Читать книгу Sort Your Brain Out - Джек Льюис, Адриан Вебстер - Страница 18

IQ stands for Intelligence Quotient and is the world's most popular and well‐known intelligence test. Up until the end of the 20th century the broadly held assumption was that once a person hit adulthood their IQ score would remain stable for the rest of their life. Then along came an ingenious Kiwi psychologist by the name of James Flynn, who noticed something curious. When he compared IQ scores of the same people, from one IQ test to the next taken a few years later, they'd gone up. We now know that IQ scores around the world have increased by an average of three IQ points every ten years!

What is driving this increase in intelligence? As far as we can tell it is driven by an increase in consumption of information and the extensive use of a steady flow of new technologies. From decade to decade the amount of information we have access to has dramatically increased, first via television and then through the internet. The more information our brains have to juggle on a daily basis, it seems, the higher our IQs go!