It is the sensation of running, trying to keep up, rushing headlong down a deep, dark yet fascinating hole.
To appearances, all is still. We are sitting in Emeritus Professor Jim Flynn’s small, tidy office in a nameless building slotted between the Water of Leith and the psychology department on the University of Otago’s Dunedin campus.
Prof Flynn, FRSNZ, has been talking for about 10 minutes. His mildly American-accented tone is that of someone who dispenses knowledge as a full-time occupation, direct, ordered, authoritative without being unfriendly.
The words make perfect sense, individually. The sentences and paragraphs seem sensible, even obvious, then quickly fade from view. Exciting flashes of insight are briefly glimpsed.
But there is a pervading sense of stumbling over unseen chunks of meaning fleetingly felt in the scramble not to lose contact with my guide, who strides with ease through these pitch-black tunnels.
It is largely self-inflicted. Prof Flynn is, after all, the man who has been credited with "ushering in the age of enlightenment in our understanding of the nature of human intelligence".
He is the University of Otago moral and political philosopher who made the leap from defending humane ideals to researching intelligence and subsequently uncovering the massive IQ gains there have been from generation to generation; what today is known worldwide as the Flynn Effect.
And now, among his many publications, and completing a four-book series on IQ, is Does your family make you smarter?, which presents his latest boundary-pushing research as well as his mature and possibly final thoughts on the theory of intelligence, a book that has had only a rushed reading and now lies on Prof Flynn’s desk next to a data recorder and a notepad, both of which are filling rapidly.
"Can I ask a bunch of questions?"
It is a breathless attempt to slow the pace and gain bearings.
"Oh, sure," Prof Flynn replies, "Go ahead. This has just been a little chit-chat."
Uh-oh. Deeper and darker, here we come.
It will take hours of going over notes, playing back the interview and rereading bits of the book to piece it all together.
What Prof Flynn brings to this new volume, firstly, is a fresh method for estimating the effects of family on a person’s cognitive ability.
Whereas others have often relied on expensive and time-consuming studies using twins, raised in their biological families and adopted out, Prof Flynn has brought new analysis to IQ tables that have been lying around in manuals for decades.
This Age-Table Method compares IQ vocabulary test results of 10-year-olds with those of 50-year-olds and then factors in the influence of family on the IQ of the children. Vocabulary tests, a subset of IQ tests, are, on their own, a trustworthy indicator of a person’s IQ.
What this leads to is a significant insight. Prof Flynn shows that family can give a sizeable boost to a child’s level of intelligence but can also hold back a child’s cognitive development. What is surprising is who is helped and who is hindered.
"There is a mismatch between the quality of their performance and the quality of their home," Prof Flynn summarises.
"Kids, where family is still influential, who are below the mean, they will be advantaged by their family. Their family will be higher than their performance. While kids above the mean will on average be disadvantaged by their family. That was my new insight."
Not only has he been able to show there is an inverse relationship between the IQ of children and the effect of their family environment, but he has been able to quantify that impact, very precisely.
Extremely bright children with an IQ two whole steps (two standard deviations) above the median IQ of 100 will on average be disadvantaged more than 6.42 IQ points by their family environment.
Clever children will be pulled back on average by 2.14 IQ points. Children one step below the median will on average be lifted 4.29 IQ points by their family environment. And the IQ of the bottom 2% of children will on average be lifted 6.43 IQ points by what goes on at home.
The disputed territory in intelligence research is the comparative importance of a person’s genes and their environment in determining their cognitive abilities, that is, their brain-based skills.
Genes set the boundaries of what is possible while the family environment shapes how much of that potential is realised during childhood. Family influences then fade as the person moves into new social and work environments, Prof Flynn explains.
How enriching or depleting that adult environment is will affect their IQ for better or worse.
What is clear from research, however, is that most people choose work, friends and partners that create an environment matching the forecast based on their genes.
Or, as Prof Flynn puts it, "Genetic quality tends to co-opt environment. There is a tendency for your genetic performance to slowly draw your current environment into a very close correlation".
