus this time was language. Some words had to be defined, others placed into context or used correctly to complete sentences and paragraphs. This was more like it. As a journalist, over a near-twenty-year career I have written, edited, proof-read or drafted, conservatively, one newspaper or magazine article a day. Say 250 a year, or 5,000 in total. A thousand words each? Five million words have passed through my brain, been sorted, queried, rejected, spell-checked, swapped, deleted, reinstated and ultimately used. And that’s just on work-time.
The Mensa wordy questions weren’t easy, but they were solvable. Is ‘separate’ the equivalent of ‘unconnected’ or ‘unrelated’? Or ‘evade’ – is it the same as ‘avert’, ‘elude’ or ‘escape’?* I felt like I was using a different part of my brain than in the first test. Rather than trying to eliminate the wrong answers as I had been doing with the symbol questions, which helps to explain why they took so long, I found I could more often directly pick out the solution, the right word. I even finished one of these linguistic tests early and as I put down my pen, I wondered how the girl whose family had challenged her to join Mensa was finding it. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought she had sounded like she was German. I didn’t catch up with her afterwards to ask, but from chatting to the others and overhearing their conversations, it seemed I was unusual. Consensus was the second test had been much harder. As we said our goodbyes, I kept my five million words to myself. The test, by the way, cost £25. And no refunds should you fail.
Until a few generations ago, the idea of a high IQ society such as Mensa would have seemed bizarre, or even more bizarre than it does now. Before the twentieth century, few people cared how intelligent they were. And they were even less bothered by how intelligent other people were, which of course is why those other people rarely cared either. School for most was a luxury when there was work to be done. Social mobility, the idea that talents and mental abilities could dictate who did what rather than the social status of family, was held back by rigid class-based rules of engagement, and when people did manage to ‘better themselves’ it was practical skills that usually counted.
One of the first nations to take intelligence more seriously was France. In the late nineteenth century, France was still smarting from the loss of the Alsace-Lorraine region during the Franco-Prussian war. The French government wanted it back. And it was willing to play the long game. Many in France pointed to the way Prussia had introduced compulsory primary education and had been forcing generations of its youngest children to attend school for at least a century.
France decided it too needed to create a new generation of bright, resourceful and educated soldiers. It wanted to launch a national cognitive enhancement programme. So in 1882 France followed the Prussian lead and made it compulsory for all young children to attend primary school.
Teachers in these new schools were stunned. Large numbers of their pupils appeared unable or unwilling to learn. These teachers were some of the first to wrestle with a social problem that has split the field of education ever since: how to teach a class of children of mixed ability, while not ignoring the different needs of the children at the top and bottom.
To work things out, the French created a ministerial commission to investigate and report back with recommendations. The commission was headed by a senator called Léon Bourgeois (who, despite the name, was a radical socialist) and he appointed to his panel two deadly rivals: a then-famous psychiatrist called Désiré-Magloire Bourneville, and a now-famous psychologist called Alfred Binet. Their deliberations would fire some of the first shots in a battle that continues to this day between psychologists and psychiatrists over the best way to understand the human brain and what it is capable of.
A senior figure at the Sorbonne University in Paris, Binet became fascinated by cognition and intelligence after he and his wife had two children, Madeleine in 1885 and Alice in 1887. The two girls, Binet noticed, learned at different rates and in different ways.
Madeleine as a child was cautious, thoughtful and picked up ideas quickly. Alice was more outgoing and took more chances – she would give up something she was holding before she had decided what to grab next, in a way Madeleine never did. The contrast between the girls sharpened as they grew older.
The two year gap between his children gave Binet a home-made laboratory to test mental ability and how it related to age. For instance, both Madeleine and Alice started to use the word ‘I’ instead of ‘me’ when they were three years old. His younger daughter did not make the transition any sooner, even though she had her older sister to copy from. Yet there were other skills they were equally adept at. Both could distinguish the longer of a pair of lines quickly and correctly; in fact they could do it as well as their scientist dad.
Binet thought his observations of childhood cognitive ability could solve the problems faced by teachers in the new French school system. If the children struggling to learn could be identified early, then measures could be taken to help them. Most accounts of his life paint him as an altruist, a well-meaning figure who was sympathetic to the extra needs of the disadvantaged children who struggled to learn. In fact, a little-known paper he published in 1905 on ‘the problem of abnormal children’ shows he was also concerned about the possible threat the less intelligent kids posed to civilized society.
If these children were excluded from school, he wrote, they would turn to crime and become a burden for the more able. ‘They become parasites that consume, without any benefit to society, the work of hale and healthy men,’ Binet warned. The solution, he said, was to keep them in the education system, where they could be supervised and not tempted astray by bad advice, which their inadequate intelligence would be unable to resist.
Binet had another motive too. He wanted to stop psychiatrists like his rival Bourneville being handed the responsibility – and getting the credit – for figuring out what to do with these children. The psychiatrists were most interested in severe cases, children who struggled to learn and who could be treated as a medical problem in special asylums. Binet instead saw an opportunity for psychologists – himself and his friends – to work with schools and educators on what he insisted should be viewed as a social problem.
