Mind Expanding Techniques

Most people understand the meaning of intelligence as a measure of how smart they are. They used to take IQ tests and compare their results with some standard thresholds, which determine if someone is smart, dull or normal. Well, this is the common concept of intellect which differs from the expert’s opinion.

Is intelligence a single general ability or a set of many mental abilities? This is the fundamental question that researchers try to answer in order to form a precise definition.

There are many theories of intelligence and also many followers of these theories argue in what intelligence is. Scholars were interested since 18th century to understand and define intelligence.


Today the most recent and prevailing definition that psychologists give of Intelligence is the ability to the environment adaptation.

To give an example of this definition, imagine someone who finds a new job. The adaptation of his environment means that this person needs to learn his duties, to get special knowledge of his working place, to get new training and in general to absorb the skills that are required in order to do his job well.

As the new broom is trying to adapt to his new job environment, he involves more of a mental ability. He needs to learn, memorize, experience and then apply all of his knowledge to his job. Thus he will learn through his experience and day by day he will becoming better.

All these mental tasks lead to the concept that intelligence is a whole bunch of mental processes and not a unique general ability.

However, this was not obvious in the beginning. To summarize and generalize the above example, the ability to successful adaptation draws upon the following cognitive processes:

o Perception

o Learning

o Memory

o Reasoning

o Problem Solving

If you want to read more theoretical knowledge on this topic, check the Theory of Intelligence and see how scholars tried and are still trying to approach this complex meaning.

But How do we Experience Intelligence?

Now let’s observe ourselves and examine how we experience intelligence in everyday life.

We may have some theoretical knowledge on it but in order to have a more complete viewpoint, we need to know it also from a practical perspective.

Well, I will speak from my experience, as it is the only one that I know and I can write for.

My Story

As I was growing, I understood that my mind should be playing a decisive role in the progress of my life. From this realization and beyond, I wanted to be a clever person and to be distinguished for this cleverness. Anything that could test my mind’s capacity was a challenge to me, to prove firstly to myself and secondly to the other people that I was indeed a smart person (not a high self-esteem here…).

Many times I got disappointed with my results, giving me a feeling that I was stupid for sure, while other times I scored high on iq tests and I was thinking about me as a genius. Well, both situations had an impact in my self-confidence that was affecting my overall performance and not only in tests…

I will give you an example of this. You may know these little games in facebook: “who has the biggest brain?”, “Word Challenge” and the “Geo Challenge”. Well, I’ll tell you for the first one. This game has 4 parts that test your analytical, calculation, memory and visual skill. In the end all 4 individual scores are added up to form your final score.

When I played for the first time, I scored about 1600 points. This is a very low score and the figure that was corresponding to this score was a monkey… I saw the scores of some friends of mine at 3000+ and got disappointed for another time.

I was keeping up playing this game until reach a score that would be satisfying for me. Finally I reached 3000+. This took me about a month of everyday playing.

So, I thought that with such a high score I was indeed a smart person… How stupid I was again? Despite the high score on this game, I didn’t realize any change in my life and in the way that I was thinking. OK, I was able to do simple mathematical calculations fast, but nothing more.

I stopped playing that game, because I proved that I was “clever” and started to play the other two games. Same story again. I got low scores in the beginning and high scores later through playing.

The interesting question is “what happens to your scores after a break of two or three months”? For sure I couldn’t reach the high results I was getting. I tested once myself in the brain game after a long period break and scored about 2600. This is roughly in the middle.

Generally, I was testing myself in other tests as well, always the same thing happened, poor performance in the beginning and good performance after a period of testing.

And then I realized another concept of this famous mind aspect.

My Point of View

I concluded the following theory.Intelligence has infinite dimensions, thus is not overall measurable.

You may have noticed that in our everyday life we act based on our intelligence every time. We even consider that it’s linked with our success in life. It is a very important aspect of our minds that determines the rest of our lives.

Up to a point in my life, I approached intellect as a closed set of mental skills and if I could train each of them then, I would be definitely smart and able to succeed in life. My approach was totally mistaken and that was the reason that in some tests I was scoring high and in others I didn’t.

I think about intelligence as a general broad meaning, an aspect of the human mind that has infinite dimensions. I am not smarter than you; there is no general comparison between people. No one is smarter than anyone. But I may be smarter in mathematics and you may be smarter in language. Do you catch me?

We are smarter than someone other in a specific skill but not overall, because that someone is smarter than us in another skill. So who is smarter? No one, we cannot compare. Another proof of this point of view is people that show exceptional skill in intelligence tests but are failing in their real lives. If Intelligence was a finite set of mental abilities then this should not be happening. Also I believe that this is the reason that there is not yet a complete unique Theory.

Anyway, I believe that our brains develop as we train them. For example, when every day we take mathematical tests then our brain develops its neurons and creates pathways between the areas of the brain that are involved in mathematical problem solving. Thus, we are getting smarter day by day in solving such problems.

This great neuron network advances to a point where we have no more difficulties in mathematics. Our brain is like a muscle. As we train it becomes stronger, but if suddenly we stop the training then it will lose all its gains.

To summarize the above, my view on the broad meaning of Intelligence is that we cannot compare the overall intelligence between people. We can only compare a skill, but not the whole skill capacity of mind.

WARNING:

All these discussion posted in this page are my thoughts and believes and cannot be used as a scientific approach. They constitute MY PERSONAL views on the matter we discuss, remember we are just drinking coffee and we are discussing. I repeat, I am not a psychologist or an expert, I just like to read and research such topics and I post what I believe over the matters that I study.

References

inteligence, human. (2009). Encyclopdia Britannica. Encyclopdia Britannica 2009 Student and Home Edition. Chicago: Encyclopdia Britannica.Detterman, Douglas K. “Inteligence.” Microsoft Student 2009 [DVD]. Redmond, WA: Microsoft Corporation, 2008.

www.Wikipedia.org