Astounding Science Fiction, British Edition — page 7: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

EDITORIAL 3 standing. While B, although learning at a higher rate, continues the process for only twenty years, and levels off at that point. His net integrated understanding will then be twenty-two hundred units. Or we might find an individual, C, who learned at a rate of one hundred ninety units a year—for twelve years. He'll wind up with two thousand two hundred eighty units of total under- standing. Finally, we can imagine an in- dividual of a nonhuman species who learned only at the rate of twenty units a year—a moronic creature. But it happens his lifespan is ten thousand years, and he goes on learning for four thousand years, reaching a net under- standing level of eight thousand units! Now using the rate-of-learning index, which the present IQ actually is, we would conclude that C, with a rate. of one hundred ninety, was a high-grade genius—while A, with his one hundred units was barely average. But in adult life, we’d find A running the place, while C was keeping the company’s books. We'd find John Stuart Mill doing essentially clerical work for the East India Company, and Copernicus reorganizing human understanding of the Universe in his off moments, while running major affairs of his country, practicing medicine, and handling the affairs of a cathedral. It’s not merely how fast an indi- vidual learns—it’s how long he can keep it up! There also seems to be another fac- tor at work here. Physiologists have found that if a pig is fed on copra, it will gain weight at a furious rate. But on being slaughtered, it is found that the pig’s layers of fat are not lard —are not of the chemical composition typically normal to the pig. They’re layers of unaltered coconut fat! The fat of the coconut has not been digested, absorbed, and made part of the pig’s metabolism; it’s simply been laid down unaltered. There are stage performers of the ““Mr. Memory” type who demon- strate that they have memorized the Encyclopedia Britannica and one thousand three hundred sixty-two and one half other reference books. They can spout facts almost endlessly. But the facts aren’t theirs; like the pig, they’ve glutted themselves on fat facts, and never digested them, never made the facts part of themselves. Facts can be stuffed into a child the way copra is stuffed into a pig. The facts can later be recovered unaltered. A magnetic tape recorder is even better at that; it doesn’t alter facts fed into it at all! : If the IQ test is designed to test for fact-storage, two entirely different effects may be present. 1. A high score can be made by an individual who has been well stuffed with remembered facts. The Mr. Memory type. 2. A high score can also be made by an individual who has digested and appreciated a great deal of information. The true thinker type. But testing for fact-content of the mind will not distinguish these two es. However, the rate-of-learning test usually ,will distinguish. It’s much faster to simply store the facts un- altered; an individual can learn to repeat by rote, like a magnetic tape recorder, far faster than he can learn to understand and integrate data. Hence the rate-of-learning test will favor the fact-stuffer over the analytical-understander. It is possible, of course, for an occasional wildly high-level genius to be able to actually absorb and digest [continued on page 43 EComichooksnco im