[Note from Pumpkin Person, feb 22, 2018: The following is a guest article by Race Realist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Pumpkin Person.  Out of respect for the author, please try to keep all comments on-topic.  I understand conversations naturally evolve but at least start on topic] 

Commenter Tvrtko writes:

P.P. what would be Marx’s IQ? I’d like to know what you estimate is the intelligence of the Left’s main deity.

On Michael Hart’s list of the 100 most influential people of all time, Marx is the second highest ranked Ashkenazi Jewish academic behind only Albert Einstein.

How exceptional does that make him?   To answer that question, we need to know how many Ashkenazi Jews have ever lived.  If you believe Greg Cochran et al (and some of you don’t), biological Ashkenazi Jews as we know them today did not full emerge until about 1700.

About 20 billion people have lived since 1650.  If we conservatively assume based on current demographics, that Ashkenazim are only 0.14% of all humans in this era,  then 28 million Ashkenazi Jews have ever lived, and Marx being the second only to Einstein, would be at the one in 14 million level in scholarly success.

If there were a perfect correlation between IQ and scholarly success, this would put Marx’s IQ about 79 points above the average Ashkenazim, but since the correlation was about 0.7 in national samples (though it’s shrunk in recent decades), and assuming roughly the same correlation and variance in Ashkenazim, this implies an IQ that is 0.7(79) = 55 points higher than the average Ashkenazim, and since Ashkenazim average about 110 (when the white mean is set at 100) an IQ of 165 is implied (95% confidence interval 144 to 186).

However because Ashkenazim come from an intellectual culture, they likely over-perform their true ability on IQ tests to some degree, so I’d round Marx down to 160; which is still absurdly high (only one in 30,000 whites score this high).

Tvrtko correctly describes Marx as a deity of the left which is ironic because he was arguably alt-right.  Unlike the right who hate the poor (including blacks) and the left who hate the rich (including Jews), Marx like many alt-righters has been accused of  hating both.

Even though Marx is considered the poster body for political correctness (cultural Marxism), he was anything but, and while like most leftists, regarded the rich as parasitic, he also viewed many members of the underclass this way too, referring to them as the lumpenproletariat though it’s unclear if this was an attack on their class, or their lack of class consciousness.  If it’s the former, it’s a right-wing view, but if Marx was merely calling certain members of the underclass “class traitors”, he’s a typical leftist.

 

 

The brilliant Bruno writes:

Chomsky has much more than 125 and a huge creativity ability. In linguistics theory, he is a master . Like Gärdenfors or Davidson for semantics. And Stalnaker for syntax .

This reminds me that I promised I would do an article on Noam Chomsky’s IQ.

Chomsky is arguably the most academically successful Jew of his generation.  In 1992, MIT news reported:

Recent research on citations in three different citation indices show that Professor Chomsky is one of the most cited individuals in works published in the past 20 years.

In fact, his 3,874 citations in the Arts and Humanities Citation Index between 1980 and 1992 make him the most cited living person in that period and the eighth most cited source overrall–just behind famed psychiatrist Sigmund Freud and just ahead of philosopher Georg Hegel.

Indeed, Professor Chomsky is in illustrious company. The top ten cited sources during the period were: Marx, Lenin, Shakespeare, Aristotle, the Bible, Plato, Freud, Chomsky, Hegel and Cicero.

In 2005 he was voted the World’s top public intellectual.

Chomsky is part of the Silent Generation, one of the 58 million Americans born from 1925 to 1945.  In 2013 it was estimated that Jews are 3.3% of U.S. adults, if Jewish is defined as having at least one Jewish parent or being raised Jewish, even if you now have another religion.  Only 55% of this 3.3% is Jewish by religion.

We don’t know how many Americans were Jewish in Chomsky’s day, but in 1957, 3.2% of Americans 14 or older were Jewish by religion, and assuming even back then, Jews by religion were 55% of the Jewish population, then the total Jewish population was 5.8% of America.

Assuming they were also 5.8% of the Silent Generation, and assuming Chomsky is the most academically successful Jew of his generation, that puts him in the top one in 3.4 million level among U.S. Jews in academic success.  If there were a perfect correlation between IQ and academic success, and assuming Jews have the same IQ variance as Whites, this would imply Chomsky’s IQ is 75 points higher than the average U.S. Jew.  Today the correlation between IQ and academic success is only about 0.55, but in the mid-20th century, when Chomsky was coming of age, it was a potent 0.7 and was likely about the same in the Jewish population.

