What is Intelligence? || The Human Potential Lab

what in the world is going on with humans. We're going to start off today with the question of what is intelligence, which is a topic that has interested me for a very long time. Ever since I was a kid, I've wondered what does it mean to be smart? Does it simply mean high IQ? Are there other ways of being intelligent? Do multiple intelligences exist? What does it mean to be generally intelligent? As a kid, I was placed into special education due to an auditory learning disability, which

I eventually outgrew. In special Ed, I would look around and see greater potential among all my friends than other people gave them credit for. This ignited my passion for understanding and tell diligence, which carried me through to college where I started to scientifically study this fascinating topic, and

I've been studying this topic ever since. In today's episode, I'm going to focus just on the facts and the science an attempt to show you why this topic really is so fascinating and so important to study for a broader understanding of how to unlock the potential of all people. So, without further ado, here is your first episode of the

Human Potential Lab series. Let's start off with the question what is intelligence and acknowledge first of all that in different cultures, people have viewed intelligence in different ways and have defined in different ways. So in Chinese philosophy, you know, the Confucian perspective emphasizes benevolence and doing what is right. Under that philosophy, the intelligent person is the one that

enjoys learning and persists in lifelong learning with enthusiasm. You may have talist approaches that emphasize the importance of humility or the freedom from conventional standards of judgment and the knowledge of oneself and of external conditions. Well, if you go onto Google and you type in what is intelligence, dictionary dot com will give you a definition that's very much in line with a Western definition or a Western understanding.

Probably what many listeners of the show immediately conjure up when they think of the word intelligence, and that's that's defined as the capacity for learning, reasoning, understanding and similar forms of mental activity aptitude and grasping truths, relationships, facts, meanings, etc. You know, that's an actual, really reasonable definition of intelligence, I think. But there's a difference between the conceptual understanding of what intelligence is and how it tends to be measured.

And we're going to be focusing a lot on the measurement today. When you look at the history of IQ tests, a lot of it traces back to a Frenchman by the name of Alfred Burnet who was tesked by the Department of Education to come up with a test that would differentiate those who would need remedial help from those who you know, wouldn't need remedial help or just find in the classroom. And that was it. That was all that he was tasked with, and he came up with

a test. He never called an intelligence test. He just came up with a test designed to measure the ability to profit from explicit instruction. And in fact, it were the Americans who got ahold of the test and were like, oh, this is amazing. Let's use this test in all sorts of ways to limit potential, you know, such as people coming in from immigrants coming in from like Ellis Island, or for army recruits, and various ways to see whether or not people are intelligent to be able to pass

some sort of threshold. That really wasn't the original intention

of Benet, in fact the original intention. In fact, the use of the Americans once they got ahold of Benez's tests really fundamentally betrayed benee original spirit of the test, and Bene towards the end of his life life he wrote how set he was that the American's betrayed that they made it very clear that intelligence testing, or his type of testing, because he never called an intelligence test, requires individualized testing between one person, a trained competent psychologist

and a person. So intelligence tests really stem from those earliest measures by Benet and the way intelligence tests are typically measured. And these are just some sample IQ test items. What you tend to find on an IQ test or a whole like cognitive Schmorgas board of tests, from arithmetic kinds of tests to a category test to reading comprehension, to similarities like in what way are dogs and rabbits alike. So it's just a whole kind of cognitive Schmorgas board

of tests. And what's really interesting is that you do find that these tests tend to positively correlate with each other. Psychologists call this the G factor. People who are ten people tend to be good at vocabulary kind of questions. Do you tend to be good at arithmetic or tend to good at block design? You know, taking a block and make putting it to its correct configuration. And so

there does tend to be a positive correlation there. And people who tend to be score poorly in one test tend to score poll in an other poorly in all the other kind of subtests. Now, these aren't perfect correlations by any stretch of the imagination, but you do see a positive correlation suggesting there is something called general intelligence that people differ on, and that's you know, quite controversial in certain circles, but it seems to become less controversial

if we frame it in other domains. For instance, do you remember the physical fitness test you took in school where you had to like do the long jump or high jump. You had to, like, I remember we had this chalk test where he had to run as quick as possible from one side or the other. And what you find is if you have a whole sorts of smorgas board of physical fitness tests, they tend to correlate

positively as well. You know, people who tend to do pretty well on one of these kinds of physical fitness tests tend to do better than others on other tests of physical fitness, forming an f factor or physical or fitness factor. But within the realm of mental ability or cognition, you know, things get a little bit more controversial for many reasons. But let's stick to the science for a second.

