ABSTRACT
The concept of intelligence has had a bumpy ride in education. Alfred Binet is credited with being the ®rst to have tried to characterise scienti®cally the notion of general intellectual ability. This idea had been around at least since ancient Greece: Why else would Plato report Socrates as being able to teach ``even a slave'' geometric theorems, if it were not that the slave was perceived as having inferior intelligence? Binet (1909) devised a wide range of questions, which included executing three simultaneous commands, comparing two objects from memory, or arranging ®ve blocks in order of weight. Unfortunately, he also used some rather different types of item, such as distinguishing an ugly from a pretty face, which we might now think to be somewhat culturally biased! Nonetheless, a characteristic of most of these questions is that they required the subject to attend to a number of features at one time, which raises the idea of connectivity in the mind, to which I shall return later.
