Hipstamatic - The New Disposable

The very first idea of this post came to me many months ago - I was reviewing my app-use trying to see if I could clean up a little bit my iPhone from apps that I don't use and camera apps take the largest share of apps for me. This leads to a struggle every time I want to take a picture - which app to use? Luckily most apps offer the option to import a picture from the camera roll so I can simply use the regular camera app that Apple includes. But Hipstamatic is an exception and as one of the very few exceptions (there was also Lomora 2 some time ago but a big update last year made it possible to import photos) of apps that simply take a picture not allowing you to import or to export original file. And that appears to be something they are adamant not to change. And I think this idea is a revelation in today's photographic sphere where multiple edits and painting over pictures diminishes the spontaneous nature of preserving a memory. When one spends too much time thinking of how a picture should look like, it is no longer a collection of an emotion but a polished work of art - and that's quite alright, too. But I take the picture not because I want to make art for someone else but to preserve a memory for myself. 

There is something scary about standing in front of a finished piece of art - it is there, it carries its own value and it is immutable. It is not encouraging the question "what will happen if ..." but it asks the question "what made it happen". These are two distinct world-views - the exploratory and the questioning, the courageous and the accommodating, the acting and the observing, the emotional and the objective.

The finished work of art (the one that is thought through and designed by nature) is not welcoming; it is only existing out there, occupying space and time - demonstrating the great power of the human mind to design. The unpolished work on the other hand (the one with imperfections) is a charmer; it starts its existance challenging its own existance - it takes up no space and no time - and yet it is there demonstrating the great power of the human ego to feel.

And it is this questionning power and self-effacing evaluation in today's ego-, head-, and objectivity-centered society that make us add those imperfections and the unplanned to our pictures - consciously or not. And I am guilty as charged to extole and abuse them to my own catharctic advantage.

Museums, paintings, and art history

I woke up in the morning relaxed - Saturdays are lovely when one has nothing else planned (which hasn't happened to me in a while). I put my tie on (with all the small details like cuff-link buttons), my tweed jacket, my casquette, and my gloves. Coquettely, I made my way along the old streets - the old streets and old buildings predispose one to feel of a different age, of a different culture, of a different time, and of a different interest. And so, I became an art historian for a day - with the tweed jacket, without the elbow patches.

I walked in the museum of art in Brussels today and looked at the classic paintings exhibition. If you were to conjecture that the paintings should reflect the true state of mind of the time, the interest of people, their culture, their thoughts an their fears, their emotions and worries, and their joys, I think you'd have to conclude that spirituality (and by an extension religion) was the topic of the day. The old masters focused on depicting the familiar religious stories - familiar to anyone who has read the Bible (which was, at the time, the book, the story, the history - and yes, not everyone had read it because people couldn't read - but yes, they knew the stories). Or they would weave religious elements with angels, wings, bishops, the Holy Trinity, and ritualistic elements. If you knew the Bible, you knew the stories; if you knew the stories, you knew the paintings. And if you don't, you look with today's eyes: try to make sense of the people and the stories - their search to the eternal answer (what is the meaning of life - there, I've said it). And back then, religion gave them that answer. 

There is another topic that often comes up in the classic artists I see in the museum - lust and seduction. For time immemorial (again, see Bible, chapter 1 - creation), relationships between people (particularly romantic relationships) were of a curious topic for artists. In fact, it probably isn't an exaggeration to say that art exists because of love. And then came the renaissance, and the question of religion took second stage. But the arts didn't die - their expression just changed. It now depicts beauty, liberty, war, love (or lust, for the sceptic) itself. Religious expressions in paintings in the 17th and 18th century were no longer flat, no longer idealizing, no longer static. In Rubens' paintings each muscle is textural, each drop of sweat reflects light, each facial expression feels authentic and tangible. 

