My headmeats!

[andrewducker]

A few weeks ago Julie passed on an email that was making the rounds of the psychology department, from someone looking for volunteers to have an MRI scan of their brain, which would then be compared to schizophrenics.

Having always wanted a photo of my brain, I immediately volunteered.

Last Friday I finally made it along for the pre-scan testing, where they made sure I could see in colour (yes!) check my reflexes (ok, but not great) and check my IQ - where it turns out I have an IQ of 138. Or 99th percentile on the scale they're using. I feel rather good about that.

It did leave me wondering what the average IQ is like across both LJ and fandom - my friends list seems to be full of people who are pretty smart, and while fandom is chock full of annoyingly difficult people with odd opinions, this is hardly precluded by high intelligence (if anything, the opposite is true).

Does anyone have any pointers as to whether liking is correlated to _anything_ interesting?

(Yes, I know that IQ isn't the same as "intelligence", if there even is such a thing - but it is highly correlated with all sorts of things across that area.)

Comments

[pennski.livejournal.com]

I think people who are fandom are (generalising wildly) people who are like using their minds and are interested in things. Some people focus in very narrowly, others are more interested in finding out new stuff generally. I think both these approaches contribute to intelligence.

If I'm offered a course at work, I'll go "Oh goody! A course!" whereas some people are only interested in learning stuff for which they can see a direct and practical relevance. While this no doubt saves time and effort, think of the accidental joys of knowledge such people miss out on...

...and in other new, the captain of the Trinity Hall University Challenge team looked worryingly like a younger version of you. Has the cloning experiment worked then?

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Given that your f-list is filled with people who both read and write a great deal, and that doing one or both of these activities is highly correlated with above average IQ scores, I'm hardly surprised that we form a rather skewed sample of IQ scores.

[fannymagnate.livejournal.com]

Basically we are all getting much better at IQ tests, by around 3 points per decade:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

So the old idea that 100 is the "average" is 90 years out of date (though psychologists may still be catching up with this). We did some experiments on students five years ago and found an average of 135 on standard IQ tests. And that's just for undergraduates.

[andrewducker]

100 is still the average. Because, as that very article says "IQ tests are re-normalized periodically, such that the average score is reset to 100."

And what any particular score means depends on the particular mechanism that test uses - and how many standard deviations a particular score represents. Which is why I mentioned that 138 was 99th percentile for the test I took.

[girl-onthego.livejournal.com]

I think I have something around a 130/135, except that the stupid facebook test was fail for testing that because it gave me something much lower. I did notice that ALL my friends scored well above me. So we are all very smart. Hurrah.

[henriksdal.livejournal.com]

That sounds really interesting - I'd love to have taken part, are they still looking for volunteers? And do you get to keep the picture of your brain?

[andrewducker]

I'll ask if she's still looking!

And yes, I do :->

[henriksdal.livejournal.com]

Brilliant, thanks!

So put it on the internet! - comedy annotations will surely ensue.

[andrewducker]

See latest post on my journal...

[johanna-alice.livejournal.com]

It's years and years ago now, but I got 138 in a test too... The test I participated in for a friend doing psychology is probably a better yardstick with the provisio that it only measures one kind of intelligence...

This one was visual pattern recognition and extrapolation. Which is a fancy way of saying we had to identify the next pattern in an evolving sequence. This wasn't easy, in that I did have to put my brain in gear as opposed to coasting. Scores ranged from 10-15 out of the twenty for the most part. Two of us got 20 and I think three were below the bell curve average range.

But that was just visual reasoning. No test of mathematical or language skills. So probably not too conclusive :)