We are living in the age of cult to intelligence. Never before was being intelligent more valued than in today’s society. Kids don’t wanna be soccer players or actors anymore, they want to build the next Google or Facebook, they want to matter, to be creative, to change the world.

In a capitalist society, being intelligent very often is equated to being successful, and nobody wants to be thought a fool.

But what does being intelligent really mean?

Look at the dictionary we might find definitions like ‘the ability to think, reason, and understand instead of doing things automatically or by instinct’. This kind of general definition pretty much equals intelligence and logical thinking, and not that that makes no sense, but, is reasoning the only component of intelligence?

I have always been of the opinion, that you should ask about things not to “experts”, but to someone who has done that particular thing in a sound manner. Well, here are some reflections about intelligence made by people who thought brilliantly:

Albert Einstein: “The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.”

For Einstein, creativity was the most important component of intelligence, and in fact, he developed his theories by doing “thinking experiments” which we could not have performed had he not possessed such an amazing imagination.

Bertrand Russell: in spite of having written perhaps the most important treatise ever done on logic, he said:

One of the chief obstacles to intelligence is credulity, and credulity could be enormously diminished by instruction in the prevalent forms of mendacity.

This is a reassuring sentence, at least to me, because I am full of doubts. But doubts come to mind because you can think about many possibilities, and you think of many possibilities when you have a lot of imagination. Again, we are seeing here that a lot of importance is given to imagination rather than logic alone.

Stephen Hawking: “people who boast about their IQ are losers”.

This sentence an important quote in an era where IQ-shaming might get even bigger than body shaming. Perhaps intelligence is not so important after all. Perhaps work ethics, curiosity, having valuable friends, or being exposed to the right environment are more important factors for success than your sheer IQ.

Pablo Picasso: “I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.”

Coming from such a talented artist, this quote reveals that our intelligence shines at its best when confronted with new things, things we cannot solve. There is an emotional factor about intelligence that we can’t ignore. How you feel has an effect on how you think and vice-versa. Inspiration and motivation are heavily dependent on our emotional state — that is, on our brain chemistry — so intelligence clearly is, as our whole brain, not static. It is good to keep in mind that you can be smarter or fooler tomorrow than you are today.

Oscar Wilde: “To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.”

Coming from a man of literature, this quote has a strong impact on today’s science. Since the boom of AI and Machine Learning, statistics have recovered a privileged position on modern thought and full books have been published about dealing with uncertainty in the current century. Nassim Taleb for instance found enormous success telling us how stupid we are by trying to predict the future. So yes, calculating odds and deciding what to do based on them even when we know they are inaccurate is a crucial task performed by an intelligence, and our life depends on it.

And all of this, my dear readers, leads me to the last quote, which in purpose I placed at the end, in order to discuss AI and current views of intelligence.

Daniel Kahneman: “Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed.”

As Kahneman says, we all know intelligence has not a single component, but many of them. Is not a single task, but a process made of many subtasks. Some people excel and one of them, some at others.

Say, who is smarter Gary Kasparov or Jim Carrey? Well, depends if we are talking about playing chess or making people laugh.

Intelligence has evolved to keep us alive — just like any other bodily function — and therefore it takes many forms to give you an advantage at a particular task. It makes little sense to speak about “intelligence as a general concept”. Today’s scientists agree that we should rather speak about intelligence as a process involving many tasks.

The father of Artificial Intelligence, Herber Simon, wrote a book called “Human Problem Solving” that is very technical but really worth reading if you want to see a brilliant description of how our mind works.

In summary, he describes intelligence as a process that has 3 stages:

• Collecting information from the environment: if you couldn’t perceive anything through your senses, you wouldn’t be able to acquire information. The ability to pay attention is the pipeline feeding your brain with food for thought.
• Selecting criteria to take into account: this means using creativity to think of all possible scenarios, picture them in your mind and come up with the important factors related to the problem in question.
• Choice: using logical reason to make a decision based on all available information.

So broadly speaking, instead of intelligence, I prefer to talk about at least 3 different components that enhance each of these process stages: your ability to focus, your power of imagination, and your reasoning skills.

As much as your ability to run fast depends on many things like your legs lenght, body mass, running technique, and so on, our ability to use intelligence depends on each of these components.

The good news is that you can work on improving any of them as much as you can exercise other parts of your body.

And maybe, finding out what component you have most developed and choosing your goals according to that is more important than just “trying to be smart in general”.

Each of these components has its own brain circuits, and I will speak about them in future articles.