We're all Einsteins now

Albert Einstein. Photo / Supplied

For most of the last century it was widely thought that intelligence was in decline.

The idea was that those at the lower end of the intelligence spectrum were having more children, thereby reducing the general intelligence level.

Then, one November day in 1984, a New Zealand-based moral philosopher named James Flynn had a eureka moment that turned cognitive science on its head. He opened a package sent to him by an academic in Holland named P.A. Vroon.

Inside was data from an IQ test known as Raven's Progressive Matrices. IQ stands for "intelligence quotient", the psychometric system by which the mental ability known as intelligence is measured. Vroon did not know how to crunch the raw numbers, but Flynn did.

And he noticed that 18-year-old Dutch males had made a giant leap in IQ scores on the previous generation. Over the following month, he checked similar data from around the world and the answer was the same: IQ was going up, dramatically.

The American-born Flynn found that in both the developed and developing worlds IQ had improved in the 20th century at the remarkable rate of 3 points per decade.

This development has since become known as the "Flynn effect".

It is noteworthy because, apart from anything else, it suggests a world-changing increase in intelligence in succeeding generations. IQ measurements are based on the score of 100 being allocated to the median average of a group (for example, 18-year-old Dutch males). Projecting forwards, the Flynn effect predicts, for example, that someone with an average IQ today (of 100) will have grandchildren with a score of 120.

Perhaps more shocking, it suggests that someone with an average score today would have had grandparents who were close to mental retards. Neither scenario makes much sense, particularly if you're a grandchild or a grandparent.

As Flynn writes in his recent book, What is Intelligence?: "In either event, the cognitive gulf between the generations should be huge." Plainly it's not.

And thus the Flynn effect has become one of those phenomena that are almost universally accepted but little understood. Some psychologists have attempted to explain the gains in what Flynn calls "artefactual" terms. It has been argued that children have got better at doing the tests partly because the administration of the tests has improved.

Others put the rise in IQ down to improvements in diet. Flynn rejects both theories, pointing out that tests are frequently restandardised and that diet has been of marginal importance in the West since the 1950s. Flynn - an emeritus professor of political studies at the University of Otago - is convinced that intelligence has improved.