There’s probably someone “smarter than Einstein” in your city

Seen on Facebook today:

“12-Year-Old Girl Beats Einstein, Stephen Hawking’s score on Mensa IQ test.”

You know the expression, “Don’t get me started!”?

That got me started.

The first thing that annoyed me was that, as far as I have been able to find, neither Albert Einstein nor Stephen Hawking, ever took IQ tests.

Stephen Hawking told the New York Times:

What is your I.Q.?
I have no idea. People who boast about their I.Q. are losers.

I found some pages like this that have estimates of Einstein’s IQ. This page says flat out that he never took it. (Googling “Einstein IQ” today reveals about a zillion pages carrying this “Girl beats Einstein” story, so I may have missed this. But I doubt it.) But when you write that Neha Ramu (the 12 year old girl’s name) has an IQ “higher than Einstein,” you’re just guessing.

The second problem is that any time you take a measurement, there is measurement error (as Joel G. pointed out on Twitter). Measure your height or weight on two different days. You may not get exactly the same value (unless you use measure very coarsely; like measuring your height to the nearest foot, say). People have good days and bad. If this girl had taken a test on a different day, oops, maybe no worldwide story, she’s lower than the completely made-up and arbitrary Einstein IQ line. As Eric Mills noted, it’s hard to assess accuracy for a test when you’re a long way from the average.

This might also be a good time to point out that there are data on the stability of IQ scores over life. People can have pretty big swings over the course of their life.

If I remember correctly, IQ tests for young people are age-adjusted, so a score tells you about how a person compares to other people of the same age. It does not tell you that a kid can flat out outperform an adult.

Second, there is an underlying assumption that this girl’s score is crazy rare. So how rare is this girl’s IQ score? Well, there are different IQ tests. In most, the average is 100 points, and the standard deviation is about 15.

The reports seem to estimate Einstein and Hawking’s IQ scores at around 160: that would be 4 standard deviations about the mean. (This site puts it at 3.75 standard deviations.)

According to this site, someone with an IQ of 160 is rare: you would expect to find one such person out of 31,560 individuals. You’d need to look through 55,906 people to find someone with a score of 162.

You’d expect someone “smarter than Einstein” in pretty much any medium sized city. With seven billion people on the planet, there are probably 125,000 who are “smarter than Einstein” on a standard IQ test.

In fact, there were at least two young people in the news just last year with the “smarter than Einstein” label. One was Paulius Zabotkiene and another was Ramarni Wilfred. And the coverage is breathless. “How is that even possible?” asks one. The other advises you, “Just let that sink in for a minute.”

And all three of these young people are from the United Kingdom. This provides even further evidence that finding someone “smarter than Einstein” is hardly a once in a lifetime event with some sort of earth shattering implications. Instead, it’s a lazy journalistic trope.

But these people’s IQ scores, and how rare they are, are, of course, completely irrelevant.

Einstein’s IQ doesn’t matter. Hawking’s IQ doesn’t matter. Neha Ramu’s IQ doesn't matter. What matters is what you do with that.

We don’t value Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking because of their IQ scores. We value them for their achievements. Many people also value their other personal characteristics, which happened to be bottled up in the same body as their smarts.

We value Einstein as a humanitarian who worried about the atomic bomb and played the violin.

We admire Stephen Hawking for being someone who remained productive and accomplished in his field despite the most astonishing physical challenges.

Young people with high IQ scores will probably (though not always) do well in life. Good for them. But they are not “the chosen ones,” for crying out loud.

Additional: Sciliz noted that there is also the possibility of sexism in these sorts of stories. You know, “Einstein beat... by a girl!”

Indeed, I’ve noticed over time that a lot of these sorts of news stories often mention sex, race, class, ethnic background, hard upbringing, and so on. The overarching point of mentioning these characteristics seems to these seems to increase the surprise factor by feeding into people’s biases. “Look how smart this person is even though...!” Again, it seems to be lazy reporting and lazy writing.

Weirdly, this story seems to have first been reported months ago. No idea why it showed up in my Facebook feed today. Ramu’s age is variously reported as 12 or 13, so presumably she’s had a birthday since the story came out.

Related posts

Genius is overrated
The genius myth

External links

12 year old girl beats Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking’s record in MENSA IQ Is there anyone who has increased IQ substantially like 40 points?
IQ basics
IQ conversion
Giftedness in the long term, professor 

MythBusters and the ultimate neuromyth

The myth that you only use 10% of your brain is pervasive, but I never expected to see it on MythBusters. After all, it’s a very – dare I say it? – cerebral myth. I didn’t see much chance for blowing stuff up.