Art came about because people wanted to share their expressions and feelings toward another person or people in a tangible way. A way that speaks not only to the subjects or objects but to the entire world. Would there have been art, were there no love? And here you ask what about the commissioned art - was it also out of love? It was and it wasn't. It gave the commissioner the object he needed that they couldn't do themselves. And it is their love that drives the painter. Could the painter be just a tool as is the brush? Isn't he just the craftsman? Is he the mind that control the hand, while the patron is the heart? 

Photography is History

For well-over a month now, I've been using quite extensively the new Voithländer 35 mm f1.2 II lens. It is a superb lens - it is sharp, it is great to handle, it offers light sensitivity unbeatable in the 35 mm range, and fantastic contrast and color rendition. It is a fantastic black-and-white lens especially when paired up with the Leica M8's infrared sensitivity. And it made me think about what the lenses tell about the picture. 

We've often read about lenses that render vintage, or modern, or clinical, or that are great for color, or that offer surreal rendition, etc. The lenses that we use (figuratively and literally) create their own reality and have their own feel. That's what we refer to "vintage" when we talk about softer lenses. We use them because they capture our own expectation of the world back in those days - ghostly and desaturated. They have melancholic value because we want to live in that world - some of us, anyway. Their low contrast is for us a summary of a historic moment - calmed down, poised, and sometimes flatly boring. We become like the characters in "Midnight in Paris" who cannot live in their own time and look for a future or a past.

The lens is more than just a brush in the hands of the photographer. The lens is the intermediary inner eye, the intuition and the impulse. It is the brush but also the canvas on which we draw with light. It is the paint and the palette. With a manual focus lens, the photographer is in absolute control of how impressionistic, Cezannian, Bensonian, Cartier-Bressonian, etc. the composition and appearance would be. Super-f lenses, opened to the fullest, gather light that can easily overwhelm the sensor – like a bucket of pain splashed on the canvas. These lensed are made for drawing at night – when each photon matters, when the human eye is not capable of seeing colors, and when people open up to you - by the fireplace, with a candle, under the fireworks.

Then we have a whole new world before our eyes. Colors and colorful people. Smiles and tears. Music and noise (no silence ever). Breath and stank. Toxicity and invigoration. Poets and lyrics. Begging for money and satisfaction without greed. Being of past, and present, and future. A Prokofiev and a Rachmaninov piano concerto – Bach doesn't fit at night but the Russian romantics and surrealists do. 

We are drawn to that world, as photographers. It is revealing, it is unseen. It is a secret. Perhaps, its allure is in its invisibility. Or maybe, photography is just the artist's attempt at escaping death, which often comes at night, in the dark, without us seeing. We all want our picture taken, our presence documented, our loved by our side. The fear of perpetual neglect is what has driven the artist for centuries. So what's so new with photography? Infinite reproducibility? And isn't it through photography that we try to live in another age? To move to the times which we like - recreating the ages, recreating the clothes, the make-up, recreate the greatest and most beautiful era. But isn't any one of them like that? Aren't we all trying to escape the present?

But life is a little unsatisfying. And that's why we need to document each and every part of it - the happy parts and the sad parts, the ones we want to forget and the ones we want to remember forever. But above all, we must document the ones we want to live in.

Intellectual Performance and IQ Measurement: Methodological and Conceptual Differences between Past and Present

Eighteenth-century philosopher Adam Smith wrote that “a man of solid learning and knowledge” knows everything there is to be known. To be a universally educated person in the 21st century, this model is no longer feasible. If Adam Smith is pro knowing everything, Oscar Wilde objects by claiming that it is better to know absolutely nothing. And this is what might well be regarded as the state of the current world, where knowledge, in its absolute form, has become more of a ubiquitous dream than an achievable goal. 

