g Force

In grade school we took an IQ test. I don’t remember which grade I was in, and I certainly don’t remember anything about the test, but I do remember my score. My mother showed it to me, telling me in hushed tones that it was a secret I must never divulge to anyone.

I never did. And I never will, though with the general populace’s interest in my IQ expected to remain at immeasurably low levels well into the foreseeable future, my continued silence won’t be too difficult to maintain.

My mother never explained why an IQ score must be kept secret. It was just one of those things, like one’s income or gambling debts, that polite people didn’t discuss. I suppose if your IQ was higher than those around you, you risked hurting their feelings. And if your IQ was lower, you risked hurting your stature, not to mention your own feelings. So you could never bring up the subject without treading on someone, maybe even yourself. So you didn’t.

I’d like to say that was why I never discussed my IQ, and leave it at that, because I’d like you to think I live my life according to the teachings of polite society, but to be honest there was another reason, one that was probably more important: I didn’t believe in IQs. Surely intelligence was more varied, more multi-faceted, vastly more complicated than anything represented by a triple-digit (or double-digit) (or, I suppose, single-digit) number. I had similarly scoffing views when it came to the PSAT and the SAT and each of the other bubble-filling exercises in quasi-intellectual standardized achievement that punctuated my academic career. Squeezing the vast universe that orbits around broad concepts like “intelligence” and “scholastic achievement” into multiple-guess and true-false questions was the ultimate reductio ad absurdum. Bringing up IQ in a conversation would be like earnestly discussing astrology or Uri Geller or UFO abductions or blogs, a total faux pas in any triple-digit IQ crowd, so I never did.

I never let ignorance get in the way of my opinions, or at least that’s how it seems to me today, for though I still do not “believe” in IQ scores – I have not welcomed my IQ score into my life as my personal lord and savior – a few years ago for some obscure reason I actually went to the trouble of researching the science behind IQ tests and came away thinking that maybe there was a little more thinking behind them than I ever supposed. Are IQs perfect? No. Are IQs strongly correlated with numerous intelligence-related factors, factors that appear to form the basis for practically every measure of success in modern society other than scoring with hot chicks? Yes.

And this was when my old IQ score started to interest me again. What does that score really mean? What does it say about me? Is my old IQ score still my IQ score today? I mean, I’d like to think my mind has bulked up quite a bit since grade school, what with all the educational stuff I’ve jammed into it and all the work-outs I’ve put it through to extricate me from complicated scrapes, but in theory a well-designed and properly scaled IQ test should yield the same score throughout one’s life, putting aside the Flynn Effect. Even after you’ve filled your head with useful knowledge. Even after you’ve exercised your brain with the most difficult problems. Even, I suppose, after you’ve constructed millions of new neural networks just to process and preserve for immediate retrieval precious memories of the female form in various stages of undress, a resource-sapping project I hadn’t even started when I took that grade school IQ test.

The obvious answer was to take another IQ test and compare the scores, but that was easier said than done. Let me make that unclearer – it was easy to take a new test, potentially much harder to actually live with the new score. If my new score was lower, would my last remaining shred of self-esteem evaporate, leaving me to live down to my potential, all the while feeling like an overachieving dunderheaded fraud? Or if my new score was higher, would I kick myself for not shooting higher in life, not taking on bigger challenges, having instead settled for a fault-resistant good enough approach to an average life after unwittingly bullying my inner-Poindexter into submission?

I couldn’t take the easy way out, which was to do nothing. I had to know, but I didn’t really want to know. So to preserve sufficient waffle room for flexible post-test interpretations I didn’t take a timed two-day professionally-administered test, much like the one we took in grade school. Instead, I took a timed two-hour test over the internet. And, when it tallied my score, I learned that my two IQ scores, though separated by 30 years and millions of new neural networks, were identical. Surely a coincidence, but a convenient coincidence – the best kind – so I quit while I was ahead, meaning neither ahead nor behind scorewise.

It’s been a few years since the convenient coincidence ended my foray into IQ land. I haven’t returned, and probably never will. The whole IQ thing still bothers me. If anything, I’m even more uneasy about it than before, now that I can no longer dismiss it so easily, but I’ve had the hardest time explaining to myself why.

And then the other day I was sitting in a meeting across the table from some people trying to convince us of something and I noticed myself paying particularly close attention to their lead guy as he spun out his presentation, weaving theories and ideas and concepts around his positions to make them more palatable, and I wondered to myself, as I often do at times like these, whether this guy really made sense, or just seemed to be making sense. Did his presentation hint at his inner brilliance, or was it just an elaborate snow job designed to blind us, hiding his hollow core? And what did his presentation say about his perception of our abilities? Were its bells and whistles borne out of deep respect, fear, even, for our deep cognitive skills, or were they eye candy designed to distract our feeble minds? In short, did he know what he was talking about, and did we know what he was talking about? We didn’t know, and he didn’t know, respectively, and that made it all the more interesting, this timeless game of trying, but never quite succeeding, in turning the inscrutable into the merely scrutable.

Tattoo our IQs on our foreheads and the game wouldn’t be nearly as fun, would it?