Let's Be Less Stupid: An Attempt to Maintain My Mental Faculties (10 page)

Jackie had a husband and a paramour and she loved them very much, but not as much as she loved the diamond brooch that caught her attention one day in the window of Van Cleef & Arpels. The jewel went for an ungodly sum, call it
x
, and she was not God, but no matter: As she explained to the salesclerk, she had a plan. The next day Jackie escorted her husband to the shop, where much ogling went on—she toward the brooch and he in the direction of his wife. “A treasure for a treasure,” said Jackie’s husband, taking out his credit card. “The clasp needs repair,” said the salesclerk, “so I will give you a fifteen percent discount. You can pick it up in a week.” The next day Jackie brought her paramour to the shop and did what women do with their wiles. The wiles worked. “We’ll take the brooch,” her paramour said to the salesclerk, “and I’ll pay cash.” “In that case I’ll give you a ten percent discount,” said the salesclerk, “but you’ll have to wait a week to pick up the item because I must replace the backing.” A week later Jackie had her brooch, which she wore insouciantly in the company of her husband and her paramour
alike. She and the salesclerk split the profit—that is, the amount netted after the original sticker price was deducted. Each ended up with $30,000. How much did the brooch originally sell for? Hint: This requires math.

ANSWER: $80,000

The Pomegranates are remodeling their bathroom. The contractor promises that he and his assistant Drago can do the job in fifteen days. Drago works three times as fast as the contractor. On day two Drago is stricken with a hangnail and cannot work. Ever. The contractor hires Buster and Lester, who together can work one-fourth as fast as Drago worked. What Buster and Lester lack in speed, they do not make up for in carefulness. They put the toilet in upside down. The resulting flood spreads to the kitchen. The contractor says that redoing the kitchen and replacing the dog will take six times as long as the bathroom. The contractor fires Buster and Lester and employs a team whose religious habits permit them to work only on days that begin with a
T
. The first day on the job, the team works ten times as fast as the contractor. Every day thereafter it works half as fast as the day before. The Pomegranates divorce. Mrs. Pomegranate is
institutionalized. Will the bathroom be painted by the time Mrs. Pomegranate gets out of the bug house?

ANSWER:

Yes, but when she sees that it is painted Crème Fraîche instead of Fraîche Crème, she will check herself back in.

Liz Taylor has been married three times. No, not that Liz Taylor, another Liz Taylor. She received a modest settlement from each ex. The amounts, in chronological order, were as follows: $1,000, $8,000, $27,000. She put this money into a fund to pay for her twins’ college education, but do you think it will cover the cost of even a semester? Her children will be attending Sarah Lawrence, the most expensive college in the country (doesn’t it figure?). The tuition is $66,259, and that’s just this year, and that doesn’t include books, though maybe they’re not necessary. Child support? There is none. It’s a long story. Considering extras and assuming tuition raises, let’s say Liz Taylor is going to have to cough up $600,000 over four years. How many more times must Liz Taylor get divorced?

ANSWER: 3

DIRECTIONS:

This quiz is self-explanatory, but if you have one of those selves who is above directions, listen up.

Number each entry in chronological order, with 1 being the first or oldest. Here’s an example:

ANSWERS:

How’d you do? Now you’re on your own. I’ll see you at the answer key on
here
.

ANSWERS:

Note: This one is alphabetical.

Note: In 2010, scientists determined that the chicken came before the egg. Anyone who answered before 2010 gets credit if you got it wrong.

SCORING:

To figure out your score start out at 64. Deduct 1 for each entry you got wrong. Now deduct 1 for each Google search. And now subtract another 2 for each time Google autocorrected your spelling. Compare your scores below.

IQ tests are meant to assess not how much you know (phew) but how inherently bright you are (uh-oh). This type of aptitude, called
fluid intelligence
, is based on your facility for reasoning abstractly, solving problems
in novel situations, and remembering to bring a sharpened number two pencil. Some neuropsychologists would also add to the list motivation to score well. The other kind of smarts, the kind that IQ tests do not care about, is called
crystallized intelligence
. This sort of intelligence, which tends to expand as we age, comes from learning and experience. Knowing the meaning of the term
crystallized intelligence
is an example of crystallized intelligence.

The good thing—or wait, is it the bad thing?—about taking an IQ test is that unlike with, say, trying to ace the
Jeopardy!
Daily Double or pass your driver’s test, studying will get you nowhere. Your cognitive capacity, say many researchers, is largely, though not entirely, determined early. If you’d only been thinking before you were born, you might have chosen different parents—from 40 to 80 percent of your intelligence is inherited. It’s not too late, however, to blame the mother and father you ended up with for raising you on Doritos, Velveeta, and Mountain Dew. Children, particularly males, who were breastfed until they were six months old and who dined on healthy foods as toddlers seem to have marginally higher IQs (as much as two points) at age eight.

