Report comment

Report comment

Report comment

Hmm, lots of things cropping up there. First off IQ tests how well you do IQ tests, that it happens to correlate at extreme high end with eminent scientists might have something to do with those scientists sharing their environment with the test designers (and the imprints from it on their subconcious processing see e.g.s: how the Cornsweet illusion is stronger among those raised in built environments with many straight lines, and how people raised with non-tonal languages cannot hear tones in tonal languages), they would also share their symbolicum, mythos and logos with the test designers.
Now let’s say we went to the Kalahari desert and found a few tribes of San bushmen who still live roughly like their ancestors, we asked around for their smartest fellas and got them to design a test to find out how clever people are. Now, as they live in an entirely different context to our scientists, and I am willing to bet that if we took say 1,000 people mixed with our eminent scientists those scientists would not necessarily stand out as particularly smart vs. these tests in an entirely different environment, requiring different subconcious processing, symbolicum, mythos and logos.
Next: there are different kinds of conciousness and different kinds of intelligence at least some of which are handled by different parts of the brain (see e.g. Clive Wearing below), Scott notes divisions between music, language and maths – these are three different kinds of mental processing: music is perceived (heard) intuitively and non-symbolically and that does not require abstraction, but requires much non-symbolic processing (it can actually work better if you “switch off” the “talking” part of the brain while playing. Zen mind and all that), language including written language that uses an alphabet or syllabary is a linear symbol processing task (closely tied to verbalisation and/or gesture) that operates at least one level of abstraction – it is, in and of itself a “mode” of thinking / almost a “trance” where the speaker once fluent may begin to think in the language (I know I reached a point with my 2nd language where I began to think in it), whereas maths is a multi-dimensional symbolicum that at advanced levels may operate at two or more levels of abstraction (e.g. imaginary numbers, complex numbers – which I only just grasped recently myself, when I saw them graphed – because my cognitive strength/weakness is vizualisation: if I can visualise it I can understand it, and my old maths teacher never graphed them for us!). Just as some people might be born with (genes/epigenetics for) longer legs and others with stronger arms, so some might be born with greater or lesser processing power in different parts of the brain.

Fair disclosure: I generally score between 130 and 140, and have a biochemistry PhD. I play (and teach) guitar mostly, and speak Spanish fairly fluently tho with bloody awful grammar and it’s rusty atm (and can read and get by in French, and manage a little German).

Also, some insight from both my learning and teaching, imo, most people’s intelligence is underexploited, because (these points in no particular order):
a) they’ve never “learned how to learn”
b) they’ve not learned how to alter their state of consciousness so as best to work with the mental task at hand (some people can do this instinctively, others not, but it can be learned – I have)
c) they don’t know their own mental strengths / weaknesses and how best to work with / around them
d) they suffer from way too much negative self-talk (huge!)
e) their “cup is full” – they think they already know everything so they cannot acquire new knowledge/skills (can be a real show-stopper this one!)
f) they have forgotten how to learn through “play” / are too frightened of making mistakes / losing “face”
g) they’ve not had good individual teaching that tried to work with / on all of the above
and
h) they only speak one language – this is huge, imo, because speaking 2+ languages forces you to break out of the assumptions inherent in your native symbolicum, so you then become aware of it as being a symbolicum that is between you and reality, rather than a quintessential part of reality – analogous to a fish that learns to walk on the muddy bank and only then realises that water is wet! 　 (maths and music both count as “languages” to an extent for the purposes of this last point)

Strongly agreeing with the uniqueness of people (even identical twins, because they have different life experiences) and the value of each individual as a unique perceptor / value of contributing according to your strengths

Report comment

Report comment

Report comment

Report comment

i giggled. the wikipedia part on things ppl said about him is full of funny statements like this. im adding yous to the collection. one that i remember is where a professor says his mind blazed across graph theory like a meteor. i thought that was funny.

btw i think this is one of your best posts evarrrr. its such a good blend of a lot of different stuff that i all liked very much. maybe i just like this topic and so i feel like it’s really cool when somebody could come along and write about it so well like you did, but this is one of the best times i had reading something on the internet in awhile so thanks

Report comment

do you think maybe it helped that your brother started piano at a younger age, so maybe you could’ve been better at it if you had? or do you just think you two really had such different aptitudes from the beginning? this is a real thorn in that genetics argument for intellectual differences you know. you cant have one brother be brilliant at piano and the other one make wounded cat sounds from his violin! i guess next you are going to tell me there is a piano gene that your brother got which you didn’t inherit. that’s awful convenient scott and i have enough knowledge of genetics to know thats not how it works.

Report comment

Report comment