Are you way smarter than you realize?

What you were actually shown

Every string in round 1 was one of the sentences from round 2 with its letters shuffled. Here they are side by side, with how many letters you remembered from each.

The letters were the same, the number of letters was the same, and the four seconds were the same. The only difference between the two columns is whether the letters were in an order your brain had seen before.

It works this way in every field

A trained musician hears a chord and recognizes it as one thing, without picking out the separate notes, and hears a familiar chord progression as one thing too. A quarterback recognizes an entire defensive formation in one glance, where a rookie sees eleven separate players. Someone fluent in a language remembers a whole sentence with no effort, which is why speaking your own language feels like nothing. In every case, working memory holds the same number of items it always did, and years of practice have made each item bigger.

This is also why memory drills by themselves do so little for anything else. Practice builds bigger items, and it builds them only for the material you practice. The student got his 79 digits from hundreds of hours with digits. A musician gets the chords from hundreds of hours with chords.

What an intelligence test is measuring

So what does that part of an IQ test measure? It measures round 1: how many separate items your working memory can hold when nothing you have learned can help. That was the weakest and least impressive thing your mind did today. It is about seven items in everyone, and practice never changes it.

And what does the test leave out? Round 2. That was the impressive part: years of reading turned the same 25 letters into a sentence you understood instantly, with no effort at all. That learned ability is what let you remember 25 letters, it is what lets you read this sentence right now, and no intelligence test measures it, because a span test is built to measure how much you can hold when nothing you have learned applies.

So the number you get from a span test is a measurement of the bottleneck. The most capable parts of your mind, the ones you built through years of learning, are the parts the test never measures at all.

Where this story comes from

Everything in this game is one small piece of The Genius and the Impostor, a book about the two characters who share your head. The Genius is the vast non-conscious machinery that turned letters into words and words into meaning for you today, without ever asking for your attention. The Impostor is the conscious narrator, the part of you that was straining to remember seven shuffled letters in round 1 and keeping score the whole time.

The book has a name for what you just felt: the Effort Inversion. How much effort you feel is not a measure of how much skill is involved. The book is about how the Genius gets built, and how to keep the Impostor out of its way when something real is on the line.

One more memory game

A chimpanzee named Ayumu beats nearly every human at a game where numbers flash on a screen and vanish, and for years that was taken as proof that chimps have better working memory than we do. Then someone checked how much practice each side had had. Try his game and see where you land.

Sources: Ericsson, Chase & Faloon (1980). Acquisition of a memory skill. Science, 208, 1181–1182. · Chase & Simon (1973). Perception in chess. Cognitive Psychology, 4, 55–81. · Miller (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two. Psychological Review, 63, 81–97.