Discovering Psychology - Testing Intelligence
Watch "Testing Intelligence" from the series Discovering Psychology by Phillip Zimbardo.
Can you think of 100 different uses for a sock? How would you cope with glasses that turn everything upside down? What's your emotional intelligence? Can you create a work of art in ten minutes? Horizon takes seven people who are some of the highest flyers in their field - a musical prodigy, a quantum physicist, an artist, a dramatist, an RAF fighter pilot, a chess grandmaster and a Wall Street trader. Each is put through a series of tests to discover who is the most intelligent? The principle way that we measure intelligence, the IQ test, remains popular and convenient. Yet most psychologists agree that it only tells half the story... at most. Where they disagree is how to measure intelligence, for the simple reason that the experts still don't know exactly what it is.
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My Brilliant Brain - Make me a Genius (47 min)
At 38 years old, Susan Polgar has reached heights that few women have ever equalled in the chess world. Despite the common assumption that men’s brains are better at understanding spatial relationships, giving them an advantage in games such as chess, Susan went on to become the world’s first grandmaster. Susan’s remarkable abilities have earned her the label of ‘genius’, but her psychologist father, László Polgar, believed that genius was “not born, but made”. Noting that even Mozart received tutelage from his father at a very early age, Polgar set about teaching chess to the five-year-old Susan after she happened upon a chess set in their home. “My father believed that the potential of children was not used optimally,” says Susan.
My Brilliant Brain - Accidental Genius (47 minutes)
Learn how remarkable talents can emerge as a result of disability or trauma, not just in birth, but even quite late in life. George Widener is autistic, but he knows the day of the week for any date in history and thousands of years into the future with lightning speed. He is a prodigious savant, one of about a hundred people in the world with a serious disability but also a seemingly superhuman mental power. Ex-convict and former heroin addict, Tommy McHugh, also boasts a talent of inexplicable origin. For decades he had no interest in art until a near-fatal cerebral haemorrhage led to spontaneous bouts of artistic creativity during his recovery. Allan Snyder, an Australia scientist, has devised a controversial experiment in which he applies magnetic stimulation to the brain to trigger savant-like powers of perception in normal healthy people. Such research into the savant brain may lead to a revolution in understanding intelligence and brain function. It could even be the first step towards building a creativity machine.
My Brilliant Brain - Born Genius (47 min)
Marc Yu, a seven-year-old concert pianist. At two he heard "Mary Had A Little Lamb", and immediately played it back, flawlessly. A year later he was playing Beethoven from memory. Now with a repertoire of more than 40 classical pieces, the young maestro's astounding brain has intrigued experts, such as development psychologist Professor Ellen Winner and neuroscientist Gottfired Schlaug. Winner and Schlaug focus on Marc Yu's achievements, and ask whether hard work is behind his success, or was he simply born with a brilliant brain? They also look at a class of 50 children learning music, and discover a number of changes are taking place in their brains. The experts believe that, given the right nuturing, any one of the youngsters could grow up to become a musical genius.
The Boy with the Incredible brain (47 minutes)
This is the breathtaking story of Daniel Tammet. A twenty-something with extraordinary mental abilities, Daniel is one of the world’s few savants. He can do calculations to 100 decimal places in his head, and learn a language in a week. This documentary follows Daniel as he travels to America to meet the scientists who are convinced he may hold the key to unlocking similar abilities in everyone. He also meets the world’s most famous savant, the man who inspired Dustin Hoffman’s character in the Oscar winning film ‘Rain Man’. (2005)