Intelligence... With this word, many of us feel a kind of pride, since it is known that a person possesses it to the highest degree. Some even think that intelligence is something that only humans have. We will have to disappoint them: animals also have intelligence. Some even try to speculate about its presence in plants and other groups of organisms, but so far this has not gone beyond the bounds of science fiction. Recently, developments in the field of artificial intelligence have achieved great results.
Myth one
Intelligence is inherited, and “bad” genes cannot be changed. In fact, a child's intelligence depends on both genes and the environment in which he grows up. This was proven by studies of the intellectual level of identical twins, who, by chance, were separated and raised in different families, in different cultural environments. These twins have the same genotype, but their level of intelligence is different.
It is difficult to determine how intellectually gifted a child is, especially when he is very small, and it is impossible to change the genotype. But it is possible to create a rich environment for the development of all his natural abilities. The importance of the environment is also proven by the following fact: when children whose natural parents were not distinguished by intelligence and abilities were adopted by families that could provide these children with all the conditions for development, the intellectual level of the adopted children increased significantly after communicating with their new intelligent parents.
Our psychologists conducted an interesting experiment. They observed a group of six-year-olds with the same IQ. Some of them stayed for another year in kindergarten, some went to school. A year later, the level of intelligence of those who went to school was higher than the level of intelligence of “kindergarteners.” This is not surprising: the school offers a richer environment for development.
Diagnostics
Intelligence studies are carried out on the basis of various methods and techniques. All of them are based on two principles: testing and experimentation. For example, logical thinking and pattern identification skills are revealed using Raven's progressive matrices. Amthauer tests specialize in orientation in professional activities. Both the first and second technologies are developed for people of different ages. To evaluate a child, the Goodenough-Harris method is suitable, which gives an assessment based on a child’s drawing. All these developments are decades old, they are unified and give average readings.
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Myth two
The main thing is to give impetus to the development of intelligence at an early age, then everything will go by itself. Not true. In one study, American psychologists selected young children whose mothers had very low intelligence levels and worked on their mental development and preparation for school. Over the course of several years of training, psychologists managed to significantly increase the intelligence of these babies: some IQs increased by 30 points! When they entered school, they were ahead in development of many of their peers. But when the special classes ended, the children returned to the world of their underdeveloped relatives, began to study in regular schools, their intellectual level gradually decreased and became no higher than the average level of their peers. Americans say about intelligence: “Use it or lose it” - use it, or you will lose it. You need to constantly train your brain.
What is intelligence
Intelligence
is the mental ability of the body, expressed in the ability to solve various problems, cope with problems, carry out cognitive activity, adapt to changing environmental conditions and manage it.
Intelligence is manifested in educational, research, work activities, communication and social life in general. This concept unites individual cognitive abilities: sensations, perception, memory, ideas, thinking, imagination, will, reflection, attention.
The concept of intelligence arose relatively recently - only at the end of the nineteenth century. At that time, psychology was developing at a rapid pace, and researchers were studying the mental abilities of humans and animals. Sometimes they made serious mistakes. Thus, at that time, the prevailing belief was that a person uses only a few percent of his brain, while the rest of it remains unused. In everyday life, this idea still persists, but it is fundamentally incorrect and was refuted by science a long time ago. But how could such an assumption even arise? The fact is that at the end of the nineteenth century the functions of a significant part of the brain were not yet studied, and researchers could not understand what they were needed for. In addition, some processes in the brain occur as if in an automatic mode, without the participation of human consciousness. That is, it seems to us that some part of the brain is inactive, but in fact it carries out extremely important work unnoticed by us, without which, probably, intelligence itself would become impossible.
However, the issue of the relationship between intelligence and the brain is quite complex. Does man have intelligence? Of course there is. But does a cat have it? Probably there is too. What about the lizard? One might think that she has it too. What about an ant, a microbe, a plant? At first glance, it seems that the more developed the organism, the more we can talk about the presence of intelligence. But here, too, not everything is so simple.
