Aarati Asundi (00:12) Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Smart Tea Podcast where we talk about the lives of scientists and innovators who shaped the world. I'm Aarati. Jyoti Asundi (00:20) I'm her mom, Jyoti. Aarati Asundi (00:21) Do you remember how back when Arpita and I started the podcast, were brainstorming names and we had all sorts of names that we were thinking about, but then we finally landed on Smart Tea for the podcast. Jyoti Asundi (00:36) Yes, I do remember those early days to some extent. But I think Smart Tea Podcast is a beautiful name. It hits the nail on the head because that's exactly what you want to do. You're spilling the tea on the lives of the scientists and it's for smart people. And so we are all being smarties together. Aarati Asundi (00:57) Yes, we're talking about smart people and in turn becoming smart ourselves. Jyoti Asundi (01:02) We are becoming, we are smart and we are becoming smarter and we are spilling the tea together and so we are all becoming smarties together. Aarati Asundi (01:10) That is the hope. And the reason I brought this up is because today are going to be talking about arguably the original smarty, the original smart person who... I don't know why I haven't thought of doing him before, but we're going to be talking about Alfred Binet, who is psychologist who came up with the IQ test. Jyoti Asundi (01:36) Oh my Lord, that is fun! Aarati Asundi (01:39) Yeah! Jyoti Asundi (01:40) So he is going to actually give you a measurement of how big a smarty you are. An accurate quantitative measurement of your smartiness. Aarati Asundi (01:53) Yes, exactly. But it was much more complicated than that as we will get into. Jyoti Asundi (01:59) Of course. Aarati Asundi (01:59) Like, how do you measure intelligence? What does that mean? So that's what we're going to be diving into today. The life of Alfred Binet and how he got into this problem and how he developed this IQ test and then what it really meant for the world after he did. Aright? Jyoti Asundi (02:19) This sounds like lot of fun. Aarati Asundi (02:21) Let's get into his life. So Alfred Binet was born on July 8th, 1857 in Nice, which at the time was part of the Kingdom of Sardinia until it was annexed by France three years later in 1860. He was an only child to very wealthy parents, Édouard Binet, who was a physician, and Moina Allard, who was an artist. And because of this, Alfred was given the freedom to pursue any subject that really interested him. At some point when he was young, his parents went through a divorce and Alfred lived primarily with his mother. When he was 15, he and his mother moved to Paris to give him the best education possible. Jyoti Asundi (03:02) Nice. Aarati Asundi (03:03) He attended Louis LeGrand High School, where he excelled in French composition and discourse and Latin. But otherwise, he wasn't particularly brilliant at any other subject. Jyoti Asundi (03:16) Okay. Aarati Asundi (03:16) And so after high school, he had a really tough time figuring out what he wanted to do for a career. Jyoti Asundi (03:22) But that's... everybody is not born knowing what they want to do. I always speak about this that we are born on this earth for a certain purpose. But sometimes figuring that out becomes more complicated and sometimes it's like the plethora that of choices available to us also confounds us sometimes everything looks very interesting. Therefore he has a hard time making up his mind. Aarati Asundi (03:44) But I also like that when we do stories like this where the person wasn't like, from the age of five, he knew that he wanted to be a biologist or he knew he wanted to become a physicist or whatever. He was obsessed with math when he was three years old. I'm like, sometimes people take a while to figure it out, but they get there and it's OK. Jyoti Asundi (04:05) Yeeh, absolutely. I'm still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. Aarati Asundi (04:09) exactly. Right? We're all still trying to figure it out. Jyoti Asundi (04:15) I'm almost... I'm so old and yet I don't know what I want to do with my life. What should I really, what's... Aarati Asundi (04:21) You still have a lot of... you still have a lot to offer. You still have lot of energy and... Jyoti Asundi (04:23) I know, I know. I still have so many directions I want to run in and everything is so attractive, everything is so fun. Aarati Asundi (04:29) Yeah. There's hope for us all. So he had a tough time figuring out what he wanted to do. So he went to law school at the University of Paris. But even though he earned his license in 1878, he never really showed any interest in practicing law as a career. He said law was, a career for those without any yet chosen vocation, end quote. Jyoti Asundi (04:57) Huh, that's interesting. Aarati Asundi (04:58) Yeah, I wonder if that was just kind of the times because obviously law today is like a full blown career and highly respected at that. Yeah. Jyoti Asundi (05:05) Yeah, it's very specialized and it's not just enough to say I'm a is so many different branches: environmental and regulatory and, you know, patent law. So many things are there. So I yeah, it might be some it might be different types. Aarati Asundi (05:22) Yeah, I think it's probably just different times. And so he was really using law as kind of a stepping stone while he tried to figure out.... Jyoti Asundi (05:31) Or even like a placeholder. Aarati Asundi (05:33) Exactly. Yeah, that's a better word, placeholder. After law school, he tried going to medical school at the Sorbonne University, trying to follow in his father's footsteps of becoming a physician. But he became profoundly disturbed by all the blood and gore he witnessed during operations. Jyoti Asundi (05:53) Of course, yeah. Aarati Asundi (05:34) And when he was studying physiology using cadavers, he was also like, just no, cannot, I cannot do this. Jyoti Asundi (06:02) Yeah, yeah, it's not it's not for everybody for sure. Aarati Asundi (06:04) No. And he actually suffered a psychological breakdown and dropped out of medical school at 22. Jyoti Asundi (06:11) Oh that is sad. Aarati Asundi (06:12) Yeah, so it was very, very disturbing for him. As he's recovering and he's working on getting better from this breakdown, he started spending a lot of time at the National Library, where he soon developed an interest in psychology. And I can kind of see why that would have happened, because he suffered a mental breakdown. He's trying to get better. And so he's reading about the mind. He's reading about psychology and all of that. Jyoti Asundi (06:39) Yes, and I can see it being almost like his way of conquering it. It's like I have a problem and I'm going to research it to its nth degree in order to figure out how to make myself better. Because the more I know about this problem that I had of a mental breakdown, the better I will be at being able to fix it and overcome it. Aarati Asundi (07:02) Yeah, I can totally see that. Some people are like that. The more I know about it, the more I can work through it. Jyoti Asundi (07:09) Correct. Aarati Asundi (07:09) So he's reading all these psychology books and some authors that he was influenced by included Hippolyte Taine, who wrote a major work called "On Intelligence", which aimed to apply the scientific method on the human mind by studying how factors like genetics, education and imagination could shape a person's intellect. Jyoti Asundi (07:35) SO the factors that might potentially influence intelligence are genetics, but also environmental, you said. I'm just wanting to go through again. Aarati Asundi (07:47) Yeah so I think what the big thing or the seed of an idea that's coming here, and we'll talk about this a little bit more later on, is that many psychologists believe that intelligence and cognitive ability