Intelligence Quotient [IQ] - Everything you wanted to know.
Basically the intelligence of the human brain is tested based on the parameters of logical thinking and reasoning competing with people of your same age group. It is a fact that, the human brain's way of thinking differs with different age groups. Most psychologists would say those scoring in a range of 95 to 105 are of a normal intelligence or have an average IQ. Actual IQ score may vary plus or minus five points since it is very difficult to get an IQ score with complete accuracy
\Keep in mind, there are many outside factors that may have a negative impact on your score. For instance, if you are not feeling well at the time of taking the test. Or perhaps you are distracted by something on that particular day. These things may affect your score. Additionally, IQ is not the be all end all of a person's abilities in life. IQ score fails to measure things such as manual dexterity (obviously), musical talent, and a slew of other abilities that may lead one to many different successes in life. However, your score on an IQ test will give you a pretty accurate indication of the ability you possess to think, reason and solve problems which can often be critical in many phases of your life.
The many different kinds of IQ tests include a wide variety of item content. Some test items are visual, while many are verbal. Test items vary from being based on abstract-reasoning problems to concentrating on arithmetic, vocabulary, or general knowledge.
Modern IQ tests produce scores for different areas (e.g., language fluency, three-dimensional thinking, etc.), with the summary score calculated from subtest scores.
The average score, according to the bell curve, is 100.
It is also said that we need to know your mental age, which is your cognitive abilities relative to what others can do of different ages. In other words, what do you think an average five year old can do? Can they read? Can they do math? What about the average ten year old? Or how about someone who is 40 years old? Your mental age is what you are capable of doing, scaled to what the average people of different ages can do. In other words, if you're capable of doing what an average 25-year old can do, then your mental age is 25. If you can do what an average 10-year old can do, but not anything more advanced than that, then your mental age is only 10.
So now that we have these two scores - chronological age and mental age - we want to compare them. If you are right on track, then your two scores will perfectly match. If you are advanced, or very intelligent, according to Binet, then your mental age will be bigger than your chronological age. Say, if you are 20 years old right now, but you can do what an average 30-year old can do, then you're 10 years ahead of schedule, which Binet would say makes you very intelligent. The opposite could also be true; maybe you're 20 years old, but can only do what the average 10-year old can do. So we can say that you are cognitively delayed and therefore not intelligent based on IQ.
The following are the current tests that are generally followed to test the IQ in modern age :
- Stanford-Binet intelligence scale.
- Woodcock-johnson tests
- Ravens progressive matrices
- Wechsler Adult Intelligence scale
- Cattell culture fair
- Thurstones Primary Mental Abilities
- Diffrential Ability scales
- Kaufman Brief Intelligence test
- Multi dimensional aptitude battery test
Based on age : Q can change to some degree over the course of childhood. However, in one longitudinal study, the mean IQ scores of tests at ages 17 and 18 were correlated at r=0.86 with the mean scores of tests at ages five, six, and seven and at r=0.96 with the mean scores of tests at ages 11, 12, and 13.
Music :
Musical training in childhood has been found to correlate with higher than average IQ.Multiple attempted replications have shown that this is at best a short-term effect (lasting no longer than 10 to 15 minutes), and is not related to IQ-increase.
Brain Activity :
Several neurophysiological factors have been correlated with intelligence in humans, including the ratio of brain weight to body weight and the size, shape, and activity level of different parts of the brain. Specific features that may affect IQ include the size and shape of the frontal lobes, the amount of blood and chemical activity in the frontal lobes, the total amount of gray matter in the brain, the overall thickness of the cortex, and the glucose metabolic rate.