Because what you find is that while all these things positively correlate with each other, not all IQ type tests are equally as valid a measure of this general intelligence. You can actually lay out on a what looks like a dartboard various kinds of tests and in three tooment, and you know, in different spaces, and ask the question, well, what tests really are tapping more into a general form

of intelligence than other kinds of tests. And we could start at the very perimeter of the dart board before we throw the dart rate of the center to what is the key of general intelligence. Let's start at the periphery.

And when we started the periphery, we have kinds of very mindless kinds of tasks like number comparison, W, digit symbol, identical figures, auditory letter span, just repeating things back, you know, simple memory things which don't tend to be that strongly correlated with IQ or the whatever is in common across

all these different kinds of tests. On an IQ test, when you let's go closer to the center of the target, you have things like W object assembly, listening comprehension, vocabulary recognition, quantitative achievement. So you know, not as cognitively complex you can, but a little bit more cognitively complex than just repeating things back. You know what, Let's go away to the center to the target. When you go away to the center, you find that congregating around that center target, you know

what is the target of general intelligence? You find it has a lot to do with anological reasoning, and maybe the content doesn't matter, maybe it's not made. It's verbal analogies or geometric analogies or letter series like ABCD. What comes next? I hope you all got that one right or else you're in trouble. Yeah, And so when you go to kind of the center there you find that there's something about anological reasoning that seems to be most

strongly correlated with general intelligence. That people who are good at that kind of reasoning tend to be good at a whole wide range of forms of reasoning and problem solving and things that we want to call intelligence. It turns out psychologists call that fluid reasoning. And one of the best measures of that is the Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices test or the Raven Advanced Progressive Matrices test. And this is just an example of a Raven's kind of item.

For those who are listening to this just on the Auditory podcast, you might want to watch the YouTube video for the video for the for the solides. But what you see here is you have a sequence of geometric figures and you have to fill in the missing piece across and down, and I've highlighted here the answer. So usually in my lectures, I ask my students or I ask people to kind of figure out the answer, then I'll give them some time to come up with it.

But today I'll just show you the answer. And I'm sure most of you. I'm sure most of my listeners here will have figured this out. You're all very smart people, but this is a You're all smart in terms of food reasoning, I'm sure, but this is considered a moderately difficult test item on the Raven test, and what you find is welles, What does it take to be good

at this test? Well, to be good at this fuloid reasoning test, you have to be able to integrate various things and hold various features in your working memory at the same time size shape, You know in some instances that things differ by another feature, such as color, And what you to do is you have to hold one piece of information in your head at one time while you're figuring out other pieces of information and then integrating them to find out what the overarching pattern is. Well.

It turns out that ability to score well on these kinds of fluid reasoning tests is correlated with a particular brain network called the executive attention brain network. And the executive attention brain network is really important for having focused attention and being able to hold multiple things in your working memory at one time and synthesize and integrate them. You can train artificial intelligence programs to solve raven items

pretty well. So if this is what you view as all there is to intelligence, then then computers are already pretty intelligent. You know, they can you can program them to come up with patterns and things. I also think in defense of fulloid reasoning ability for a second, I do think it's important. You know, I think that if you have the ability to fill in the blanks quickly in a situation, you're going to be more adaptable, and

that is a reasonable aspect of intelligence. When and then so let's ask the question what is the correliated with Well, this kind of ability is pretty strongly correlated with school achievement. Surprise, surprise. You know, in the school system we have lots of tests that are what psychologist would call g loaded or

really draw heavily on general intelligence or fluid intelligence. Some people, by the way, think fluid intelligence is synonymous with general intelligence, whereas others argue that general intelligence comprises fuluid reasoning as well as knowledge like what's called crystallized intelligence. And more on that. More than that in a second, we're getting

ahead of ourselves. But when you look at the correlation between IQ and academic achievement, what you find is there is a pretty strong correlation people who tend to score higher on IQ tests or measures of general intelligence do tend to do better on school tests and do tend to be better at standardized tests of academic achievement. But I think it's also important to recognize this is not a perfect correlation and a lot of people, a lot

