Cyde Weys Musings

I’m starting to think that “intelligence” as a general term is rather meaningless. “Multiple intelligence” theory may actually have a closer bond with reality. I read an article in Scientific American recently that said that our consciousness only feels like a single entity from the inside; in reality, it may be an interplay between many different parallel processing centers in the brain. MRI scans have confirmed that certain areas of the brain are active for certain tasks, so is it really so hard to believe that the brain is really made up of lots of separate processors, squished together, that work closely in parallel, but still have discrete subunits?

Last month’s Wired had a personal story about a reporter whose assignment was to try to increase his intelligence in one month. Some of his training exercises included showering with his eyes closed and playing Brain Age on the Nintendo DS. The showering is supposed to “open up new neural pathways by challenging your ‘proprioception’ – your brain’s perception of movement and spatial orientation.” It did make him better at sensing his body’s spatial orientation without visual input. And playing a lot of Brain Age did, understandably, make him better at playing Brain Age, but one wonders if saying it made him “smarter” makes sense.

What if there is no such thing as general intelligence? What if, when we do something, we get better at just that thing? People who play sports get better at sports independent of any other sort of intelligence (and don’t kid yourself, there’s a lot of skill involved in sports, something I almost entirely lack). People who like to write a lot get better at writing without necessarily getting better at other skills. There was an interesting study done on Chess masters who found that Chess masters aren’t, on average, smarter in anything than other people — except for Chess, of course. In other words, Chess masters are Chess masters because they play, practice, live, and dream Chess all the time, not because they are “smart”. I put “smart” in quotes because I don’t think the word has meaning in an unreferenced context; it only makes sense in relation to specific kinds of intelligences.

Let’s look at what I’m good at. I’m good at programming, which I’ve now spent over half of my life working on. I’m good at reading and writing, also skills that I’ve been exercising for a long time (I’ve done a lot more writing recently, too). I’m good at math, which I was always ahead on in school and which was originally what I thought of going to college for. But all of these skills (except for some overlap between math and programming, reading and writing) are largely independent. I don’t know if it makes sense to say that I am “smart” in general. I am good at the things I am good at because I have done a lot of each of them. I don’t think the intelligence transfers over. I am only smart in the sense that I am better at a variety of academic skills than is average.

Now it should be pointed out that lots of fields are closely related, including many academic disciplines, such as math, physics, computer science, and engineering. I think this is where the false concept of a generalized intelligence originally comes from — it turns out that a lot of our academic skills are somewhat intertwined. Someone very good at one of them will have a medium-sized toolkit in common with another one, thus giving him an edge up on someone else with no experience in any related fields, thus making him look “smarter”.

Of course, genetic and and environmental factors also play a role. Someone can simply be born with a brain that is better wired for certain tasks; or maybe they’ve been exposed to chemicals in their early environment that have affected brain development. Fetal exposure to alcohol, for instance, will tend to reduce the capability of all intelligences in unison, creating an illusion that they are all linked, but in reality may be more of a case of a low tide lowering all ships rather than a low tide lowering a single cruise ship.

But the concept of intelligence as a single number, the Intelligence Quotient, is bunk. There is no single way to quantify someone’s intelligence. There isn’t even a single intelligence inside of a brain; there are many, each optimized for different tasks such as visual processing, memory, empathy, language, etc. In this world the majority of people are good in some areas, either through practice or being born that way, and these people will tend to gravitate towards what they find interesting or what they are good at. But the different intelligences are still wholly separate, so while playing Brain Age may make one better at quickly adding together two-digit numbers, it won’t make one better at all in systematizing, which is a skill frequently used by computer scientists that is much more complex than any of the simple skills being taught in Brain Age.

I suppose the only way to really get smarter isn’t to go out there and buy into things like Brain Age which purport to make you smarter. Brain Age will largely get you better at Brain Age, and maybe a little bit better at arithmetic, saying what color a word is written in rather than what color the word says, etc. The way to really get smarter is to identify in which way you want to become smarter, and then focus on that. Want to become a writer? Start reading the works of great writers, and write a lot. I’ve read a fair number of biographies by famous writers, and most of them say the key is to simply write for hours every day; it’s the practice that makes perfect. Want to become smarter at physics? Then go take lots of physics classes. Brain Age or Sudoku aren’t really going to help you.

I’m not saying there are separate intelligences for the various branches of science and the arts. But there are separate intelligences for various neurological skills and abilities, and each field tends to have a unique profile of skills which it uses the most. Sculpting is a lot more kinesthetic than drawing, for instance. Even though both are arts, they require differing skills, and an MRI scan would reveal that the brain has differing activity levels when drawing versus when sculpting.

I used to be smug. I used to think people could be placed along a continuum from smart to stupid, and that I was high on the “smart” end. But as my own intelligences have matured, as I have critically analyzed the kinds of things I am good at (and those I am not), and after reading some scientific journal articles on the topic, I’m really seeing the merits of the theory of multiple intelligences. It explains very well all of the eccentric genius inventors and scientists, the ones who invested all of their effort into a narrow field to the exclusion of most other kinds of intelligences, including intelligences related to social skills.

Science is going to continue trying to find the solutions to this vexing problem, but it is going to be a long, tough slog. The brain has steadfastly refused to give up its secrets, and it may be decades before we really pin down how the brain really works in terms of higher-order functions, and how it gets all of its separate parts to work together in unison. In the mean time, as you continue your journey through life, take a good look at the people around you and try to figure out what specific skills they are really good at. Most people have at least one thing they could be described as a genius in, so it makes sense to recognize it and make use of it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 11th, 2007 at 13:46 and is filed under Science. Keywords: Tags: Best posts, Brain Age, intelligence, IQ, smartness, theory of multiple intelligences, Wired. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.