“I said it as a joke. I think I am getting dumber.”

The test I ended up taking

40 questions. Four kinds of thinking.

Scored separately, so you find out which one is actually yours. About 25 minutes.

Show me my score

$0.99 for 14 days, then $29.99/mo. Cancel any time.

It started as a joke at the kitchen table, which is where most of the uncomfortable things in this house start.

My daughter was home and we were laughing about attention spans. Hers, mostly. She had just admitted she cannot get through a film any more without checking her phone twice, and that half the people at her work have stopped reading anything longer than a paragraph. Then she said the thing that ended the joking part of the evening.

“It is not getting better either. Everyone just asks the AI now. Nobody sits and works anything out any more.”

And I said, without really thinking about it, “I feel like I am getting dumber.”

I meant it as a laugh. Nobody laughed. She looked at me for slightly too long and said, “Well, when did you last actually find out?”

Here is the thing. I knew exactly what I used to be.

They tested us at school. Properly, sat in a hall, pencil and paper, the whole business. My mother kept the letter and I have known the number on it my entire adult life the way you know your own birthday.

At seventeen I scored [128].

I have leaned on that number quietly for forty years. Not out loud, I am not that man, but it sat there in the back of everything. Bad meeting, difficult client, a decision that went the wrong way. Whatever else, I knew what I had.

And sitting at that table I realised I had absolutely no idea whether I still had it. Nobody had tested me since 1983. School tested my thinking. Work tested my output. Somewhere along the way those two stopped being the same thing and nobody tells you when the switch happens.

So I went looking, and the first three were a con

Free IQ test, top of the search results. I did three of them that evening and they were identical. Twelve questions. A progress bar. Then a page telling me I was in the top two percent and would I like the certificate for $19.99.

Everyone is in the top two percent. That is not a result, it is a checkout screen with a compliment stapled to the front.

Then I found MensaIQ, and the reason I kept going with this one is very simple. It was the first one that looked like the test I actually sat in that school hall. Forty questions, not twelve. Number sequences, word analogies, logic problems, and the drawn pattern grids where you work out the rule and find the missing tile. Same shape of thing, forty years later, on a screen instead of paper.

On the price, because I know that is the question. It is $0.99 to get in for a fortnight and $29.99 a month after that if you stay. Against the three free ones that wanted $19.99 for a PDF certificate and told me nothing at all, a dollar for a proper forty question test was honestly not a bad deal. Set yourself a reminder for day thirteen if you do not intend to keep it. I nearly did not, and I forget everything.

Forty questions, and it turns on you around 25

The early ones are gentle. What number comes next: 3, 6, 9, 12. Kitten is to cat as puppy is to what. I remember thinking, here we go, same con in different colours.

It is not the same con. There are three difficulty tiers and a small row of dots in the corner telling you which one you are in, and somewhere in the twenties that second dot fills and the questions stop being polite.

Then the third dot filled and I put my glasses back on, which I had not done for a test since 1983.

Try the one that got me. Question 36 of 40.

Reproduced exactly. Do not scroll past it, because how you feel doing this is the whole point of the article.

Then the score came up

I had quietly assumed I would land near where I started. A few points off, fine, blame the eyesight, close the laptop and tell my daughter to mind her own business at dinner.

It came back [108].

I sat and looked at it for a long time. Twenty points. Not a rounding error, not a bad night. Twenty points below the number I had been quietly carrying around since I was seventeen years old.

That is what twenty points looks like when you draw it. It is not a small slide along a line. It is the difference between sitting out in the thin part of the curve where very few people are, and sitting in the fat middle with almost everybody else.

My first thought was that the test was broken. My second thought arrived about a minute later and was considerably worse: what if it is not.

Then I scrolled down, and the whole thing turned over

Underneath the number was the part I had not bothered to look at yet. Four separate bars. Numerical, verbal, logical, spatial. Each one scored on its own.

They were not level. They were nowhere near level. Three were sitting low and one was miles clear of the rest. Not slightly. Obviously.

I had not become worse at thinking. I had become narrower. One kind of thinking had carried on getting sharper for forty years and the other three had quietly gone to seed from never being used, and a single number blended all of that into a verdict that told me nothing true.

And the tall bar was not the one I would have bet money on. I have described myself the same way for thirty years. The test very calmly told me I am something else, and that I have been leaning on the wrong strength the whole time.

It explained a great deal. Why certain work has always felt like wading through wet sand while other work feels like nothing at all. A career decision I made at thirty four that never quite made sense afterwards. Why I am the person everyone brings the tangled problem to and never the one they hand the spreadsheet.

I have thought about those four bars every day since. I have not thought about the single number once.

Would I tell you to do it?

If you have ever said my sentence out loud, even as a joke, then yes. Not because the number will reassure you. Mine did the opposite.

Because you will find out which of the four you actually are, and I will bet you it is not the one you would guess. I would rather know that at sixty one than never find out at all.

One thing it is not, and I want to be straight about this: it is not a medical or clinical assessment. No psychologist is involved and it diagnoses nothing. It is a reasoning test. A hard one, and an honest one, which is more than I can say for the three free ones I did first.