The World’s Largest Intelligence Experiment

In January 2020, the BBC, in collaboration with Dr Adam Hampshire (Imperial College London), launched an experiment that has today won the title of “World’s Largest Intelligence Experiment”. This experiment differs from other experiments in that it is able to present highly representative numerical results, as more than 250,000 people have already participated in the experiment to date.

As Dr. Adam Hampshire himself has pointed out, ” It’s equivalent to about 125,000 hours of testing or more than 14 years of experimentation .” The first results of this largest intelligence experiment in the world are now available. It should be noted, however, that the process is not yet over and can still be involved.

The proposal for this largest intelligence experiment in the world is very simple. Thus, in this experiment, people are simply asked to move to the platform created for the test and answer a series of questions, after which they move on to perform the test. It is not a test measuring the IQ, but an in-depth study of aspects of human cognitive and emotional intelligence.

The world’s largest intelligence experiment

As already mentioned, more than 250,000 people have already participated in the world’s largest intelligence experiment to date. Admittedly, most of them are British citizens, so in this respect the sample is not representative of the whole world. However, participants have been very different in terms of gender and age.

The first part of the test focuses on lifestyle issues. This section is intended to gather information about, for example, the respondent’s diet, use of technology, and habits.

In the second part, a series of different cognitive skills are performed, such as problem solving exercises, memory testing exercises, and tests measuring spatial reasoning.

Similarly, in an experiment, a person is subjected to several tests designed to find out about his or her emotional intelligence. Finally, the results obtained from all these sections are crossed to draw conclusions.

Problem solving and age

So far, this largest intelligence experiment in the world has provided data that confirms already existing data on human intelligence. For example, age is not a determining factor in this regard; although there are cognitive abilities that are more prominent in certain age groups, the truth is that they do not disappear as a person grows up and that they also have significant exponents.

The results shown by the experiment tell us that a person’s ability to solve problems is at its peak between the ages of 20 and 30. From that moment on, the brain begins to show a decline. At the same time, however, we cannot forget the fact that this refers strictly to cognitive problems in the context of a test measured in real time.

There is no information on the value of experience in solving problems to perform this test over a longer period of time. The same experiment, along with other available studies, shows that the older we get, the slower our brains also function.

New knowledge about human intelligence

One of the new insights offered by the world’s largest intelligence experiment is that verbal reasoning is a skill that grows with age. In this study, it has been seen that it progresses up to more than 80 years of age. Until now, it has been believed that the peak of ability would be at the age of 60, and that from then on it would begin to decline.

Another very striking fact of the study relates to memory. According to what – what has been found in the test so far – the subjects who scored the best points were the people who played video games. Namely, this segment had better spatial memory than others. This is very interesting information given that games of this type have traditionally been considered useless from a cognitive perspective.

The study also found that people who use social media very regularly have poorer mental health than normal. Many of them experience symptoms of anxiety and depression, perhaps because social media is dominated by a so-called reference culture, and based on this, many people also judge their own social success based on the feedback received in these media.

One of the most valuable aspects of this study has been that it confirms that human lifestyles have a decisive impact on one’s own intelligence. In particular, the results have shown that the brain works much better when we exercise. At the same time, staying intellectually active and learning languages ​​at any age seem to be two important antidotes to slow brain aging.