What ever happened to the Neurometrics "IQ Cap" IQ-testing device?

[BrainGlutton]

I recently started a GD thread: “How valid/useful is IQ as a measure of personal intelligence?” – http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=277940. (The question is really a scientific one, but so controversial and contentious I decided it really belonged in GQ.) I recently added the following post:

[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
Here’s an interesting bit from Hooking Up (Farar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), a collection of essays and articles by Tom Wolfe – from “Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died,” about modern neuropsychology, pp. 95-96:

Even more radioactive is the matter of intelligence, as measured by IQ tests. Privately – not many care to speak out – the vast majority of neuroscientists believe the genetic component of an individual’s intelligence is remarkably high. Your intelligence can be improved upon, by skilled and devoted mentors, or it can be held back by a poor upbringing – i.e., the negative can be well developed or poorly developed – but your genes are what really make the difference. The recent ruckus over Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve is probably just the beginning of the bitterness this subject is going to create.

Not long ago, according to two neuroscientists I interviewed, a firm called Neurometrics sought out investors and tried to market an amazing but simple invention known as the IQ Cap. The idea was to provide a way of testing intelligence that would be free of “cultural bias,” one that would not force anyone to deal with concepts that might be familiar to people from one culture but not to people from another. The IQ Cap recorded only brain waves; and a computer, not a potentially biased human test-giver, analyzed the results. It was based on the work of neuroscientists such as E. Roy John, who is now one of the major pioneers of electroencephalographic brain imaging; Duilio Giannitrapani, author of The Electrophysiology of Intellectual Functions; and David Robinson, author of The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale and Personality Assessment: Toward a Biologically Based Theory of Intelligence and Cognition and many other monographs famous among neuroscientists. I spoke to one researcher who had devised an IQ Cap himself by replicating an experiment described by Giannitrapani in he Electrophysiology of Intellectual Functions. It was not a complicated process. You attached sixteen electrodes to the scalp of the person you wanted to test. You had to muss up his hair a little, but you didn’t have to cut it, much less shave it. Then you had him stare at a marker on a blank wall. This particular researcher used a rasberry-red thumbtack. Then you pushed a toggle switch. In sixteen seconds the Cap’s computer box gave you an accurate prediction (within one-half of a standard deviation) of what the subject would score on all eleven subtests of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale or, in the case of children, the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children – all from sixteen seconds’ worth of brain waves. There was nothing culturally biased about the test whatsoever. What could be cultural about staring at a thumbtack on the wall? The savings in time and money wsere breathtaking. The conventional IQ test took two hours to complete; and the overhead, in terms of paying test-givers, test-scorers, test-preparers, and the rent, was $100 an hour at the very least. The IQ Cap required about fifteen minutes and sixteen seconds – it took about fifteen minutes to put the electrodes on the scalp – and about a tenth of a penny’s worth of electricity. Neurometrics’s investors were rubbing their hands and licking their chops. They were about to make a killing.

In fact – nobody wanted their damnable IQ Cap!

It wasn’t simply that no one believed you could derive IQ scored from brain waves – it was that nobody wanted to believe it could be done. Nobody wanted to believe that human brainpower is . . . that hardwired. Nobody wanted to learn in a flash that . . . the genetic fix is in. Nobody wanted to learn he was . . . a hardwired genetic mediocrity . . . and that the best he could hope for in this Trough of Mortal Error was to live out the mediocre life of a stress-free dim bulb. Barry Sterman of UCLA, chief scientist for a firm called Cognitive Neurometrics, who has devised his own brain-wave technology for market research and focus groups, regards brain-wave IQ testing as possible – but in the current atmosphere you “wouldn’t have a Chinaman’s chance of getting a grant” to develop it.
I did a web search on “Neurometrics” and found something called the “Neurometrics Institute” – http://www.neurometrics.com/ – but it does not appear to be a commercial enterprise and its site says nothing about neurometric IQ testing. See also Neurobehavioral Consulting – Brainmapping 2004, http://www.brainmappingadd.com/Brainmapp.htm, and the Psychological Sciences Institute – Functional Brain Assessment, Psychological Testing & Speech Therapy for Kids in Georgia…_assessment.htm.

To which Loopydude replied:

@Loopydude

Beyond the “Your Soul Just Died” article (which seems to be little more than a deliberately inflammatory polemical front for this BrainMachines “biometric kung fu” nonsense), I can find nothing more substantive about this “IQ Cap” thing; hence, I remain highly skeptical. If there exists some more info. about this, perhaps some good data published in a peer-reviewed journal of neuroscience to back up its purported utility, I might give the idea more credence.

And I must admit I’m stumped. I see no reason to believe Wolfe made up this whole thing for his book, but I can’t find anything about the “IQ Cap” or this “Neurometrics” company through Googling – and Wolfe, curiously, did not actually give the names of the neuroscientists who allegedly invented it, only of those on whom they based their work.

Is this “IQ Cap” for real? Is anybody still working on developing it? Is it possible to buy one or see one in operation? Does anybody know?

[BrainGlutton]

Nobody knows?

[DocCathode]

Having spent a few years working for a company that dealt in medical sensors and software, I’m going with ‘It’s BS’.

I simply cannot see how sixteen seconds of data, in response to looking at a thumbtack, can be an indicator of intelligence.

[Chronos]

The measure of intelligence is derived from the length of time before the test subject takes off the hat, throws it against the wall, and says “This is bunk”.

And pertaining to the quoted article, why would such a test (if it existed) be an indication that intelligence is genetic? It seems quite as plausible that whatever brainwave patterns were picked up by the machine were learned as that they’re hardwired. Now, if you could take a blood sample and determine an IQ from that, that might mean something, but brainwaves? Nah.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

The IQ Cap is sitting in Mr. Burns’ safe, right next to the carburetor that gets 100 miles a gallon on Duff Beer and the nutrient pill that would replace the need for food.

[Bewildebeest]

Hummmm. Giannitrapani - trapan: variant of trepan.
trepan: prankster, trickster

[BrainGlutton]

@Bewildebeest

Hummmm. Giannitrapani - trapan: variant of trepan.
trepan: prankster, trickster

Cite? I thought “trepan” was a hole bored in the skull, or something.

Hard to believe a journalist of Wolfe’s reputation would just make up something like this. So far as I’ve heard, he’s never been caught out in a serious journalistic fabrication, nor involved in any kind of prank or hoax. (He reported on the Merry Pranksters, he never joined the club himself.) On the other hand, he does not claim to have actually seen the device demonstrated. Maybe he was hoaxed himself – but if so, wouldn’t it have come out by now? Wolfe is a very high-profile figure. This is puzzling.