On this week’s episode of MythBusters, it was tested and busted. But I was puzzled by the way they interpreted their results to bust it.

For the second test, they gave Grant and Tori questions while they recorded the brain using magnetoencephalography. (Forgive me if I write that as MEG from here on in.) This is a brain imaging technique that isn’t used as commonly as, say, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), but as far as I can understand, the logic of how it works is somewhat similar.

In brain imaging studies, brain “activation” is usually the difference between a task where you’re asked to do something, and a control situation where you’re asked to do as little as you can. The important thing is that you’re making a comparison to some baseline activity. And that baseline isn’t zero. I fully admit that I may be misunderstanding this, and MEG may just be that much different than fMRI.

The segment made it sound like we use only about 30% of our brain, rather than 30% of our brain was more active than normal when given these tasks.

It’s like comparing your heart rate during exercise to your resting heart rate. Your resting heart rate isn’t zero, because if it was, you’d be dead.

In some sense, I suppose it doesn’t matter, since the original myth is about how much of our brains we “use” – which is a surprisingly slippery wording. And it’s still good to have information out there that might help make a dent in the undisputed heavyweight champion of neuromyths.

I’m do worry, though, that people will end up thinking that 70% of our brain is just filler. It isn’t.

P.S.—The dramatic tablecloth pull on the same episode also flubbed the explanation of the physics.

Eating your own brain: Ocean of Pseudoscience repost

Southern Fried Scientist decided to feature a week of surreal science related to the oceans. I take this opportunity to be a lazy blogger and repost this piece (slightly rewritten) from May 2008.

Adult sea squirts (also known as tunicates or ascidians) are sessile animals. As adults, they really don't move. But if anyone has heard about sea squirts, they’ve probably hear that little sea squirts start life as smart little tadpoles, searching this way and that for a place to land. Once they’ve found the place where they'll spend the rest of their lives, they go through a metamorphosis into the immobile adult.

But as they have no further need of their brain, they eat it.

The punchline is, “It’s rather like getting tenure.”

The facts should never get in the way of a great joke, but the truth is more complicated. The swimming tadpoles are only about a millimeter long, and there are only a few hundred neurons in the entire tadpole (Meinertzhagen and Okamura 2001), of which the “brain” is only a small part. Tadpoles have miniaturized brains.

Sea squirt larvae do undergo metamorphosis into a adult with a small brains, but it's not the vestigial little thing that the “eat your own brain” story suggests. “In fact, adult ascidians have perfectly good brains, an order of magnitude larger than those of their larvae, and their behaviour is as finely adapted to sessility as that of the larvae to motility” (Mackie and Burighel, 2005).

We’ve learned a lot about how brains work from invertebrates, and their complexity is often underrated.

References

Mackie GO, Burighel P. 2005. The nervous system in adult tunicates: current research directions. Canadian Journal of Zoology 83(1): 151-183. DOI: 10.1139/z04-177

Meinertzhagen IA, Okamura Y. 2001. The larval ascidian nervous system: the chordate brain from its small beginnings Trends in Neurosciences 24(7). 401-410. DOI: 10.1016/S0166-2236(00)01851-8

Humans do not have reptile brains

A neuro myth needs busting. Again.

At the Speaking About Presenting blog, Olivia Mitchell trots out the idea that we have a three part brain: an old, primitive reptilian brain, a mid brain, and a new brain. I am about to go over and be a pedant and leave a comment that while it’s a great story, it is wrong.

Yeah, I know, there I go with that blind obsession with the truth again.

I wrote a comment on the All In The Mind Blog about this, which I reused on this blog here, but I’ll save you all the bother of clicking the link and just repost it.

The basic premise discussed in this show – that human behaviour has an evolutionary history – is not terribly contentious. The specific model discussed in the program, Paul MacLean’s “triune brain,” is more problematic.

As typically expressed, MacLean’s model suggests that entire reptilian brain has been conserved through the evolution of the mammals, with new brain regions essentially added on to the existing core, like suburbs being added to a city.

There are a few problems with this model.

