Mary Beard
Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge

“Intelligence” quite simply equals “brain power”. So can you, quite simply, measure it? Are really intelligent people the equivalent of the Aston Martin (where the rest of us are Ford Fiestas?) Happily, the answer is no. After 30 years teaching in a university, I’ve begun to understand that, even among the boffins, brain power comes in many different forms: from the knack of high-level theorising through razor-sharp logic to imaginative originality. There is no single scale for measuring all that.

Sir Peter Lampl
Chairman of the Sutton Trust, which helps deprived children to get to Oxford

Highly able children express their intelligence in many ways: the analytical skills needed to master a wide range of information and identify quickly relevant trends or issues; the communication skills needed to present facts in a meaningful way; and the people skills that are so essential for forming fruitful relationships: knowing when and what to say and to whom. Often it is the combination of all these that make people successful in life.

A. C. Grayling
Professor of Philosophy, Birkbeck College

The marks of intelligence are alertness, perceptiveness, wit, curiosity, creative responses to opportunities and problems, and the ability to learn quickly from errors. Intelligent people tend not to be mentally lazy or pedestrian, because being smart enough to recognise that one is either or both these things makes for dissatisfaction. Intelligent people are more often than not self-motivating and ambitious and derive pleasure from putting their talents to use. The value of what results depends, of course, on whether the intelligence in question is bent to good or bad ends.

Dr Maria Leitner
British Mensa Supervisory Psychologist

With regard to Mensa membership, the definition of intelligence is in fact a score on a well-validated IQ test. More broadly, there is simply no commonly agreed definition of intelligence. Most IQ tests (and most available attempts at definition of intelligence) focus on a background that ties together a set of skills. These will reflect a person’s ability to problem solve, to think logically and reason; to adapt to change; to think “outside the box”. One can argue that what ties the skills together is a quite primitive notion of dealing well with one’s environment — that is, in evolutionary terms, having a brain that is likely to facilitate one’s survival.

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