school and you can guess from the title
is we’re going to talk about my clearest
memories are of sexual molestation
physical violence and emotional cruelty
and for me I always look back when I
talk to my peers have helped my
schooling and I feel that what I
experienced was closer to a Dickens
novel than what most people do it listen
far obviously inside me I had a mantra
if only I was stronger
if only I was smarter and that kind of
that mantra although it’s very unstable
and it’s very misguided obviously what
happened to me had nothing to do about
being strong or by about being smart and
it also has nothing about being happy
which is what I then dedicated my life
to is how do I help other children other
people get stronger and smarter so they
can be happier but what I find
interesting is I’m luckily or wisely I
don’t really know how it happened I made
my life about trying to achieve that for
other people and even though I had this
sort of misguided sense of the world
where I was trying to go it put me on
this amazing journey which has been
incredibly diverse and I hope it’s a
unique perspective on the world and it’s
taken in all sorts of areas so I’m a
scientist I’m a entrepreneur I’ve been
an educator and yes I’ve even worked as
a martial artist and an anti-terrorism
trainer I’ve got to work with Stephen
Hawking which was a great privilege when
I was at Cambridge I have traveled the
world and worked with all sorts of elite
forces and tried to save lives there but
I’ve also traveled to Libya and seen
firsthand what that was like when
Colonel Qaddafi was in power so I’ve
been into a number of places and where
that’s led me now is is I now run a
company I spend most of my days running
a company what we do is roll back the
great mysteries of how the brain works
and we do in a way that you wouldn’t
imagine you’d think that was some sort
of education business and it’s not we
work in digital marketing what we do is
we map and measure and respond to the
cognitive processes that consumers go
through as they interact with brands but
interestingly
we get to work with as many as 26
million people in a day and it’s it’s
kind of like a lab on a scale that’s
utterly unprecedented and it gives me
the chance to it’s kind of a dream come
true to look into the mysteries that
kind of always perplexed me before I got
into this area because they just didn’t
have enough information or data to solve
them and what I want to talk about today
is what I call the elephant in the room
with education it’s something that has
been dear to my heart for well I mean
since the beginning but this particular
topic for at least 10 years and what I
think is true is that there’s a problem
at the heart of education that we all
know we know that although it works for
some for many it crushes creativity and
it destroys their confidence and the
reason for that or one of the reasons I
believe is that about 30 years ago
essentially IQ was trying to tell us
something we didn’t want to listen we
didn’t want to hear what it was trying
to tell us because it seems so
unpalatable and so because we wanted
lives to be better for our kids we kind
of ignored it we didn’t know you might
not know directly that’s what you did
but that’s what happened and ever since
then we’ve been kind of making mistake
after mistake in education what I want
to do today is to take you on a journey
I want to turn the world upside down I
want to talk go straight into that
uncomfortable place with what IQ is
telling us but then to show you that if
you’ve got the courage to sit with that
to not try and deny it but also to not
accept it straight away there’s a
journey through that and interesting or
I found is that journey goes back to
what we all know is true what we really
want for our kids and what we know is
right for if you like for education so I
suppose the best place to start is well
what is IQ and it’s obviously a very
well-known thing it is basic your
general intelligence your ability to
solve problems the average is a hundred
most people range from 85 to 115 and
there’s the odd genius out there one in
a million that’s over 170 and so what
does IQ why is it so important because
it’s the most predictive psychometric
that’s ever been discovered it strongly
predicts your peak income for instance
it even predicts how likely you are to
get divorced and Moe
significantly it is incredibly strongly
correlated with your academic
performance so what’s the problem the
problem is really simple IQ is basically
inherited how do we know that well we
knew that 30 years ago by studying what
happens to twins for instance when
they’re adopted and brought up in
different families obviously if they’re
brought up in the same family by
comparing it and by doing that they
created studies that could show which
bits of your IQ came from your genes
which bits came from your family from
your parents putting input in and which
bit came from your school essentially
and the most interesting of those I find
is this one which was a fantastic study
that looked at a group of I think it was
250 children roughly through their
lifetime and what I find the most scary
thing about this is if you look at the
age of five as a parent you’re
contributing hugely maybe not the
dominant thing to you almost as equally
to to their genes in terms of their IQ
but the message here if you look at the
chart sort of goes downwards it’s not
just that as the child approaches 12
we’re no longer in putting into their IQ
it’s that our input has been completely
wiped out now the thing is with IQ is
you don’t need infinite amounts of it in