Perhaps for this reason, the interest of researchers in the beginning of the 20th century moved from the pursuit of omnipotent knowledge in the Faustian tradition to the pursuit of understanding the flexibility to knowledge acquisition. The argument of boundlessness of knowledge available for accumulation is what can be rather discouraging in today’s society. For example, if there are more than several hundred thousand articles published since the 1950s in the field of psychology alone, what are the chances that one person will have accumulated that knowledge? 

Do the math: assuming there are a minimum of 300,000 articles (which excludes books, dissertation abstracts, posters, and other forms of academic publications), and that it takes a person approximately 1 hour to read and to accumulate the knowledge of 1 single article, this makes 300,000 hours of reading time (it would be assumed for the sake of the argument that each article makes its own contribution to the general idea of knowledge). Three hundred thousand hours of reading is equivalent to 18,750 days of reading (assuming that each day a person would read for 16 hours). This is equivalent to approximately 51 years (calculated by 365 days a year – leap years would not make much of a difference). If one multiplies this average by the number of fields that publish (some have published more), if one adds other types of publications, if one takes into account the fact that during these 51 years, there will be on average 50 x 51 times more publications (assuming that the rate of publications remains constant, which is does not – it has been increasing geometrically since the 1950s), one can understand the clairvoyance of Oscar Wilde. 

Unfortunately, research of the knowledge acquisition process and the ability to acquire knowledge and skills has not been very helpful in determining how it would be possible to surmount these obstacles (in fact it seems to contribute to the confusion by about 70,000 articles). By “ability of knowledge acquisition”, one should understand intelligence in the context of this text. 

Intelligence has been defined by Ramey and Blair (1994), among many others, as:

The sum of component and coordinated cognitive processes that allow individuals to contemplate and achieve specific aims. These aims contain the universe of practical, artistic, scientific, athletic, philosophic, academic, and other domains of knowledge that mankind is able to produce. These domains of knowledge vary individually and culturally within a given time period and change ontogenetically for the individual, and historically for cultures and subcultures, over time. (p. 60)

This also explains the functions of intelligence and its necessity in daily activities for differentiation, memorization, concept formation, reasoning and strategic thinking. Each of these processes strongly suggests that intelligence would be independent from environmental influence. If anything, these functions would shape the way environment is perceived. Differentiation refers to the ability to discriminate one object or event or another type of element from another one. Thus, the internal perception (the intelligence) determines the environment and not the other way round. Memorization refers to the act of representing internally a previously experienced event, object, thought or other experiences. Thus, the internal processing (the intelligence) determines how the environment will be processed and not the other way round. Concept formation refers to the symbolic representations that are generated by the individual and that are to be projected onto the outside world. Thus, the internal conceptualization (the intelligence) determines how the outside world will be changed. Reasoning refers to the ability to focus on and apply the rules of logic, mathematics, and others. Thus, the internally stored information (the intelligence) would determine how one interacts with the external world. Finally, strategic thinking refers to the ability to make inferences and organize the decision processes based on the other 4 functions. Thus, it is the intelligence that guides the way a person would interact with the world. 

Measurement of intelligence has become a core interest of researchers in the field of intelligence. Intelligence, however, is an amalgamation of extremely complex processes which are not entirely understood and which stand alone amidst the many questions about thinking that have been posed. One of the attempts to measure and explain what intelligence constitutes of is the Stanford-Biten intelligence scale (which resulted in more than 500 hits in the psychology database PsycInfo). The development of this test was initially in the beginning of the 20th century by Alfred Binet. The concept of intelligence quotient as he defined it is IQ score (referring to Mental Age) divided by the chronological age and multiplied by 100. Thus, for example, if a person has the mental age of a 29-year old but is in fact only 20 years old, then the IQ score would be 145. The caveat is that around the age of 16, the ratio between mental age and chronological age levels off and would not constitute changes throughout the lifetime. As such, the average score would about 100, with anything falling high above and below considered abnormal (defined mental retardation and as superior giftedness respectively). 