First, MacLean’s ideas seem to be highly influenced by old ideas that emphasized the “march of progress“ or the “great chain of being.” In particular, the MacLean model seems to be based on the notion that reptiles were the ancestors of mammals. It’s debatable whether reptiles are the ancestors of mammals, however. It may be that the two groups shared a common ancestor, then diverged. It's also somewhat misleading in that it lumps all reptiles together. Snakes, for instance, appear much later in the fossil record than the earliest mammals.

Second, the suggestion that the entire reptile brain is essentially the mammalian hind brain is not supported by modern neuroanatomy. To give an example, in MacLean's model, the limbic system is characterized as a “lower mammalian” part of the brain. There is evidence, however, that reptiles have a limbic system (Bruce and Neary, 1995; Lanuza et al., 1998).

MacLean’s “triune brain” hypothesis may have caught the popular imagination, but it has not proved useful in modern neurobiology.

References

Bruce LL, Neary TJ. 1995. The limbic system of tetrapods: A comparative analysis of cortical and amygdalar populations. Brain, Behavior and Evolution 46(4-5): 224-234.

Lanuza E, Belekhova M, Martinez-Marcos A, Font C, Martinez-Garcia F. 1998. Identification of the reptilian basolateral amygdala: an anatomical investigation of the afferents to the posterior dorsal ventricular ridge of the lizard Podarcis hispanica. European Journal of Neuroscience 10(11): 3517-3534.

Jellyfish nervous system myth busted

I was leafing through the June 2009 issue of Popular Science, and was pleased to see invertebrate neurobiology featured in a little quiz.


For those of you who don’t want to turn your computer monitor upside down to read the answer to question #3, “Do jellyfish have brains?” the answer given is, “Nope, they have a network of nerves but no central location to it.”

Which is only partly correct.


It is not true that jellyfish have no central nervous systems. They have an unusual nervous system, because jellyfish are not bilaterally symmetrical – that is, they don’t have a left side and a right side. So while most invertebrates have a chain of ganglia lying down the middle of the body, with one very large one at the front end (the brain), jellyfish don’t.

Instead, jellyfish have a ring nervous system, located along the margin of the bell. There is definitely a concentration of neurons in that location (although it contains relatively few neurons compared to other animals). Plus, those neurons do serve as an active relay and processing station for sensory and motor activity. Those are two of the main things that central nervous systems do, so there seems to be no good reason to deny that jellyfish have a central nervous system. (Picture from Mackie and Meech, 2000.)

Mackie and Meech (1995) credit the initial discovery of nerve rings to Passano in 1965, so we’ve known about the existence of jellyfish central nervous systems for at least a few decades.

It is true that jellyfish have no brains. But that may not be so bad. Mackie and Meech (2000) wrote:

(T)he lack of a brain is... an adaptation to radial symmetry rather than an indication of primitiveness(.)

Take that, bilateral bigots!

Reference

Mackie G, Meech R. 1995. Central circuitry in the jellyfish Aglantha. I: The relay system. The Journal of Experimental Biology 198: 2261-2270. http://jeb.biologists.org/cgi/content/abstract/198/11/2261

Mackie G, Meech R. 1995. Central circuitry in the jellyfish Aglantha. II: The ring giant and carrier systems. The Journal of Experimental Biology 198: 2271-2278. http://jeb.biologists.org/cgi/content/abstract/198/11/2271

Mackie G, Meech R. 1995. Central circuitry in the jellyfish Aglantha. III: The rootlet and pacemaker systems The Journal of Experimental Biology 203: 1797-1807. http://jeb.biologists.org/cgi/content/abstract/203/12/1797

Jellyfish photo: User mayhem on Flickr.

Myelin myth busted

The Neurophilosophy blog has an excellent post on a recent article about sensory hairs involved in crayfish escape responses.

I did see an opportunity to correct a common error. What follows is a repost of my comment from the blog.

"Neuro myth busting" may have to become a blog label. Previous examples include this one on ascidian brains and one on reptilian brains.

Just a quick reminder for those who aren't biologists: Myelin is a covering around many neurons that makes signals travel along neurons faster.

;;;;;

The crayfish is an invertebrate, and therefore does not produce myelin(.)

Many invertebrates produce myelin (Hartline & Colman 2007). In fact, many decapod crustaceans (shrimps and prawns) have myelinated giant interneurons that are the core of the escape system described here. These crustaceans have the fastest known conduction velocity in the animal kingdom, about 200 m/s. This is about double the typical textbook value given for myelinated mammalian neurons.