A 0.7 correlation implies that instead of Chomsky being 75 IQ points smarter than the average Jew, as a perfect correlation predicts, he’d be 75(0.7) = 53 points smarter than the average Jew.  On a scale where the white mean is set at IQ 100 (Standard Deviation = 15), U.S. Jews average about 110, making Chomsky’s expected IQ 163, with a 95% confidence interval of 142 to 184.

Why are Ashkenazi IQs so high?  Gregory Cochran, Jason Harding, and Henry Harpending cite sphingolipid diseases in the Ashkenazi gene pool and claim these mutations increase the length and branching of neurons in Ashkenazi brains.  As many as 2% of Israeli Ashkenazim are in high IQ occupations, but an incredible 15% of Israeli Gaucher patients are.  This suggests Gaucher patients are 1 standard deviation above the Israeli Ashkenazi mean in occupational status.  If one assumes Gaucher disease caused these high occupations via increased IQ, then the 0.7 correlation between IQ and occupation implies this disease increased IQ by 1.43 standard deviations (21 points) for occupation to have increased by 0.7(1.43 SD) = 1 SD.

Of course these results need to be replicated in more numerous and diverse samples before any causal inferences are made.

My personal opinion is that yes, Ashkenazim are smarter than whites, but that the gap is inflated by their hyper-intellectual culture, giving them an unfair advantage on IQ tests.  On a truly culture reduced IQ test (that could somehow measure verbal ability without culture bias), I think they’d score 5 points higher than whites, instead of the 10 point advantage they enjoy on conventional tests.  Thus, my best guess is Chomsky’s true IQ is 5 points lower than estimated above: 158, not 163.

Given that Chomsky is now 89, it would be absolutely fascinating to give him a version of the WAIS.  Unlike brilliant young adults who have their IQ scores limited by ceiling bumping, the WAIS-R had an astonishing ceiling of IQ 185 for 70-74 year olds, so just imagine how much ceiling you could get at Chomsky’s age.

Now that I’ve discussed Chomsky’s intelligence, here’s Chomsky discussing Neanderthal intelligence:

 

Minor corrections were made to this article on Feb 14, 2018

The great Gordon Lightfoot!  Such a beautiful song.  I was honored to be given front row seats when he shocked everyone by showing up to sing it at Canada’s 150th.  I didn’t think he was going to show but like the great Canadian he is, he showed:

The legendary Anne Murray  So innocent! My favorite part of the below video is at the 1:25 mark when the beat picks up and Anne starts walking forward to the beat.  In the U.S. singers have to shake their booty, but all Anne has to do is stand there, because she’s Anne Murray, and that’s enough.  And because she’s so restrained and understated, the mere act of taking a few steps forward is enough to excite the crowd.

The great Celine Dion  In one of the finest moments in TV history, here she is surprising the  Canadian Tenors on Oprah.  French Canadian women are the most beautiful on Earth:

 

The incredible KD Lang

Commenter JC writes:

Through a purely subjective (and admittedly meaningless) “assessment”, k.d. merits a VQ (Vocal Quotient) of 190 (SD = 16); score assigned on the basis of her supernal performance of the song “Constant Craving”.

I also love her version of “Crying” and the way the audience cheers when she hits the high notes:

 

The great Burton Cummings Commenter JC also suggested that at his prime, Burton Cummings was in the same vocal league as Lang:

 

The fabulous Joni Mitchell Black national merit finalist G-man made this great suggestion

 

Based on feedback from readers, the list was updated on Feb 13, 2018

A reader asked which was the better test.  I once asked J. Philippe Rushton which IQ test he would put more trust in if they gave different results: The Raven or the Wechsler.

“They’re both excellent tests,” he gushed, but the problem with the Wechsler he felt, was that there’s a lot more room for scoring error because the examiner has to time you to the second on certain puzzles, and various verbal questions require subjective scoring, so in a case where the two tests disagreed, Rushton placed his vote with the Raven.

However the Wechsler is probably much more g loaded, and recent editions of the Wechsler include a Matrix reasoning subtest, so now the Raven has been reduced to just another Wechsler test.

The Wechsler probably also has more predictive validity, not just because it’s more g loaded but because it measures non-g abilities that are useful in life like verbal skill, spatial ability, processing speed, memory, and social understanding.

