"What song has made you the most money?
Probably "Mr. Blue Sky." It has been in a lot of films, and they pay fortunes. When I wrote it [in a [in a Swiss chalet] it had been mist and fog, and I was up in the mountains. I couldn't see bugger all for a week and didn't come up with any songs. Then the sun came out, and I wrote "Mr. Blue Sky" as kind of a joke. It turned into a really nice song."
"Follow-up surveys — at ages 18, 23, 33 and 48 — backed up his hunch. A 2013 analysis5 found a correlation between the number of patents and peer-refereed publications that people had produced and their earlier scores on SATs and spatial-ability tests. The SAT tests jointly accounted for about 11% of the variance; spatial ability accounted for an additional 7.6%.
The findings, which dovetail with those of other recent studies, suggest that spatial ability plays a major part in creativity and technical innovation. "I think it may be the largest known untapped source of human potential," says Lubinski, who adds that students who are only marginally impressive in mathematics or verbal ability but high in spatial ability often make exceptional engineers, architects and surgeons. "And yet, no admissions directors I know of are looking at this, and it's generally overlooked in school-based assessments.""
