Everything Bad Is Good for You (22 page)

Consider the kind of thinking you have to do to perform well on the Raven test. First, the information is presented in a visual language, not a textual one. You need—literally—to “fill in” the missing space and complete the sequence. You can't fill in by memorizing facts or having a large vocabulary; you have to do it by paying close attention to the grid, by detecting patterns in each object, by separating the relevant information from the irrelevant. You're presented, in effect, with a grid of potential clues that suggest what the missing box should contain; those clues are defined as a series of relationships: each shape connecting to other shapes in the grid in subtle ways. To solve this particular puzzle, you have to grasp that the essential relationships between the shapes run on both the vertical and horizontal axes, moving left to right and top to bottom, and involve adding the dark areas in the first two shapes together to create the proper coloration in the third shape. But the diagonal axes, for instance, are irrelevant. In this sense, there's an open-ended nature to the question: part of figuring out the solution lies in figuring out which elements of the question are pertinent and which are red herrings. If you ask someone to name the state capital of Missouri, or the square root of 128, there's no need to parse the question and determine which components are relevant or not: you either know the information by rote, or in the latter instance, you know the procedure for extracting a square root from a given number. The Raven grids, on the other hand, force you to separate the essential and the peripheral in the question itself.

This is exactly the kind of thinking that has become widespread in the popular media over the past few decades. Games, of course, rely heavily on this pattern recognition and deciphering; some puzzle games like
Tetris
even look like the Raven test. When you're mapping the complex relationships of
24
to figure out who the mole is, you're doing a social network rendition of the Raven grid: looking for patterns of behavior that reveal a hidden identity. When you're trying to figure out why your new e-mail client keeps crashing your PC, you're analyzing an array of potential clues—separating the essential from the peripheral—to figure out the underlying conflict. In all these activities, you have to analyze a complex tableau, build a working model of it in your head, and then make a decision. In the most basic sense, these different forms of media reward you for
solving
something.

The emphasis on abstract problem-solving in tests like the Raven originally stemmed from a desire to create tests that were free of cultural bias. It was better to ask people to mentally rotate rectangles in their heads than it was to ask them to analyze paragraphs about the Founding Fathers, because there were invariably culturally endowed facts and skills in the latter that favored certain demographic groups over others. For a while, this approach probably worked, precisely because there were no cultural groups that placed a disproportionate emphasis on mentally rotating a rectangle 270 degrees. But a few years ago, all of that started to change. A new group appeared that compulsively rotated rectangles all day long, that literally rotated rectangles in their sleep. But this group didn't break down into the usual economic or racial divisions. These weren't prep school elites, or Japanese-Americans, or the urban underclass. They were kids who played
Tetris.

One other tendency in the history of IQ mirrors the trends in popular culture we've explored. The Flynn Effect is most pronounced in the low-to-mid range of intelligence scores. At the very high end of IQ—the top 2 or 3 percentile—the curve levels off. Moderately intelligent people today are much smarter—at least where
g
is concerned—than moderately intelligent people were a hundred years ago. But a Mensa member today with a 150 IQ wouldn't be able to run circles around a genius from 1900. This is precisely the result we would expect to see if lowbrow culture and middlebrow culture are a driving force behind the Flynn Effect: while a person of moderate intelligence will have his or her pattern recognition talents sharpened by playing
Zelda
or studying the plotlines of
24,
a genius would probably require more challenging fare to improve his or her skills. Spending a week reviewing multiplication flash cards will decidedly improve the math skills of a fourth-grader, but it probably won't improve the skills of a college physics major. The same goes for popular media and
g.
The Sleeper Curve shows that the popular culture is growing more complex, yet it is not sufficiently complex to challenge the most gifted minds, which is why the geniuses aren't getting any smarter. What has changed is the cognitive workout that mass culture offers the rest of us.

Science is only beginning to understand what that workout actually entails. While many studies have analyzed the impact of television violence on behavior—with no clear consensus either way—the
positive
mental impact of contemporary media has not been widely examined. But a handful of recent studies have looked at the effect of playing video games on visual intelligence and memory. One study at the University of Rochester asked subjects to perform a series of quick visual recognition tests, picking out the color of a letter or counting the number of objects on a screen. The test was not as intricate as the Raven matrices, but it was more time-sensitive. Regular gamers consistently outperformed non-gamers on all the skills measured by the study. The researchers also debunked the premise that visually intelligent people are more likely to be attracted to video games in the first place. They had a group of non-players spend a week immersed in
Tetris
and the World War II game
Medal of Honor,
and found that this group's skills on the visual test improved as well. Games were literally making them perceive the world more clearly.

Another recent study looked at three distinct groups of white-collar professionals: hard-core gamers, occasional gamers, and non-gamers. The results contradict nearly all the received ideas about the impact of games: the gaming population turned out to be consistently more social, more confident, and more comfortable solving problems creatively. They also showed no evidence of reduced attention spans compared with non-gamers.

These early studies are tantalizing, but they are only the beginning. Because we have lived so long under the dumbing-down hypothesis, because we have been inclined to evaluate these new cultural forms as debased versions of older forms, we have very little data on positive cognitive impact, beyond the macro trend of the Flynn Effect. My hope is that we are beginning to appreciate some of these virtues, and that we will soon see research into the impact of gaming on probing and telescoping in complex environments, or the relationship between following television dramas and our ability to map social networks. Until that time, the most compelling evidence for the Sleeper Curve is financial: games and narratives that were too intricate for mass audiences thirty years ago now regularly attract millions of willing enthusiasts. Clearly
something
has changed in the minds of all those people that keeps them from being unpleasantly disoriented by these experiences. It's time we tried to figure out exactly what that something is.