One of the great disappointments for psychometrics was discovering that the Raven was not the culture-fair test so many psychologists had hoped.  In fact it shows some of the largest Flynn effects ever recorded, though this doesn’t necessarily prove it’s the most culturally biased, as the Flynn effect has a biological component (nutrition increasing brain size which might in turn be increasing IQ) and the biggest Raven Flynn Effects were in countries like Holland, where people have been getting taller so rapidly that brain size is likely exploding.

Nonetheless IQ gains of 7 points per decade are unlikely to be entirely caused by exploding brain size so we’re forced to admit the Raven is sensitive to something changing in the culture, and thus is not culture fair.

People think culture bias means the Raven must be measuring some kind of knowledge or skill, but I suspect the culture bias is more subtle.  When Rushton administered the Raven to a bunch of gypsy adults they had shockingly low scores (only IQ 70 on average), far lower than the IQ 85 that had been reported for gypsy children.

My guess is dropping out of school made the gypsies intellectually lazy and so their Raven scores (though not real intelligence) declined rapidly with age, relative to the white reference group, most of whom stayed in school.

Because so many gypsies complained that the test was giving them a headache, it was clear their minds weren’t used to working hard intellectually.  For me the lesson was a true culture reduced test needs to be “fun” like some of the hard-core Performance subtests on the Wechsler, not hard work like the Raven.

The fact that some studies show IQ declining when kids go on summer vacation is more evidence for the intellectual lazy factor.

The other day I was at a bar when a woman confronted me. “You don’t remember me, do you.  Oh how could you, you were just a teenager, but you gave me a test!” she reminded me.

It took me a while but I remembered she was the delinquent older sister of a childhood friend who had had shocked her upper middle class family by running away from home to dabble in drugs and prostitution.  In high school, my friend and I would sneak downtown to stay at her apartment.

“I just wanted to give you a hug” she said sweetly, “because of you I ended up getting my college diploma!”

“What did I do?” I asked puzzled.

“You always used to give me those tests,” she explained, referring to some Raven items I would ask her to solve when I first learned about the test. “So when it came to taking the exam to get into college, I was totally prepared.” (Unlike our universities, Canadian colleges use entrance exams because many applicants are high school dropouts who lack basic skills)

Apparently I had cured her intellectual laziness.

The only Canadian to make my authoritative list of the 100 most influential living people EVER is David Frum.  His intellectual impact on the Bush administration, including coining the term “axis of evil”, landed him the 71st spot on the Living 100.

While I’m thrilled that a Canadian made the list,  I would have much preferred it be the great Jean Chrétien or Celine Dion than the neocon Frum.  Frum’s politics are especially heartbreaking because we Canadians so worship his late mother, liberal icon Barabra Frum.

I remember in the early 2000s seeing David spouting his neocon views on TV, as my grandparents would moan “poor Barabara must be turning in her grave.”

Yet as much as I disagree with David’s politics, the neocons are brilliant and exude a level of sophistication that other conservatives can’t match, and it’s because outside foreign policy, they’re basically liberal intellectuals, and Frum’s Canadian roots give him an added layer of polish.

He’s especially critical of Trump for the damage he feels he’s doing to democratic institutions:

I couldn’t sleep so I listened to a great lecture on youtube by British historian Ian Morris.  He wrote a book a called Why the West Rules–For Now which sounds really good, even though, like Jared Diamond, he explains World history from a non-HBD perspective.  But I think it’s good for HBDers to learn about non-HBD theories because HBD has anomalies that can only be resolved from more holistic views.

Example:  HBDers argue whites, especially Nordics, are smarter than dark Caucasoids, but how then can we explain the fact that civilization started in the Middle East, not Europe?

Well, Morris argues that geography explains everything, but the meaning of geography is constantly changing, so at the dawn of civilization, the Middle East was in one of the “lucky latitudes”.  Morris writes:

Humans may all be much the same, wherever we find them, but the places we find them in are not all the same. Geography is unfair. Human societies have all followed the same sequences of cultural development, but geography has dictated that they have not done so at the same speed. … If we look back nearly 12,000 years to the end of the last spasm of the Ice Age, what we see is that climate, topography, and ecology conspired in these Lucky Latitudes between China and the Mediterranean (and a similar band stretching from Peru to Mexico in the New World) to allow the evolution of unusually large numbers of plants and animals that could be domesticated, vastly increasing humans’ food supply. Because people (wherever we find them) are all much the same, it was in these Lucky Latitudes that humans first domesticated plants and animals. Fuelled by these resources, it was also in the Lucky Latitudes that people went on over the next 10,000 years to create the world’s first cities, states and empires. People in Australia, Siberia, and sub-Saharan Africa stuck with hunting and gathering not because they were lazier, stupider, or better attuned to nature than people in the Lucky Latitudes. Geography had simply endowed their homelands with fewer resources, and domestication therefore took longer. (p. 35)