fact by the time you reach 115 points
you can pretty much do anything you want
so IQ is really predictive between 85
and 105 where most of us fit the problem
is yes if we could raise IQ on average
in education by 15 points then lives
would be transformed but science is
telling us you can only raise it by
about four points and reality is saying
you’re not even doing that so what do I
mean by reality one of the things we do
with schools is we rank them through SAT
tests the standardized academic tests
they correlate very well with IQ and we
use that as somehow a way of
benchmarking how good a school is but
what we’re actually doing is
benchmarking how smart the children were
always destined to be in terms of IQ
when they entered the school and when
they left the school it’s all the same
now if we take that away if we just look
at what’s the difference between when
the children enter the school and when
they leave the school we get a radically
different picture between the bottom two
percent of schools and
top 2% of schools there is only a six
and a half percent swing in performance
now I don’t know if that sounds
significant it should be a hundred
percent it should be two hundred percent
it should be massive but it isn’t it’s
tiny and that’s practically saying
something that is very difficult to hear
we’re born with a certain amount of IQ
or destined to have a certain amount of
IQ that determines a certain amount of
factors one of those is how well you’re
going to do at school and there is
nothing you can do from the day that
you’re born to the day you finish school
to change that very much now there’ll
always be exceptions to that rule but
I’m talking about the rule of the
average and yet we’re using that to
measure the performance of Education so
that’s what I mean by the dark place the
place that was unpalatable and we didn’t
want to go now what’s interesting to me
as a neuroscientist is it’s the last
thing I would ever expect to be true of
the human brain that there would be this
one parameter this one thing that could
measure your intelligence there’s a sort
of a single number and I don’t mean that
from kind of my heart place that I look
around me and there’s such diversity in
the world of people that’s true too but
the brain isn’t really built in a way
that you’d think that would work so just
as a starting point I just want to bring
across the power of the brain so when I
started in computers the be the most
powerful computer world is a Cray – it’s
shown up there at the moment it was this
massive thing at least fill the stage
probably more it was so powerful it had
to have liquid nitrogen to cool its
cause and it’s roughly the power of the
iPhone 6 in your pocket today right now
if the iPhone 6 is a walking pace in
terms of computers then it would take
you about a year to walk from here to
Sydney as you’ll foot touch the pavement
on your first step your brain would go
around the world 200,000 times that’s
the difference between your iPhone 6 and
what you’re carrying in your head right
now it’s absolutely vast but even more
interestingly it’s so diverse it’s
nothing it’s the last thing you would
expect from what I just told you you’re
not one computer you’re a hundred
billion computers and in fact the
intelligence that you are is encoded in
a hundred trillion connections between
those computers are those connections
built from your genes no they’re not
they’re built on a user or lose it
principle in fact your brain goes
through the equivalent of a trillion
years of human evolution
over its lifetime it’s also a very it’s
got lots of little localized clusters of
things that work so there’s a little bit
that deals with grammar and there’s a
little bit that deals with recognizing
faces and there are hundreds of these
centers across the brain so when you
look at it you wouldn’t think that there
would be a single measure of
intelligence you’d think that where
there would be thousands and they would
be based on the environment not on
genetics now by the work that I’ve done
and simply the number of people we’ve
been able to unlock this a little bit
further and then to understand other
studies that have been there about kind
of other properties that people have and
in fact what we’ve discovering what
we’re working with is they’re actually
three sorts of intelligence one is
abstraction intelligence what we’ve been
talking about the ability to layer
abstract ideas IQ problem-solving then
there’s artists and our ability to learn
new things whether that’s chess music
you know do all those skills that we can
pick up and then complex the
intelligence which is the last thing you
expect it to mean if it’s social it’s
more like an emotional intelligence and
if it’s kind of pointed inwards it’s an
aesthetic intelligence so like I said
not quite what you might expect and
although you can’t study them exactly
we’ve worked out a huge amount about
these and being able to relate them to
various functions and studies around the
brain now the first thing I cover off is
how on earth can i Q be singular and the
best way I can explain that to you is
that although the IQ test it’s
misunderstood it’s very very test it’s
got verbal reasoning new memory skills
spatial awareness it works using your
conscious mind all the time and by doing
that there’s a feature it’s very hard to
define conscious but there’s a feature
you can define quite easily and that’s
can be seen in these pictures if you
look at the pictures you can either see
one version or the other your mind can
flip between the two but seeing both at
the same time it’s pretty much
impossible your conscious brain brings
