The Intelligence Delusion.

I’m supposed to be intelligent, right? I passed the test to join MENSA, didn’t I? Sure did. But I’ve learned something about intelligence: it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. At best it’s a genetically derived faculty over which we have no control, so it’s nothing to take pride in. Furthermore, it can be deceptive because the system we use to quantify it – the IQ test – is highly subjective and depends as much on environmental conditioning as it does on native ability. And the biggest point of all to be made about intelligence is that it doesn’t necessarily make you clever.

Take me, for example; I’m a complete dope when it comes to electricity. I started young. Some time before I got to the stage of learning about electro-magnetism at school, I’d picked up the notion that magnets could be made – and therefore, I assumed, strengthened – by wrapping wire around the metal and passing an electric current through it. Well, that isn’t untrue; it’s just that I hadn’t learned the finer points of detail when I put my ‘knowledge’ into effect. I was more than a little precocious as a child, you see. 

 

I had a U-shaped magnet that wasn’t as strong as I would have liked, so I decided to give it a boost. I got two pieces of wire and wrapped one around each arm of the magnet. Then I wrapped one of the loose ends around the live pin of a standard plug, and the other around the neutral. Then I plugged it into a mains socket. There was a flash and a very loud bang. The plug flew across the room like a cannonball and thumped into the far wall. When I picked it up, there was a scorched hole in the plastic. I later learned a bit about electricity and realised that the two pieces of wire must have touched, causing a short circuit. Meanwhile, my mother came upstairs wanting to know what the hell I was doing. I constructed a convincing lie very quickly. I was good at that. I needed to be.

 

It didn’t end there, though. I’ve been doing stupid things with electricity all my life. I remember staying overnight at a pub once during the winter. The bars on the electric fire weren’t getting red, so I decided to touch one to see whether it was heating up yet. Ouch! And only last week I was moving some lighting around in my living room. Obviously I turned the power off before I started, but then I turned it on again to test that a light was working without first replacing the cover on a connection panel. That was no problem. The problem came when I started fiddling with the connection panel, having forgotten to turn the power off again. Another ouch!

 

So there you have it. Intelligence might help you understand quantum theory and its relevance to the human condition, but that skill is of little use if you’re stupid enough to fry yourself along the way. Like I said: not all it’s cracked up to be.