To find the children who needed help, Binet needed a way to distinguish them from the rest. Remembering the differences between Madeleine and Alice, he designed tests of how children developed with age. A four-year-old child’s performance could then be compared to what most four-year-olds could do, a five-year-old measured against the typical performance of five-year-olds, and so on. To do this, he drew up a scale of thirty different tests, which – like my Mensa tests – got progressively harder.
According to Binet’s scale, most three-year-olds should be able to point out their eyes, nose and mouth, and tell a teacher their surname. By five, most were expected to copy a picture of a square and reconstruct a card cut diagonally into two pieces. At eight, they should be able to count backwards from twenty and know the date. The tests ran to age fifteen, by which stage most kids were expected to find three rhymes for a given word and to repeat a seven figure number.
The tests were not passed or failed – it was rare for a child to succeed at all the questions up to a given age group and to fail all the ones above. More commonly, their performance tailed off as they tackled the tougher questions aimed beyond their age, and this was allowed for in the way the results were totted up. A seven-year-old who answered all of the seven-year-old questions, but also half of the questions aimed at eight and nine-year-olds, was judged to have an intelligence above average. In this way, Binet invented the concept of mental age. The seven-year-old above, through a calculation to weight the answers, was said to have a mental age of eight. One who struggled with the questions for seven-year-olds but managed most for a six-year-old had a mental age of six.
It sounds crude and Binet knew it. He didn’t mind. He was using it for a specific task: to help teachers identify kids who scored significantly below the average for their physical age, and offer assistance so they could catch up.
He warned against reading too much into the mental age number, which he insisted was a score not a true measure. The test was just one of several factors teachers should use, he said, alongside the child’s reactions, behaviour and other characteristics.
Most importantly, Binet stressed, not every ‘normal’ child would pass the tests appropriate for their age. Not every six-year-old was supposed to pass all of the tests for six-year-olds and so on. In fact, the test was set up so at least a quarter of every age group would not reach the standard of their peers. (He had identified the tests as those which 65–75 per cent of children a given age could master.) The mental age he devised, by definition, was a statistical tool loaded with caveats and disclaimers. It was a snapshot of a child’s performance on a given day – and that day alone – and not a firm measure of ability or future potential.
Binet died of a stroke in 1911 and was buried in the famous Montparnasse cemetery in Paris, a final home for writers and intellectuals and the later resting place of Samuel Beckett, Susan Sontag and Jean-Paul Sartre. It was a bit less crowded in 1911, which was useful for Binet as he needed the room. The way his system was used in the decades after his death, with his caveats and cautions ignored, would see him spin in his grave for years.
Alfred Binet’s work laid the foundations for IQ tests like those that Mensa use. Forget the simple lists of questions you can find online. The best modern IQ tests cost hundreds of pounds and take several hours to administer. Their questions are a closely guarded secret: only accredited psychologists and other experts can get hold of them. They probe a range of cognitive abilities, from language and mathematics to spatial awareness and short-term memory. And, more than a century on, they still rely on the basic scoring principle established by Alfred Binet from observations of his own children. An IQ score is a relative measure: it is your performance compared against typical performance of your peers. IQ, in other words, is a way to rank people, to place them in order of intelligence.
Critics of IQ tests, and there are many, like to point out it’s ridiculous to try to reduce the myriad abilities and potential of a person to a single representative number. They’re right, but it’s not clear who they are really arguing with. It’s much harder to find someone, at least someone who fully understands them, who truly believes IQ tests should be used that way.
Then there are those critics who scoff at the idea of IQ at all. They typically crop up in the online comments sections beneath newspaper articles about bright teenagers who have tested unusually high. IQ tests do not measure intelligence, these keyboard experts insist, not real intelligence. But, as we’ll see, it’s hard enough to define what intelligence is, without trying to work out what it isn’t as well.
These complainants are correct on one point: the only thing we can say for certain about an individual’s IQ is it reflects their performance on IQ tests. And, to continue the circular logic, IQ tests, we can confidently say, are a good way to measure that person’s IQ. But that misses the point. IQ isn’t so much intended as a measure of individual ability, but a way to compare differences in that ability. And, on average, better performance on IQ tests does indicate higher levels of achievement in the wider world.
First, and most unsurprising given the pen-and-paper style of most IQ tests, students with higher IQ scores tend to spend more time in education and achieve better grades. Are these people only book smart, and not street smart? It seems not – the same positive association shows up in the workplace. The employees who are judged the best performers and managers by their bosses and colleagues are most likely to be those with higher IQs. This applies to all sectors, from white-collar highly skilled professional work to low-complexity blue-collar jobs. The trend is most striking in the military where recruits with higher IQs are most likely to do well in training.
Performance and pay are linked, and sure enough, those with a high IQ tend to earn more money. And they are healthier. Those bright teenagers profiled in the newspapers? As they grow up they are less likely to suffer from high blood pressure and heart disease, less likely to be obese, and less likely to have a psychiatric disorder needing hospital treatment. They will probably live longer. Some studies suggest a relatively low IQ carries the same extra risk of an early death as smoking.