is something you were just born with. But Hippolyte Taine is just sort of starting to push the fact that maybe intelligence can be influenced by different factors. Like genetics is there, you're born with a certain amount of something. But environment, education and imagination are also some factors that could intelligence. Jyoti Asundi (08:25) Yeah. Aarati Asundi (08:25) And so it from person to person, how intelligent people are. Jyoti Asundi (08:30) Yes. Aarati Asundi (08:31) The other big person that he's inspired by is Theodule Ribot I hope I'm... There's a lot of French names in this, you know, in this episode, so I really am trying to get it right. I hope I get it right, but if not, let me know. I'll correct it next time. Any French people out there, please let me know. But Theodule Ribot, who is remembered as the founder of scientific psychology in France. So Alfred reads his work and agrees strongly with his ideas that psychology should be studied more like the other sciences using controlled experiments and data that you could analyze. Jyoti Asundi (09:14) Yes. Aarati Asundi (09:15) So just because we're studying the mind doesn't mean that you can just go off of a gut feeling or intuition or faith or something. You need to create psychological tests that are actually quantitative. Jyoti Asundi (09:27) Absolutely. Aarati Asundi (09:29) And in line with this, he believed in positivism, which is the idea that if something is true and there is some real knowledge that is indeed a fact, that there should be some tangible evidence for it. So he's rejecting this idea that anything in psychology is allowed to be based on intuition or faith. Jyoti Asundi (09:51) Got it. Aarati Asundi (09:53) So for the first time in his life, Alfred is full of enthusiasm. And despite the fact that he never actually had any formal education in psychology-- everything up to this point he's been learning from reading books at the library--- he starts conducting his own experiments on himself and his friends. Jyoti Asundi (10:12) Okay, he's found his calling at this point. Aarati Asundi (10:15) Yes. In 1880, Alfred published his first paper in Revue Philosophique, which is a journal that Théodule Ribot himself was an editor of. The paper was titled "On the Fusion of Similar Sensations", which examined the two-point threshold of sensation. So basically what that is, is Alfred was attempting to measure the smallest distance between two points of contact on your skin that can be perceived as distinct sensations. Jyoti Asundi (10:47) Two distinct points of contact on the skin. Got it. Otherwise it would be point of contact. Aarati Asundi (10:54) Yeah I had do an experiment like this, I think in middle school or high school or something. The teacher gave us a bunch of toothpicks and an index card and tape. And you had to tape two toothpicks at different distances apart on separate index cards. So one index card would have toothpicks that were like one inch apart. Another index card would have toothpicks that were half an inch apart. You know, whatever, and you keep going down. And then you were teamed up with a partner and the partner would close their eyes and you would use the toothpicks that were like one inch apart to touch different places on their skin. So you would try their face, or you would gently poke their fingertip or, you know, their arm or leg or something, and see if they could tell if it was two toothpicks or one toothpick... Jyoti Asundi (11:46) Just one toothpick. ⁓ interesting. Aarati Asundi (11:49) ...that was touching them. And then you tried it with all the different distances. And then you could kind of say that, you know, my forehead isn't very sensitive it can't tell the difference when the toothpicks are half an inch apart. It can only tell the difference when the toothpicks are one inch apart. But... Jyoti Asundi (12:05) This is a fun experiment. Yes. Aarati Asundi (12:07) ...my lips are very sensitive. My lips are very sensitive, and my lips can tell when the toothpicks are even like a quarter of an inch apart. Jyoti Asundi (12:17) Make sense. Aarati Asundi (12:17) And same with your fingertips. Your fingertips are very sensitive. Your lips are very sensitive. And so you can kind of map out the sensitivity of your body in different, And also fun fact, I learned that that's why babies put everything in their mouth. Jyoti Asundi (12:29) Oh! That's the most sensitive! So they are trying to learn a new world and that's their most sensitive organ of perception. Nice! Aarati Asundi (12:41) So tangent, but I thought it was interesting. But the reason he liked this particular experiment was because it was, again, a quantitative way to measure mental cognition and perception. So you could tell that the toothpicks are one inch apart, they're half an inch apart, they're a quarter inch apart, and that gives you data and it gives you numbers. Jyoti Asundi (13:02) Yes. Aarati Asundi (13:03) However, he hadn't realized that this exact experiment had already been performed at a much higher and more sophisticated level by a Belgian physiologist named Joseph Delboeuf. Jyoti Asundi (13:15) Okay. Aarati Asundi (13:16) And once Alfred published his paper, Delboeuf read it and noticed many errors and heavily critiqued Alfred's paper. So it was an extremely humbling experience for Alfred. Jyoti Asundi (13:30) Okay, but it's a learning experience. These kind of things are that you really learn a lot when these kind of things happen in life. Aarati Asundi (13:38) Yes, and that's how he took it. He didn't lose his enthusiasm. He becomes, in fact, inspired again by another psychologist named John Stuart Mill, who was a proponent of something called associationism. And he coined the term mental chemistry, which basically was the idea that people learn by combining simple ideas to form more complex ones, kind of like a chemical reaction. Jyoti Asundi (14:06) So give me a second. Let me understand that properly. So you basically take two simple thoughts and then you put them together and get a complex thought. Is that what you just said? Aarati Asundi (14:17) Yes. So one kind of example that I thought of, which I hope is correct in the way I'm thinking about it, is that, for example, you can have a simple thought like a color, which is orange, then you can have another simple thought, is a ball, And you put those two together and you get an orange ball. Right? And so then, Jyoti Asundi (14:39) Yes. Aarati Asundi (14:39) And so then that brings in associationism, which is "what do you associate with an orange ball?" And you could think maybe a basketball. A basketball is an orange ball. And while if I just said "orange", you probably wouldn't think "basketball". And if I just said "ball", you don't necessarily think of a "basketball". If I say orange ball, you think "basketball" and you also think of like the whole game associated with basketball. You may think of memories associated with you watching a game of basketball. Jyoti Asundi (15:16) You might think of the players, the big player names might flash into your head. Aarati Asundi (15:20) Yeah, so you have this whole understanding. Yeah, if I say "orange" and "ball", all of a sudden, our minds immediately leap to "basketball" and "game", and we associate all of these things. ⁓ Jyoti Asundi (15:33) Yes, yes. Aarati Asundi (15:34) And so that's kind of how, in the beginning, we learn from babies that this orange colored ball is a basketball, and with basketball, there's this whole game associated with it. So I think that's kind of how it's working. And so John Stuart Mill is saying that that's how we learn about everything. We learn about everything from these small building blocks that build into a much larger picture. Jyoti Asundi (16:00) So this actually, this kind of thought process... that also exists