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IQ is rising in many parts of the world. What's behind the change and does it really mean people are cleverer than their grandparents?
It is not unusual for parents to comment that their children are brainier than they are. In doing so, they hide a boastful remark about their offspring behind a self-deprecating one about themselves. But a new study, published in the journal Intelligence, provides fresh evidence that in many cases this may actually be true.
The researchers - Peera Wongupparaj, Veena Kumari and Robin Morris at Kings College London - did not themselves ask anyone to sit an IQ test, but they analysed data from 405 previous studies. Altogether, they harvested IQ test data from more than 200,000 participants, captured over 64 years and from 48 countries.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 05 2015, @06:19AM
A good memory helps synthesis - kind of like a large cache on a cpu. The CPU can be blazing fast but if it has to constantly idle waiting on memory reads - or worse yet paging in from disk - then it gets nothing done. The larger the "working set" the more patterns and inter-relationships you can put together in a reasonable amount of time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 05 2015, @07:34AM
A poor CPU with high storage (ala. SAN) are those people who are walking encyclopedias but can't think themselves out of a paper bag.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 05 2015, @05:25PM
I don't think comparing brains to CPUs or making such analogies is very meaningful. Intelligence is far more complex than that, to the point where we can't even really define it in an objective way. There are various ways around the memory problem, such as storing the data elsewhere. Most rote memorization 'geniuses' I've encountered were only good at memorizing information and doing nothing else; they could not innovate.