of kids do fall between the cracks. Remember that was Benai's original intention here was to find the kids falling between the cracks. But here's what I mean by falling between the cracks. I think that there are a lot of ways in which schools use IQ as a measure of prediction, and then they expect that they're going to be able to forecast the child's future on these kinds of tests are in school and sometimes even beyond that

into life. And I never think we should use IQ tests in childhood as a way to forecast owes life potential for many reasons. But what you see here in this chart is that while fifty percent of people do tend to underperform based on what they would be predicted of them based on their IQ score on academic achievement tests, fifty percent overperform and that's a really big deal, and

that's really important to recognize. Fifty percent overperform on academic achievement tests based on their predicted performance on IQ tests. So that is really important to keep in mind in our models in schools and in life, you know, in terms of trying to predict what kids do or what they're capable of doing, because there's a lot more to academic achievement than just your food reasonability or your IQ. But I just staying in defense of general intelligence for

a second, or IQ. IQ is not meaningless. So not only does it predict some important things in life, actually quite a lot of important things in life. There are also a certain developmental stability stability to IQ after a certain age, So after around seven or eight, IQ tends

to stabilize. You wouldn't want to predict someone's IQ in their teenage years if all you have is information about their IQ at age one, for instance, because like as you see at this chart here, the correlation between IQ at age one and the correlation of IQ at age seventeen is almost zero, so you do want to wait a bit. But there is some developmental stability. Again, this is not perfect, and we individually as as a person within person, we change quite a bit throughout our lives

in terms of our intelligence. Of course, I would hope that my age sixteen intelligence was much more intelligent than my right now in age intelligence. I'm not going to tell you how old I am whatever, But this is talking about relative correlations. So people who tend to be at the top of the pack on IQ test at age eight, when they grow up, they do also tend to be top of the pack again when they're measured against the same people. But these are not perfect correlations,

and these correlations can differ across our lifespan. Psychologists have expanded our notion of intelligence though beyond general intelligence, and this is where we start to get into the fascinating multiple intelligences debate, because psychologists have argued that we should actually view intelligence as a hierarchy, with G or general intelligence,

at the top of the hierarchy. Underneath of that some more broad abilities like food reasoning knowledge you know some refer to as crystallized intelligence, maybe auditory processing, visual spatial ability. These things comprise general intelligence, and then underneath each of those abilities we have more narrower abilities that are specific skills that make up food reasoning specific skills that make up visual spatial processing specific skills that make up crystallized intelligence.

And one of the most prominent models is called the HC model or the could Tell Horn Carol model integrate they could Tell Horn Carol integrated model of cognitive abilities,

which does view intelligence as that hierarchy. But note that even within this hierarchy, you still have G or general intelligence there at the top, and there's still an acknowledgment that all these other multiple abilities are still positively correlated with each other, and that some and that people who do tend to and that people who tend to do well one of these cognitive abilities will tend to do

well on the others. A really big breakout from this what we call psychometric model testing model of intelligence came in the eighties, I believe nineteen eighty three with the publication of Howard Gardner's seminole book called Frames of Mind, The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. This is one of the books that really influenced me a lot when I was in college and I really was getting interested in understanding intelligence.

This book and another book which I'll tell you about a second, really deeply influenced me When I read Howard Gardner's Frads of Minds, it made in too a sense to me that, well, we have multiple intelligences. We have not, you know, we have multiple ways of being smart at things in life. And here's some of the intelligences that Howard Gardner proposed. He proposed a linguistic intelligence, so we got the kind of intelligence used in reading a book

or writing a poem. Logical mathematical intelligence, such as the kind of intelligence that comes from deriving a logical proof or solving a mathematical problem. Spatial intelligence, such as the kind of intelligence we have when we're fitting suitcases into the trunk of a car or mentally rotating things in our head. Musical intelligence your ability to sing a song or compose a symphony. Bodily kinesthetic intelligence, such as your ability to dance or play football, play basketball. I think

sports is associated with bodily kinesthetic intelligence. Interpersonal intelligence, such as understanding and interacting with other people, interro personal intelligence understanding oneself. Naturalistic intelligence such as discerning being able to discern patterns in nature. Well, actually, I should say that his proposed seven intelligences stop at inter a personal intelligence.