for how we learn a language, for example, or even how we learn to think everything. Everything is like that. So you go back to your kindergarten, you start with your small alphabets which then become the words, which then become the sentences. The sentences then are then made 5 or 10 sentence essays. And then you slowly build that into a story and then into a novel maybe. So that, you know, everything, your entire learning exactly mimicking this idea put forth by Dr. Mill. That's interesting. Aarati Asundi (16:42) Yeah. So that's his idea. That's what he's, that our entire cognitive ability, our entire, the way we think can all be boiled down to us using these little building blocks to build more complex ideas. So once again, Alfred runs with this idea. He loves this idea. He runs with it. He publishes a second paper that strongly advocated for associationism as this all-encompassing explanation the basis of human thought. Jyoti Asundi (17:12) Okay. Aarati Asundi (17:13) But once again, he is widely critiqued because psychologists had already been moving away from associationism because they realized that it didn't explain some parts of human thought and behavior, like why we get motivated to do certain things and things that subconsciously can influence us. So I was like, yeah, that makes sense. Sometimes if you're in a store or something and they're playing music that you really like, you might stay in the store a bit longer, but you're not really thinking about that. And you may have the opposite. Like I may say, ⁓ I love this store. I love the ambiance in this store. And subconsciously it's because of the music and the lights and whatever. But you may hate it. You may be like, I hate this store. I hate this music. The lights are too bright. I don't like anything about it. Jyoti Asundi (18:04) Yeah. But then there is yet another layer actually. And that is something that is our innate tendencies that we are born with. Aarati Asundi (18:11) Yep. Jyoti Asundi (18:12) Some people may be more like go with the flow and some people might be highly dynamic. So you may see something that needs to be done. And we see this in our own house as well. There's a dishwasher waiting to be unloaded and there'll be a couple people in the household who just jump up there and it's like "Clean dishes, let's put them all away!" and somebody else will be like, "It's okay. It'll get done one way or the other, it'll get done." That comes from the latent tendencies that a person is born with. Aarati Asundi (18:42) Yes. And so, associationism isn't really explaining some of these things. So, Alfred kind of throwing his full weight behind associationism and saying, like, this explains everything. Psychologists were already like, "It doesn't explain everything. You need to slow down." Jyoti Asundi (18:55) Hmm. That shoots down his credibility then. Aarati Asundi (19:02) Yes. And so, again, he gets kind of publicly humiliated as trained psychologists are shooting down his papers. But he keeps learning from his mistakes and continues to stay optimistic. In 1882, a former classmate of his introduced him to the famous hospital in Paris called the Salpétrière. Because Alfred was independent from any school or job at this point, he starts volunteering here and he meets a neurologist named Jean-Martin Charcot and his physician assistant Charles Féré. So Charcot and Féré were interested in studying the baffling condition of female hysteria. Jyoti Asundi (19:51) Excuse me? Female hysteria? Aarati Asundi (19:55) Yes. The symptoms of which included paralysis, loss of sensation, seizures, and memory loss. So I have no idea what they were actually studying. I feel like they were studying some sort of other mental disorder, but for some reason were focused on females specifically because all of these symptoms that they're talking about, I'm like, something deeper here. I don't know why you're attributing it only to females. Jyoti Asundi (20:26) You know, this may be a product of the times. Aarati Asundi (20:29) Oh definitely. Jyoti Asundi (20:30) There was a time in my life when I was younger that I was very fond of historical romances. And every drawing room of a cultured lady included a fainting sofa. Aarati Asundi (20:43) Ah yes. Jyoti Asundi (20:44) And I always about that. You need a sofa for fainting? That's very interesting. At some point I kind of thought about it and I said "You know what it must be? It must be just the fact that ladies were forced to wear very constrictive garments like the corsets and things like that which basically stole their breath." They didn't-- didn't allow them to breathe very well. So naturally would faint due to lack of air and oh! Another thing in those times was a lady could have "melancholia". Which I think was depression, basically. And so I think it's a product of the times where they had very little power. Just like today a guy can condescendingly talk about "Is this PMS that's talking?" He can tell a lady who agitated whether she's having PMS. Maybe that's what's going on here. Aarati Asundi (21:38) So I think yes, for sure that that's part of it. I think in this case, there was definitely something mentally wrong with the patients that Charcot and Féré were studying. I just don't know what it would be called today. So they had one patient in particular who they were conducting experiments on. Jyoti Asundi (22:01) Okay. Aarati Asundi (22:01) named Marie Wittman and she was often called Blanche because that was actually her sister's name but she kept repeating it in fits of hysteria. Jyoti Asundi (22:12) Uh-huh. Aarati Asundi (22:13) And she was also nicknamed the Queen of Hysterics. So, Charcot had discovered that hypnosis in some patients could result in some of the same symptoms of, you know, loss of sensation or seizures or memory loss. And so they figured there must be a connection between hypnosis and hysteria. And so that's what he was studying. Jyoti Asundi (22:37) Okay, are we thinking multiple personality disorder or bipolar disorder or something? Aarati Asundi (22:45) Maybe bipolar? Jyoti Asundi (22:47) Maybe it manifested itself differently i53men and women of those times, Aarati Asundi (22:53) Or it was called something different, again because of sexism and everything. If a woman did it, it was female hysteria. If a man did it, it's like, OK, something is mentally infirm with him and we need to... Jyoti Asundi (23:06) Yes, exactly, it's exactly. Aarati Asundi (23:08) But in a woman, it's attributed to the fact that she's a female. Jyoti Asundi (23:12) Correct. Aarati Asundi (23:12) But I think there's no doubt that there was something mentally disturbed about Jyoti Asundi (23:17) Mary Whitman. Aarati Asundi (23:18) Marie Wittman. Yeah, at least with Marie Wittman, I think there's no doubt. I was reading a bit about her and it does sound like she had a very difficult and hard life because of her mental incapacities. So they're studying her and they're trying to do these hypnosis experiments on her. And here, once again, we foray into very shaky science. So Alfred is working with Charles Féré doing a series of experiments where they supposedly found that Marie's behaviors and symptoms under hypnosis could be controlled by a magnet. So I think what they did is they placed a magnet near her while she was under hypnosis and reversed the polarity of the magnet. And they found that if she was paralyzed on the right side when they started, the hypnosis, when they reverse the polarity of the magnet, the paralysis would switch to her left side. Or if she was crying, would start laughing when they reversed the polarity of the magnet. Jyoti Asundi (24:22) Aha, okay. Aarati Asundi (24:25) So they were very excited by this. Alfred and Charles Féré wrote up these findings in a series of articles. However, Alfred's Belgian