Radio Australia Today Editorial

IQ isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

22 July 2009

I knew it.

I always suspected that ranking peoples’ intelligence by IQ was problematic, or at least I started suspecting it after the smartest guy in our school told me that me he got high results in IQ tests by learning how to approach the questions (studying number sequences, learning the tricks in the questions etc). If the system can be so rorted, how good could it be (sorry to all you good people at Mensa).

Since starting journalism, I know that I have become much smarter now than that bored little Greek kid languishing in the back row of Summer Hill Primary in Sydney. Back then it took weeks for me to understand a arithmetic concept. (Mind you, back then I had trouble learning how to tie my shoe-laces). I suspect if they tested my IQ in those days I would’ve come in somewhere between Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon. Hopefully things have improved a little since then.

Today I got some support in my suspicion of IQ. It’s to do with Working Memory. This is where a person has to remember something while simultaneously processing another piece of info. An example that we used on the program this morning was the phonetic alphabet, when we spell out something directly from the phonetic alphabet (eg: kafcaloudes: kilo-alpha-foxtrot-charlie etc). In this example we are remembering the name and applying an unrelated alphabet to it as we spell it.

It seems this Working Memory (WM) ability is very useful, perhaps even more so than IQ, particularly in assessing the brain activity of children. UK researcher Dr Tracy Alloway has studied 3000 children and found that ten percent had working memory problems. Some are so limited in WM that they forget the task the are in the middle of doing; can’t solve problems, and make many careless mistakes.

She says the problems can be solved by simple techniques like reading out a list of numbers to your kids, getting them to recite them back but in reverse order. Dr Alloway says simple tasks like these will go a long way towards fixing the problems.

If this has pricked your interest, Dr Alloway suggests going to www.junglememory.com which gives your kids a memory workout.

Take it from a guy who has just graduated from Cro-Magnon.

– Phil