There’s more. High IQ is linked to creativity, musical ability, securing patents and winning artistic prizes. The higher a person’s IQ, the less likely they are to hold racist and sexist beliefs. They are less likely to be religious and more likely to be interested in politics. They are less tolerant of authoritarian attitudes. They are more likely to be, as the marvellous auto-insult-generators popular on right-wing US websites might construct, bong-smoking, flag-burning, commune-dwelling, troop-slandering, tax-wasting, owl-kissing, Hollywood-humping, moonbat-crazy leftie liberals.
Still, despite the general link between IQ and what might be loosely considered as success in life – good grades, higher salaries, better health – there are some careers where high intelligence is considered a no-no. One of these – and make up your own joke here – is the US police force. In 1999, a would-be cop in Connecticut was told his performance on the force’s intelligence test was too good, so he was rejected.
Police superiors were worried Robert Jordan, who had a degree in English literature, would get bored on the job and leave for a career with greater cognitive challenges, so wasting the money they spent on his training. Jordan challenged the decision in court but lost, on the grounds he was not discriminated against. The police had a right, the court said, to turn down people who scored too high – as well as too low – on their entrance exams. He worked as a prison officer instead.
It took at least a couple of weeks for my Mensa results to drop through our letterbox. The word Mensa was clearly visible through the envelope, so it took at least a couple of seconds for my wife to ‘open it by mistake’. She called me at work with the bad news.
‘Ha, you got in. I knew you would’.
This was terrible. How could I use cognitive enhancement to cheat my way into Mensa if I was already in?
Then a second thought struck me. I had got in; I truly was Mensa material. I felt a surge of pride and then was immediately ashamed. I told a colleague, and in doing so realized there is no way to tell people you have got into Mensa without coming across as smug and a bit odd. How do you know if someone you meet at a party is in Mensa? They will tell you.
What now? Maybe, I thought, I would have to set my cognitive enhancement sights higher. Mensa admits people it regards as being in the top 2 per cent of the population – one person in every fifty – but other, much more exclusive clubs exist. The members of these elite groups probably look down on the Mensa crowd as, well, a bit thick.
Under half of the Mensa membership, for example, would get into the Top One Percent Society (TOPS). And fewer than one in ten of those TOPS members would make the grade at the One in a Thousand Society. Above that the names get cryptic and the spelling freestyle.
There’s the Epida Society, the Milenija, the Sthiq Society and Ludomind. The Universal Genius Society takes just one person in 2,330, and the Ergo Society just one in 31,500. Members of the Mega Society, naturally, are one in a million. The Giga Society? One in a billion, which means, statistically, just seven people on the planet are qualified to join. Let’s hope they know about it. If you are friends with one of them, do tell them.
At the top of the tree is the self-proclaimed Grail Society, which sets its membership criteria so high – one in 76 billion – that it currently has zero members. It’s run by Paul Cooijmans, a guitarist from the Netherlands. About 2,000 people have tried and failed to join, he says. ‘Be assured that no one has ever come close.’
I took a closer look at my Mensa test results. I was right. I hadn’t passed the first test at all. But Mensa was also right, because, according to the organization’s rules, I didn’t need to. To join Mensa, applicants need pass only one of the two separate papers. And my score on the second, the language, was high enough.
On the first test, the symbols – more properly known as the Culture Fair Scale – I scored 128 out of 183, putting me on the ninety-sixth percentile: pretty good but not high enough for Mensa. On the second, the words – or the Cat-tell III B scale – I scored 154 out of a total 161. That, the Mensa letter said, was bang on the ninety-eighth percentile. So I was in, if I wanted in. I just needed to pay my £50 subscription.
I figured, why not? Now I had my exact IQ test results, I would do my cognitive enhancement experiment as planned, then resit the Mensa entrance tests and try to improve them. I just wouldn’t tell them I was already a member. The first test – the symbols and abstract reasoning – felt much more like a true test of natural brain power, so that became my goal: to improve my score on that test with the help of neuroenhancement.
But I was going to have to wait. Taking an IQ test for a second time comes with a built-in improvement, because the questions and the responses required are more familiar. It’s hard to be sure how big this retest effect is, or how quickly it wears off. Some reports say it can be up to ten points and fades after three months, while others say it takes six months. To be safe, I decided to wait a year, which is how long Mensa asks people who fail to get in to wait until they try again.
That gave me plenty of time, I thought, to find a reliable way to increase my intelligence and so boost my IQ. Except, it turns out that it’s not as simple as that. For starters, there isn’t even a reliable way to define what intelligence is. Intelligence is a slippery concept that we all recognize but many struggle to pin down. And that means my goal of increasing intelligence – cognitive enhancement – is an equally tricky thing to identify. Is it enough to have an increase in IQ score? People have argued about this stuff for decades and I had twelve months to investigate. Let’s start by turning the question around. How intelligent are you?
* Mensa is understandably reluctant for people who sit its tests to share the questions afterwards. I include these examples only because they are already in the public domain, having been published in previous newspaper articles.