Brain & Nervous System Health Center

Does IQ Test Really Measure Intelligence?

RIP IQ Test? continued...

John Gabrieli, PhD, professor of brain and cognitive science at MIT in Boston, reviewed the study for WebMD. “This is a really compelling study of an extraordinarily large number of people taking tests with a careful data analysis. It makes the case against the idea that IQ is localized in one part of the brain. We imagine that there is THE test of intelligence, but you can measure it in many ways. One measure may make a person seem super-intelligent, but if they picked another, they may seem average. There are multiple kinds of intelligence that can link to various tasks and different parts of the brain.”

Gayatri Devi, MD, agrees with the new study findings. She is an attending neurologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. “To come up with one unifying score and use that to determine a person’s overall ability is fraught with problems,” she says.  “We need to get away from that.”

The study appears in the journal Neuron.