The Lucky Latitude hypothesis was criticized by historian Michael Hart who argued that sub-Saharan Africa was actually luckier than Mesoamerica, but I do think the Middle East was lucky in the sense that it’s in the middle of where peoples from different regions could trade.

A second anomaly is the dominance of Whites over the last 500 years or so, even though HBD claims East Asians are smarter.  I’ve argued it’s because East Asians are too evolved for their own good, and such advanced social organization weeds the mentally unstable creative types out of the gene pool because their non-conformity is disruptive.

However Morris gives his geographic explanation.  Admitting that East Asians were the first to have the guns and navigational ability to conquer any country on Earth, it seemed unimaginable that whites could ever catch up technologically.  But Morris argues that the East Asian technologies worked to White advantage, because Whites were geographically much better equipped to exploit them, given their ocean proximity to the Americas.

So what started out as Europe’s geographic disadvantage (being isolated from the terrestrial trade routes that the Middle East enjoyed), suddenly became a geographic advantage, thanks to Chinese sea navigation technology.   The Atlantic ocean went from being a barrier to a trade superhighway, allowing whites to sell goods to Africa and buy slaves, sell slaves to the Americas, and buy more goods to take back to Europe and sell to Africa, and this feedback loop continued for centuries, creating what he calls the first true market economies.

If Morris is right, no wonder libertarians worship markets, given all they have done for the West.

The need to navigate faster, led to modern science and calculus and Western domination for centuries, Morris claims.

Morris ends the lecture much like J.P. Rushton ended his infamous AAAS lecture back in 1989: By making two important predictions about the course of World history.  1) Like Rushton he predicts East Asians will once again rule the World,  but unlike Rushton he gives (somewhat facetiously) a specific year: 2103.  And 2), he shockingly predicts there will be over FOUR TIMES as much progress in just the next 100 years as has occurred from the ice age until now.  Sounds like a future that would exceed our wildest sci-fi fantasies.

What a great time to be born!

You can watch the full lecture below, or if you don’t have time, the last 20 minutes is the most relevant part:

 

Of course nowhere in the study do the scientists use the term “genetically inferior” but here’s what they actually say:

By studying height, a classic polygenic trait, we demonstrate the first human signature of widespread selection on standing variation. We show that frequencies of alleles associated with increased height, both at known loci and genome wide, are systematically elevated in Northern Europeans compared with Southern Europeans (P < 4.3 × 10−4). This pattern mirrors intra-European height differences and is not confounded by ancestry or other ascertainment biases. The systematic frequency differences are consistent with the presence of widespread weak selection (selection coefficients ~10−3–10−5 per allele) rather than genetic drift alone (P < 10−15).

Now you might say genetically short is different from genetically inferior, but when Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein said blacks might average genetically low IQs, here’s the reaction:

• Paul Krugman of The New York Times wrote “…Charles Murray, most famous for arguing that blacks are genetically inferior to whites.”
• Scholar Shirley Steinberg said “As educators, we cannot imagine a stronger disincentive to our non-White students than to be told that they are genetically inferior to Whites and there is nothing they can do about it.”

Some might say that genetically low IQ implies genetic inferiority because intelligence is such a valued trait.  But height’s an extremely valued trait too.   We metaphorically “look up” to people we admire and “look down” on those we disdain.  “Standing tall” is a metaphor for dignity.  Tall men earn more money, attract more mates, and are far more valued by sperm banks, so if calling blacks “genetically low IQ” is “racist” because it implies “genetic inferiority”, then calling Southern Europeans “genetically short” is racist too.  Indeed I suspect most men would rather boost their height by a couple inches than boost their IQ by 10 points.

More interesting from a scientific perspective is this comment from Steve Hsu:

 If the results on selection hold up this will be clear evidence for differential selection between groups of a quantitative trait (as opposed to lactose or altitude tolerance, which are controlled by small sets of loci). We may soon be able to conclude that there has been enough evolutionary time for selection to work within European populations on a trait that is controlled by hundreds (probably thousands) of loci.

