Shankar Vedantam

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.

There was a second area when Nick McIntosh started to sway Scott's pre-existing views about IQ tests.

Scott's foray into the lion's den of IQ testing hadn't turned out the way he'd expected.

When we come back, how Scott responded to his moral quandary.

You're listening to Hidden Brain.

I'm Shankar Vedantam.

This is Hidden Brain.