Tag Archives: Intelligence

EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE – IQ vs EQ

A2There’s a world of difference between book smarts and street smarts – between braininess and savvy. The first has its place, but the second is much more useful. Being smart is the ability to logically think things out. Being sharp is the ability to tune into the world, to read situations, and positively connect with others while taking charge of your own life.

What is intelligence?

A4Intelligence has been defined in many different ways such as your capacity for logic, abstract thought, understanding, self-awareness, communication, learning, emotional knowledge, memory, planning, creativity and problem solving.

Where it comes from is anybody’s guess. It’s something that’s designed into us, possibly imbedded in our brain through DNA. I’m a believer in the concept of Infinite Intelligence which is the basis of Napoleon Hill’s masterpiece on human achievement in Think And Grow Rich. If you haven’t read it, here’s the link. If you have read it, go read it again.

Intelligence has long been measured in a quotient called IQ. It’s different from a measure of your ability to control your emotions which is called EQ – a much more difficult thing to measure.

A5Most average adults have an IQ around 100 on the Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scale. The MENSA club requires members to be in the top 98 percentile which sets the bar at 132. According to the Guinness Book of Records, the ‘smartest’ person in the world was Marilyn vos Savant, who scored 185. Probably the most intelligent person who ever existed was Leonardo da Vinci who’s been estimated at around 220.

Conversely, mental retardation used to be divided into sub-classifications, but these labels are officially obsolete due to political correctness: Borderline Deficiency (IQ 70-80), Moron (IQ 50-69), Imbecile (IQ 20-49) and Idiot (below 20). I’ve dealt with a few in my policing career who rated around 15 and I have my own term for that classification.

So what about emotional smarts?

I have a great book called The EQ Edge by Steven J. Stein, Ph.D. and Howard E. Book, M.D. I’ll steal their definition of EQ.

A6Emotional Quotient is the set of skills that enable us to make our way in a complex world – the personal, social and survival aspects of overall intelligence, the elusive common sense and sensitivity that are essential to effective daily functioning. It has to do with the ability to read the political and social environment, and landscape them; to intuitively grasp what others want and need, what strengths and weaknesses are; to remain unruffled by stress; and to be engaging. The kind of person others want to be around and will follow.

Sophisticated mapping techniques in brain research have recently confirmed that many thought processes pass through our emotional centers as they take the psychological journey that converts outside information from infinite intelligence into individual response and action.

God only knows where infinite intelligence comes from.

 

WHAT’S SO SPECIAL ABOUT THE HUMAN BRAIN?

AA1Why do we study other animals and they don’t study us? What is it about the human brain that allows the cognitive ability for abstract reasoning and creativeness? What is it that makes the human brain so special? It comes down to one thing that humans do that no other living creature does.

I just watched a fascinating TED Talk by neuroscientist Dr. Suzana Herculano-Houzel where she looks at the difference in animal brain structures and arrives at a shocking, yet simple explanation.

AA6For years, mainstream science assumed that there was a direct relationship to the rate of intelligence and the size of the brain. However if you look at the brain of a cow to the brain of a chimp, they both weigh around 400 grams. Using that theory, the two species should have about the same intelligence. Carrying it further, a human brain weighs about 1.5 kilograms, an elephant’s is 4.5 kilos, and a blue whale tops out at 9 kg. Something clearly is wrong with the size of the brain vs. intelligence theory.

Is there an intelligence relationship in the size of an animal’s brain to the size of its body?

Take gorillas for instance. Their bodies average 180 kg and their brains are 0.5 kg. Human bodies average 75 kg and our brains are 1.5 kg. So the human brain to body ratio are 7.2 times larger than gorillas and we appear to be a lot smarter – although that’s debatable with some people.

But the daily energy consumption that a human brain requires is proportionately much higher than a gorilla’s brain.

AA8Gorillas spend most of their day feeding to supply energy in keeping a larger body mass fuelled, whereas humans only require three quick meals to support a smaller body but a larger and more active brain. Human brains are only 2% of our body mass but require 25% of our energy consumption to operate. Gorilla brains only consume 10% of their daily calorie intake. So what’s going on here?

Dr. Herculano-Houzel researched the long-held assumption that there was a direct proportion of neurons, or thought processors, per weight of grey matter. It was thought that the human brain held around 100 billion neurons but she could not find the source of this information. So she decided to do some experimentation.

AA9She developed a process to extract neuron nuclei from grey-matter cells and established that the average human brain contains 86 billion neurons – 16 billion in our cerebral cortex alone, which is by far the highest in any species and the seat of cognitive awareness.