The 5th edition of the Stanford-Binet manual assesses 4 areas of intelligence: verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning, abstract and visual reasoning, and short-term memory skills. These four areas are further subdivided in 15 subtests. The way these scales are developed goes back to psychometric designs and the basic methodological issues associates with scale and index development. The validation of a scale is a vital component of its development. The validation involves administration of the test to many samples of people, evaluating the results, revising the scale, comparing the results with other scales and theoretical frameworks which make predictions about the same concepts and re-test the scale again after the revision. This process, also referred to as triangulation (see Neuman, 2006), is, however, the time limitation associated with the measurement of intelligence. 

Specifically, Flynn (1996a) summarizes his research suggesting that since the introduction of IQ tests, the gain in IQ scores has resulted in inflation of the results, which makes understanding intelligence and IQ as one concept much harder. Flynn suggests that “the time between the advent of industrialization and the beginning of IQ gains is probably short and the two may well coincide” (p. 17). With this, Flynn introduces the methodological limitations and environmental influences that come to be associated with IQ measurement. 

This paper will outline both the methodological issues that have been discussed in this context, as well as the environmental influences as a possible explanation for the observed changes. Specifically, the paper will look into the time development of the tests and their administration to evaluate the likelihood that the observed changes are an artifact of the testing process; furthermore, the paper will look into the environmental factors which accompanied the observed changes and relate these factors to the testing process; finally, the paper will attempt to present an understanding of the current state of intelligence measurement, hemispheric specialization, and neuroscience discoveries which relate to and explain the concept of intelligence as a measurement of human nature, rather than an interindividual difference. 

Since the very first tests in the 1900s, the most widely used IQ test, the aforementioned Stanford-Binet, has been revised on 5 occasions. Each of the changes has been accompanied by new investigations about the validity of the test, new items that relate more to the modern person, and elements have been added and removed wherever necessary. With each revision, the validation processes was required and as such a new population sample was assessed for its ability to fulfill the criteria set by the test. Unfortunately, IQ tests over time can be viewed as an artifact of the standardization and the basis for comparison of those tests. Because of the 5 standardizations during the century of existence and use of the Stanford-Binet test, the measurement from one generation to the next differed in terms of the comparison basis. Specifically, a test standardized 20 or 30 years before its administration, results in, paradoxically, lack of generalizability because the obtained results will be a reflection of the norms, criteria, standards, etc. set for the previous generation (the generation of the standardization. 

The result of such a comparison is inflation in the scores and the results associated with them. Specifically, Vernon (1982) performed an analysis, which scored Chinese Americans against the obsolete norms of the different generation, and concluded that the participants had higher mean IQ than white Americans. This question was initiated due to the observed advantageous performance of Chinese Americans. The researcher then concluded that there must be environmental differences that determine the change associated with IQ differences between Chinese Americans and white Americans. 

In 1991, however, Flynn, aware of the limitations about IQ standardization, adjusted the same IQ scores and found out that they were no longer higher than the IQ scores of white Americans. This, however, posed yet even harder question to answer: What is it that increases the performance and achievement of Chinese Americans but does not influence general IQ score? This question requires a whole new evaluation of what IQ scores actually measure. It appears from results such as these that achievement is not necessarily related directly to IQ scores. This further implies that IQ measurements may be irrelevant with respect to the ability to use acquired knowledge. 

To illustrate this with a metaphor, one can equate IQ measurement with the measurement of all of the people’s shadows. If measured at the same time of the day, and at the same location on the earth, the measurement will correlate perfectly with a measurement obtained by conventional height assessment regardless of the time and day. However, as soon as an external/environmental factor is changed, e.g. the time of the day, the shadow length will change as well. This measurement will also correlate with the actual conventional measurement but will suggest ‘change in the height’ if compared to the previous measurement. While in reality it is simply an artifact of the measurement process, it may be construed as a change due to the comparison basis that stays stable. And as with measurement at different times, it has been reported that IQ has changed and has increased over the decades. What appears to be (relatively) constant is intelligence. 

