Genius: what is it and why do we care? Everybody wants to
think originally, to be smarter, to think and to solve problems better and
quicker than any of our peers. Our culture revolves around the idea that those
people who succeed in school will become leaders in society, and presumably those
measures we use to seek out the best thinkers (and perhaps the most
intelligent) and thereby the best leaders work properly. We even developed
tests to measure scholastic aptitude: the Alfred Binet Intelligence Quotient
(IQ), the SAT, the PSAT, GRE, the PGRE, just kidding, that last one doesn’t
exist, but hey I just thought I’d throw another acronym out there.
Although, creative geniuses of the past did not necessarily
score “genius” level on IQ tests (considered by many to be a score of 145 on
the IQ test – the average is a score of 100). This includes Richard Feynman, a
Nobel Laureate for his ground-breaking work in Quantum Mechanics, an
illustrious bongo-player and brilliant physicist.
The thing about IQ, grades and essays, at least the primary
and secondary school levels, is that they do not measure “originality” or “creative
ability”. Unless of course you are lucky enough to go to a school or have been
blessed with a teacher who values and fosters such creative thinking in class
(I came across two throughout my whole life at the primary school level in my
personal experience). So our system does
not measure genius, and we are really good at taking a funnel and filtering all
the people who do not master our system of education as candidates for
intellectual, political, economic, and you-name-the-adjective leadership. Plus,
these traditional means of measuring the propensity for success do not work
when measuring intelligence other than scholastic intelligence. Howard Gardner,
a psychologist, posited that there are seven different types of intelligence.
To name a few: emotional intelligence, motor intelligence, and philosophical
intelligence. These intelligences: the ability to understand and use people’s
emotions to your advantage (don’t you ever wish a particular doctor had some
training in “people” interaction. After all, you don’t want the doctor to treat
you like a human being rather than a subject in a laboratory?), the ability to
control movement, especially prevalent in sports (hey, according to this
definition, Michael Jordan could be a genius), and the ability to ponder
philosophical questions deeply (even though we don’t know too many philosophical
geniuses, think of Aristotle, Plato or Locke who changed our fundamental
notions of truth and government – their philosophical genius would not have
been measured by the IQ test simply because it does not test for this type of
intelligence). A more obvious distinction that Gardner points out is the
difference between verbal and mathematical intelligence. How many times have
you heard or experienced in your life that someone is amazing at math, but
awful at writing essays, or precocious at learning and manipulating words, but
terrible at solving equations. If this
is the case, the IQ test won’t accurately measure your mathematical, your
verbal or your emotional intelligence. One, because the IQ test doesn’t even
measure emotional intelligence. Two, the IQ test measures general intelligence, and I would use that word cautiously because
I think this measure is BS, rather than distinguishing between your separate
cognitive abilities. After all, you wouldn’t look at a football player’s poor
throwing capabilities and presume he is a terrible athlete who has no use on
the field. Throwing is just one of many
athletic capabilities. The football player may as well be a terrible thrower,
but he may also weigh several hundred pounds and make a good defender.
This limited view of intelligence is a problem, because from
a utilitarian perspective, keeping in mind what is best for the largest amount
of people and for the common good, we need creative and original thinkers who
not only know how to master an arbitrary test (made private corporations’
seeing this weeding out of “scholastically inept” students), but who know how
to think outside of the box. Who knows, maybe that person will discover the
cure to cancer, or pave new paths of inquiry into previously unknown fields of
study. Maybe they will become the next T.S. Eliot, Michelangelo or Einstein
(who was, on a side note, jobless after college because university professors
wouldn’t take him seriously – maybe due to skipping class – too busy
daydreaming thought experiments that would transform our view of the universe. Psshhh
what a waste of time).
So we know the system is screwed up and has a twisted view
of intelligence for reasons mentioned earlier. How should we view intelligence
then? Well first we should distinguish between intelligence and genius. These
are two very different things. To illustrate, say I have a super computer that
has the ability to process more information in a second than we as human beings
can in a lifetime. On the other hand, give the computer two known facts, and ask the computer to
connect the dots to figure out a third thing that was previously unknown, and it cannot accomplish this
task but a human being can. Wouldn’t you classify the human being as being more
genius on a rating scale of 1-10 than the computer because the computer cannot
originate ideas, despite its enormous processing capabilities? Raw
intelligence, is the ability to process and understand information. Genius, on
the other hand, is the ability to employ creativity to use knowledge to make previously
unmade connections and to originate novel ideas.
I’m not quite sure if this is measurable yet. We are
thinking of ways to measure cognitive ability. Cognitive neuroscientists have
devised tests in which they have test subjects think of a new idea or figure
something out, and then view the electrical activity of the subject’s brain to locate
specific pieces activated during the “eureka!” moment, with the hope of finding
the origin of creativity in the physiology of our brains.
One day we may have an intelligence and/or creativity test
that is way more reliable than our current exams, which would measure our brain
activity directly and perceive how intellectually capable we are, and how
original we can be.
Before I digress, a couple recommendations:
- Give your kids a break. People are not machines and need to know that their value and self-worth is more than a statistic on a page.
- Give yourself a break. You have intrinsic value that school, the system and society cannot measure. You are human, and deserve to be valued for existing and not just to be a puppet for society valuing yourself based on its every grade on a paper as worthless as the dead tree that it was made from.
- Reformulate your view of intelligence and genius. Genius is not merely memorizing enough material to get an A on an exam. It’s the ability to think creatively and to arrive at novel conclusions or to solve problems via fresh perspectives.
Just a few thoughts. Talk to you soon. My next blog will be
about music.