Hsu hits the nail on the head because one of the arguments by HBD skeptics like our very own Afrosapiens is that populations differ primarily on genetically simple traits like skin colour, yet here we have groups as closely related as Northern and Southern Europeans showing genetic differences on a trait influenced by an estimated 10,000 SNPs.

Hsu quotes a blog called Genetic Inference stating:

 Europeans differ systematically in their height, and these differences correlate with latitude. The average Italian is 171cm, whereas the average Swede is a full 4cm taller. Are these differences genetic? Have they been under evolutionary selection in recent human history?

It’s worth noting that a within sex difference of 4 cm equates to about 0.76 standard deviations within developed countries.  An IQ difference of 0.76 SD equals 11 IQ points.  If a 0.76 SD difference between groups as genetically similar as Italians and Swedes might be mostly genetic for a complex trait like height, then how big of a genetic IQ gap might we expect for far more genetically distant human groups?

Just the name Cheddar man gives me the creeps.  Sounds like the title of a slasher film.

MSN reports:

DNA from a 10,000-year-old skeleton found in an English cave suggests the oldest-known Briton had dark skin and blue eyes, researchers said Wednesday. Scientists from Britain’s Natural History Museum and University College London analyzed the genome of “Cheddar Man,” who was found in Cheddar Gorge in southwest England in 1903.

Scientists led by museum DNA expert Ian Barnes drilled into the skull to extract DNA from bone powder. They say analysis indicates he had blue eyes, dark curly hair and “dark to black” skin pigmentation.

The researchers say the evidence suggests that Europeans’ pale skin tones developed much later than originally thought.

“Cheddar Man subverts people’s expectations of what kinds of genetic traits go together,” said Tom Booth, a postdoctoral researcher at the museum who worked on the project.

“It seems that pale eyes entered Europe long before pale skin or blond hair, which didn’t come along until after the arrival of farming.”

So it seems the earliest Caucasoids looked pretty much identical to today’s South Asians, except with blue eyes or green eyes, as some rare South Asians today have.

.

Also interesting was this quote:

Cheddar Man is the oldest complete skeleton found in Britain. Humans had lived in Britain off and on for thousands of years before his time, but they had been wiped out during periodic ice ages.

So once again we see evidence of just how hard it was to survive the extreme cold of the ice age, thus supporting Richard Lynn’s claim that cold winters were a major selection factor in the evolution of alleged racial IQ gaps.

Of course if climate were the only factor we’d expect Inuit to be among the World’s smartest people, and they don’t appear to be (though they are among the biggest brained), so obviously some other factor(s) would have to be involved too, if you accept HBD.  Richard Lynn argued the other factor was population size increasing the odds of favourable mutations (Inuit lacked big populations and were geographically isolated).

In his 2006 magnum opus, Race Differences in Intelligence: An Evolutionary Analysis, Lynn writes:

The Arctic Peoples experienced the severest winter conditions of all the races with coldest winter temperatures of about -15°C and falling to about -20° C during the main Wiirm glaciation. In response to these cold winters the Arctic Peoples evolved more pronounced forms of the morphological cold adaptations of the East Asians, consisting of the flattened nose, the short legs and thick trunk, the subcutaneous layer of fat that gives the skin a yellowish appearance, and the epicanthic eye-fold. These severe winters would be expected to have acted as a strong selection for increased intelligence, but this evidently failed to occur because their IQ is only 91.

The explanation for this must lie in the small numbers of the Arctic Peoples whose population at the end of the twentieth century was only approximately 56,000 as compared with approximately 1.4 billion East Asians. While it is impossible to make precise estimates of population sizes during the main Wurm glaciation, there can be no doubt that the East Asians were many times more numerous than the Arctic Peoples. The effect of the difference in population size will have been that mutations for higher intelligence occurred and spread in the East Asians that never appeared in the Arctic Peoples. The East Asians consisting of the Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese would have formed a single extended breeding population of demes in which mutant alleles for high intelligence would have spread but would not have been transmitted to the Arctic Peoples isolated by high mountain ranges and long distance.

The Arctic Peoples did, however, evolve a larger brain size, approximately the same as that of the East Asians, so it is curious that they do not have the same intelligence. A possible explanation for this is that the Arctic Peoples have evolved strong visual memory that would have been needed when they went out on long hunting expeditions and needed to remember landmarks in order to get home in largely featureless environments of snow and ice. An increase of this ability would have required an increase in brain size but is not measured in intelligence tests.

