Monday 20 June 2005

Pic of the day: In the anime Stellvia, the final defense of mankind lies in the hands of young teens. It is perhaps assumed that the Flynn effect will continue to make each generation smarter than the last. It has been like that for a while now, but...

The end of the Flynn Effect?

Gradually the expression "Flynn Effect" has made it into literature and educated conversation. It refers to the gradual increase in intelligence since IQ tests began around the onset of World War 1. Average IQ is by definition 100, so what has happened instead is that the tests have been revised, over and over. In the USA, the growth has been approximately 10 points per generation or 3 points per decade. In some countries the growth has been faster, but worrying signs are emerging from Scandinavia that the trend has broken and possibly even reversed.

It is obvious that such a fast growth is not biological evolution in action. The speed is orders of magnitude above what we have seen over the last few million years. Some cite better nutrition, but in Northern Europe poor nutrition has not been a problem since World War II ... and even then, the 5 years of roughness did not slow down the IQ growth, quite the opposite if anything. It seems more likely to be some kind of cultural evolution. We live in a society where abstract problem solving is not just for the doctor and the rabbi. It is something every child learns, not just in school but at home where ever more complex technology surrounds us all.

There are opposing forces, though. Most western countries have programs that encourage unemployable women to bear children so as to receive government support, "for the sake of the children". Only the most charitable of euphemisms can conceal that this is a breeding program for morons. At the same time, having children means reduced career options and thus less income for most high-education groups. Since education past a certain point is hard to achieve without a high intelligence, this hits the most intelligent citizens the hardest. So it is no wonder if the Flynn effect stalls eventually. The fact that it has happened at all is more like a miracle of Biblical proportions. Which it may well be, given that the Bible in fact predicts great knowledge as one of the events in "the last days". If you read my entry yesterday, you will see that the "last days" could possibly be a very natural conclusion of the trend toward a new mode of human thinking, which has been underway for several thousand years but only lately gaining momentum.

There is one more possibility though. The end of the growth may not represent a failure of education in the Nordic countries (in fact, modern IQ tests are designed to filter out the effects of education as much as possible) or even bad nutrition (although it is hard to imagine burgers and cola contributing greatly to a higher IQ, or the other way around). It could be that we have reached the end of the road for the current mode of human thinking. That we either have to breed faster brains (there are still geniuses after all) or switch to a new and better mode of thinking.

***

It is widely believed that the human leap into sentience was caused by language. All modern humans have spoken languages, and despite the bewildering variation there are also many common traits. So many that some respected scientists believe that the underlying structure of language – the syntax – is coded into our brains. Certainly it seems that all humans have such brains. But our last common ancestress lived perhaps 150 000 years ago; why did her children wait another 100 000 years before talking about the mysteries of life and death, the need for art, better tools and weapons and a decent burial? If we had language all the time, why did these topics never come up before, and then suddenly they were on everyone's mind?

One theory I have read is that humans originally used a more restricted language based on signs. But two arguments speak against this: One, the language centers in our brain are located ideally to work with our sense of hearing and our vocal apparatus. In fact, they do so even in people born deaf, and who use sign language. Two, these deaf people are not grunting savages. They are grunting civilized people with the same mental capabilities and the same inclinations as we. There is no obvious reason why a primordial sign language would not allow abstract thinking, or why a spoken language would.

What is certain is that the new mode of thinking, while seemingly wasting lots of resources on art and religion, was vastly more efficient. At a blinding speed it replaced the old mode of thinking, so fast that some of the more excitable observers of today think it must have happened simultaneously across the world. Actually people were pretty mobile at the time, despite the lack of airplanes, and from a distance of 40 000 years there is no way we can say whether it took one generation or fifty. We know however that the "new humans" did not outbreed the old, for the genetic variation is still there. They must have converted them instead. As if, by contact, the new mode of thinking made more sense and was obviously more attractive.

***

If that is to happen again, and if it is in fact beginning already, what will the new mode be? Perhaps it will, like the old, start out as a mode of communication. Language is at the face of it a way to communicate with others; but it turns out to also be a great way to shape your own thoughts. The concepts we use in language are also usable as building blocks when we think, allowing shortcuts by assigning known concepts to words. Is it possible that a new mode of communication will allow us to think more efficiently again?

Easily excitable New-Agers believe that telepathy will take over for speech as the new mode of communication. They claim that the new wonder-children are already communicating this way all over the world. I'll see that when I believe it. Telepathy would be great, but the problem is that there is no known way to do that with our current brains. While telepathy seems to happen spontaneously at random times, nobody is able to consistently display it in a test situation. Contrast this with language, which even small children can demonstrate tirelessly for hours on end.

There may however be a feature that superficially looks like telepathy and has some of its advantages, but a very different underlying structure. I will call this with a name borrowed from computing. It is parallel or distributed processing.

Sometimes you are together with a friend or family member and you are just about to say something, and then they say it first. This could be telepathy, but typically they are not aware that you were thinking of it. Rather, they came to the same result by their own thinking, feeling or habit. But these days, we are not just in contact with friends and family. Through work and leisure, through reading and writing, telephone and internet, we are exposed to partially processed information from hundreds if not thousands of people. Each of us is combining this in a different way, acting as nodes where different information flows meet and combine (or not, if they are not compatible). And then we give off partially processed information of our own, which others can pick up and which will make new associations in different brains. This is eerily similar to how information flows inside each human brain.

The result could be thoughts on a much grander scale. Technologies like internet or mobile phones may increase the speed, but the most important part is exposure to different thoughts. Already as long ago as Isaac Newton, inventions were made simultaneously by two people living quite a distance apart. If we exclude telepathy, a reasonable assumption is that they had similar information available and drew similar conclusions from it. Instead, Newton's competitor accused him of plagiarism, Newton retaliated, and this tendency is still found among scientists today.

Modern humans have slightly smaller brains than the Neanderthals, and also smaller than their ancestors that lived at the same time as the Neanderthals. It may be that the slightly lower IQ of modern Danes and Norwegians reflect their intense use of mobile phones and Internet. Because when you are always connected to a wide circle of friends, who are always connected to more friends again and so on, you don't need to know everything yourself or be able to solve all problems yourself. You can solve them together. Distributed processing.

I am not actually saying that this is the new mode of thinking. It is just an example that you cannot simply measure the IQ and say that things are getting better or worse, just like you cannot just measure the volume of the cranium and say that humanity has regressed. Some ways of thinking are simply more efficient than others and need less "brute force". Distributed processing is one of them. Another is mysticism. The two also go well together.