What's it like to have a much lower IQ than you currently have or to have a much higher IQ?

Welcome to the inner cosmos with me, David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford.

And in these episodes,

we sail deeply into our three-pound universe to understand why and how our lives look the way

they do.

Today's episode is about intelligence.

What is it?

What would it be like to have the intelligence of a mosquito or a horse or a squirrel?

What would it be like to presumably understand only very basic things right around you,

not doing sophisticated simulations of the future like we do as humans?

And what can we say about the present and future of intelligence that is artificial?

Okay, so let's start with this question of what is it like to have a different level of

intelligence?

I see people post this question sometimes online on forums like Quora.

Someone will write, I have an IQ of 68. What is it like to have a higher IQ?

Now, first of all, I think this is an amazing question because it acknowledges that not everyone

is having the same experience on the inside. And so someone is taking the time to ask, what would it be like

to have what is called a higher intelligence level? What's the experience of that? Now, the

interesting thing in life is that we can't run a control experiment on our own experience of the world.

And so whatever IQ you have, you sort of have just that one experience of reality.

But to get at this, let's start by thinking about what it would be like to have a much lower IQ than you do now. One way to get at this is to ask the question of,

what would it be like to be a squirrel?

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