The first IQ test I ever took I got a score of 79. My school didn’t have streams, everybody was integrated, so after the school psychologist saw my score nobody had any great hopes for my future. In Grade 5 a student teacher realized I read at a college level. I was tested again. Now I was at 127.
The student teacher thought that was still too low and arranged for me to be tested at the University of British Columbia by educational psychologists who concluded I didn’t yet have the motor control in my hands to take a proper written test. So they asked me the questions. I have no idea what they learned from that except that expectations for my academic success were suddenly sky high.
As I moved forward in school a pattern began to emerge. I am what is known as a three tier learner. There are subjects in which I express severe learning disabilities. Typing was pure agony for me because I have dyslexia. French was worse because I simply couldn’t make my mouth shape some of the more common sounds, it wasn’t exactly stuttering but I would try and try and just totally screw it up.
Life is filled with irony. I have been married for 30+ years to a francophone and we speak French at home, or try to anyway. I make my living on a computer or with a computer and program in a number of different languages. But as I type this I am making dozens of mistakes and going back and correcting them, where I see them. I don’t actually identify mistakes easily. Because of the dyslexia I have learned to guess words rather than read them. This makes proofreading a bit challenging.
Then there is a second tier, subjects where I am right around average. In school this was things like Social Studies, English, Art, Chemistry, Biology, Auto Mechanics, Wood Working, Drafting, Literature and Physics. I was a B student in all these things.
Then there were the things I was gifted in which included Math, Metal Work, Music and Physical Education. And once I got into an enriched High School you can add Agriculture, Ag Mechanics, Home Ec, Electronics, Plumbing, and Economics. In these I was an A+ student. It was my high school guidance counselor who first said the word that would eventually come to dominate my adult life, entrepreneur.
When I got to university and started struggling I was sent for evaluation at the University of Alberta’s Educational Psychology Department and then in the Psychology Department and finally in the Faculty of Medicine Psychiatric Department. The conclusion in essence was I have severe brain damage and am on the spectrum. I also had ADHD, really bad ADHD. I still do but the diagnostic categories have changed. And my brain, on a CAT Scan or an nMRI looks like a woman’s not a man’s.
But depending which IQ test you administer and how you administer it I go off the conventional scoring table (over 200) or am far below average and profoundly disabled at 69. You can manipulate the test you give me to get a result anywhere in between. The smartest move I have ever made was refusing to allow them to write about me in journals and turn me into a circus freak. I am a human calculator. I honestly can’t understand why people can’t just multiply and divide large numbers in their head. I also calendar calculate. And yes I have been called an Idiot Savant, for a while that was my diagnosis.
But being a freak has lead to me being fascinated by intelligence and how it works. I have come to conclude that there is no such thing as general intelligence. All mental activity is situational.
I am a horse whisperer, well I can do it with dogs, cows, goats, pigs, and sheep as well. This is no magical thing, it just means I am super aware of small behavioral cues and know what they mean. And I know how to communicate with gestures, body language and tone of my voice to reassure the animals. Then I know enough standard veterinary science, animal husbandry and handling to train them and handle them. A lot of high functioning people on the spectrum can master these things. We can often do with animals what we cannot do with people.
At university I took courses in animal science, animal physiology, comparative physiology, anatomy, comparative anatomy, animal nutrition, animal behavior, animal husbandry, and animal psychology. I grew up in a family that bred and trained animals. I trained under my granddad to be a blacksmith and a farrier.
I am compassionate and kind and very empathetic and animals like me. I could have, and nearly did, become a veterinarian but humans just interested me far more. And there are only so many hours in a day. But I have spent significant parts of my life, breeding, raising, and training animals.
You could fairly say I am a highly intelligent and highly educated animal trainer. And you could even rank me against other trainers with similar backgrounds (grew up on farms in Canada, in families that bred, raised, and trained, went to university and studied animal science, and worked with mentors who taught them the tricks of the trade for being a farrier, or a trainer, or a vet, or doing Artificial Insemination). And you could design a test to rank us.
