Myth #6-R

Hey, everybody. Myth number six here. Let's go on and take a look at this.

This is a bell shaped curve and it's

measuring IQ score. I'm sure you've heard of IQ.

It stands for intelligence quotient.

And if you'll notice there,

there's a yellow portion there with 100 being in the middle and the range is 85 to 115.

Uh So those are quote unquote normal IQ scores.

And

of course, the average

right smack dab in the middle is 100. So

what are we saying here? We're saying that

the majority, vast,

vast majority of the human population falls right there in the middle at 100

then

the range of plus or minus 15 is a little bit smaller.

As you can see the little, the little curve,

right, fewer people

at 85 and fewer people at 115.

And as we go on either side, either to 130 in the blue zone or 70

even smaller percentage of the people.

And as we get to

those green zones, that's even tinier tinier percentage of the population.

So, um

I've got news for you if you think that you are above average or below average.

I'm sorry.

But you probably are not, you're probably average just like all the rest of us are,

most of us are

completely average. As you can see by the curve. You see how the red curve goes way up.

That's the most number of people there, right in the middle at 100.

All right. So that's,

that's where we are. That's what the bell shaped curve tells us.

It's just statistical fact.

Um So the myth is that deaf Children are not as intelligent as hearing

Children. And as you

can see,

we're all

in this thing together, right? This is, this is not a bell shaped curve based on

um deaf people or hearing people. This is everybody falls into this.

All right.

So quickly, psychologists measure intelligence,

which means cognitive potential, meaning the ability to learn and use knowledge,

but not the actual knowledge itself.

So it's not like

um you're going on a trivia night and measuring your

uh memory of trivia,

history, trivia or science, trivia, et cetera. It's, it's the ability

to

use your cognitive

uh potential. Right?

Again, it says right here, standardized intelligence tests, the average IQ is

100

that

right there

right there proof is right there. We are all basically in that yellow zone.

Um Much, much fewer of us are in the blue and the green zones there.

So Yoda is very, very full of wisdom.

I'm not quite sure what his IQ is but he probably falls in the,

in the green zone. I mean, look at him.

He's green, he probably falls in the green zone.

Uh, being deaf doesn't mean you're dumb.

Just like being hearing doesn't mean you're smart. I'm sure we've all met

our share of

a wide variety of people who

don't seem as intelligent as, as we think they ought to seem. Right.

Um,

the problem is that most intelligence tests include hearing,

which is probably not the most fair thing in the world

when you're measuring intelligence of a person who can't hear.

Uh,

but when the tests, um,

like the sub tests that they use are fair,

they actually hearing and deaf people actually perform equally as well.

Again falling in that average yellow zone right there.

Now, the patterns on the scars on parts of the test may be different.

I don't know if you've ever had an IQ test, but they take a

long time, a psychologist has to administer it.

It's full of a variety of subtests that

measure all kinds of different things that your brain,

you know, is capable of doing

and

patterns on scores are gonna be different for all of us.

Like I might be high in one area but low in another

and you might be vice versa. And that's what kind of brings us together

and gives us that whole average thing. Right.

So we all have our,

our strengths and our weaknesses.

It just is what it is.

Um

The problem though, historically, with deaf people has been that

um speech

or lack of ability to do speech has been confused with intelligence,

but they are not related.

Let me say that again, speech is often confused with intelligence

but they are not

related.

I put the example of Stephen Hawking, I'm sure you've all heard of Stephen Hawking.

He was a very famous

physicist who probably, by the way,

probably

was in the green zone with his actual IQ.

Uh but he had a

disease that rendered him unable to use his voice any longer.

Did that make him unintelligent?

No,

of course not because he could still communicate what

was going on in his very intelligent mind.

And he did so with uh

computers, technology, et cetera,

oftentimes. So speaking of IQ uh in years past, in our country,

because IQ tests, the subtests

weren't very fair in measuring deaf people.

They were thought to be

in these blue in this blue zone

and therefore cognitively delayed or cognitively disabled.

And that's, and that's how they were labeled basically and treated

um

which has been the experience of some deaf people in our country.

We are getting better. Now, this was maybe more the experience back in the,

oh you know, earlier part of the century,

up until around the sixties when we started to realize that

um

you could, deaf people could still communicate using sign language

we thought the only way that you could communicate was by

speech.

So again, that's why

that's where the terms deaf and dumb come from. Dumb used to mean mute.

And we thought that deaf people were mute, meaning they couldn't speak

and

uh mute.

Well, actually dumb was first dumb

turned into mute because

words change all the time, their meaning

and the word dumb

de

decided to be something else, right?

People started changing the meaning of dumb and associating it with

unintelligent.

Uh Of course, now we don't use deaf and dumb.

We don't use that terminology anymore because that

the words have changed meanings and it's,

it's rather insulting to call somebody dumb deaf and dumb especially.

Well, here's a neat little quote that's attributed to Albert Einstein.

I did not fact check this at all. So I don't know if it's true, but I just really like it.

He says everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree,

it will live its whole life. Believing it is stupid.

For many years, deaf people were

judged on their ability to

speech, read

and to use their voice.

And that is why

uh

they often felt them themselves to be stupid

or less than, or unintelligent, right?

And also other people in their lives and educators and

their parents thought that way about them as well.

Luckily, uh we've evolved and we've gotten better

at understanding

what it is to be deaf?

Ok. Here's the question though. And I get this question every year.

Do deaf individuals see better?

All right. Well, you've, you've all heard of sensory compensation.

Obviously, it's a natural adaptation as a result of having to

depend on one sense over another.

Absolutely.

And uh what we know from research is that deaf

people and sometimes even hearing people who use sign language,

like a coda

who, you know, a child of deaf adults

or someone who grew up signing around deaf

people do show advantages and several visual disabilities.

So let's look further into that though.

OK, hearing and deaf people have the same visual abilities.

All right,

we have the same ability to notice differences between brighter and darker images

and between different temporal patterns.

And those are two common basic evaluations for visual

processing and you might see something like that on

uh an IQ test. It could be a subtest

uh for visual processing. OK. So we have the same visual abilities.

Deaf people don't have

different eyes, they don't develop

a different process in their actual ability to take in information with their eyes.

Here's where the differences show up

when we go to higher levels of complexity.

All right. So that is attention,

deaf people notice quicker when something appears in peripheral vision, you know,

that's that vision off to the side, right?

They are much faster at shifting their attention

to the periphery and then shifting it back.

Uh Deaf people notice more.

Uh I can attest to this having been around and working among and with deaf people for

decades of my life.

Um Absolutely deaf people notice more

in the visual realm, things like gestures, facial expressions,

eye mouth and body movements.

All right. And those are all part of a sl

those are a part of

um you know, getting certain

points and nuances across, right?

There's lots of nuances in a sl some of you may be picking up on those.

Um Now some of you might be

not quite picking up on some of those yet, but you will the longer that you are

involved in a sl and especially with deaf people.

Also, they are gonna be picking up on

pictures accompanying text,

spatial layout of objects and visual characteristics of people and things.

Um Those are more important to deaf people than they are for hearing people.

And those kinds of things would also be like special layouts and

characteristics. Those are also subtests on A Q test that

deaf people are gonna probably sky score much higher than you. And I would

especially

a deaf child with deaf adults because we know that

it is possible that

their auditory

cortex was taken over by their

uh visual cortex, right?

So they have tons and tons of visual processing ability that you and I don't have.

So the final question is, do deaf people see better?

No, they don't actually see better,

but they attend better

to what occurs around them than you and I do.

All right, I'm gonna stop this one here.

See you next time. Bye.

Myth #6-R

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