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In Flynn’s terms, we now see the world through “scientific spectacles.” He means that rather than relying on our own direct experiences, we make sense of reality through classification schemes, using layers of abstract concepts to understand how pieces of information relate to one another. We have grown up in a world of classification schemes totally foreign to the remote villagers; we classify some animals as mammals, and inside of that class make more detailed connections based on the similarity of their physiology and DNA.
Words that represent concepts that were previously the domain of scholars became widely understood in a few generations. The word “percent” was almost absent from books in 1900. By 2000 it appeared about once every five thousand words. (This chapter is 5,500 words long.) Computer programmers pile layers of abstraction. (They do very well on Raven’s.) In the progress bar on your computer screen that fills up to indicate a download, abstractions are legion, from the fundamental—the programming language that created it is a representation of binary code, the raw 1s and 0s the computer uses—to the psychological: the bar is a visual projection of time that provides peace of mind by estimating the progress of an immense number of underlying activities.
Lawyers might consider how results of one court case brought by an individual in Oklahoma could be relevant to a different one brought by a company in California. In order to prep, they might try out different hypothetical arguments while putting themselves in the shoes of an opposing attorney to predict how they will argue. Conceptual schemes are flexible, able to arrange information and ideas for a wide variety of uses, and to transfer knowledge between domains. Modern work demands knowledge transfer: the ability to apply knowledge to new situations and different domains. Our most fundamental thought processes have changed to accommodate increasing complexity and the need to derive new patterns rather than rely only on familiar ones. Our conceptual classification schemes provide a scaffolding for connecting knowledge, making it accessible and flexible.
Research on thousands of adults in six industrializing nations found that exposure to modern work with self-directed problem solving and nonrepetitive challenges was correlated with being “cognitively flexible.” As Flynn makes sure to point out, this does not mean that brains now have more inherent potential than a generation ago, but rather that utilitarian spectacles have been swapped for spectacles through which the world is classified by concepts.* Even recently, within some very traditional or orthodox religious communities that have modernized but that still block women from engaging in modern work, the Flynn effect has proceeded more slowly for women than for men in the same community. Exposure to the modern world has made us better adapted for complexity, and that has manifested as flexibility, with profound implications for the breadth of our intellectual world.
In every cognitive direction, the minds of premodern citizens were severely constrained by the concrete world before them. With cajoling, some solved the following logic sequence: “Cotton grows well where it is hot and dry. England is cold and damp. Can cotton grow there or not?” They had direct experience growing cotton, so some of them could answer (tentatively and when pushed) for a country they had never visited. The same exact puzzle with different details stumped them: “In the Far North, where there is snow, all bears are white. Novaya Zemlya is in the Far North and there is always snow there. What colors are the bears there?” That time, no amount of pushing could get the remote villagers to answer. They would respond only with principles. “Your words can be answered only by someone who was there,” one man said, even though he had never been to England but had just answered the cotton question. But even a faint taste of modern work began to change that. Given the white bear puzzle, Abdull, forty-five and barely literate but chairman of a collective farm, would not give an answer confidently, but he did exercise formal logic. “To go by your words,” he said, “they should all be white.”
The transition completely transformed the villagers’ inner worlds. When the scientists from Moscow asked the villagers what they would like to know about them or the place they came from, the isolated farmers and herders generally could not come up with a single question. “I haven’t seen what people do in other cities,” one said, “so how can I ask?” Whereas those engaged in collective farming were readily curious. “Well, you just spoke about white bears,” said thirty-one-year-old Akhmetzhan, a collective farmer. “I don’t understand where they come from.” He stopped for a moment to ponder. “And then you mentioned America. Is it governed by us or by some other power?” Nineteen-year-old Siddakh, who worked on a collective farm and had studied in a school for two years, was brimming with imaginative questions that probed self-improvement, from the personal to the local and global: “Well, what could I do to make our kolkhozniks [collective farmers] better people? How can we obtain bigger plants, or plant ones which will grow to be like big trees? And then I’m interested in how the world exists, where things come from, how the rich became rich and why the poor are poor.”
Where the very thoughts of premodern villagers were circumscribed by their direct experiences, modern minds are comparatively free. This is not to say that one way of life is uniformly better than another. As Arab historiographer Ibn Khaldun, considered a founder of sociology, pointed out centuries ago, a city dweller traveling through the desert will be completely dependent on a nomad to keep him alive. So long as they remain in the desert, the nomad is a genius.
But it is certainly true that modern life requires range, making connections across far-flung domains and ideas. Luria addressed this kind of “categorical” thinking, which Flynn would later style as scientific spectacles. “[It] is usually quite flexible,” Luria wrote. “Subjects readily shift from one attribute to another and construct suitable categories. They classify objects by substance (animals, flowers, tools), materials (wood, metal, glass), size (large, small), and color (light, dark), or other property. The ability to move freely, to shift from one category to another, is one of the chief characteristics of ‘abstract thinking.’”
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Flynn’s great disappointment is the degree to which society, and particularly higher education, has responded to the broadening of the mind by pushing specialization, rather than focusing early training on conceptual, transferable knowledge.
Flynn conducted a study in which he compared the grade point averages of seniors at one of America’s top state universities, from neuroscience to English majors, to their performance on a test of critical thinking. The test gauged students’ ability to apply fundamental abstract concepts from economics, social and physical sciences, and logic to common, real-world scenarios. Flynn was bemused to find that the correlation between the test of broad conceptual thinking and GPA was about zero. In Flynn’s words, “the traits that earn good grades at [the university] do not include critical ability of any broad significance.”*