We'll take a quick trip to the cognitive history of the twentieth century, as our minds have changed dramatically in this century.
As you know, in the 1900s the tools people used changed because today the roads are better and the technology is more advanced.
Our minds have also changed. We are faced with a very complex world in which we will cease to be people dealing with the material world and analyze that world in a way that will benefit ourselves, and this world has forced us to develop new mental habits and a new mindset.
These include categorizing this material world, developing new abstractions that are logically consistent but also take assumptions seriously, wondering what it is rather than what it could be.
Now, this striking point has caught my attention with significant IQ increases over time. I'm talking about a huge increase. So we're not talking about just a few correct answer increases on IQ tests. Since testing was invented, each generation has been answering more and more questions correctly than the next.
Indeed, if you scaled people a century ago with today's values, their average IQ would be 70. If you measured us by their values, our average IQ would be 130.
Now this issue raises all kinds of questions. Were our close ancestors on the verge of mental disability? Because 70 is normally the limit of mental retardation. Or are we almost gifted? Because 130 is the limit of superior ability.
I will now discuss a third option, which is more illuminating than the others. To visualize this, let's say a Martian came to Earth and found a destroyed civilization. This is a Martian archaeologist and he found target charts that people use to shoot.
First, they looked at the year 1865 and saw that in one minute people could fire a single bullet into the center of the target. In 1898, they were hitting the target center with five bullets in one minute. By 1918, this number had risen to 100. At first, the archaeologist was quite surprised. and they would say, “Look,” they would say, “these tests are designed to find out if people have the fixity of their hands, the sharpness of their eyes, and whether they can handle a weapon.
How did this ability get to such an incredible level?” So, in answer, of course, we know that if he had looked at Martian battlefields, he would have seen that people only had old-style rifles during the Civil War, duplicitous firearms in the Spanish-American War, and machine guns in World War I. In other words, it was the equipment, not the sharpness of his eyes or the fixity of his hand, that ensured the accuracy of the average soldier.
It's the mental weapons we've acquired over these few centuries that we have to envision now. And I think another thinker will help us here, which is Luria. Just before Luria entered the age of science, he looked at humans and saw that these people resisted classifying the material world. They wanted to break it into small pieces that they could use. He found that they were resistant to understanding the hypothetical, to pondering what might happen, and found that they were unable to deal with abstractions, or to understand those abstractions logically.
Now I want to give you some examples from his interviews. He talked to people in the Russian countryside. As in the 1900s, they too had only four years of schooling. He asked that person: “What do crows and fish have in common?” Friend: “Absolutely nothing; So you know, I can eat a fish. I can't eat the crow. A crow fish can peck. The fish can't do anything to the crow." said. And Luria said, "Aren't they both animals?" asked. Man: “Of course not. One is a fish, the other is a bird.” he replied. And he was particularly interested in what he could do with these concrete objects. Then Luria went to another person and said:
“There are no camels in Germany. Hamburg is a city in Germany. Are there camels in Hamburg?"
Man: “So, if the city is big enough, there must be camels there.” Luria “But what does what I said mean?” said. And the man said, "So maybe it's a small town and there's no room for camels." she replied.
In other words, he was closed to all options except seeing the issue as a concrete problem. He was used to camels living in towns and could not use abstract data to question whether there were camels in Germany.
A third interview took place at the North Pole. Luria: “There is always snow at the North Pole. Where there is snow, bears are white in color. What color are bears in the Arctic?" asked.
Answer: “Such a situation should be determined on the basis of testimony. If a wise man from the North Pole came to tell me that bears were white, I might believe him, but all the bears I saw were taupe." it happened.
Now, as you can see, once again this person refused to go beyond the concrete world from daily experience, and for this person what color the bears were was important for hunting. They were not willing to go into this matter.
Someone said to Luria: “How can we solve something that is not a real problem? None of these problems are real. How should we handle them?” Now, these three categories—classification, using logic in abstractions, disregarding the hypothetical—how much difference do they make in real life outside of the experiment room?
Let me give you a few examples. First of all, almost all of us get high school diplomas today. This means we have moved from four to eight years of education to 12 years of formal education, and 52% of Americans are pursuing any tertiary education.
Now, not only are we getting more educated, much of that education is scientific, and you can't do science without classifying the world. You can't do science without putting forward hypotheses. You can't do science without making it logically meaningful. Even at the elementary school level, things have changed. Examining the exams given to 14-year-olds in the state of Ohio in 1910, it was seen that they value concrete knowledge in the social sense.
These were information like the capitals of 44-45 states at that time. When the questions of the exams held in the state of Ohio in 1990 were examined, it was seen that all of them were on abstractions.
These are, "Why is a state's largest city seldom the capital?" such questions. And you are expected to think something like this:
“The state legislature is locally controlled, and they hate big cities, so they preferred a rural location rather than making a big city their capital. They chose Albany over New York and Harrisburg over Philadelphia." as.
In other words, the nature of education has changed. We train our people to care about the hypothetical, to make use of abstractions and to make a logical connection between them. What about the workforce? So, in 1900, three percent of Americans worked in mentally demanding jobs. Only three percent were judges, doctors, and teachers.
35% of Americans today are engaged in professions that require brain power, not just real professions like being a judge or a doctor or a scientist or a speaker, but many, many sub-professionals, technician jobs, or computer programming.
Many professions today demand brain power. And in the modern world, we can meet this demand of the workforce much more flexible mentally. It's not just that more people are working in jobs that require intelligence.
Now I have to say something rather discouraging. We haven't made that much progress in everything. One way we would like to deal with the complexity of the modern world is politics. But sadly, even if you have high moral values, can categorize, reason about abstract concepts, you can't do politics if you don't care about the history of your own country or other countries.