These features of the IQ tests pose some questions to researchers. The artifacts of the measurement process relate to intrinsic conceptual limitations of the IQ measurement, intelligence and their relationship to achievement. Particularly, the questions pertain to the ever-lasting debate in the psychological sciences “nature vs. nurture” and the implications and influences that each of these brings into reality. 

It has been put forward, for example, that the process of measurement of IQ in the first generations of the test had no time limitations given to participants to answer the questions. This lack of time limitation resulted in greater involvement in the questions but also reduced the number of heuristically based replies and also the number of responded questions. As such, the IQ score reflected much more the actual conscious intellectual ability of the individual rather than an automatic learning ability. 

Going back into the past, every generation has supposedly been more scrupulous than the succeeding one. Therefore, its members have exhausted themselves by making sure each answer was corrent and wasted scoring chances by refusing to guess on harder items. The significance of this hypothesis is that if it were true, we would have a diagnosis of how some IQ tests go astray as measures of intelligence. (Flynn, 1996b, p. 198)

For example, Flieller, Jautz, and Kop (1989) performed an analysis results both with time and without time pressure with respect to the comparison between generations. What they found, however, was that the variance of the poorer performance of the last generation’s scores was entirely explained by the performance on the completed items rather than the number of completed items per se. 

This hypothesis could have potentially explained the change of IQ over the years and yet the perfect functioning (and lack of change there off) in everyday situations. With the results obtained by Flieller and colleagues, it is not possible to explain the change in results with time limitations alone. 

A methodological aspect that can further relate to the possible improvement on the scores of IQ tests but no intellectual increase is the increased popularity and use of IQ measures which may potentially result in increased familiarity of the test taker with the material and thus hinder the measurement of actual abilities. This hypothesis, however, has been disconfirmed as repetitive taking of the test improves IQ score only marginally and the rate of increase is reduced sharply after the initial increase of about 5-6 points (see Flynn, 1996a for a detailed discussion). 

Another hypothesis put forward in recent decades refers to the nourishment factor and the improvement of nourishment over the last decades. Theoretically, better nourished brains would function better in every day life as well as in the test room. Problematic, it still remains, is the fact that better nourished brains cannot explain the lack of change in everyday performance; it can only account for the increased test performance. This, however, did not seem troubling to Schoenthaler, Amos, Eysenck, Peritz, and Yudkin (1991) who assessed the performance after vitamin-mineral supplement consumption. Their experimental groups were given three different amounts of and the same supplement. Interestingly, only a moderate amount of the supplement resulted in significant improvement of performance. 

The amount of nutrition has changed over the years in the various countries depending on the economic situation, the political regime, the social class and structure, etc. For example, both World Wars have been of influence to the nutrition of the nation and have lead to decrease for the countries involved. These differences, however, as presented by Flynn (1992) in his analysis of The Netherlands during and after the Second World War, suggests that the effect on IQ gains over time “was nonexistent” (p. 346). A further methodological issue regarding nutrition is its relation to other factors such as improved pre-school home environment, as well as the correlation between the financial possibilities of a family (which also relates to, for example, increased amount of books at home, better schooling, more attention to the children, etc.). Storfer (1990) analyzed the possible influence of these factors are found out that all in all they could account only for about 11-point intelligence gain since 1900, which is below the observed gain. 

It appears so far that none of the attempted theories manages to explain the abnormal results. Moreover, the new questions that those results pose do not advance the understanding of knowledge acquisition or knowledge organization. 

Another hypothesis, which reflects a more complex interaction with the external world from a very early stage of one’s life, has been put forward by Ramey and Ramey (1992). What they propose is a developmental priming mechanism, which promotes positive cognitive development, and they specify 6 factors, which contribute to this mechanism:

1. Encouragement of exploration
2. Mentoring in basic skills
3. Celebration of developmental advances
4. Guided rehearsal and extension of new skills
5. Protection from inappropriate disapproval, teasing, or punishment
6. A rich and responsive language environment. 

