I was today years old when I learned that a snail once “rose from the dead”. Almost four years after it was glued to a piece of paper and exhibited in a museum. The Egyptian desert snail was donated to the British History Museum in 1846. It was labeled, dated and put on display. Nothing out of the ordinary there. But what the museum didn’t realize was that the snail was actually alive.
Canadian science writer and novelist, Grant Allen penned this amusing account of the incident in Seven Year Sleepers: “Being a snail of a retiring and contented disposition, however, accustomed to long droughts and corresponding naps in his native sand-wastes, our mollusk thereupon simply curled himself up into the topmost recesses of his own whorls, and went placidly to sleep in perfect contentment for an unlimited period.”
Allen went on to write, “the desert snail might have snoozed away his inglorious existence unsuspected, but for a happy accident which attracted public attention to his remarkable case in a most extraordinary manner." On March 7 in 1850, staffers discovered the exhibit card was slightly discolored. They removed the snail, gave him some water and out peeked his tentacles. The rest, as they say, is history.
I now have something really interesting to share at the dinner table tonight. But does knowing a wealth of facts make me intelligent? Would I be able to join Mensa, the elite club made up of some of the world’s most brilliant brains? Bored Panda reached out to Charles Brown to find out. He’s the Director of Marketing and Communication for American Mensa.
Mensa is known as the world’s largest, oldest and most famous members-only club for the super smart. A high IQ society made up of around 150,000 highly intelligent people. Only 2% of the global population. They have branches on every continent except for Antarctica.” One of their famous members is Hollywood actress, Geena Davis.
We asked Brown to define intelligence. “At its most basic level, being intelligent just means you can learn or understand things more easily and solve problems more quickly than others,” said Brown. “Generally, someone is born with high intelligence. That intelligence can be nurtured so that it manifests itself in ways that people commonly associate with high intelligence, but you still shouldn’t confuse intelligence with book smarts. Those two things are not mutually inclusive or exclusive."
The Oxford dictionary defines “book smart” as “having a lot of academic knowledge learned from books and studying, but not necessarily knowing much about people and living in the real world.” So, learning a bunch of interesting facts from this list or the factsdailyy Instagram page might make us book smart but not necessarily street smart. Or intelligent.
Mensa only accepts super smart people, so we wanted to know how we could get in. “Candidates must first qualify for membership before they can join,” Brown told Bored Panda. “In American Mensa, they do this in one of two ways. The first is by submitting proof that they have taken a qualifying exam in the past and scored in the top 2% of the general population. The second is by sitting for our exam and scoring in the top 2%."
When Brown talks about testing, he’s referring to an Intelligence Quotient, or IQ test. The BBC's Science Focus puts it like this: “Scores are gathered by participants completing standardized tests that measure abilities in puzzle-solving, memory, and more. Based on a median score of what’s typically around 100, your given IQ score is relative to that of the general intelligence of the population. Below 85 is seen as a poor score, 130 and above is smart (in the top 2% of the population).”
“Scientifically, IQ is the difference between someone’s chronological age and their mental age,” said Brown, before getting a bit more technical. “Traditionally, this was established by administering a test and comparing the results with previous test takers to see what age the average person would be when they achieved the same results. The formula is basically MA/CA * 100.”
Brown added that test results could differ from day to day, “It is important to note that this number is a snapshot of a person at one moment in time. Modern tests use what is called a confidence interval to say that we can be 90% sure that this person’s IQ will fall between X and Y on any given day. That is usually the IQ score the test yielded +/- 5 points.”