A further possibility is that one or more new mutant alleles for more efficient neurophysiological processes underlying intelligence may have appeared in the East Asians but not in the Arctic Peoples.

There is a further anomaly in the intelligence of the peoples of Northeast Asia concerning the IQs of the Mongols of Mongolia and the closely related Samoyeds of Northern Siberia. There are no studies of the intelligence of these peoples but their low level of cultural development and technology suggests that it is not so high as that of the East Asians of China, Japan, and Korea. Yet these peoples also experienced many thousands of years of severe winter environments that have produced the pronounced morphological cold adaptations of the epicanthic eye-fold, short legs, and thick trunk that evolved in the Arctic Peoples. The probable explanation of this anomaly is the small population size of these peoples (the population of present- day Mongolia is approximately 2.4 million and there are only a few tens of thousands of Samoyeds of Northern Siberia) and they have been isolated from neighboring peoples by the Gobi desert and high mountain ranges, so new mutations for higher intelligence did not occur and their geographical isolation would have prevented the acquisition of these mutations from other races.

JayMan on the other hand argued that it was not population size, but civilization, that explains why not all cold winter races score high.  He argues that races that had both cold winters and civilization evolved the highest IQs (Northeast Asians), and those that had neither remained the lowest (Bushmen, pygmies, Australoids) , with the rest falling in between.

JayMan writes:

So it seems that different latitudinal regions have different ceilings. Broadly speaking, the IQ ceiling in sub-Saharan Africa is lower than it is North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, which is in turn lower than it is in Europe and Northern Asia. Average IQ is allowed to rise somewhat in these northern regions, as the Mongolians, Siberians, Inuit, and Native Americans demonstrate. Civilization then takes it “all the way”.

Of course others might argue civilization was the cause, not the product, of high IQ.

 

[Note from Pumpkin Person, Feb 6, 2018: The following is a guest article by Race Realist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Pumpkin Person.  Out of respect for the author, please try to keep all comments on topic.  Conversations naturally evolve, but at least start on topic]

We’re only one month into the new year and I may have come across the most ridiculous paper I think I’ll read all year. The paper is titled Knowledge of resting heart rate mediates the relationship between intelligence and the heartbeat counting task. They state that ‘intelligence’ is related to heartbeat counting task (HCT), and that HBC is employed as a measure of interoception—which is a ‘sense’ that helps one understand what is going on in their body, sensing the body’s internal state and physiological changes (Craig, 2003; Garfinkel et al, 2015).

Though, the use of HCT as a measure of interoception is controversial (Phillips et al, 1999; Brener and Ring, 2016) mostly because it is influenced by prior knowledge of one’s resting heart rate. The concept of interoception has been around since 1906, with the term first appearing in scientific journals in the 1942 (Ceunen, Vlaeyen, and Dirst, 2016). It’s also interesting to note that interoceptive accuracy is altered in schizophrenics (who had an average IQ of 101.83; Ardizzi et al, 2016).

Murphy et al (2018) undertook two studies: study one demonstrated an association with ‘intelligence’ and HCT performance whereas study 2 demonstrated that this relationship is mediated by one’s knowledge of resting heart rate. I will briefly describe the two studies then I will discuss the flaws (and how stupid the idea is that ‘intelligence’ partly is responsible for this relationship).

In both studies, they measured IQ using the Wechsler intelligence scales, specifically the matrix and vocabulary subtests. In study 1, they had 94 participants (60 female, 33 female, and one ‘non-binary’; gotta always be that guy eh?). In this study, there was a small but positive correlation between HCT and IQ (r = .261).

In study 2, they sought to again replicate the relationship between HCT and IQ, determine how specific the relationship is, and determine whether higher IQ results in more accurate knowledge of one’s heart rate which would then improve their scores. They had 134 participants for this task and to minimize false readings they were asked to forgo caffeine consumption about six hours prior to the test.

As a control task, participants were asked to complete a timing accuracy test (TAT) in which they were asked to count seconds instead of heartbeats. The correlation with HCT performance and IQ was, again, small but positive (r = -.211) with IQ also being negatively correlated with the inaccuracy of resting heart rate estimations (r = .363), while timing accuracy was not associated with the inaccuracy of heart rate estimates, IQ or HCT. In the end, knowledge of average resting heart rate completely mediated the relationship between IQ and HCT.