These 6 factors define the early childhood experience (and vary from culture to culture, from family to family, from child to child) and as such they represent an important contribution to the daily lives of the children during the period when they are under the influence of external factors the most. The reasons for the greater malleability at this early stage relates to historically, bio-medically and socially defined contexts. From a historical point of view, the importance of early childhood education has varied depending on cultural background as well as educational standards set in the different countries. Socially defined norms require a different amount of involvement on the side of the parents, which also relates to country- and culture-specific organization. Bio-medically, the malleability of the mind has been shown to be the greatest at the early stages of the development when the brain still grows, connections between different parts of the brain as still being established, and functions are still being defined. 

Of particular importance for the clarification of the issue between the intellectual performance and the IQ measurement disparity is the bio-medical research, which asks if the individual differences in such basic neural processes as nerve conduction velocity can cause individual differences in the higher mental processes involved in the measurement of intelligence or vice versa. 

The first question refers to the limitation that the central nervous system imposes on the whole human thinking due to properties intrinsic to the levels of information processing (from simple tasks such as choice reaction times, to more complex tasks and problems such as the ones found in the IQ tests). These intraindividual differences exist on various levels of the information processing channels and as such may affect the complex psychometric tests. For example, hemispheric specialization in logical and creative thinking has been investigated with various methodologies. Specifically, it has been shown that the left hemisphere is specialized for lexical processing, analytic and logical thinking (see Gott, Rossiter, Falbraith, & Saul, 1977; Gazzaniga & Smylie, 1984; Deglin & Kinsbourne, 1996; Drews, 1987; Collins & Loftus, 1975; Nottelmann, Wohlschläger, & Güntürkün, 2002; Tranel, Damasio, & Damasio, 1997). The right hemisphere, on the other side, has specialized in semantic processing, global and abstract processing and restructuring of problems (e.g. Drews, 1987; Leehey, Carey, Diamond, & Cahn, 1978; Sergent & Hellige, 1986; Schooler & Melcher, 1995; Fiore & Schooler, 1998; Goldberg & Costa, 1981). Despite the specialization of left and right in discrete processing of information, it has been further suggested that for everyday tasks, one needs “the whole brain” (Hartmann, Goldenberg, Daumüller, & Hermdörfer, 2005; see also Dimond & Beaumont, 1971). Hartmann and her colleagues examined two patient groups and compared their performance on everyday tasks such as coffee making to the performance of healthy controls. Patients had either left or right hemisphere damage and the results indicated that independent of the hemispheric damage, the patient groups did not manage to perform adequately on these everyday tasks. This finding was interpreted by the researchers as an indication of the importance of the interaction between the two hemispheres and the impossibility to handle the task independent of which hemisphere is damaged. 

It, thus, appears that damage in a particular brain region can result in difficulties in acquiring knowledge. The importance of this assertion can be further strengthened by an intrinsic shortcoming of lesion investigations. Brain research investigating patients with lesions has made conclusions about the involvement of the lesioned area guided by the shortcomings associated with performance of that patient. However, what is in fact assessed is not what the particular damaged area cannot help in, but what the rest of the system can do without it. 

The biological factors presented so far can potentially explain the lack of change in the achievements throughout the years. The biological basis for brain development is genetically pre-defined and as such it cannot change for mere 100 years. It has been suggested, however, that there are neurons, which can contain information that passes along from generation to generation. This assertion, however, remains an assumption and future tests need to clarify this. 

It appears that biological differences cannot yet explain the changes in IQ and the stability of general intelligence at the same time. Social and environmental factors are just as well incapable to define the existing difference. It appears that the definition of IQ needs to be refocused to include components that it has not and to exclude components, which are irrelevant for everyday intelligence tasks.