She observed that there was nothing different in the basic structure between human brains and other primates like gorillas, chimps, and orangutans. And yes, humans are just another species of primate. It’s just that we have a much higher brain to body size ratio and we have a lot more neurons that our cousins do.

AA13But our brain to body energy requirements are so much higher than apes, yet we feed far less. This led her to ask the question – What happened in our evolutionary process that made human brains so proportionately larger?

Anthropology determines that the human brain suddenly increased about 1.5 million years ago. Something else happened at the same time.

Humans learned to cook their food.

AA12We learned to use fire to pre-digest our caloric intake which supercharged the ability to fuel and grow the brain. Because of cooking high-calorie, high-protein foods, our brain size rapidly increased to becoming a large energy-consuming asset rather than a liability.

Humans spent far less time searching for, devouring, and digesting low calorie raw vegetative foods than other primates did. Our omnivorous diet allowed us to focus our cerebral cortex on developing better food processing ventures like agriculture, civilization, electricity, and supermarkets.

So what do we do that no other creature does?

We cook.

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AA15Watch Dr. Suzana Herculano-Houzel’s fascinating, 13 minute TED Talk here: 

http://thenewhypnotists.com/solving-puzzle-human-brain-13-minutes-will-stun/

Visit her website at: http://www.suzanaherculanohouzel.com/lab

STEMI – 5 KNOWN REALITIES OF THE UNIVERSE

There are 5 known realities in the universe.

Universe 1Space. Time. Energy. Matter. And Intelligence. STEMI for an acronym.

I think about STEMI like a ball game.

Space is the ball field. It’s where we play. We need to play somewhere. Right?

Time is the measurement of how long we’re going to play. The duration.

Energy is the dynamics, like getting off the bench and getting going. Keeping it moving. Hitting it out of the park and making the crowd roar.

Matter is the ball, the bat, the uniforms, the payers, and the fans. Little stuff like that. It’d be a boring game if nobody showed up.

Intelligence is the rules. The ideas for the game. It’d be a pretty whacky game if there were no rules.

Let’s look at these concepts a bit more.

SpaceSpace is that dimension in which objects and events occur and have relevant position and direction to each other. We know on earth to observe the three dimensions of height, width, and length. It keeps us from walking in front of a bus. Then, there’s the fourth dimension. Space-Time is now well recognized as the fourth dimension. It’s also obvious, although most don’t recognize it. These four dimensions are fundamental to our understanding of the physical universe. Oh, there are many theories floating around about additional dimensions. Branes, warps, strings, and M-Theory are fun to ponder, but the four dimensional model works very well.

TimeTime can be a problem, though. We move about freely in space, but not in time. Time is linear. It’s a temporal measurement. Pretty much a one-way street. Time travel makes a great plot for Back To The Future and The Twilight Zone, but in reality… it ain’t never gonna happen. Time is nature’s way of preventing everything from happening all at once. Or, from doing it all over again.

EnergyEnergy? Some days I have none. Energy is a scalar, physical quantity describing the amount of work performed by a force. There are many types of energy. Nuclear, chemical. kinetic, potential, thermal, sound, gravitational, and that biggie of all, electromagnetism, which is transmitted in waves. A basic law of physics, the law of conservation of energy, tells us that any form of energy can be transferred to another, but the total remains the same. The total inflow of energy into a system must equal the total outflow. So, all the energy available since the Big Bang is still available to us and always will be. It changes form all the time, but the fundamentals do not.

MatterMatter is composed of particles. Anything that has mass and occupies a volume, or space, is matter. But matter needs energy to exist. Matter stays matter until it is accelerated to the speed of light. Then, in theory, it converts back to pure energy and ceases to exist. E=MC2 and all that crap. But relativity doesn’t allow that to happen easily in practice.

 

IntelligenceIntelligence? I don’t pretend to have a grip on that.  All I know is that there is some magnificent source of intelligence that gives order to existence. I believe that manifests itself by way of local and non-local consciousness. And I believe we all are capable of tapping into both forms, if we just allow ourselves.

I’m not a religious person in the conventional sense, but I’ll give credit where credit’s due.

Take Genesis from the Hebrew Bible. Whoever wrote that got the process right in the opening sentence.

Universe 2In the beginning (Time) God (Intelligence) created (Energy) heaven (Space) and earth (Matter). It was not till the third line that God said ‘Let there be light.’ She’d already whipped-up the universe before turning on the lights.

Pretty cool game we’re playing, eh?