Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Intelligence Defined

As I've mentioned before... one of my biggest fascinations is the human brain. What makes you... you. Why are some people sensitive and empathetic and others are not? What makes one person violent, where another is passive? How do you define love? How much of each person's makeup is how their brain's have reacted to the environment and situations they have experienced, particularly in the younger "formulative" years? How much of each person is comprised primarily of their "inherent" personality?

Abstract concepts (e.g. love, hate, loyalty, betrayal) that revolve around "the (abstract) mind" are very interesting to me, as you can tell... but, one thing I come back to is intelligence. The physical brain. Since I (am forced to) interact with people all the time, its something I often wonder... How smart is this person talking to me?

What actually comprises intelligence?

I'm not usually one for "lists," but I do believe there are four main pillars of intelligence.



The first is obviously... what do you know. There are a lot of people who have potential, but how much information have you actually comprised. (actuality vs potentiality) How much are you aware of? How many concepts have you tackled and comprehend? How many facts do you know? What events are you aware of? As opposed to asking how big is your (metaphorical) library, Im not asking about the size of the building... but, how many books do you ACTUALLY have in your library.
I would NOT consider this 2nd most important, but, since I mentioned the other end, the other pillar would be your potential. What are your capabilities? This would be the least practical of the four... only that... if two people are doing everything they can to improve their minds... the person with far more potential will have a much higher upside. [The bigger library has the ability to bring in more books.] On the flipside... you can have all the potential in the world, if you do not apply your mind to growing, one who may not have nearly the intellectual capacities could be (actually) smarter than you, because that person is optimizing what they do have to its potential.
Another fascinating pillar (perhaps my favorite!) is "retention." How long and how well do you retain what you have taken in? If a professor addressed every test question in different lectures over the course of a 3 week period... without studying outside of class... how well would you do on that test? What portion of a book chapter do you remember after reading? Can you listen to someone give you driving directions and get to the destination, or do you have to write them down and go over them time and time again? If someone asks you to buy five things from the store, will you forget one or two if you dont write them down? Could you get through high school without taking books home?


And lastly... SPEED. Almost like a game show... how quickly can you process the problem and remit the answer? If two people are asked a math question... and they have no access to each other... or any outside sources... if both people come up with the correct answer... yet it took person B three times as long as person A to figure out the solution... we would conclude that (at least as far as math goes)... person A was "sharper" than person B. Obviously, having the right answer is more important than a quick wrong answer, but, the speed at which one's brain is able to correctly process a problem and determine a solution is a good indicator of that person's intellectual prowess.
There may be other things, but they should fall under one of these main four categories.
This is how I define intelligence...
Actual Knowledge - Potential Capacity - Retention - Speed