critic, Joseph Delboeuf, also had an interest in hypnosis. And he read these papers and he was like, "No way, that's not real". Jyoti Asundi (24:42) Utter garbage. Yes. Aarati Asundi (24:45) Especially he had a chip on his shoulder because Alfred's name was on the paper and he had already shot down Alfred's papers once before. So... Jyoti Asundi (24:53) Yes. Aarati Asundi (24:53) ...he's like, "Mm-mm. No, this isn't right". The big flaw that he picked up on was that Alfred and Charles thought that when a person was under hypnosis, they were completely unconscious to the outside world. And so because of that, they hadn't tried to hide from Marie when they were switching the magnet's polarity. Jyoti Asundi (25:15) Oh yes. Okay. Aarati Asundi (25:18) But Joseph Delbeouf was like, "If she knew when you were switching the magnets, she would have known when to change her behavior." Jyoti Asundi (25:26) That's right. Good point. Yes. Aarati Asundi (25:29) Yeah, even if she's doing it subconsciously or whatever. Jyoti Asundi (25:32) Yes, yes absolutely, absolutely. That's the human brain is extremely complex. Aarati Asundi (25:39) Yes. So Joseph Delbeouf actually travels to Salpetrière Hospital and conducts the same experiments with Marie, but under much more controlled conditions. Jyoti Asundi (25:52) Ah, he is a true scientist, yes. Aarati Asundi (25:54) Yes, and sure enough the magnet theory falls apart really fast. Jyoti Asundi (25:58) Absolutely. But I really like it that he has such a passion for science and truth that he literally travels to this place to say, "let me show you how this experiment should be conducted." Aarati Asundi (26:12) And on the same patient and everything the same. Like same hospital, same patient using your same equipment. Jyoti Asundi (26:17) Yeah, but when I do the experiment, this is how I'm going to do it, and I'm going to show you why your method is wrong and gives you completely false results. Aarati Asundi (26:27) Yep. So after that, very heated public debate followed between Delbeouf, Charcot, and Féré. Alfred initially wanted to side with Charcot but eventually he admitted that Delbeouf was right and the experiment had indeed been flawed. Jyoti Asundi (26:43) Correct. Aarati Asundi (26:44) In a chapter on Alfred Binet from the Handbook of Intelligence, the authors Amber Esping and Jonathan A. Plucker wrote that Alfred's "willingness to acknowledge and work within the constraints that psychological tests will always contain some degree of error is perhaps Binet's greatest contribution to intelligence testing". Jyoti Asundi (27:05) Yes. Aarati Asundi (27:05) So he admits it when he's wrong and he admits that he can't always get everything right and that's huge. Jyoti Asundi (27:08) Yes, yes absolutely that's beautiful. Aarati Asundi (27:13) But it was another major career setback for him. He had spent seven years at Salpetriére with Charcot and Féré. And during that time, he had written about 20 articles and three books on various aspects of psychology. And while I'm sure a lot of it had its merits, it's not hard to see how his credibility might've really tanked at this point. Jyoti Asundi (27:36) Yes, and now he himself, because he has such an open mind and he's able to see the flaw in the design of the experiments, all his work he himself is going to look at with skepticism and say, "I have to go back and check everything and see what can be kept and what has to be thrown out. I have to apply more stringent parameters to all the work that has been done and figure out what is OK." Aarati Asundi (28:04) Yeah, he had really blindly been loyal and believed anything that Charcot and Féré had been telling him. When they said a patient under hypnosis is unconscious, he completely believed it and took it as fact. And then they were proved wrong. And so now he's like, "Crap! Like what am I going to do?" Jyoti Asundi (28:25) Absolutely, absolutely. No, this is the problem when you idealize someone and they take everything they say without checking. What does it say? Trust but verify. That's what they say. Trust but verify. And that's what he did not do. Aarati Asundi (28:41) So he left Salpetriére Hospital in 1890 kind of ashamed and in disgrace. But it's not all bad. In 1884, he had gotten married to Laure Balbiani who was the daughter of a well-known embryology professor at the College de France. Jyoti Asundi (29:00) Okay. Aarati Asundi (29:01) Together, the couple had two daughters, Madeleine and Alice. And towards the end of his time at Salpetriére, Alfred had started spending a lot of time in his father-in-law's lab and even started working on a PhD in comparative physiology in insects. After leaving Salpetriére it took Alfred more than a year to find another position, during which time he conducted psychology experiments on his two daughters, who were around five and three years old, and all of their friends. And he was like making them solve puzzles and take mental tests. Jyoti Asundi (29:32) Oh my gosh! This is a new level of play dates. Aarati Asundi (29:38) Yes, come over to my house and we'll take some psychology tests together. Jyoti Asundi (29:42) That's right. Aarati Asundi (29:43) So through this work, he started to dig deeper into intellectual development and child psychology. One particularly interesting thing that came from these experiments was when he was studying reaction times. So he noticed that on average, children's reaction times are a lot more variable than adult reaction times. So sometimes a child would react just as fast as an adult to some sort of external stimulus. But sometimes they would be a lot slower. And he made the connection that this was because children's attention spans vary a lot. If they're focused on the task, they react quickly, but they also get distracted more easily than adults and they lose focus and then their reaction time slows down. Jyoti Asundi (30:33) Okay. Aarati Asundi (30:33) He also found that children could not think as abstractly as an adult could. Jyoti Asundi (30:37) Mm-hmm. Yes. Aarati Asundi (30:38) For example, when shown a knife and asked what its function was, child was likely to say something highly specific like "to chop up meat" rather than an adult who would say something more abstract like "to cut things with". That's what, yeah. Jyoti Asundi (30:54) Yes. Okay. Aarati Asundi (30:57) So at some point in human development, he reasoned that it must become important for us to start thinking more abstractly. Jyoti Asundi (31:04) Yeah. Aarati Asundi (31:06) Eventually, he connected with a man named Henri-Étienne Beaunis, who was the director of the Laboratory of Physiological Psychology at Sorbonne. It was France's first experimental psychology lab. And since Alfred wasn't having any luck finding a job still, he volunteered to be Henri's assistant. Jyoti Asundi (31:29) Okay. Aarati Asundi (31:30) One year later, he was promoted to assistant director, and in 1894, he took over Henri's position as director when he retired. Jyoti Asundi (31:39) Oh wow, okay. Aarati Asundi (31:40) However, I was very surprised to find that all of this was still an unpaid position. Alfred remained in this unpaid position for the rest of his life. Jyoti Asundi (31:50) Wow, but it is such a passion money is of secondary importance in his calculations. Aarati Asundi (31:58) At the Sorbonne he continued his experiments on child psychology, expanding his research pool to include students at local schools. So no longer just his kids' friends group. Jyoti Asundi (32:10) That's right. Aarati Asundi (32:11) He started studying how memory develops and how easily children could be influenced, in other words, their suggestibility. Jyoti Asundi (32:18) Ah yes. Aarati Asundi (32:19) And how that decreased as a child got older. He also started taking interest in so-called child