How should we measure cleverness?
CrowdScience
BBC
4.8 • 985 Ratings
🗓️ 15 April 2022
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The team at CrowdScience have spent years answering all sorts of listener questions, which must make them pretty smart, right? IN this week’s episode, that assumption is rigorously tested as Marnie Chesterton and the team pit their wits against a multitude of mindbending puzzles from an old TV gameshow - all in the name of answering a question from Antonia in Cyprus.
She wants to know: how do we work out how clever someone is? Is IQ the best measure of cleverness? Why do we put such weight on academic performance? And where does emotional intelligence fit into it all?
In the search for answers, presenter Marnie Chesterton and the team are locked in rooms to battle mental, physical, mystery and skill-based challenges, all against the clock. Unpicking their efforts in the studio are a global team of cleverness researchers: Dr Stuart Ritchie from Kings College London, Professor Sophie von Stumm from York University and Dr Alex Burgoyne, from Georgia Institute of Technology in the US.
They are challenged to face the toughest questions in their field: Why do men and women tend to perform differently in these tests? Is our smartness in our genes? And what about the Flynn effect – where IQs appear to have risen, decade after decade, around the world.
Produced by Marnie Chesterton on BBC World Service
[Image: Man doing puzzle. Credit: Getty Images]
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | I'm Rory Stewart and I grew up wanting to be a hero and I'm still fascinated by the ideas of heroism. |
| 0:09.0 | In my new series, I'm taking in the long sweep of history from Achilles to Zelensky and asking, what is a hero? |
| 0:16.0 | Simply doing your job, being a decent human being. |
| 0:20.0 | A true hero is someone who just kind of shines by |
| 0:23.1 | their own light and that light is to be recognised by others. The long history of heroism |
| 0:27.8 | with me, Rory Stewart. Listen on BBC Sounds. This is crowd science from the BBC World Service and today the team are coming to you from an Aztec world. |
| 0:43.3 | And we've been in the space world. In fact there are a bunch of different worlds here. Let me explain. |
| 0:48.3 | We're in a giant puzzle room called the Crystal Maze. |
| 0:52.3 | And with me are some of the presenters and producers who make this show and we're testing |
| 0:56.0 | our smartness. |
| 0:58.0 | Now, we could do this in a room with a bunch of multiple choice questions or we could have |
| 1:02.5 | a little more fun, which is why we're essentially in this immersive IQ experience. |
| 1:07.4 | A series of challenges, physical, mental, all sorts of puzzles that members of our team will have to face in order to win the ultimate prize. |
| 1:17.6 | And it's all because we're trying to prove our cleverness. |
| 1:20.6 | And maybe this is a good way to measure that. |
| 1:22.6 | Over in Cyprus, our listener Antonia also wants to know how to quantify our smartness. |
| 1:26.6 | Hello, I am Antonia from Cyprus, and my question is, how should we measure cleverness? |
| 1:33.8 | Now, you're a university lecturer, and I think you're surrounded by clever people a lot, right? |
| 1:40.2 | Yes. |
| 1:41.9 | And that may have influenced you asking this question. Yes, it has, especially during |
| 1:47.9 | exam period that we're marking, assignments, exams. But I think it was triggered because of being |
| 1:54.4 | immersed at the university and we have like the two terms, the two semesters, and we tend to evaluate students based on |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.