The Entangled Universe

Have you ever been into an IQ test?

Some time ago I was involved in a test of this kind and as soon as I reached the end I got a score representative of my “intelligence”. It was one of those online tests taking about half an hour of your time, where you surf between anagrams, mathematical series and visual pattern recognition. An average person should score around 100 and when you totalize over 120 you are said to belong to an elite of “superior” or “gifted” individuals.

As a consequence, when you score high you feel great, a genius, but on the other side of the badge a low score can make you question your brain power and you will end up to claim that this kind of tests are mere trivial mind games and nothing more, taking your self esteem back.

Following the above considerations, what I wonder is whether these tests are a really good assessment of intelligence or not. IQ is a “psychometric” test, measuring mental ability, but define intelligence is far from being simple. Some psychologists believe that intelligence can somewhat be genetically inherited, while others sustain the thesis that the development of the mind might be the result of social background. The way to determine the real validity of an IQ test to assess general intelligence is debatable. Many see those tests as an appraisal of problem solving skills rather than a metric to measure intelligence. Besides, they are not accurate tests of creativity and other elements important to assess and individual’s effective intellect power.

Anyway IQ tests are popular and because of their supposed ability to measure intelligence they have been widely used by many companies and institutions over the years. There are many associations where the entry requirement is a particular high IQ score, like the famous Mensa, gathering something like 3% of the civilized population. Other groups which flourished and spread on the internet are so elitarian that will accept only members with an IQ of 140 or higher –Albert Einstein was supposed to score around 160.

In conclusion, when you take an IQ test don’t be too excited or depressed by your score, your genius can be misunderstood.