prodigies, studying children who for some reason seem to excel at a very narrow particular field, like chess or music. Jyoti Asundi (32:35) Right. Yes, yes. Aarati Asundi (32:38) Importantly, Alfred recognized that all people are different and it's these differences that allow child prodigies to pop up. And it may sound super obvious to us now, but like we were kind of touching on before, there were psychologists who believed that everyone was basically born with the same traits and abilities. And it was really only matter of environment that shapes us. Jyoti Asundi (33:04) Mm-hmm, okay. Aarati Asundi (33:06) And because of that, when psychologists would create a study, they would make broad assumptions or statements assuming that it was true for everybody. Jyoti Asundi (33:14) Yes, yes, got it. Aarati Asundi (33:17) Everyone is born with the same basic tools is their assumption. And then it's just a matter of like our environment and how we're brought up. Jyoti Asundi (33:25) The opportunities to hone your particular skill sets and things like that. Nothing to do with innate ability. So they are... it's basically nature versus nurture is going on right now. That's the fight. Aarati Asundi (33:27) Yes. But Alfred was falling more into the opposite camp that yes, environment absolutely plays a role, but people are also born differently from the beginning, that there is something to nature that is different. And he would point to even his two daughters who one would argue had exactly the same environment and upbringing, but still showed clear psychological differences from one another. Jyoti Asundi (34:02) Yes okay. Aarati Asundi (34:02) So they don't think exactly the same way. They don't have the same interests and cognitive abilities in different areas. Jyoti Asundi (34:11) Yes, and we see that even today with twins, I think, where... not just fraternal twins, but even identical twins with different interests and different liking towards different things. Aarati Asundi (34:22) Yes. So he's pushing this idea that you cannot just make these blanket statements, that if you're going to study an individual's psychology, you can't just assume that they are like everybody else. You have to really study that person and who they are, what they were born with, what their environment was, what their tendencies are. However, he did recognize that sometimes these long deep dives into an individual's psychology was not always practical. Especially if you're dealing with a lot of patients or you're trying to study something about psychology, and you need hundreds of people in order to create a data set. Jyoti Asundi (34:59) Yes, yes, correct. Aarati Asundi (34:59) You can't feasibly go into every single person's history. Jyoti Asundi (35:04) Yeah, how much depth can you go with each of your subjects? Aarati Asundi (35:08) Yes. So he did start to think about whether there were certain criteria a psychologist should focus on to quickly understand someone's basic psychology. He and a young research assistant named Victor Henri put together a list of 10 variables that they thought should be measured. These 10 variables were memory, imagery, imagination, attention, comprehension, suggestibility, aesthetic sentiment, moral sentiment, muscular strength and willpower, and motor ability/ hand-eye coordination. Jyoti Asundi (35:47) Okay so he's now slowly bringing in the physical aspects because the brain is involved in your ability to coordinate hand eye movements for example. Aarati Asundi (36:00) Yes. Alfred and Victor published this new approach in an article called Individual Psychology in 1896. Also side note, Victor Henry, his assistant, went on to become very famous in his own right. He actually moved away from psychology and made huge breakthroughs in enzyme kinetics and biochemistry. So if anyone recognizes the name Victor Henri, did become very, very big. Jyoti Asundi (36:27) Got it. Aarati Asundi (36:28) But in a separate field. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Aarati Asundi (36:35) Hi everyone, Aarati here. I hope you're enjoying the podcast. If so, and you wish someone would tell your science story, I founded a science communications company called Sykom, that's S-Y-K-O-M, that can help. Sykom blends creativity with scientific accuracy to create all types of science, communications, content, including explainer videos, slide presentations, science, writing, and more. We work with academic researchers, tech companies, nonprofits, or really any scientists. To help simplify your science, check us out at sykommer.com. That's S-Y-K-O-M-M-E r.com. Back to the story. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Aarati Asundi (37:22) A few years later in 1899, a very important character enters our story. His name was Theodore Simon. He was a young student who had gotten an internship working with hundreds of mentally disabled children At the Perray-Vaucluse Asylum. He had been highly impressed with Alfred's writings. And so one day he simply shows up at Alfred's lab asking to be a student assistant and told him he was working with these children at the asylum for his thesis. Alfred was very interested and saw the opportunity to try his individual psychology testing on these very unique cases. Jyoti Asundi (38:00) Hmm... Correct. Aarati Asundi (38:03) And so together, they undertake a bunch of psychological testing of these children in which they tried to figure out if there was a common indicator between all of them that would kind of be a marker that this child would need special education or attention. So all of these children have some sort of mental disability. And so they're studying them, looking at everything from physical characteristics to personality traits. But ultimately, they were unable to come up with anything concrete. They were trying to find something that would be like, if the person has smaller hands than normal, then they probably are going to develop some cognitive deficiency. Or if the person, you know, seems more depressed than the average, then they're probably going to have some mental disability. But they couldn't find anything like that. That was just really quick and easy to say, if you measure this one thing, then you can tell that this child is going to need special attention or going to have some.... Jyoti Asundi (39:02) Yes, they wanted to somehow find a marker that would differentiate the person early on so that you could then track them differently early on Aarati Asundi (39:11) Yes, exactly. Jyoti Asundi (39:12) And provide them with the required resources. Aarati Asundi (39:15) Yes, but they couldn't find anything like that that was common across all these different children. So although it was a bit disappointing, it did confirm for Alfred that intelligence and cognition were highly individual and there was no broad test that you could apply. Jyoti Asundi (39:34) Yes. Aarati Asundi (39:35) But something soon changed his mind. So around the turn of the century, France had been mandating public school education for all children, including children with mental disabilities. And this soon started taking its toll on the teachers who are now having to deal with everyone from these like super advanced kids to these mentally disabled children all in one class. Jyoti Asundi (39:58) Yes. Aarati Asundi (39:59) So it was utter chaos and it soon became clear that some children need different education methods, more attention and different tools in order to learn. Jyoti Asundi (40:10) Yes, yes, some are very advanced while others are mentally challenged and the same curriculum is not going to be applicable to them all. And probably just one teacher trying to deal with a different cognitive is going to be very difficult. Aarati Asundi (40:27) Yes. Because I can imagine children on both ends of that