Ants, like all other insects, do not have a brain at all. Their "brains", dispersed throughout the body, are a primitive nerve cluster. And the entire structure of the ant organism is very primitive. Meanwhile, some even seriously compare the intellectual abilities of ants with those of humans. Ants can accumulate and transmit information, communicate, learn, and they have a complex hierarchy. They can navigate the terrain; recent research shows that they apparently can even count. In ant society there are many “professions”, the variety of which varies for each species. In fact, the life of an anthill is very reminiscent of human society.
A lizard is an organism of a completely different kind. Its overall development is tens of times more complex and organized than that of an ant. And there is a full-fledged brain, and a fairly developed one at that. But the intellectual abilities of a lizard are very modest and cannot be compared with the intelligence of an ant (and even more so a human).
It turns out that intelligence is more of a function than a certain material structure. Intellectual activity can be realized in various ways.
How is this function implemented? The implementation of an intellectual function occurs through the work of its components: this is the ability to find connections between disparate data, synthesize and analyze, compare, classify, build associations, etc. Each such ability separately does not form intelligence, it can only be discussed in the aggregate of these abilities .
Features of the human intellectual system consist of several parameters
:
- Working memory capacity, ability to predict, use tools, logic;
- Multi-level hierarchy of selection of valuable information - six layers of neurons are involved in this;
- Consciousness;
- Memory.
Intelligence does not appear suddenly and on its own, but develops over time. The intellectual level of a person can be increased through special techniques; it can also decrease due to various circumstances (old age, head injuries, mental illness, etc.).
Myth three
Only communication with adults develops a child. This statement is true for babies. Yes, a child learns to speak and think by communicating with adults. His parents explain to him the meaning of new words, teach him new expressions, and correct him when he pronounces something incorrectly. And babies, left to their own devices, twins, the same age, whom their parents leave for a long time in each other’s company, begin to lag behind their peers in mental development. But later, during school years, communication with peers is just as necessary as communication with adults. During the presidency of John Kennedy in the United States, a situation arose that scientists did not fail to take advantage of. Kennedy decided to merge schools for black and white children. Before this, the children of white and black Americans studied separately. The white parents of the state of Georgia - descendants of South American planters - were categorically against such an innovation. They stopped sending their children to school, and the schools closed for two years. The children, and they were mostly from quite prosperous, wealthy families, studied with hired teachers at home. When the conflict was settled two years later and the children returned to school, it turned out that their IQ (in the USA the level of intelligence of schoolchildren is constantly measured) was significantly lower than the IQ of children from other states who did not interrupt their studies at school and continued to communicate with their peers. And this backlog was eliminated only after 4 years.
Levels of intellectual activity
There is such a thing in psychology as levels of intellectual activity.
Researchers identify three such levels
:
- Stimulus-productive – when mental activity is caused only by the influence of external factors.
- Heuristic is a spontaneous cognitive activity that leads to the discovery of a number of patterns.
- Creative is the highest level of mental activity, at which there is a full penetration into the essence of the things being studied, solving existing problems and setting new tasks.
At the first level, intellectual activity is limited to a given or initially found path. A person can study various phenomena and solve various problems, but only as private ones, without connection with each other. At this level, however, the intellectual can put forward quite bold hypotheses.
At the second level, the researcher can compare disparate phenomena and problems and find something in common in them, identify new patterns. In this case, knowledge occurs empirically.
At the third level, comparing different phenomena and finding what they have in common becomes not just a separate technique, but is itself a problem that requires deep insight into the essence of things. In this case, the researcher uses the theoretical path of knowledge.
Intellectual actions of an individual are divided into levels in another way.
In this case, there are two levels
:
- Personal actions at the level of a social individual, while human activity is determined by the task and desired results.
- Actions of a creative person; in this case, the result turns out to be broader than the stated goal and gives rise to new tasks.
The activity of the individual gradually ceases to be a response to the initially set task and takes on a creative character.