the world into a single scene it’s the
most amazing thing our brain does it’s
done by billions of connections bringing
your whole neocortex your upper brain
into synchrony in about half a second
and IQ has to do with the performance of
that system which is why it’s a single
measure now let’s go to something else
art design intelligence the clearest bit
of information I give you about that is
when scientists studied what I call
skill athletes chess players muse
Editions and they look to the difference
between the world’s best and the
professionals and sort of the people in
the middle they found one consistent
thing that linked them together and that
was the number of hours of practice the
people at the top about 20,000 the
people who are just kind of on the
professionals out of 5,000 everyone else
in between what’s interesting is we’ve
gone from having something that’s
completely almost inherited to something
that’s completely based on our behavior
and choices now the next thing
complexity intelligence is very hard to
study whether that’s aesthetic or social
or emotional but what we have discovered
by studying a number of these kind of
thousands of factors that make it up is
it is related to your personality
development and what I’m showing on the
screen is is called the big five it’s
your fundamental package kind of set of
traits in personality and what you
should be able to see here is really
interesting that yes you do inherit it
to an extent but the pivotal part of
this that you that isn’t inherited comes
from your school life so what does that
mean for education what should we be
doing and I just want to propose
something isn’t really groundbreaking
that we should be firstly focusing on
what we can actually change what we can
actually empower people to do and not on
a very narrow perspective of something
that’s hard to change or we can make a
little difference in so if we look at
education through that principle we see
two things will actually shine out the
top two things on that list the first is
to focus on artisan intelligence what
does that mean it means understanding
that everybody’s got a different brain
that they’re actually on a creative
journey from you know the moment they’re
kind of they’re born all the way through
their lives working out what matters to
them how they work and how they can use
themselves to get what matters to them
and a lot of people think oh if you’re
talking about our talent agents you’re
talking about just you know bit of
design technology and will you be an
apprentice and are you going to go into
carpentry but I’m not I mean music and
martial arts are more pure but actually
what we’re talking about is inspiring
kids to practice it could be BMX riding
it could be tiddlywinks it really
couldn’t matter less because what
they’re doing is discovering how they
work how to get themselves to be better
at something and that’s immensely
important that’s something that 100%
that we can change and the second factor
which I think is utterly
critical is that schools play this
pivotal role in terms of our personality
development and there is the science
there to measure whether they’re doing a
good job now personality is very
individual I’m not suggesting we’re all
trying to conform people like SAT tests
to one thing but think about personality
a different way if you’ve been nourished
you’ve had good loving experiences your
personality is kind of well-rounded and
smooth and it’s comfortable with itself
and if you haven’t it’s jagged and
they’re kind of a little off set and
uncomfortable it’s not about the sort of
general space it it feels it’s about
it’s sort of shape and quality but we
can measure that can you imagine a
school system where we ranked schools by
measuring the personality development of
the children within them and how well
they were supporting each teacher in
each classroom each year each school was
doing that it would be a radically
different process right at the bottom
you’ll see I put abstract intelligence
because that’s about discovering if
you’ve got those abilities and then
taking them further but it’s not a place
of this is central I think what we need
to do is really ask the question what
matters and I think we do know what
matters the problem is by making
everything about SAT scores by making it
all about peeking comes or a limited
amount of professional development we
focus on IQ and we disenfranchise a lot
of kids by doing it but if we ask
ourselves what we want for our kids I’ve
got five of them I couldn’t give a stuff
how much they earn in their lives and I
don’t care if they turn into doctors or
lawyers but what I care about is are
they happy are they at current do they
contribute to the world around them can
they form great relationships and in
fact economically I haven’t got time to
go into here this is a great you knows a
lot of evidence there that actually what
you’re looking at with education
performance isn’t a full predictor of
that so really what I wanted to say was
by looking at that idea of IQ and by
going through it we come to a completely
different place with it with education
and by going somewhere dark and having
the courage to face it you come through
to something kind of a different vision
and what I hope now is here we have
teachers with what they’re trying to
achieve in the skills they have and
actually they can do this job we have
governments that need to measure it and
they’ve been at war for twenty thirty
years with kids in the middle and we
actually have the technology to overcome
that war and to end that fight
thank you [Applause]