spectrum, could both be highly disruptive in a classroom. Both of them are not getting their needs met and so... Jyoti Asundi (40:38) Correct. Aarati Asundi (40:39) So in 1904, the French government decided to put together a group of experts who could help solve this problem. And naturally, they turned to Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon because of their work at the asylum. Jyoti Asundi (40:50) Yes, they have done this. Aarati Asundi (40:54) They were asked to come up with a way to identify children who were either mentally disabled and/or who would likely benefit from special education classes. And also, just as important, the test had to safeguard against false positives. So students who were actually competent shouldn't fall into the special needs category. Jyoti Asundi (41:14) Yeah, just because they had ADHD, for example, or then they were running off and not... lack of focus should not be misinterpreted as being lack of ability or something like that. Aarati Asundi (41:25) Yes. So Alfred and Theodore got to work. And this time they had a different approach for how they dealt with this problem. So before they were only looking at children in the asylum that they knew had some cognitive disability. Jyoti Asundi (41:42) Mm-hmm. Aarati Asundi (41:43) But for this project, they started looking at two groups of children who had previously been identified as either having normal cognitive function or were falling in the special needs category. Jyoti Asundi (41:57) Okay. Aarati Asundi (41:58) So they're comparing two different groups now. And they came up with a variety of tasks for the children to perform, which, very importantly, they made sure had absolutely no reliance on any sort of formal education because they understood that people came from all different educational backgrounds. Jyoti Asundi (42:19) Yes. Aarati Asundi (42:20) They also soon realized that age was a factor in many children even understanding what they were supposed to do in the task. Jyoti Asundi (42:28) Yes. Aarati Asundi (42:28) So they started coming up with different levels of difficulty for certain tasks depending on the child's age. Jyoti Asundi (42:35) This is nice. All his early criticism that he received in terms of his lack of appropriate controls for the experiment, now he is implementing those controls and making it fairly stringent. He learns. Aarati Asundi (42:47) Yeah, he learned. This is the big thing. Jyoti Asundi (42:49) He learns. Aarati Asundi (42:49) Like his beginning of his career was really not promise... He was not off to a promising start. He was making so many mistakes. He didn't know what he was doing. He had no formal education in psychology and he's just, you know, following whatever he believes in. But he sticks with it and he learns. And because of that, Jyoti Asundi (43:09) and does it right now. Aarati Asundi (43:10) he's able to finally get it right. Jyoti Asundi (43:13) Get it right now. The second time round or the third time round, he's getting it right. Aarati Asundi (43:18) Yep. he came up with different levels of difficulty for certain tasks. For example, very young children just had to follow a light with their eyes, unwrap candy, or shake hands with an examiner. Slightly older kids were asked to repeat back a series of three-digit numbers, repeat a 15-word sentence from memory, point to certain body parts, and define words like fork or house or mother. Jyoti Asundi (43:48) Okay. Aarati Asundi (43:49) Older kids were asked to draw certain things from memory, state the difference between pairs of things, and form sentences that contained three separate words that they were given. So can you make a sentence with the words, picture, chair, and house? And they would have to do that. Jyoti Asundi (44:08) Yes. Aarati Asundi (44:09) And then the hardest tests ask kids to repeat back seven digits, state the difference between abstract concepts, like what's the difference between sad and bored, and then come up with scenarios as to what could be happening when they were told a partial story, like "My neighbor has been receiving some strange visitors, like a lawyer, a doctor, and a priest. What could be happening over there?" And they had to come up with some story. Jyoti Asundi (44:38) Some interesting story. Aarati Asundi (44:39) Which I think you would be really good at and I would be really bad at. Jyoti Asundi (44:42) I already had three, three, right away there were three scenarios in my head. It's terrible. It's terrible. My brain is just like Right off the bat, it's like a lawyer, a doctor and a priest. Okay, he's on his deathbed. No, he's having a fantastic party. No, he's having his, his daughter is getting married to a doctor and they're having a prenup and they're having their nupitals. So right away there's three things that's in my head right off the bat. I'm sorry. Aarati Asundi (45:12) Yeah, no, that's great because I think these are the tests that I completely failed at. I was like, I don't know, why would a doctor, a lawyer, and a priest be together at all? That makes no sense. I can't even come up with it. Jyoti Asundi (45:23) Oh makes perfect sense to me. Aarati Asundi (45:27) Yeah. So based on their answers, Alfred and Theodore began to calibrate the scale, figuring out at what age kids normally started accomplishing tasks or giving correct answers. And based on this, they were able to create a scale. a accomplished all the tasks most other 10-year-olds could accomplish, then they were normal, quote unquote. Jyoti Asundi (45:52) Okay. Aarati Asundi (45:52) Not highly intelligent, but also not handicapped or disabled in any way. Jyoti Asundi (45:57) Okay. Aarati Asundi (45:58) If a 10-year-old could only accomplish the tasks that a normal 8-year-old could do, then they were mentally challenged. And if they could accomplish a normal 12-year-old task, then they were more advanced. Jyoti Asundi (46:11) Okay. Aarati Asundi (46:12) This scale called the Binet-Simon scale was revolutionary because it didn't rely on any sensory perception or reaction times, and it actually quantitatively measured memory, attention span, and language comprehension. Jyoti Asundi (46:29) Yes, yes. Aarati Asundi (46:31) In 1905, Alfred wrote up a report of his findings and outlined his suggestions regarding education. Importantly, he wrote that he did not think intelligence was fixed. So I thought this was a really important concept. Jyoti Asundi (46:47) Okay. Aarati Asundi (46:47) So if a child showed signs of being less intelligent than normal, according to his scale, that did not necessarily mean that they were handicapped anything like that. He said " intelligence is susceptible to development through exercise, training, and above all, method. One will be able to increase one's attention, memory, judgment, and to become literally more intelligent than before." end quote. Jyoti Asundi (47:18) Oh what a positive idea! And so true actually. The more you work at improving your skill set and sharpening those tools, the better your brain saw that with your grandfather who kept his brain very, very sharp all the way till the very end. Aarati Asundi (47:36) Mm-hmm. Yeah, so there is something to playing all of those like Wordle and Sudoku and all of those kinds of, you know, games. ⁓ It does actually do something for your brain. Jyoti Asundi (47:48) Yes, and also, every day that you have learned something is a day that you lived well. And if you have not learned something on that day, then that's a day wasted in your life. Aarati Asundi (47:58) I think he would have strongly agreed with that. So he came up with some cognitive exercises he called "mental orthopedics" that could be used to help children who were lacking in one particular area or another. Jyoti Asundi (48:14) Okay. Aarati Asundi (48:15) He also advocated that