April 11th, 2006

Intelligence I believe is defined as the total skill and knowledge aquired at any one point (my words) but with this definition it would be obvious that intelligence would increase and just get better as we age. This is a major weakness in the definition that the scientific community solves by making age specific tests and norming them on a percentile scale. This means that your IQ test at age 5 could be completely different than age 10 or later.

It is commonly mentioned that children start with a genius IQ and then get stupider… and that really bothers me, as realistically it should be the other way. Children are not mentally developed till about 4 or later but in that time they acquire motor skills and language skills, usually not much else. On the other hand it is entirely possible for an adult to gain a new skill in as little as a week or a new language in about 90 days to be competent and understand 80-90 percent of conversations (not including reading as this varies widely in complexity).

Why this huge difference in capability while the psychologists say we are getting stupider? I believe it is a large misunderstanding on what IQ and intelligence is. The so-called trained behaviors that are discounted in some IQ tests should be really defined as skill sets and knowledge’s. If you happen to come from a poor or underprivileged area of the country you are going to get lower IQ’s at the current definition. This is a good point in my opinion that our definition is wrong and needs to be reevaluated.

Ideally we should strive to establish clear separation from physical attributes and knowledge skills. While both are trainable the physical attributes shows a large portion of inherited or biological intelligence and the knowledge skills are completely dependent on situation and personal preferences.

Here is a link to Wikipedia’s definition of IQ. As you can see they mention how it is a mix of physical and knowledge skills. There is also a lot of good info on opposing arguments at the bottom of the article.

This is where I believe the true issue lies and to look at that it makes people realize that there really is no limit to intelligence for those who continue to learn. While it is true there is physical restrictions on some people due to either mistraining or biological injury (including inherited problems) a majority of people have the equivalent capability as any genius or virtuoso in history. This is called the apparent plasticity of the brain, which I would really define as it’s capability to learn and adapt.

Basically it means that any skill you work with continually and try to improve you will actually change the structure of your brain to accomodate that skill. This can improve physical attributes like reaction time or increase knowledge like say reading a book. Training these can overcome physical limitations that happened because of injury or even exceed what most would consider possible.

Now the key to learning as far as I have found in my experience is the idea you need to “Learn how to Learn”. This means that the skill of gaining new skills and knowledge’s as well as improving yourself physically is truly a skill that is not taught or in most cases not even mentioned. People are generally shoved into classes and expected to perform.

I personally learned to hate school because of my restriction on what to learn. This resulted in reduced social skills (lol, I am a Geek/Nerd) but a real zest for learning. I used to get in trouble for reading to much in school…. ha! How many people can say that! I am currently working to improve my social skills, as this is part of being as I call “Balanced”.

What I am trying to do is create a true method to train and teach learning that would realistically improve the capability of each student and practitioner. This would identify the crucial skills and attributes that need to be trained and how to train them. There are many books out there that offer partial training in memory, math, reading and languages and even some places that believe it is possible to expand intelligence usefully. The issue with most of these is that these are truly small pieces and it really is difficult in some cases to use these without training other capabilities, whether physical or skill.

This will incorporate a wide variety of skills and knowledge’s and will be usable without any restriction of age. The only requirement may be reading (audio books are a possibility here) and basic math. This of course could change to less or more but these seem to be the only limits I see.

My next post will be on the different ways you can improve intelligence and how you can begin to use these now.

Signing off

Jeremy

PS: Please feel free to comment on this! I would love feed back!