> That being said. I wonder how much of those kinds of complications lead to higher IQ and higher education test scoring. Simplification also dumbs down, stunts the mind.

I would say more that simplification makes the boring bits easy and allows the mind to concentrate on more interesting higher-level concepts. As someone who has attended a range of educational institutions for the same courses, one thing that really stood out to me about the "top-level" ones was that there was none of this "life must be hard" attitude. For the core material, the teaching was excellent and designed to make it as easy to learn for students as possible to learn. Then while "lesser" universities were examining students on those core materials (often with questions they'd seen before), the top universities asking novel questions on material that hadn't even been explicitly covered, but which the students could reasonably be expected to answer on because they had a really solid grasp of the core stuff.