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Measuring The Mind
by Gerald Gabriel
The Nature of Things
There is something ethereal about human intelligence, something hard-to-pin-down. It's hard even to define. Is intelligence the ability to reason? Does it have to do with memory? Is it aptitude with language? With mathematics? All of the above? Plenty of folks would go so far as to say that you just can't measure intelligence. Take the man credited with creating modern intelligence testing, French psychologist Alfred Binet, who wrote: "Intellectual qualities are not superposable and therefore cannot be measured as linear surfaces are measured." This business is complex and complicated, warned Binet, not a thing, like the hundred yard dash, to have an objective outcome.
According to others, however, our picture of intelligence is perfectly lucid. Many scientists believe that we long ago deciphered intelligence testing, thanks, in part, to Binet himself, and a pair of early-century scientists, Karl Pearson and Charles Spearman, whose work created a means of quantification.
Modern intelligence testing is coming up on its one-hundredth birthday, but unlike many of the landmark scientfic ideas of a century ago, the idea of testing intelligence, though it has certainly enjoyed moments of prosperity during the twentieth century, has failed to gain a consensus of believers in the sciences. In fact, those scientists who most focus their attention on intelligence are more fractured now than ever about our ability to measure it—and our methods of doing so. Where we are, finally, is really where we've been from the outset: confronting the dubious nature of testing, its misuse and sometimes sordid history, and its uncertain future.
The first real scientific attempt to study human intelligence began in the early nineteenth century, with the strange (by today's standards) idea that the measurement of skulls revealed something of intellect.
The thinking went that the larger the skull, the larger the brain, and the larger the brain, the higher the intelligence. This idea, called craniometry, was borne from an earlier science called phrenology, in which folds of the brain were associated with intellectual properties. The theory amounted to little more than a sneaking suspicion that the brain had something to do with intelligence and psychological functions.
Until this point, the concept of intelligence had been the sole province of philosophers like Descartes and Locke, whose speculation raised many interesting questions about man's consciousness and ability to reason. But their era lacked the tools of investigation necessary to explore those ideas empirically.
It wasn't until the nineteenth century that the development of scientific tools began to bring forth an ever-expanding arsenal of gadgets and ideas with which to combat the centuries of ignorance. With these new tools came a firm belief that everything could be explained -- the formation of continents, the stars -- even human intelligence.
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