I saw a picture on FB today with the caption ‘The higher your IQ, the more forgetful you are’.
Anyone have a cite for that? (‘I would post a cite, but I forgot where it is.’ Beat you!)
What was the question?
I highly doubt that any good cite exists. It’s obviously a re-wording of the absent-minded professor trope.
The OP reminds me of an old (pre-internet) IQ test I saw once. It had two questions, with a 5 minute limit on each.
List everything you remember.
List everything you’ve forgotten.
The higher the ratio of remembered to forgotten was supposed to indicate IQ.
I don’t remember how this was verified, the OP just reminded me of it (one of those things I remember that I have forgotten).
“List everything you’ve forgotten.”
I don’t know…I forgot.
:eek: Wow! You’re smart!
Depends on your definition of forgetful. Someone who is highly intelligent might learn many more things and then forget a higher volume of information compared to others, but still forget information at the same rate as anyone else. Someone who is highly intelligent may be occupying their memory with many complex concepts and detailed facts and yet be very forgetful of the mundane details of life. Or there may be no basis at all for the statement in the OP. If I was more intelligent I might have already known the answer and forgotten it.
Some stuff I’ve read about almost makes me think there is some trade off between memory and intelligence or at least creativity in people who have extreme memories. Kind of like the guy rain man was based on he had this almost perfect memory and could regurgitate all sorts of stats, facts, and passages from hundreds(thousands?) of books verbatim but when given problem solving type tests to perform he just couldn’t do it.
And there was also this Russian guy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_Shereshevsky, who from what I’ve read was supposed to have this almost perfect memory, but he was supposed to not be very intelligent and kind of an unimaginative dullard.
Memory is positively correlated with intelligence. According to this source (PDF), the digit span components of the WISC, a test of cognitive ability, have a correlation of about .4 with g. In a digit span test, the subject is asked to repeat digits read to them by the proctor, either in the order they were given or in reverse order.
Spatial memory, wherein the stimulus are given visually and not orally, is also positively correlated with cognitive ability. However, the correlation is much weaker here, ranging from .06 for forward memory tests to .27 for reverse tests.
Some unsourced picture found on Facebook seems designed to reassure low IQ individuals of their intellectual superiority, especially when the claim is just flatly incorrect.
If the converse were true, I’d be a genius.
Arthur Conan Doyle expressed the idea (through Sherlock Holmes) that there was only a finite number of facts one could learn. Once one’s knowledge reaches this maximum capacity, each new fact learned must result in an prior known fact being forgotten.
If there is any truth to this, then the most fact-encumbered brains must also be the most fact-porous as they continually drop facts to accommodate new ones.
I think intelligent people tend to be preoccupied a lot of the time and never really registering a lot of things that they possibly should be, giving the impression that they are forgetful.
I must be fucking brilliant.
The WAIS-IV test (currently the most-oft used test to determine IQ scores) has four subtests that are used to calculate the full-scale IQ score: verbal comprehension index, perceptual reasoning index, working memory index, and processing speed index. Since a person’s memory is a large component of the IQ score, I don’t see how the OP’s proposition could make sense.
This. By “forgetful” do we mean “absent-minded”, as in not paying attention to what’s going on around them immediately, or do we mean “prone to jettisoning once-learned significant facts”?
The OP’s facebook feed item is, no surprise, pure bunk. And not even logically meaningful pure bunk.
But the blue tree frog is cute!
Whether it’s due to my getting older, high IQ, or the advent of search engines like Google, I tend to not remember things lately. I just look them up on Google or use my powers of deduction to figure it out again.
Maybe my mind is getting filled up with useless stuff. I can tell you the dwell angle of a distributor on a 1962 Chevy 283 engine, but can’t remember what I wore yesterday.
It’s interesting to consider whether this is more due to a physical limit in terms of data storage or is more an organizational/structure limit. You could imagine it as sort of similar to the difference between raw RAM size and bus width in computers. Sure, you could try to plug 128 GB of RAM into a 16 bit processor, but you’re not going to get very efficient use of space…
Good point. Perhaps there are people who have never forgotten the day in fourth-grade where they had to recite the names of all the US state capitals and can still do the same today, even though they have learned very little in the intervening years. Other classmates may have gone on to learn all about quantum physics and all sorts of other stuff and now can no longer remember the capital of Iowa.
Isaac Asimov had a photographic memory. Nuff said.
Plus, I suspect Jeopardy contestants have higher than average IQs, and that is all about having a good memory with lots of links.
The only thing I know is that in school, I was always amazed how the dumb kids could never remember the stuff we were taught the previous year.
I guess it’s possible to be dumb and have good memory (although that doesn’t seem the most common way of being dumb), but it’s hard to see how you could be smart if you can’t remember stuff.