Interestingly enough, when I went through a battery of tests when I was younger, the psychologist told us that we would never be able to get accurate test results for me, because I tended to think about things before I started to do them.
I agree that smart is far from one-dimensional, but I suspect that narrowing it down to categories like music, spatial, interpersonal, etc... is still far from accurate, though it's probably a better model than a simple line of smartness. When we learn new ways of doing things, we can feel the mind-muscles being worked, can feel ourselves learning, and the feel of new neural pathways forming, of our mind stretching. I think that for each of those, for each of the things that we can learn where our mind stretches in some new and different way, there is a level of intelligence that we have that is specific to that sort of thought. Then there are two other factors that come to mind: (1) How good we are at recognizing when to apply certain types of intelligence to areas outside of the places where they are commonly used, and (2) how quickly and precisely (two seperate categories) we are able to learn truly new systems. Oh, and I suppose our recall rate... no, that's not right... our recall momentum. How long it takes us to sharpen old ways of thinking, long left unused.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2005-07-01 02:00 pm (UTC)I agree that smart is far from one-dimensional, but I suspect that narrowing it down to categories like music, spatial, interpersonal, etc... is still far from accurate, though it's probably a better model than a simple line of smartness. When we learn new ways of doing things, we can feel the mind-muscles being worked, can feel ourselves learning, and the feel of new neural pathways forming, of our mind stretching. I think that for each of those, for each of the things that we can learn where our mind stretches in some new and different way, there is a level of intelligence that we have that is specific to that sort of thought. Then there are two other factors that come to mind: (1) How good we are at recognizing when to apply certain types of intelligence to areas outside of the places where they are commonly used, and (2) how quickly and precisely (two seperate categories) we are able to learn truly new systems. Oh, and I suppose our recall rate... no, that's not right... our recall momentum. How long it takes us to sharpen old ways of thinking, long left unused.
Mmmm...