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YOUNG men and women are getting smarter every hour in the day. It is not only that they are getting worldly-wise. Their level of intelligence, as measured by the Intelligence Quotient (IQ) test, is also increasing day by day. Those who have high IQ, as everyone knows, have a mental age that is highly developed compared to their chronological age. A girl whose chronological age, that is the number of years she did actually pass since her first birthday, is 10, but has a mental age equivalent to 15, has an IQ score of 15/10x100=150. One can say that the girl with this score for her IQ is one and a half times more mature than her chronological age.
However, modern intelligence tests do not calculate the level of intelligence of people according to the old formula of mental age divided by physical age. Nowadays, the scores of IQ tests compare performance of individuals on the basis of an average level of performance of persons of identical age. In fact, it is the measure of deviation from the average at 100 that determines the score of IQ in modern parlance.
But intelligence is such a many-sided psychological attribute of humans that it cannot be completely defined or measured by any single measuring scale. Though IQ scores may measure the academic aptitudes of people, those are often useless when one attempts at fathoming other human faculties such as creativity and abilities in the areas of fine arts. Various branches of hard science, on the other hand, are trying to understand the phenomenon of intelligence basing on neuroscience, behavioural and cognitive sciences. And researchers are also matching the various measures of IQ up with the corresponding levels of neural activities in the brain. And the standard procedure of measuring neural activities, as is well known to the informed ones, is to observe the electrical or electrochemical activities in the brain. For example, modern machines like the PET(positron emission tomography) can scan the brain to measure the rate of its energy use while solving difficult problems or going through the process of hard reasoning. The fuel that supplies energy to the brain is glucose. So, what PET does to measure the use of energy by the brain is to simply determine the rate at which it metabolises cortical glucose. The more gifted the person concerned is in respect of her/his brain power or intelligence, the less is her/his rate of expenditure of energy when involved in reasoning and solving problems. On the contrary, less gifted individuals in this respect cudgel their brain more to do the reasoning and, therefore, use up more energy.
Measuring neural activities is one way of understanding the problem of intelligence. The protagonists of artificial intelligence, on the other hand, use computer programmes and models to understand intelligence or mind for that matter. Modern computers have heralded a new epoch of intelligence research through what is known as artificial intelligence. The study focuses on processing of information by the brain and that of the computer programmes and relates the two.
But intelligence is not concerned only with bone-dry information process in a computer. When humans are concerned, one has to consider also the emotional root and content of the thought process and one of its attribute known as reasoning. Peter Salovey and John Mayer, two American psychologists, have together introduced the concept of emotional intelligence about a decade and a half back. Emotions being the motive force behind thoughts, the intelligence associated with emotions, which is emotional intelligence according to these two theorists, is complementary to the measure of intelligence done through IQ tests. And such intelligence consists in one's faculties of perception, understanding, expression, and controlling of emotions. People, who are intelligent in this sense, have control not only on their own thought processes and emotion but they have also the ability to correctly understand those of others. The concept of emotional intelligence gained further currency in 1995 when American journalist Daniel Goleman wrote his book "Emotional Intelligence." According to Goleman's book, social competence, too, should have a place in the calculation of intelligence tests.
But how may the complex phenomenon of intelligence possibly be comprehended? The question of comprehension again refers to the selfsame human faculty of intelligence and as such the entire venture has a circular ring to it. American psychologist Douglas Detterman has tried to explain general intelligence as a complex systems as found in cities, universities or even countries. What the results of IQ tests come up with are an overall assessment of the different cognitive processes and experiences involved in the phenomenon called intelligence. To Detterman, IQ rating of an individual resembles that of a university in terms of the learning facilities available, their sizes and the amount of endowments. Similarly, human mind, which is the seat of intelligence and resembles a university, is a unified system of complex maze of subordinate and/or parallel units that function together in a concerted fashion. The mental or intelligence tests, therefore, correlates all these functions and provide the researchers with, if anything, a global rating of all the disparate components of the cognitive process, of which intelligence, is probably one indicator.
The present discussion started with a concern for boys and girls of high IQs. How are modern high achievers among the young people, especially girls, faring in other spheres of social engagement, finding their male partners, as for instance? Girls of today are more intelligent, may be rather precocious, than they were in the past. That means they are mentally more advanced than their progenitors. Should modern boys be not then happy that their future wives would be smarter and more intelligent? And are modern young men, who are undoubtedly equally smart and intelligent, drawn towards such high IQ female partners? One may like to think that it is only natural for the modern men to go after super intelligent modish women. Ironically though, that is not the fact, if one is willing to trust the result of a recent survey carried out among some nine hundred men and women in their 10s and 40s in Great Britain. Boys don't like girls with high IQ as their partners. The higher the level of intelligence of the girls, the lower their chance of marrying an equally or more intelligent boy.
"A high IQ is a hindrance for women wanting to get married while it is an asset for men, according to a study by four British universities," The Sunday Times newspaper reports.
"The study found the likelihood of marriage increased by 35 percent for boys for each 16-point increase in IQ".
But for girls, there is a 40-percent drop for each 16-point rise, according to the survey by the universities of Aberdeen, Bristol, Edinburgh and Glasgow".
The study, if anything, is revealing and undoubtedly shattering for the high achiever women. Here, it appears, it is again the old ego problem between men and women. But is it then possible to again invoke the power of intelligence to tide over this crisis rooted in ego-yet another unsolved mystery of human mind like the intelligence?
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