As if everything wasn’t bad enough, now we’re all getting stupider. That, at least, was one interpretation of an interview earlier this week with the presenter of Radio 4’s long-running quiz Brain of Britain, in which he said today’s contestants were struggling more than before to get the answers right.
It’s not that the questions are getting harder – the host Russell Davies and the regular question-setter Elissa Mattinson told Radio Times they were often asked by producers to simplify their submissions. But the quiz’s elusive bonus point – offered when a contestant gives five correct answers in a row – was being achieved more and more rarely, Davies said. Just when we could really do with some smart people around, it seems even the eggheads on Britain’s toughest quiz are dumbing down.
Except, with the notable exception of politicians, that was not Davies’s point (quizzing the initial lineup of Tory leadership contenders would be pointless, he said – “literally pointless in some cases”). Rather, in a highly connected and turbulent world, there is just so much more stuff to know to be considered “well-informed”.
“I don’t think the contestants are getting any worse at all,” says Jane Allen, who as founder of the British and International Quiz Associations runs the World Quizzing Championship and oversees teams setting questions for Pointless, Mastermind and many others (“My business card says I’m the queen of quiz.”)
Instead, she says, “the quiz canon, if you like, has expanded over the years. It’s 55 years since Brain of Britain started” – Allen knows this, of course – “and in that time, more famous buildings have been erected, more records have been set and broken, more art has been made, more books written. People’s general knowledge has expanded hugely because the world’s expanded hugely”.
That’s emphatically a good thing, according to Bobby Seagull, who shot to swot celebrity in 2017 with his University Challenge rival Eric Monkman – the pair went on to present the BBC’s Monkman and Seagull’s Genius Guide to Britain. Now a school maths teacher (and writing occasional Brain of Britain questions), Seagull stresses that excellence in general knowledge needs to encompass the experiences of all – gaming, women’s cricket, the history of diverse communities, PewDiePie – not just those with a particular education.
Inevitably, creating the space to learn amid the white noise of teenage life is a challenge for his students, says Seagull. “They have phones with Instagram and TikTok, there’s constantly, constantly a source of entertainment available. And if you’re an educator, you’re competing against that space.”
As well as embracing technology himself, he has taught his students about the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve, an influential psychological model that seeks to explain why facts fall out of our brains so soon after we hear them. “The first time you learn something, you remember 100%, then you forget it; you revise it again the next day, and then two days later, you forget it. So then you revise it again. Whether with revision or quizzing, the more you expose yourself to things from different angles, the more likely they are to stay in your long-term memory.”
It can be treacherous to dip a toe into the psychology of memory, where one can find a study to back up any point one might wish to make about how brainy or thick we are progressively becoming. Much of this turns on how we define intelligence, notes the chartered psychologist and writer Audrey Tang, a measure that still frequently relies on early 20th-century IQ theories that many dispute.
IQ scores, such as BMI measurements and personality-type tests, can be useful tools, but are also necessarily limiting, says Tang. “You then have a very reductive approach to [the questions of] what is intelligence? And who gets the opportunities? And how might society be run?”
Some may train themselves to remember lots of facts – “It’s a lot of work to be really, really good at general knowledge,” says Allen. Others, notes Tang, “use modern technology as a substitute for our memory. We don’t need to remember something because we can Google it – and then there’s no motivation to learn anything else”.
The good news, according to Linda Blair, a practising psychologist and author based in Bath, is that we can, indeed, get better at remembering. She cites a study which showed that the brains of London taxi drivers, who undertake extensive training to learn the streetmap of the city in detail, were different to those of a control sample. “We can change our brains in adult life. We don’t put effort into remembering things. And that’s all it takes – effort.”
