Shankar Vedantam

Instead, it was the Americans who fell in love with Alfred Binet's test.

And they used it to measure the very thing the French psychologist had warned against.

They used it to assess intelligence.

The psychologist Lewis Terman at Stanford was among those who transformed Binet's test in the United States.

Instead of being used as a tool to direct resources to kids who needed help, he turned the test into a tracking tool to identify the gifted.

Lewis Terman drew on the work of German psychologist William Stern and helped popularize the notion of something called an intelligence quotient, what we now know today as IQ.

So McIntosh obviously was one of the most respected researchers in the field of intelligence, but he was also genuinely open-minded and responsive and curious and not sort of dogmatic.

Can you just describe that?

You in some ways were coming to him

perhaps with an agenda that he didn't know, that your agenda was really to pull down the edifice of intelligence and intelligence testing.

And maybe he didn't know that you were a saboteur who had just arrived at Cambridge University.

But describe to me the way he worked and sort of the effect this had on you and the way you started thinking about the questions you were grappling with.

I forgot.

At one point, Nick McIntosh asked a simple question.

Assume for a moment that there is no underlying innate ability called intelligence.

Some people are good at math, others are good at reading.

But if that was the case, he asked, why is it teachers often notice that the same students who do well at math also do well at reading?

What does vocabulary have in common with cognitive processes like rotating an image in the mind?

If verbal skills and spatial skills were just that, skills that could be learned with practice, wasn't it odd that the kids who were good at one were often also good at the other?

Scott found himself intrigued by questions like this.