Up like Flynn: video games and IQ.

• Author: Bailey, Ronald
• Position: Intelligence (Psychology - Brief article

IN THE 1980s, the New Zealand social scientist James Flynn discovered that IQs had been rising by about three points per decade. According to his findings, average IQs in 20 developed countries had increased by about 15 points during the previous 50 years. (That's in constant terms: IQ scores are periodically rescaled so that the average score is 100.) The increase was far too fast to result from genetic changes, so most researchers attribute it to an array of environmental influences: improved nutrition, more-challenging childhood games, better teaching methods, and even exposure to more media in the form of television and computers.

In the last decade, IQs in Denmark and Norway have failed to increase, and some worry that beneficial environmental influences on children are being reversed. In the July-August issue of the American Scientist, Michael Shayer, a psychologist at the University of London...