Scripts

N = Narrator; I = Ian Deary; W1 = Woman 1, etc.; M1 = Man 1, etc.

N: Recent research into the history of IQ tests in Scotland suggests your IQ score might predict, to an extent at least, your health and even your life expectancy.

W1: You have 45 minutes to do the test, OK?

M1: OK.

N: Bill and Davina are 79 years old. This is the second time they’ve done this test. The first time was in 1932, when every 11-year-old in Scotland was put through an intelligence test. It’s the only time this kind of mass testing has ever been done in the UK. The results were rediscovered recently in an Edinburgh basement. If you want to know how our intelligence changes as we get older, these results are a potential goldmine.

I: We brought hundreds of people back and we got them to sit the exact same test that they had sat when they were aged 11. Now, these people are now 79 or 80 years old. We gave the same instructions. We gave the same test. And we gave the same time limit.

M2: It was a little stickier than I thought it would be.

M3: I walked through it quite happily, quite honestly.

W2: I felt I must have been very bright at 11 if I sat that exam and passed.

N: There were some intriguing results. Almost everyone had a better score at 80 than they did at 11. But some had gone from being just averagely intelligent to a much higher level.

I: Now, that’s what really drives our research. We’re interested in: Why have those people who’ve gone (people gone) from IQ 100, at age 11, up to 110 or 120? What have they done right? What can be the recipe for successful aging? We’re finding that the person with more education, even though they had the same IQ in childhood, is doing slightly better in old age, on average. The person who had a more professional job, in old age, is doing slightly better on average than the person who had a manual job, despite the fact that they started at the same level. The people who smoked have got slightly less good mental ability than you would expect.

N: What’s even more remarkable is that the kids who had higher IQ scores at 11 are the very ones still alive today. So it seems high IQ in childhood is good for survival.

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