children who fell on the lower end of the scale should still be allowed to interact and learn with kids who were of a normal or higher intelligence, believing that it would not only give the slower learning children a model to copy, but it would also teach the faster learning children lessons in solidarity and empathy. Jyoti Asundi (48:37) Oh fantastic. There's learning going on both ways. Very nice. Aarati Asundi (48:41) Yes, Be patient with somebody who maybe isn't learning as fast as you in one particular area. And the people who need help, they have now someone that they can look up to. Jyoti Asundi (48:53) And also the people who need help may require help in one area, but they might teach you something new in some other area entirely. Aarati Asundi (49:01) Yes, just like we were saying, think I would fail horribly at the section where it's like, come up with a scenario, whereas you are great at that kind of thing. Jyoti Asundi (49:12) And you on the other would be wonderful at drawing something from memory, I can see my stick figures would have put me in like the mentally challenged category. So we each have our own ability that we work with. Aarati Asundi (49:25) Yeah. Alfred continued to refine the test until his sudden death in 1911 at the age of 54, most likely from an illness, but we're not completely sure what happened. Strangely the Binet-Simon scale did not really become popular in France immediately. It was actually an American psychologist, Henry Herbert Goddard, who first popularized the test in America. He used the test for children he was working with and found it to work fairly well. So he translated the test from French into English and distributed over 22,000 copies around the US. Jyoti Asundi (50:02) Nice. Aarati Asundi (50:03) In the mid-1900s, much after Binet's death, the test made its way back to France, where it finally became popular. Psychologists have made some improvements on the test over the years and put their own interpretations on the results. A psychologist named Louis William Stern had the idea of creating a ratio where he divided the child's score on the test by their age. So a low score at a high age would give you a low number and vice versa. Lewis N. Terman then multiplied that number by 100, and that's how we get to the intelligence quotient, or IQ. Jyoti Asundi (50:40) Oh my goodness, so that is foundation of the IQ testing. Aarati Asundi (50:45) Yes. Today, 100 is considered to be an average IQ with 68 % of people falling within an 85 to 115 IQ range. Jyoti Asundi (50:57) Okay. Aarati Asundi (50:58) Unfortunately, while psychologists were refining the test, people started using the IQ test for all the wrong reasons, as humans are going to do. Jyoti Asundi (51:07) Humans...if there is a way to misuse something they will find it. Aarati Asundi (51:11) Since the definition of what intelligence is, is kind of broad, people started using it to categorize people for important things. For example, in World War I, the US military started using IQ tests to screen recruits for officer training. Jyoti Asundi (51:31) Ah that's a tough one because sometimes again education and environment will come into all those things. Aarati Asundi (51:40) Yeah. And I don't think the IQ test really tested like leadership ability per se, you know, someone can be really smart and have zero leadership skills. So. Jyoti Asundi (51:49) Yeah, and that's where you have those horrible dynamics. Aarati Asundi (51:54) Mm-hmm. Jyoti Asundi (51:55) I remember when as a young girl, I was reading a poem. It's called The Charge of the Light Brigade. Aarati Asundi (51:59) Okay. Jyoti Asundi (52:01) And it glorified the fact that this small contingent of the English army knew that it was going into certain death because the enemy was so many times more in number. But the leader gives the order to charge ahead anyway. And so it glorified the fact that these people went in knowing that they were charging into certain death on their horses. And then they... very few survive that encounter and every person who reads it is like that is horrible, horrible leadership. Aarati Asundi (52:37) Yes! Jyoti Asundi (52:38) You should know when to retreat so that you stay alive to fight another day. You should have enough empathy for the lives of your people who whom you're in charge of. Aarati Asundi (52:49) Yeah, bravery is one thing, but, you know, tactical decision making... Jyoti Asundi (52:54) Yeah. Just recklessly throwing other people's lives away for that moment of glory where you say I don't want to be called somebody who turned and ran. You don't have to call it turning and running. You can say "strategic retreat" so that you can come back and fight for victory another time. Aarati Asundi (53:11) Yeah. Jyoti Asundi (53:12) Anyway, I went off on a tangent. I didn't mean to do that. But yeah. Aarati Asundi (53:15) No, that's okay. Jyoti Asundi (53:15) Leadership... leadership is a difficult one. You have to have good leadership. You have to have good empathy. So in it's not just IQ that decides who a good leader is. It's also EQ, the emotional quotient. Aarati Asundi (53:29) I don't even know if they knew that EQ was even a thing at this point. Also, with completely zero evidence, people who believed in eugenics started claiming intelligence was an inherited trait. Jyoti Asundi (53:44) Oh no! Is this the foundation for Hitler's genocides? Aarati Asundi (53:49) Yes, they started linking it to race to justify mass genocides in Nazi Germany. Jyoti Asundi (53:54) Oh no. How a person, how people can take something that makes a lot of sense and twist it into something so grotesque. Aarati Asundi (54:03) And he, like Alfred Binet explicitly said the opposite. That intelligence is not something you're only born with. Like there's of course some innate ability, but it does depend on your environment and it is something that you can work on. And so it is variable within a person themselves. If they start off on the lower end of the IQ scale, you can work your way up. So Tte fact that these people saying that people of different races or different creeds were inherently lower on the intelligence scale because of the color of their skin or something is explicitly against what Binet had been saying, what Alfred had said. ⁓ Jyoti Asundi (54:44) That's right. And the original... even if there was a distinction between innate ability, it had never ever been linked to race until these people decided to do so. Aarati Asundi (54:58) Yep. And not to be outdone in terms of horrific policy, in 1924, the Virginia Sterilization Act was signed into law... Jyoti Asundi (55:08) No way. Aarati Asundi (55:08) ...and upheld by the US Supreme Court, which forced reproductive sterilization of institutionalized people who were, quote, "afflicted with hereditary forms of insanity that are recurrent, idiocy, imbecility, feeble-mindedness or epilepsy" end quote. That's straight from the act. Jyoti Asundi (55:31) Wow, are you serious? That is truly, truly horrible. Aarati Asundi (55:37) Yes. Jyoti Asundi (55:38) Such atrocities. Aarati Asundi (55:40) So between 1924 and 1979, over 7,000 people were involuntarily sterilized. Jyoti Asundi (55:50) Wow. Aarati Asundi (55:51) And this will blow your mind. The act has never been declared unconstitutional even to this day. But in 2001, the Virginia General Assembly passed a resolution apologizing for any damage done. And in 2015-- so we're in the 2000s now-- in 2015, the assembly agreed to compensate anyone who had been forcibly sterilized. Jyoti Asundi (56:17) However, they have still not outlawed it. Aarati Asundi (56:20) Yes, they still have not, declared it's unconstitutional. Jyoti Asundi (56:24) They are saying what we did was wrong, we will compensate and yet actually technically that is still law. Aarati Asundi (56:32) Yeah, technically