Is it possible after the age of three to hike up your IQ? When I was a kid, one’s IQ was top secret—a
God-given barometer of consequence that was known only to the authorities and inscribed on your Permanent Record. A few of my classmates claimed to have discovered their IQs—and guess what? Every one of them was genius material. (By the way, 140 is the cutoff for genius, but 160, reputed to be the IQ of Einstein, will qualify you to be a genius genius.) The rest of us worried that we were destined to be enduringly dumb, for back then, the conventional wisdom about wisdom was that your IQ was immutable—like your hair color (little did I know!). Today most scientists, though not all, believe that by regularly challenging yourself with a variety of novel and complex mental activities, and by living a drab life (exercise, meditation, ground flaxseed, etc.), it is possible to increase your IQ or at least improve your test-taking skills, if not your intelligence. Whether IQ is indeed a true measure of thinking ability and neural efficiency has stumped greater minds than mine. Bear this in mind, though: Cartoon celebrity Lisa Simpson has an IQ of 156, one point higher than the Rembrandts and Jonathan Swifts. I rest my case. Oh, wait—I unrest my case so that I can present one more item: My microwave is a Genius. I’m not bragging—that is Panasonic’s name for it, and anyway, yesterday it broke. I am replacing it with an LG LMH2016, which is probably a moron.

Another way to raise your IQ is to be born in the future. According to data collected since the test has been documented, the average IQ around the world has been increasing by about three points every decade, a phenomenon called the Flynn effect. Nobody knows for sure why this is so, though theories abound—healthier diets, more widespread schooling, greater familiarity with tests, smaller families, earlier maturation of children, etc. The explanation that James Flynn favors—and after all, it’s his effect—posits that society nowadays encourages more abstract problem-solving than in the past; to a great extent, this is the very facility that IQ tests measure. Take, for instance, the word similarities sub-test on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale. Flynn gives this example to demonstrate how our thought processes have changed over the years. To the question “What do dogs and rabbits have in common?” most respondents today would answer (correctly) that they are both mammals. Someone who lives in a less complicated world, however, might answer: “We use dogs to hunt for rabbits.” “The right answer,” Flynn writes in
Are We Getting Smarter?: Rising IQ in the Twenty-First Century
, “assumes that you are conditioned to look at the world in a certain way: through scientific spectacles—as something to be understood by classification; and not through
utilitarian spectacles—as something to be manipulated to advantage.” Um, maybe. Still, don’t you think that second guy is a little stupid?

In any case, cramming for the Wechsler the night before will not give you an IQ higher than your cholesterol. But how could I resist? As a rehearsal for my psychometric ordeal, I decided to take my neurons on some trial runs by sampling several free online IQ tests. By
free
I mean that they cost money—not the tests per se, but the results (anywhere from $9.95 to fifty dollars, sometimes with bonus personality test included). A handful of outfits online offer the kit and caboodle without charge—and I completed as many of those questionnaires as I could tolerate. The items range from simple analogies (head is to hat as hand is to glove) to spatial puzzles that invite you to imagine reconstructing deconstructed polyhedra and then rotating them in order to determine which plane ends up next to which other plane, a task that makes my brain stand up and scream.

Please, whatever you do, don’t make me tell you again how I scored. If you’d like to revisit my humiliation, see the second page of the prologue.

The first time I was evaluated by a psychologist, I was about six. My parents were concerned because I still wet my bed. The psychologist watched me play
with blocks and showed me some inkblots. He came to a conclusion: “In my judgment,” my parents say he said, “your daughter is lazy and will never get into a good college.”

This time an affable young woman in charge of psychological assessment at NYU School of Medicine at Bellevue Hospital would superintend. The process, she warned me in an e-mail, could last five hours. “Try not to worry too much,” she wrote after I sent her a worried note. “We will make it fun!” This made me more worried.

It was a four-hour undertaking, and not as agonizing as I’d expected, but what is? I wish I could disclose the test questions, but because the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale is copyright-protected, it was requested that I not reveal this information. Also, letting you in on what to expect would thereafter skew the average IQ upward, which would make me seem even more dim-witted (is it possible to have a negative IQ?), and that is something I need like a hole in my head. Another reason I can’t divulge the exact questions is that I forget what they are.

As long as you don’t tell on me I guess I won’t get in too much trouble by advising you to bone up on your block design. Also, it wouldn’t hurt to practice repeating series of numbers in reverse order—but you probably
already do that. There’s also a mathematical game that looks like a Fisher-Price toy for eighteen-month-olds and involves strategically moving doughnut-shaped disks from one peg to another. In addition to these sorts of merriments, there is a seven-page personality test consisting of statements, a few of them startlingly kooky, to which one must respond (1) very true, (2) true, (3) somewhat true, (4) not very true, or (5) false. If you answer “very true” to the statement “Most people look forward to a trip to the dentist,” it means you are (1) high on nitrous oxide, (2) a dentist with a child in college, or (3) deliberately trying to foil the results. (The answer is 3, and this is typical of the sort of question planted in the IQ test to make sure you’re not answering honestly and to the best of your ability. So watch it.)

My apologies for this chapter’s anticlimax, but, just as I chose not to find out the results of my brain scans until undergoing the follow-up test, I will, no matter what my editor says, put off knowing my score as long as possible, or at least until my brain is wised up. In the meantime you might be interested to know that just now, when I took an online quiz in order to find out “what your name should be,” I was informed, “Tiffany is the best name for you. You’re charming and you rock those heels, girl!”