It's not clear why crayfish lack myelin. Shrimps and prawns are more basal taxa, and the distribution of myelin suggests that myelination was the ancestral condition. Many decapods (including crayfish) seem to have lost myelin, rather than the shrimps and prawns gaining it (Faulkes 2008).

References

Faulkes Z. 2008. Turning loss into opportunity: The key deletion of an escape circuit in decapod crustaceans. Brain, Behavior and Evolution 72(4): 351-361. doi: 10.1159/000171488

Hartline DK & Colman DR. 2007. Rapid conduction and the evolution of giant axons and myelinated fibers. Current Biology 17(1): R29-R35. 10.1016/j.cub.2006.11.042

Sea squirt myths busted

I bust another invertebrate neurobiology myth on the All In The Mind blog that crops up in a post about cars, of all things. What follows is a slightly edited version of my comment on the post.

It’s widely thought that sea squirts (also known as tunicates or ascidians), once they’ve found the place where they'll spend the rest of their lives, have no further need of their brain and eat it.

The punchline is, “It’s rather like getting tenure.”

The facts should never get in the way of a great joke, but the truth is more complicated. The swimming tadpoles are only about a millimeter long, and there are only a few hundred neurons in the entire tadpole (Meinertzhagen and Okamura 2001), of which the “brain” is only a small part. Tadpoles have miniaturized brains.

Sea squirt larvae do undergo metamorphosis into a adult with a small brains, but it's not the vestigial little thing that the “eat your own brain” story suggests. “In fact, adult ascidians have perfectly good brains, an order of magnitude larger than those of their larvae, and their behaviour is as finely adapted to sessility as that of the larvae to motility” (Mackie and Burighel, 2005).

We’ve learned a lot about how brains work from invertebrates, and their complexity is often underrated.

References

Meinertzhagen IA, Okamura Y. 2001. The larval ascidian nervous system: the chordate brain from its small beginnings. Trends in Neurosciences 24(7): 401-410. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0166-2236(00)01851-8

Mackie GO, Burighel P. 2005. The nervous system in adult tunicates: current research directions. Canadian Journal of Zoology 83(1): 151-183. http://pubs.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/cgi-bin/rp/rp2_abst_e?cjz_z04-177_

The reptilian brain critiqued

The following is a blog post I made over at the All in the Mind blog in response to a recent show on evolutionary psychiatry. I wanted to post it here, because I've been wanting to discuss the "reptilian brain" idea for some time, as it may well be one of the most popular but wrong ideas about the evolution of nervous systems out there.

More posts on reptile brains later, I hope.

;;;;;

The basic premise discussed in this show -- that human behaviour has an evolutionary history -- is not terribly contentious. The specific model discussed in the program, Paul MacLean's "triune brain," is more problematic.

As typically expressed, MacLean's model suggests that entire reptilian brain has been conserved through the evolution of the mammals, with new brain regions essentially added on to the existing core, like suburbs being added to a city.

There are a few problems with this model.

First, MacLean's ideas seem to be highly influenced by old ideas that emphasized the "march of progress" or the "great chain of being." In particular, the MacLean model seems to be based on the notion that reptiles were the ancestors of mammals. It's debatable whether reptiles are the ancestors of mammals, however. It may be that the two groups shared a common ancestor, then diverged. It's also somewhat misleading in that it lumps all reptiles together. Snakes, for instance, appear much later in the fossil record than the earliest mammals.

Second, the suggestion that the entire reptile brain is essentially the mammalian hind brain is not supported by modern neuroanatomy. To give an example, in MacLean's model, the limbic system is characterized as a "lower mammalian" part of the brain. There is evidence, however, that reptiles have a limbic system (Bruce and Neary, 1995; Lanuza et al., 1998).

MacLean's "triune brain" hypothesis may have caught the popular imagination, but it has not proved useful in modern neurobiology.

References

Bruce LL, Neary TJ. 1995. The limbic system of tetrapods: A comparative analysis of cortical and amygdalar populations. Brain, Behavior and Evolution 46(4-5): 224-234.

Lanuza E, Belekhova M, Martinez-Marcos A, Font C, Martinez-Garcia F. 1998. Identification of the reptilian basolateral amygdala: an anatomical investigation of the afferents to the posterior dorsal ventricular ridge of the lizard Podarcis hispanica. European Journal of Neuroscience 10(11): 3517-3534.