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The Best of the Mensa Research Journal
Mensa Research Journal vol. 41, No. 2; 108 pages; published summer 2010.

In honor of the 50th anniversary of Mensa in North America, we went through the MRJ archives and compiled a complete representation of research in the field of human intelligence. This issue showcases the MRJ's best articles and studies from the past 25 years as well as the researchers who have had the greatest impact on the field. It includes 11 articles; notes, quotes and anecdotes; and guidelines for authors. 

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Notable quotes from the Best of the MRJ:

"Twenty years later, knowledge is accumulating at a phenomenal rate in both brain science and genetics. At the risk of seeming hyperbolic, I am prepared to defend the proposition that we have learned as much from 1983 to 2003 as we did in the previous 500 years. As an amateur geneticist and neuroscientist, I have tried as best I can to keep up with the cascade of new findings from these areas. I can say with some confidence that no findings have radically called into question the major lines of MI theory. But I can say with equal confidence that in light of the findings of the last two decades, the biological basis of MI theory needs urgently to be brought up to date.… It is fundamentally misleading to think about a single mind, a single intelligence, a single problem-solving capacity. And so, along with many others, I tried to make the argument that the mind/brain consists of many modules/organs/intelligences, each of which operates according to its own rules in relative autonomy from the others. Happily, nowadays, the argument for modularity has been well made. Even those who believe strongly in "general intelligence" and/or neural plasticity feel the need to defend their position, in a way that was unnecessary in decades past. But it is time to revisit the issue of the relationship between general and particular intelligences."

— Howard Gardner, from the article "Multiple intelligences after 20 years"

"Recent theorising on losses and gains in advanced old age (cf. Baltes, 1997), suggests that we have been successful in identifying and introducing behavioral and environmental compensations for the increasing physiological frailness all of us can expect as we age; these seem to work well in early old age. We have been far less successful in dealing with the needs of the very old, where the compensatory methods that may work well at retirement no longer suffice. …my inveterate optimism would argue that even here other possibilities for successful interventions may still lie ahead. Hence, studies of the very old, including investigation of behavioural and environmental prostheses, would seem to be part of the need for a strong applied psycholology of adult development, one that will find ways to enhance the quality of our existence towards the very end of human existence."

— K. Warner Schaie, from the article "The impact of longitudinal studies on understanding development from young adulthood to old age"

"…tests work for some people some of the time, but they do not work for other people much of the time. Moreover, the people for whom they do not work are often the same, again and again. Applied conservatively and with full respect for all the available information, tests can be of some use. Misapplied or overused, they are worse than nothing. I believe we do have some promising leads for the tests of the future, however, that eventually may enable us to test intelligence in ways superior to those of conventiona1 IQ tests. At worst, persons who scored high on these new indices but low on conventional tests may be worthy of further consideration before they are written off as weak performers. In the meantime, we must remember that the fact that a test score is (or appears to be) precise does not mean that it is valid."

— Robert J. Sternberg, from the article "What should intelligence tests test? Implications of a triarchic theory of intelligence for intelligence testing"

"Our study indicates that, in those normal young adults for whom a cognitive task is difficult (i.e., low RAPM scorers), more cortical activity throughout the brain is necessary to perform the task. This may be because, as opposed to those with lower intelligence due to brain damage and neuronal death, these poor-performing normal subjects have inefficient neural circuitry. This inefficiency may be due to the use of more energy by each neuron and/or the use of more neurons to perform the task. The inefficient neural circuits are used intensively to try to solve the problem and are unable to do so, possibly because extraneous, irrelevant circuits are used. Less-efficient circuits are used either because all of the subjects’ circuits are inefficient, because the proper circuits do not exist, or because the subject does not access them when attempting to solve the problem. Conversely, the subjects who perform well on the task either have more efficient circuits in general or access the circuit which is most appropriate for performance of the task, requiring a minimum amount of energy utilization."

— Richard J. Haier, et al., from the article "Cortical glucose metabolic rate correlates of abstract reasoning and attention studied with positron emission tomography"

"The foregoing results suggest that whatever it is that an IQ test measures, it is not the ability to engage in cognitively complex forms of multivariate reasoning. Traditional psychometric views of intelligence that postulate a single, underlying intellectual force (g) that supposedly permeates all cognitive performances, as well as more recent information processing approaches to intelligence that characterize it in terms of the efficiency with which specific cognitive processes are used would both appear to make predictions different from those observed in this study. …we view the present findings as supportive of a view of mental functioning that assumes there are multiple cognitive potentials (Gardner, 1983), not all of which are measured by IQ tests. Moreover, even those that are presumed to be measured by IQ tests are governed by a fairly specific set of contextual constraints. Thus, mental arithmetic may be manifested in some contexts more easily than in others, and this same principle may very well be true of other types of abilities (see Ceci, 1986, for an elaboration of this argument). Such a view runs counter to virtually all post hoc approaches to defining intelligences (i.e., those that emerge from factor analyses of psychometric tests) because it implies that the limited range of abilities and contexts involved in the standardized testing situation reflects an equally limited range of practical intelligence used in coping with environmental challenges."

— Stephen J. Ceci and Jeffrey K. Liker, from the article "A day at the races: A study of IQ, expertise, and cognitive complexity"