He has proposed that maybe maybe there's a naturalistic intelligence such as discerning patterns of nature, or as well as maybe there's a spiritual and existential intelli dilligence, such as your ability to I don't know, be intuitive and understanding human existence and being one with the cosmos. I don't know.

You see a lot of people with self proclaimed spiritual intelligence, and Howard Garner identified a bunch of criteria for identifying an intelligence, things like isolation by brain damage, the existence of exceptional individuals. So the fact that there are people who are exceptionally exceptionally gifted in music, for instance, is an example that music might be a specific intelligence. Here argued there has to be an identifiable core operation essential

to performance. You know that we can understand the mechanism behind it, that there's a distinctive developmental history leading from novice to experts, so that in each of these proposed intelligences, we know that there's a certain set of stages that people go through and developing expertise and intelligence in those areas. And by the way, expertise intelligence are not exactly the same thing. But that's that's for another episode. There's a lot there'll be a lot of things to talk about

in the in the coming Soul episodes, I guarantee. He also argued distinctive evolutionary history is important so that each of one that each one of these seven intelligence intelligences have their own distinct evolutionary history that you know, are just and important, that are importantly distinct from each other. Supportive evidence from cognitive experimental research, he argued. He argued that another criteria for accounting as an intelligence is that

susceptibility to encoding in a symbol system. That each of these kind of intelligences have their own symbol system, maybe it's verbal or spatial or or something else that are encoded uniquely in the brain. And then finally, and this is the one I'm going to double click on, is supportive evidence from psychometric tests. Well, you know, there's been some criticism of Howard Garner's theory, and I think some

of the criticism has been fair. Even even though I was deep influenced originally by the theory of multiple intelligences, I have come to appreciate some of the criticisms of it from academics, for mostly academics, because it's really academics

who seem to care the most about this shit. But so anyway, the academics have argued and point out that, well, Howard Garner, even with your different intelligences, that you propose very few of them, if any meet all of this criteria, you're kind of selectively picking, mixing and match, you know, criteria for different intelligences. So none of them really meet

all this criteria. But probably the most critical one that intelligence researchers have pointed out really rightly so to a large degree, is that all of these seven intelligences positively correlate with each other, forming that G factor or the general intelligence factor. It's really hard to sweep the general intelligence factor under the rug. This is a big point

I want to make here. As much as people try to, it turns out that whenever fore you try to put it to the test, you know, to try to take one of these intelligences and operationalize it. That's what psychologists called operationalizing something. So psychologists will take one of these tests and try to take it, define it, and then put it to the test to give to people to see exactly how these things correlate with each other. You

find that a lot of these tests are gladed. Gloaded is an expression just to just mean some of these tests really do correlate quite strongly with that general intelligence factor that we talked about earlier. So I really find this test, this study interesting by Beth. Advisor might be Beth Visser. I'm sorry, Beth if I mispronounce your last name Beth Visa at all? Where And I believe this is from two thousand and six, and it's called beyond

G putting multiple intelligence's theory to the test. You can take this test. You can go to Google scholar if you want and find this test. Find this paper and read it. It's a really interesting paper. And what they did is they attempted to take each one of Howard Gardner's multiple intelligences and measure them, and they administer it to a large group of people, and they look to see whether or not these things are really independent from

each other. And surprise, surprise, linguistic intelligence, spatial intelligence, and logical mathematical intelligence in particular were strongly correlated with each other. And we're strong correlated with that G factor. Row that's a rot road for those who are pure multiple intelligence theorists, who think there's no such thing as general intelligence. At least those three intelligence researchers for for many many years have could have told you that that these that they

are correlated with general intelligence. But interesting enough, even skills like interpersonal intelligence, interpersonal intelligence is being able to have kind of like social skills or social intelligence. Even some of those kinds of tests, the way that they tried to measure that intelligence was still correlated significantly with the

general intelligence. But some others, like intro personal intelligence, the ability to know yourself know thyself was pretty low and non significantly correlated with the general with general intelligence, and bodily kinesthetic intelligence was very low correlated with general intelligence. And music some musical skills such as rhythm ability and tonal ability that they picked out were quite low in

their correlation with general intelligence. Interesting enough, naturalistic intelligence, which remember I argued was a candidate intelligence in Gardner's model, showed a pretty strong g loading or correlation with general intelligence.