Merdjanova (2005) suggests a new functional definition of intelligence. Knowledge acquisition is not simply about the sensorial perception and the acquisition of memory structures, not simply about understanding the cognitive processes and being able to guide one’s own thoughts into a desired direction. Her work has focused on the multi-sensory experiences that allow for an evaluation of the environment and the projection of this internal evaluation onto the sensorial perception of the outside world. This loop gives the opportunity to learn not simply by memorizing but internalizing, by developing own concepts based on internal representations, by projecting the artistic vision to the outside, by experiencing physically the ‘new’, etc. These domains may vary specifically depending on the cultural background. They, however, manage to account for the existence of multiple level of intelligence and that each of these levels can be affected by environmental as well as subconscious factors. 

By refocusing intelligence on reflective regulations, understanding of one’s emotions, facilitation of thought and expression of emotions, it is possible to explore the new boundaries of knowledge, which pertain to the Faustian tradition. The boundaries of this model are cultural because culture is a small part of the perception and ‘making sense’ of the external world. On the other hand, it is an internal plan for the approach to the outside and inside world. These features make intelligence distinct from IQ measures which focus on the way one processes external information while disregarding the internal sources of this information.

Intelligence, however, requires the conscious feel of the environment and the conscious ability to map the internal onto the external world and the other way round – simultaneously. Thus, IQ tests do not necessarily need to measure the constructs they are currently assessing. They need to focus on the interactive and flexible loop-type components of knowledge acquisition. 

The emotional involvement in daily cognitive processes has only recently been brought to the attention of researchers by Damasio who has put forward a hypothesis that suggests that the emotional evaluation of the context and its relevance are as important for any process as the cognitive/analytical processing of the situation (see Damasio, 2005). The emotional factor has not been assessed, controlled for, partialed out, or taken into consideration in any other conceptual, methodological or statistical way. It is conceivable that as a factor, it has mediated the effects observed throughout the decades and have influenced the ability of people to process information, to make projections, to control the thoughts and to guide the decision process. As such, IQ tests fell pray of the precision, which they so strongly strive for. 

Adam Smith’s statement about knowledge being graspable in the 18th century cannot hold true, unfortunately. The development of understanding about knowledge acquisition has lead researchers to the construction of multiple tests that presumably assess the ability to acquire knowledge. Researchers have, though, paradoxically, been unable to explain occurring changes in the scores of generations. Flynn has researched extensively the change of IQ score and the relation to the lack of change of intelligence. His conclusions are conservative in that they point out the factual results but cannot explain the disparity. The descriptive nature of his investigations has increased interest in other researchers who have attempted to provide an explanatory evaluation of the observations and have concluded that potential social and biological factors can influence IQ but not intelligence. 

Specifically, this paper summarized theories proposing that the risk-attitude in the different ages of IQ development has lead to the different attitude of participants in their answering of questions, that nourishment differences over the years have resulted in better or worse performance and other social reasons. Perhaps the most influential social explanation, or rather a methodological one, appears to be most compelling suggesting that the standardization procedures associated with each revision of the IQ test, sets an anchor against which each subsequent test taker is judged. Due to the costly nature of such revisions, they happen only occasionally (every new generation) which results in inflation of the results. This, however, does not explain why even after the validation and adjustment of the newly obtained results, researchers still face the problem of increased IQ and no change in intelligence. 

As Damasio suggests then, it could be perhaps a question of further investigation of brain related regions and connectivity. On the technical note, however, it is not impossible yet to take into account all brain regions at the same time let alone to calculate specific connectivity. The constant exchange in the brain makes the processes dependent on each other. Thus, intelligence is necessarily bound to what would be ideally measured in IQ tests. It yet remains to be observed how these future IQ tests will manage to map what they want to measure to the actual measurement. This would be the future question that Adam Smith may pose – if one does not know everything in the world, how would one make sense out of the world?

References:

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