The forces brought to bear to produce Prof Flynn’s capacious, inquiring mind are represented on his office walls.
There are cartoons that appeared in Punch magazine in England in the late 19th century portraying Irishmen as chimpanzees and orangutans. Prof Flynn’s great-grandfather emigrated to the United States from Ireland.
His sons, Prof Flynn’s father and uncles, were intelligent, working-class men who left school in their early to mid-teens.
"All but one of ... [them] suffered to some degree from alcoholism and I suspect that ... this was due to a mismatch between their promise and the kind of education that might have enhanced their lives," he writes in Does your family make you smarter?
Prof Flynn’s parents encouraged him to pursue education.
There is a photograph on his wall of his younger self graduating from university at the age of 18.
"At the University of Chicago you took a ‘great books’ course no matter what you wanted to do, whether it was elementary education or nuclear physics. You became accustomed to thinking about interdisciplinary problems and you were given the confidence to feel that if you went into an area without formal training you could gain an amateur competence to deal with it."
There is also a photo of him setting a running record, at the age of 75. Now 82, he still runs several kilometres a week. It points to an active body and mind as well as a "why shouldn’t I?" attitude that is applied in all areas of life.
"One of the things that frees me, I think, is that many social scientists are so conservative that they ignore interesting questions because they are unwilling to chance their arm," he says.
"My approach has been, to investigate a serious question, if I have to go beyond what the data strictly implies and use a bit of imagination, I’ll do it."
It has been instrumental in providing another significant insight, detailed in his new book.
Genes and environment play the biggest roles in determining cognitive ability. But there is a third component, which is often ignored. Fully 20% of IQ variance is decided by what researchers have called "luck".
Prof Flynn shines the spotlight on this neglected portion, pointing out that it puts the power back in people’s hands to play an active role in shaping their own intellectual capacity.
Until now, this 20% has been treated as a chance factor.
"People would say, 'Imagine your wife runs off with a circus performer’. This could throw you into a depression. And you would become reclusive. And that would affect your IQ. Or, imagine you suddenly become unemployed.
"And, if they were in a more generous mood they would say ‘Imagine you were a legal assistant and a firm decided you should train as an attorney’. That would be a beneficial piece of good luck, wouldn’t it?"
Always an advocate for human autonomy, Prof Flynn reflected on the accepted wisdom and realised more than just uncontrollable forces must be at play.
"I wanted to emphasise that a large portion of this is undoubtedly human autonomy," he says.
"It is not that the world makes a change in your current environment willy-nilly; you can actually say to yourself ‘Well, I’m going to make a change in my current environment’.
"We all know what I say is true. We find people at 35 who think ‘I’m stuck in a dead-end job. All my mates talk about are girls and the rugby. I’ll go back to university’.
"And some of these are your best students. And when they leave university they have significantly upgraded their cognitive skills. They have leapfrogged, in some cases among two-thirds or four-fifths of them, ahead of themselves on the [IQ] scale."
How much of the 20% variance is open to manipulation by a deliberate exercise of the will is not yet known.
Prof Flynn puts it at somewhere between a quarter and three-quarters.
Either way it is good news. And a welcome antidote to what he calls "post-twin pessimism".
In some minds, the studies of twins leave only your genes in the driver’s seat. Genetic influence continues while the influence of family eventually fades, so what else is left, genetic determinists say.
"Well, there is something else; that 20%, which never goes away," Prof Flynn responds.
Does your family make you smarter? is the final chapter in his decade-long campaign to convince psychologists, researchers and the public of two things: that intelligence is not something that can only alter slightly from one generation to another, and that individuals are not just captives of their genes which unalterably fix their level of intelligence.
"I’ve shown, of course, that there have been massive IQ gains over time, that many of our conceptual skills have been enormously upgraded over time.
"And this book completes the picture by showing that individuals during their own lifetime, even through adulthood, can change their environment in a way that upgrades their cognitive competence.’’