The division of the work of the intellect into levels also reflects the history of the development of mental activity in humans. That is, the first people passively solved the problems facing them, formed by nature itself, and strived for biological survival; knowledge was more of an adaptive nature. Subsequently, primitive “scientific” activity appeared, when, through searches, trial and error (empirically), people found new patterns in the structure of the surrounding world and tried to use them in their practice. Finally, at the very latest time, a theoretical science was formed that had a developed methodological apparatus and deep criteria for knowing the truth.
For clarity, you can also use Maslow’s famous pyramid, which reflects the hierarchy of human needs. It shows that the need for creativity and spiritual development is the highest, and to achieve it you need to go through lower levels. In accordance with this, the intellect works: at first it is aimed at achieving pressing goals and solving specific problems (finding food, housing, achieving material well-being), then opportunities arise for learning something new, and at the highest level the opportunity arises for creative activities.
Myth four
To get a smart child, you need to develop his logical thinking. Employees of the Department of Psychogenetics, Faculty of Psychology, Moscow State University, conducted long-term observation of the development of intelligence of a group of people from 6 years of age to 24 years. And we saw that the level of logical thinking was higher among those teenagers and young people who, at the age of 6, were distinguished by rich visual and figurative thinking.
So don’t rush to solve logic problems with preschoolers. Children need to develop fantasy, imagination, imaginative thinking, write more, draw, and play with them. Play is a very important stage in a child’s development. Our famous psychologist, researcher of the world of childhood D. B. Elkonin said: if a child does not play enough in preschool age, this will affect his further development.
Structure
The processes in our head are so complex and diverse that they are not subject to structuring according to several criteria. Comparing a talented mathematician with a brilliant composer is difficult and unproductive.
Psychologist Daria Milai
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J.P. Guilford presented a three-dimensional cubic model in which he identified 120 mental abilities (memory, analysis, assessment, expression of thoughts, etc.) and structured them into three components:
- Content (what we think about).
- Operation (as we think).
- Result (what the process leads to).
Some people are able to quickly draw conclusions and make decisions, others are close to flashes of insight with an instant understanding of the essence (remember Archimedes with his “eureka”), others are fixated on the assumption that came first. An intellectually developed person can live happily all his life, while thinking haphazardly and impulsively, without going beyond standards and stereotypes.
Myth fifth
People of different nations differ in intelligence. In the United States, the intelligence of representatives of the white and black races was constantly studied and compared. And it used to always turn out that whites had an average IQ of about 15 points higher. From this they concluded that blacks are a genetically defective race. But more recent research has shown that the cause of differences in IQ levels is not genes, but environment. And 15 points is a typical difference in the level of intelligence of privileged segments of the population and groups with limited rights, regardless of nationality. When the level of intelligence of representatives of black and white groups, equal in position in society, education, income, the number of children in the family, and the spiritual values of their parents, was determined, it turned out that they had the same IQ.
And in Germany, the intelligence of children from mixed marriages and children of ethnic Germans was compared. And also there were no differences in single social groups.
What types of intelligence are there?
A major researcher in the field of intellectual development, Raymond Cattell, believed that intelligence should be divided into two types - mobile and crystallized. The first is based on logical operations, the ability to solve problems that go beyond the limits of existing experience. The second is based on accumulated experience and the ability to use existing knowledge and skills.
There is also a division into emotional and social intelligence. The first is the ability to recognize and understand your own emotions and the emotions of those around you. The second type is the ability to understand people's behavior. Social intelligence is the most important part of a person’s social life; it allows you to interact with other people and build various relationships. Researchers emphasize that the purpose of such intelligence is not depth of understanding, but social adaptation.