But I think that's because the way they measured naturalistic intelligence was really, in my view, like measuring three dimensional rotation ability or visual spatial reasoning, like one of the tests was called diagramming relationships, And therefore it's no surprise that that's g loaded or correlated with general intelligence, but musical, bodily, kinesthetic, and intro personal intelligence were not that strongly g loaded, suggesting that Gardner was partly right, but he was also

partly wrong in saying that all of the seven intelligences are really completely independent of each other, and that there is no such thing as general intelligence, and that doesn't make sense to talk about general intelligence. So he's partly right and partly wrong. I now want to turn my attention to the theory of successful Intelligence by Robert Sternberg.

This is the Do you remember earlier I said there were two books in college that really really deeply, deeply impacted me and deeply influenced me in inspiring me and wanting to study intelligence and human potential. The second book was Successful Intelligence by Robert Sternberg. When I read this book, and by the way, his subtitle is how Practical and Creative Intelligence Determines success in Life. Now, when I read

this book, I was super inspired. I was like, Wow, this is what I'm gonna do the rest of my life. I want to study intelligence. I want to know everything there is to know about intelligence and particularly multiple intelligences. I really resonate a lot with particularly him talking about creative intelligence. And we'll do another episode later on about creativity and whether or not there are multiple creative abilities

that exist. That's a topic for another day. But interestingly enough, Robert Stirnberg included creative intelligence as part of his model of intelligence, and he also included practical intelligence, or like street smarts, as a particular aspect of intelligence. I think that is really really quite interesting that he included these and I really resonate with that a lot. You can really think of your think of a lot of people

with a lot of street smarts. People maybe grow up in the ghetto, grow up under very difficult situations in life, under a lot of stress, who are really able to adapt, and maybe that doesn't correlate necessarily with their IQ or with their analytical intelligence. By the way, that's the third intelligence, Analytical intelligence, analytical, creative, and practical he argue together comprise

successful intelligence. He argues that people, some people could be as good as can be on these kind of analytical IQ type tests and not be very creative and also

maybe not have a good street smarts. There's some actually really interesting research coming out recently showing that what they call stress adapted people are good at all sorts of kinds of tests that are uncorrelated with IQ, that people grow up in very stressful situations as child of that are very unpredictable and chaotic, learn to adapt in very

important ways. The question here, as the question that we have for Howard Gardner's theory as well, is do we want to call these things, these extra things that go beyond analytical intelligence? Do you want to call them intelligences? This is the question, This is the million hour question. And at the end of the day, maybe you'll just say, well, this is just a semantic argument. This is just the kind of thing that only nerdy academics care about. Who

cares whether it's intelligence or a talent. But in terms of our theories of intelligence, it matters, and our operationalizing of these constructs and academic papers and how we test them. And I also think conceptually it matters in terms of how we treat kids and how we view their abilities. Do we view only a certain subset of cognitive skills? Is that the true intelligence and all the other things are just talents or not? I am still on the fence with this one, to be honest, I still am

trying to keep my mind open about this. Do we want to call bodily kinesthetic intelligence a talent or an intelligence? Is an intelligence as someone who's a good dancer but can't reason their way out of a cardboard box intelligent.

Maybe maybe they're intelligent at dance, but that doesn't seem to mean the same thing as being generally intelligent across different domains, you know, being domain domain general in your intelligence, being able to be quick and reason and deep and thoughtful and adapt to multiple situations just doesn't seem to be the same thing. What about music intelligence? Well, do we want to say that someone who's good at music

is necessarily talented or is necessarily generally smart? My mentor Nicholas McIntosh at University of Cambridge, May he rest in peace. He often made the point about sports and because he's British, he was at the University of Cambridge, because he's British, he's the example of cricket. But he's like, surely we can all distinguish between the talented cricketer who's dumb and the brilliant cricketer who maybe is not as talented. I don't know, do you think you know? Think to yourself,

can you make that distinction. Can you when you think of basketball, can you think of wow, that player is really generally intelligent but not as talented as the other players. But or you look at someone else who's like, Wow, that player is amazingly talented at basketball, but they're not that smart. And so we really need to think this through intelligence or talents. I don't know, this is this is the question. Let me know what you think in

