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CrowdScience: How should we measure cleverness?

Discussion & Talk

How should we measure cleverness?

26/01/2024 GMT

BBC World Service - CrowdScience, How should we measure cleverness?

The CrowdScience team are tested to the limit to see how brainy they are.

The CrowdScience team are locked in rooms to battle mental, physical, mystery and skill-based challenges, all against the clock. It’s all in the name of measuring cleverness

Presenter Marnie Chesterton and the team pit their wits against a multitude of mind-bending puzzles from an old TV gameshow - all in the name of answering a question from Antonia in Cyprus: how do we work out how clever someone is? Is IQ the best measure of cleverness? Why do we put such weight on academic performance? And where does emotional intelligence fit into it all? 

In the search for answers Marnie and the team are locked in rooms to battle mental, physical, mystery and skill-based challenges, all against the clock.  

Unpicking their efforts in the studio are a global team of cleverness researchers: Dr Stuart Ritchie from Kings College London, Prof Sophie von Stumm from York University and Dr Alex Burgoyne from Georgia Institute of Technology in the US. 

They are challenged to face the toughest questions in their field: Why do men and women tend to perform differently in these tests? Is our smartness in our genes? And what about the Flynn Effect – where IQs appear to have risen, decade after decade, around the world. 

Producer/presenter: Marnie Chesterton 
Editor: Richard Collings 
Production co-ordinator: Jonathan Harris 

(Photo Man doing puzzle. Credit: Getty Images)

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