it's not illegal. Jyoti Asundi (56:34) So technically if somebody in Virginia is institutionalized for let's say epilepsy, they can still be sterilized on an involuntary basis. Aarati Asundi (56:47) I think so. I know that there are now laws that there has to be some consent from either the patient themselves or some caregiver or something. But I still think that there is that loophole that if they were involuntarily sterilized... Jyoti Asundi (57:04) Yes, it would still be law, lawful. Aarati Asundi (57:05) that original law has never been rescinded. Jyoti Asundi (57:08) Oh wow, unbelievable that we live in these kind of times. Aarati Asundi (57:13) Yes. Jyoti Asundi (57:13) We are in 2025 and we still have to face this kind of discrimination. This is terrible. Aarati Asundi (57:19) And I mean, I think it's especially horrible for like, I feel like this was probably just another sexist thing because if women... Jyoti Asundi (57:28) I don't know if it was sexist or racist. Aarati Asundi (57:31) Probably both, honestly. But I'm just thinking of the fact that, like, if women could just be put away for something as vague as female hysteria, and someone could just say, I want her to be sterilized, you know? Jyoti Asundi (57:44) That's incredible that they would do this. And I can see a whole lot people who not of Caucasian descent being subjected to this law. Aarati Asundi (57:53) Yeah, I do feel like it was like, you know, very like I can see so clearly how the white male would have been able to gain a lot of power from this kind of a law because now they can they can just declare anybody to be mentally disabled or mentally handicapped or something and... Jyoti Asundi (58:13) and take away fundamental rights. Yes. Aarati Asundi (58:13) If it's a woman, if it's a person of a different color, whatever it is, yeah, and they can just be like, well, you're not going to argue with me because I'm the white man in this situation, so... Jyoti Asundi (58:22) And the more you argue, the more "hysterical" you seem. And therefore, I have the ability to take away your fundamental rights to reproduction. Terrible, terrible. unbelievable. Aarati Asundi (58:36) So slowly scientists started to gather data to debunk all of these theories, showing that people who scored higher on IQ tests generally had access to things like education, health care, and proper nutrition. All very important for your cognitive ability. Importantly, today IQ tests are not used to clinically diagnose anyone with any sort of mental illness or disability. Jyoti Asundi (59:02) Okay, yes. Aarati Asundi (59:03) However, it is still used sometimes to identify people who may have a disability and provide them with better educational support, job training, and appropriate health care. Jyoti Asundi (59:15) Yeah bring them back into society in a more constructive way so that they can contribute to society. Yeah. Aarati Asundi (59:23) Yeah, so that's pretty much the story of Alfred Binet his IQ test and how we kind of screwed it up for a while there, but then sort of got right back on track. Jyoti Asundi (59:35) That is a wonderful story. It's funny because this kind of testing for mental abilities, the mental faculties of people, many, many tests have bee... have come up from that time on. IQ tests, EQ tests. And as you were telling me this story, it reminded me of the competency test that was conducted at Stanford. S Aarati Asundi (1:00:02) I don't know about that. Jyoti Asundi (1:00:04) So basically there was a set of people at Stanford who wanted to see how competent you are. Aarati Asundi (1:00:12) Okay. At... at life? Jyoti Asundi (1:00:14) At life, basically at life. Aarati Asundi (1:00:16) Yeah, okay. Jyoti Asundi (1:00:17) I don't remember the parameters of the test. But what I do remember is if you are very, very highly competent person. You're out there, you set your mind to it, you achieve it. Then when somebody asks you, hey, how competent do you think you are? In general, either you are pretty good at saying, yes, I'm fairly competent person... Aarati Asundi (1:00:45) Yeah. Jyoti Asundi (1:00:45) ...or you are humble or you are self-deprecating and you say something like 90%, not necessarily on purpose, but you genuinely have a humbler opinion of yourself. Aarati Asundi (1:00:56) I'm sure there's someone out there better than me. Yeah. Jyoti Asundi (1:00:59) Exactly. But the people who are really incompetent also thought of themselves as very competent. Aarati Asundi (1:01:06) Ah yes. Jyoti Asundi (1:01:09) So then the researchers said, let me show you a highly competent person. So they would showcase to this highly incompetent person, they would showcase to them a highly competent person and say, this is what that person did. Now, what do you think of your capabilities, your competency in connection, in the context of that person's competency. And they still doubled down and said, I am highly competent. Aarati Asundi (1:01:37) Oh my gosh. Jyoti Asundi (1:01:38) I'm almost equally competent. Aarati Asundi (1:01:40) So there's like a correlation between low competency and high confidence in yourself. Jyoti Asundi (1:01:46) No, no. Let me add a little more. So what the researchers said was, a certain threshold of competency is required in a person to even be able to determine their own competency level accurately. Aarati Asundi (1:02:02) Ah! Am-hmm. Jyoti Asundi (1:02:03) So if you are not competent to a certain level, then you are completely incapable of figuring out... Aarati Asundi (1:02:11) where you fall on a scale. Jyoti Asundi (1:02:13) Where you fall, where other people fall, you're completely unable, the scale is entirely missing from your ability to judge. Aarati Asundi (1:02:22) Yes. I wonder if that's something you could also on that. You know, the same way Alfred Binet was saying, you can improve your intelligence if you work on it. But for you to work on it, you have to understand that there's something for you to work on. Jyoti Asundi (1:02:35) Something missing, yes. So how do you slowly create awareness in them you need to improve, yeah. So I just wanted to add that one small piece there. Aarati Asundi (1:02:47) Very interesting. Jyoti Asundi (1:02:47) This was a fantastic story. He wanted to use those tools to say, you're highly intelligent. Yours requires work. Here are the tools for you to work and make yourself better. Here you can learn some empathy. You can learn other skills from this person. So both of you work together and make society more harmonious. That was his take on it. Aarati Asundi (1:03:09) We were touching on this before that everybody learns differently. Everyone has a different pace at which they learn things and figure things out. And I think that was even true for Alfred Binet's life. Until his mid-20s, he had no idea what he was doing. And he kept making mistakes. He kept falling down. But he kept on learning from it. And then that was all integrated into his final work on intelligence that he's like, this is something you can work on. Jyoti Asundi (1:03:35) Yes. Yes, absolutely. His legacy to the world was so impressive. And it all was rooted in those early failures and his ability to humble himself enough to learn from the criticisms that he received. Aarati Asundi (1:03:51) Yes. So keep at it. Jyoti Asundi (1:03:53) Fantastic. Yes a very inspiring message. Aarati Asundi (1:03:57) Thanks for listening. If you have a suggestion for a story we should cover or thoughts you want to share about an episode, reach out to us at smartteapodcast.com. You can follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Bluesky @smartteapodcast and listen to us on Spotify, Apple podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a rating or comment. It helps us grow. New episodes are released every other Wednesday. See you next time!