I took this test when it came out, which set me on my short affiliation with a few IQ societies. That is a story I am no longer much interested in telling.
What does fascinate me is looking at it again decades later. I remembered many of the Vocab questions and know that I have run across many of the words over time, reinforcing them. I would have to check my work with a dictionary, and then double back and try other resources if I found myself wrong, but I think I could get them all at this point. Yet I did not get them all in 1985. I did about equally well on 1-24 and 25-48 then. I don't even know which ones I got right then, though I am mostly certain on some.
For the Spatial and Numerical questions, I did not recognise a single one, except #36, which is notorious in the societies and I got wrong, and maybe #44?, which had a Eureka moment I remembered. I had an idea what I might do with most of them, but nothing came to memory, even when I started down a solving path just for fun. There were a couple of exceptions, where I intuited a guess on method that probably came from memory somehow rather than fresh thinking.
I'm big on innate versus learned on so many things at this point. Yet i do believe in reinforcement and even more especially, reward systems. Did I remember the vocabulary ones and even likely improve because I have continued to live in the world of words, while losing all the spatial and numerical memory because I so seldom visit those cities now? Or did I remember them so divergently because of brain structures in place long before I took the test? Or are the types of memory needed for these tasks fundamentally different fright out of the gate? Or am I just lazier about types of thinking I have not used in 50 years?
6 comments:
I don't know, but maybe my experience from driving is a data point. (When I spent months _walking_ an area I remember the paths very much better.)
In a town where I drove or rode a route every day, I remember it very well for a while. I may not remember the street names, but I remember how many seconds it takes to get from one to the next, and where to turn if a block is blocked.
But two years later I have only the sketchiest idea. Some of it comes back to me as I drive, but I notice things I didn't remember from before (_not_ including the new things).
For information about how different aspects of intelligence tend to develop with age, this may be worth reading: http://miyaguchi.4sigma.org/gradytowers/diff_intell.html
You might be interested in what I have written about Grady, and relatedly, about Billy Sidis
I searched your blog for those names when you recommended that I do so in a comment on your post about three interpenetrating cubes, but I remember no articles showing up. I found them now though. Thanks. I'll read them
Thanks for letting me know. Next time I will create the actual links.
If you haven't read the long Billy Sidis series, i think you will find it interesting. And the reasoning of people who still insisted he was the smartest person ever was interesting too. Ah well. the internet is a big place.
I'm sure Sidis was intelligent. Without any results on adult high-range tests, it's impossible to get a hard estimate, but I'm sure his adult I.Q. was over 145. That's all I can really say based my impression of his output.
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