WHIZ KIDS

Claire Karwowski asks what makes people tick and if there is a secret to being smart.

You’ve probably heard the terms “book smart” and “street smart”. Your cousin Sammy solves every maths problem at lightning speed (book smart) or your neighbour Amaya, who reads people very well and isn’t easily scared (street smart), but have you ever heard of “music smart”? How about “nature smart”?

For over 100 years, scientists have studied bright people and asked what it takes to be clever. The brain is a mysterious place, though, and researchers around the world continue to argue about what it means to have and measure intelligence. Put on your thinking caps, because it’s time to explore the science and history behind being a whizz.

What is intelligence?

Put simply, intelligence is the mental ability to learn and understand new things, or to adapt to new situations. Neuroscientists (scientists who study the brain) believe that the frontal and parietal lobes, which are the forward and top parts of your brain, are most likely to be the main processing areas for human intelligence, but how is cleverness actually measured? One of the most widely known ways of measuring it is the Intelligence Quotient, or IQ.

IQ is a number that originally measured a person’s mental age in relation to their physical age. For example, if you are 10 years old with the mental age of a 10-year-old, then you’d have a score of 100 – the average IQ – but if you’re a 10-year-old with a mental age of a 17-year-old, you will have a higher-than-average IQ.

How do you find your mental age? In 1905, a French psychologist (someone who studies how people think, feel and behave) called Alfred Binet co-created the first IQ test, which inspired many intelligence tests today. However, IQ tests measure just one kind of smarts, known as g-factor or general intelligence, which includes skills like reasoning, problem-solving and memory.

Super smarts