This study replicated another study by Mash et al (2017) who show that their “results suggest that cognitive ability moderates the effect of age on IA differently in autism and typical development.” This new paper then extends this analysis showing that it is fully mediated by prior knowledge of average resting heart rate, and this is key to know.

This is simple: if one has prior knowledge of their average resting heart rate and their fitness did not change from the time they were aware of their average resting heart rate then when they engage in the HCT they will then have a better chance of counting the number of beats in that time frame. This is very simple! There are also other, easier, ways to estimate your heart rate without doing all of that counting.

Heart rate (HR) is a strong predictor of cardiorespiratory fitness. So it would follow that those who have prior knowledge of their HRs would more fitness savvy (the authors don’t really say too much about the subjects if there is more data when the paper is published in a journal I will revisit this). So Murphy et al (2018) showed that 1) prior knowledge of resting heart rate (RHR) was correlated—however low—with IQ while IQ was negatively correlated with the inaccuracy of RHR estimates. So the second study replicated the first and showed that the relationship was specific (HCT correlated with IQ, not any other measure).

The main thing to keep in mind here is that those who had prior knowledge of their RHR scored better on the task; I’d bet that even those with low IQs would score higher on this test if they, too, had prior knowledge of their HRs. That’s, really, what this comes down to: if you have prior knowledge of your RHR and your physiological state stays largely similar (body fat, muscle mass, fitness, etc) then when asked to estimate your heart rate by, say, using the radial pulse method (placing two fingers along the right side of the arm in line just above the thumb), they, since they have prior knowledge, will more accurately guess their RHR, if they had low or high IQs, regardless.

I also question the use of the HCT as a method of interoception, in line with Brener and Ring (2016: 2) who write “participants with knowledge about heart rate may generate accurate counting scores without detecting any heartbeat sensations.” So let’s say that HCT is a good measure of interoception, then it still remains to be seen whether or not manipulating subjects’ HRs would change the accuracy of the analyses. Other studies have shown that testing HR after one exercises, people underestimate their HR (Brener and Ring, 2016: 2). This, too, is simple. To get your max HR after exercise, subtract your age from 220. So if you’re 20 years old, your max HR would be 200, and after exercise, if you know you’re body and how much energy you have expended, then you will be able to estimate better with this knowledge.

Though, you would need to have prior knowledge, of course, of these effects and knowledge of these simple formulas to know about this. So, in my opinion, this study only shows that people who have a higher ‘IQ’ (more access to cultural tools to score higher on IQ tests; Richardson, 2002) are also more likely to, of course, go to the doctor for checkups, more likely to exercise and, thusly, be more likely to have prior knowledge of their HR and score better than those with lower IQs and less access to these types of facilities where they would have access to prior knowledge and get health assesments to have prior knowledge like those with higher IQs (which are more likely to be middle class and have more access to these types of facilities).

I personally don’t think that HCT is a good measure of interoception due to the criticisms brought up above. If I have prior knowledge of my HR (average HR for a healthy person is between 50-75 BPM depending on age, sex, and activity (along with other physiological components) (Davidovic et al, 2013). So, for example,if my average HR is 74 (I just checked mine last week and I checked it in the morning, and averaged 3 morning tests one morning was 73, the other morning was 75 and the third was 74 for an average of 74 BPM), and I had this prior knowledge before undergoing this so-called HCT interoception task, I would be better equipped to score better than one who does not have the same prior knowledge of his own heart rate as I do.

In conclusion, in line with Brener and Ring (2016), I don’t think that HCT is a good measure for interoception, and even if it were, the fact that prior knowledge fully mediates this relationship means that, in my opinion, other methods of interoception need to be found and studied. The fact that if someone has prior knowledge of their HR can and would skew things—no matter their ‘IQ’—since they know that, say, their HR is in the average range (50-75 BPM). I find this study kind of ridiculous and it’s in the running for most ridiculous things I have read all year. Prior knowledge (both with RHR and PEHR; post-exercise heart rate) of these variables will have you score better and, since IQ is a measure of social class then with the small correlation between HCT and IQ found by Murphy et al (2018), some (but most is not) is mediated by IQ, which is just largely tests for skills found in a narrow social class, so it’s no wonder that they corrrlate—however low—and the reason why the relationship was found is obvious, especially if you have some prior knowledge of this field.