But would that test work in the US? In China. In South Africa?
Now for sake of argument imagine we could develop a test that you could use all over the world to rank animal whisperers. Would that test look anything like an IQ test?
Yet think what I said about being an animal whisperer. To be good at it you need to be good at all the things IQ tests claim to measure. Minus the cultural elements the test designers biases have baked into these tests they measure reasoning, analytical ability, forethought and spatial reasoning. Do you think any animal whisperer walks into a paddock, a barn, a pasture, a corral without a plan, without a sense of where they are, without constantly analyzing the animals’ behavior, without reasoning what the next step should be? Not being good at this stuff gets you dead or badly injured. I work with as many as 8 big bulls at a time, each weights more than 2,600 lbs. One mistake, and I have done this, and you have multiple broken bones and a life lesson.
So why doesn’t an IQ test measure this kind of intelligence?
There are a number of reasons. And you can read about them online in hundreds of scientific papers and magazine articles. In part it is because the kind of intelligent you are isn’t the kind of intelligent I am. Our intelligence is shaped by our culture.
Culture is a much more complicated and powerful force than we admit.
It is not made up solely by the obvious things people do (art, music, make tools). Every culture is its own complex language. That language defines and controls every aspect of our lives.
This includes how we act, what we think, and even who we think we are. The language has rules and it sets rules. Culture determines behavior, values, morals, goals, and even perceptions of cause and effect. Think of cargo cults for example.
The language of a culture controls where members of that culture focus their attention. It determines what see and hear out of a stream of information of which we couldn’t otherwise make sense. Language is logic and thus even simple tasks like categorization are different from culture to culture. This is a major challenge in biology.
Cultural language controls how and what people learn. Of course it also controls how they express what they have learned. When I am working as a biologist I write scientific papers and attend conferences and present posters. That is the culture of biology. When I am at a sweat, or a pow-wow or a dance with my family we tell stories. These are often oral histories that have been passed down for generations. This is the culture of my people.
One of the first biases Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky ever identified, and they realized it applied to them, is availability bias as well as the rest of us. In decision making we will use examples that come readily to mind even if those examples are not optimal or even useful. Our culture determines what examples come readily to mind. This limits the available resources for thinking and acting.
If you carry that thought just a step further forward you realize that a shared lack of available thinking tools, particularly examples, reinforces group identity. Our cultural language separates “us” from “them.” What makes this worse is every culture includes shared cultural perceptions. These perceptions often come to focus on “them” and how to reinforce their status as “them”. Cultures develop all manner of clever tools for maintaining “us” versus “them”.
In western European neo-colonial culture these tools include IQ tests and comments on the inferior Intelligence of “them”. The theory that there is such a thing as an abstract concept of intelligence is very useful (if you are the person determining who is intelligent) for maintaining the illusion that “us” are better than “them”. I will leave that for you to think about and move on to my closing argument.
You want to know how I ended up with a fabulous life after making a complete mess of my life over and over again? I gave up all decision making control. I let my wife, my daughters, my partners, my friends, my colleagues, and my grandchildren decide things for me. I just go along for the ride. I am sure I will add my great granddaughter to this long list as soon as she can talk. Hell, I let my dogs, horses, cattle, and bison decide things for me.
My brain damage is in the part of the brain that deals with executive function. The result is I am terrible at making decisions for myself. Ironically, I have turned out to be pretty good at helping other people make decisions.
I have spent a large part of my career fooling around with algorithms and tools for helping people make better decisions.
In summary, in some ways I am brain damaged and mentally challenged in other ways I am pretty average. However, there are a few ways in which I am truly gifted. I have come to realize that is a near perfect description of the human condition. We just don’t see that because we are blinded by a cultural construct called intelligence.
www.psychologytoday.com/…
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/…
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