The diversity of types and forms of intelligence can be judged, for example, by the cultural characteristics of different peoples. For example, the Negroid race has the most highly developed concrete visual and plastic thinking. The people of Africa are good artists and excellent dancers; they can depict by hand what Europeans are accustomed to depicting only with the help of computer graphics. Drawing and dance in Africa play the role of original “alphabets” from which special languages are composed. European thinking is abstract. Painting and dance in European culture are considered an art, that is, a skill accessible to few; at the same time, the sound-letter alphabet, reasoning in abstract categories, understanding of such phenomena as law, justice, order, etc. are developed. The Asian peoples of the Mongoloid race are carriers of “symbolic” thinking. Their symbolic (hieroglyphic) alphabet and system of allegories have reached a high level of development; the culture is replete with symbols that lack practical meaning and express complex ideas, and rituals and ceremonies play a significant role in behavior.
There are other ways to divide intelligence. Thus, they distinguish between logical and spatial intelligence, and the latter is divided into physical, social, spiritual, creative, and emotional.
Interesting
Mormon experience. The intellectual level of children from large families also greatly depends on the education and social status of their parents. In educated families where children are taught, the level of intelligence in the first four is no lower than that of their peers from single-child and small-child families. And only the fifth could be worse. Apparently, our parents no longer have enough strength for the fifth. In large families where the parents themselves do not shine with either intelligence or education, a decline in intelligence is already observed in the second child, not to mention all subsequent ones.
However, in large families of Mormons and Quakers, who traditionally are very involved with their children, the intelligence of their heirs does not decrease, regardless of what age they were born.
Recommendations for increasing the coefficient
5 practical tips for training your brain activity and increasing your IQ that you can use every day:
- Challenge your brain, solve math problems, learn foreign languages, learn to play a musical instrument.
- Talk to educated people. By having a conversation and understanding the way smart people think, you will benefit for yourself.
- Play computer games that require strategy development and train your reactions.
- Read books, it develops vocabulary and erudition.
- Play sports, lead a healthy lifestyle.
The influence of society on IQ
An important issue to study is the relationship between a person’s social status and activity and his intellectual potential. Can society influence this indicator and is there a relationship between different social groups and their mental indicators?
The Relationship Between Intelligence and Academic Achievement
A certain relationship between the good performance of students and their IQ was noticed even in the early stages of developing these tests. However, a much more important question is the relationship, in other words, is this relationship one-way or do both factors have the same influence on each other? Can we assume that good performance in school will be the key to a high IQ upon graduation?
In search of an answer to this question, many observations and tests were made, which equally showed that a student’s IQ level directly affects his ability to quickly learn material, and as a result, this plays a key role in academic performance. However, the opposite effect is not observed, that is, a diligent student who devotes a lot of time to “memorizing” the material does not thus increase his intellectual potential.
Do you need a high IQ to do a good job?
The influence of intelligence on employment is another issue of concern to society, especially recently, when interest in this indicator has increased manifold. This formulation also refers to a person's potential well-being and the impact of IQ on financial income.
A scientific experiment also helps in this matter, which shows the significant influence of intellectual potential in professions that require analytical processing of information; this indicator is also very important for middle and senior managers. High mental activity allows you to better optimize the management process and systematize data. Thanks to the results obtained, managers of many companies have introduced an IQ test into the mandatory list during job interviews. Among representatives of this range of professions, it was those with a high IQ who showed high efficiency in their work, which directly affected their income.
Another category of specialties, which involves a person’s physical skills, such as strength, dexterity, and certain skills, did not show any dependence on the intellectual age coefficient, which proves the insignificant importance of such a test when choosing workers. In this direction, this indicator did not play any role on the productivity and financial income of workers.
Does IQ affect crime?
It was hypothesized that people with low intelligence scores most often break the law, since it is difficult for them to find a method of self-realization in life, and they do not fully understand the impact of their actions on their own lives and those around them.
However, the research revealed that the effect of IQ on crime was only 4%, which can be regarded as an error due to incomplete information about the associated factors. Thus, one can see that people with different levels of intelligence become criminals and there is no innate predisposition in their choice.
Honesty and decency are also inherent in completely different categories of people, both in terms of social indicators and intellectual potential.