Flynn's own position on the trend he discovered is itself iconoclastic. On the one hand, he remains convinced of the original insight that drove him into this line of inquiry nearly three decades ago: IQ is far more vulnerable to environmental conditions than previously believed. (In 2001, he coauthored a fascinating paper on the interaction of culture and genetics that explained why previous studies showing high rates of heritability for IQ neglected environmental factors.) And if environmental factors are responsible for the increase in IQ over the past fifty years, the next logical question is: What has changed in the environment over that time? In the industrialized world, where the Flynn Effect has been most pronounced, the answer is simple: Media and technology. Our diets haven't improved; our schools are more crowded and less endowed; our living environments are increasingly suburban. But the media and technology that our minds grapple with every day have grown at an exponential rate over that period, in both the complexity of the individual object and the diversity of the overall ecosystem. The mind is more challenged following the plot of
24
than the plot of
Dragnet
, and the mind is more challenged mastering the dozens of new media forms—games, hypertext, instant messaging, TiVo—that constitute mainstream culture today.

Yet Flynn has a twist. He sees the Flynn Effect undermining not only the genetics of IQ, but also the correlation between IQ and real-world intelligence. “Just as an elite with a massive IQ advantage should radically outperform the rest of its generation,” he writes, “so a generation with a massive IQ gain should radically outperform its predecessors…. The result should be a cultural renaissance too great to be overlooked.” And yet we see no evidence of “a dramatic increase in genius or mathematical and scientific discovery during the present generation.” If IQs are improving but the culture isn't, then IQ must not be as useful a measure of intelligence as its supporters believe.

This is a book about a popular culture and not the history of science, so I'll leave Flynn's claims about the state of mathematical and scientific discovery for others to dispute in more detail. (Suffice it to say that the age of brain imaging, genome mapping, and the microchip stacks up nicely against past eras—particularly when you look at the sheer number of individuals contributing groundbreaking work, as opposed to the isolated geniuses of the past.) But in focusing on the idea of cultural renaissance, Flynn is looking at the outer edge of the bell curve, among the savants and visionaries. As we've seen, the Flynn Effect is most pronounced in the middle regions: the average person has seen the most dramatic IQ increase over the past decades. And the average person, like it or not, doesn't trigger scientific revolutions or cultural renaissances. The sharpening of his mind can't be measured at the extremes of intellectual achievement. Instead, we should detect that improvement somewhere else, in the everyday realm of managing more complex forms of technology, mastering increasingly nuanced narrative structures—even playing more complicated video games. We should detect that improvement in the realm of the Sleeper Curve. Flynn was right to say we should expect to find a cultural renaissance if the general rise in IQ truly measured an increase in intelligence. It's just that the culture turned out to be mass, not elite.

 

I
F RISING
IQs and the TV ratings suggest that the Sleeper Curve is having a beneficial impact on our mental faculties, one crucial question remains. Why is this tendency toward increased complexity happening in the first place? It is a truth nearly universally acknowledged that pop culture caters to our base instincts; mass society dumbs down and simplifies; it races to the bottom. The rare flowerings of “quality programming” only serve to remind us of the overall downward slide. But no matter how many times this refrain is belted out, it doesn't get any more accurate. As we've seen, precisely the opposite seems to be happening: the secular trend is toward greater cognitive demands, more depth, more participation. And if you accept that premise, you're forced then to answer the question:
Why?
For decades, the race to the bottom served as a kind of Third Law of Thermodynamics for mass society: all other things being equal, pop culture will decline into simpler forms. But if entropy turns out not to govern the world of mass society—if our entertainment is getting smarter after all—we need a new model to explain the trend.

That model is a complex, layered one. The forces driving the Sleeper Curve straddle three different realms of experience: the economic, the technological, and the neurological. Part of the Sleeper Curve reflects changes in the market forces that shape popular entertainment; part emanates from long-term technological trends; and part stems from deep-seated appetites in the human brain.

The Sleeper Curve is partly powered by the force of repetition. Over the past twenty years, a fundamental shift has transformed the economics of popular entertainment: original runs are now less lucrative than repeats. In the old days of television and Hollywood, the payday came from your initial airing on network or your first run at the box office. The aftermarkets for content were marginal at best. But the mass adoption of the VCR, and cable television's hunger for syndicated programming, has turned that equation on its head. In 2003, for the first time, Hollywood made more money from DVD sales than it did from box office receipts. Television shows repurposed as DVDs generated more than a billion dollars in sales alone during the same period. And the financial rewards of syndication are astronomical: shows like
The Simpsons
and
The West Wing
did well for their creators in their initial airings on network television, but the real bonanza came from their afterlife as reruns. Syndication has changed the underlying economics of how television shows are conceived and produced, because the rewards of reaching syndication are so much more immense than those generated by the original airing of a show. Every local channel everywhere on the planet that airs an old episode of
Seinfeld
is paying a fee to Jerry Seinfeld, Larry David, and the other creators of the show. Those syndication fees, added up, are mind-boggling: Seinfeld and David together have earned hundreds of millions of dollars from the syndication rights, while earning only a small fraction of that from the show's first run on NBC. Network television made stand-up comics like Milton Berle and Bob Hope millionaires. Syndication has turned today's comics into magnates.