the comments. Now, let's talk about another form of multiple intelligences, an attempt to go beyond IQ, and this particular one is uniquely interesting for a number of reasons. So this is emotional intelligence. We're going to talk about emotional intelligence right now. Many people who are familiar with the construct of emotional intelligence first got their introduction to it in the book in the early nineties called Emotional Intelligence Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, and that was written

by Dan Golman. Now, I want to say that when I first discovered this book in high school, I believe I was in ninth grade in high school I discovered this book. I was like, this book is amazing. It was one of the earliest times in my life where I really realized I loved psychology and I just found psychology and neuroscience fascinating because he talks a lot about neuroscience in there as well, and I was sold. I was sold on the idea of emotional intelligence as Daniel

Goleman presented it. And the thing with the way that Daniel Goleman presented emotional intelligence is that he included so many things within that idea of emotional intelligence, so many skills. Basically, all the skills that are positive in the world he included as emotional intelligence. Your ability to have empathy, your ability to have social skills to not be all socially awkward, your ability to get things done, to be effective, that's

emotional intelligence. It was only really when I got to Yale for my PhD work in intelligence research where I discovered that the original model of emotional intelligence was not created by Daniel Goldman. It was created by John Mayer and Peter Salve. And in their original model of emotional intelligence, they argue that there are four branches of emotional intelligence. One branch is the ability to perceive accurately, appraise emotions,

and express your emotions accurately. The second branch is the ability to access and or generate feelings when they facilitate thought. The third branch is the ability to understand your emotions and as well as emotions of others and have emotional knowledge, know that when someone's feeling angry, you understand that that's anger. And then the fourth branch is the ability to regulate emotions to promote emotional and intellectual growth. This one's really important.

They're all important, but you could see why the person who's emotionally intelligent is able to when they're angry sad, to not immediately spiral down, but to regulate their emotions in ways that promotes their own personal growth. So this is what's interesting about the emotional intelligence thing is that Daniel Goldman wrote this popular book because he went to

a conference. This is the story as it was told to me, is he went to a conference where John Mayer and Peter Salve were presenting their model of emotional intelligence, and he saw a book there. He's like, wow, this would make a great best selling book. So he went and wrote this popular book. But it went way beyond

that original four branch model. And another thing that really differed between the Goldman model and the John Mayer and Peter Salave model of emotional intelligence is that Meyron Salve never argued that emotional intelligence was more important than IQ. In fact, they argued that it to be to count as a form of intelligence, it should correlate with IQ.

You know that there should be at least a moderate correlation, but that there are just extra skills of emotional intelligence, such as those branches that are not adequately assessed on current measures of intelligence. Whereas Daniel Goleman build up the idea that emotional intelligence is the best things in slice spread and that it's better than IQ and it outpredicts things in life than IQ, Well, what's the data actually show about that question about whether or not out predicts IQ.

This is a paper called a Critical Evaluation of the Emotional Intelligence construct by Cherokee, Chan and Kaputi in two thousand. By the way, there are a number of these kinds of studies that have come out now critically evaluating the correlation between IQ and emotional intelligence and pitting the two against each other and predicting lots of outcomes in life.

And we'll summarize some of that research. Not just this research, but I'll summarize a lot of in a nutshell, basically, what you find is that there's a small correlation between IQ and various branches of emotional intelligence. It depends on the branch. For instance, the perception branch of emotional intelligence is more strongly corel with IQ and some other branches

such as understanding and managing your emotions. But you also find that for things like academic achievement, come on, IQ is still a better predictor of academic achievement, far and away better predictor than emotional intelligence. You can't just sit down at a standardized test of critical reasoning and feel your way through it, no matter how social intelligent you are.

But there are some demeans, like in relationships, in terms of life satisfaction and in terms of just being having warmth with others and being people liking you, where emotional intelligence probably does matter more than IQ, and the data does bear that out in some studies. So there are specific demeans where intelligence emotional intelligence matters more. I imagine in the helping professions, emotional intelligence skills are going to

be super important. My friend Mark Brackett has done amazing research going in schools. He calls it emotional literacy as opposed to emotional intelligence and Mark Bracket although he's at the he's head of the Center for Emotional Intelligence at Yale, where which is where the original emotional intelligence construct by

Meyer and Salve was created. And Mark Brackett teaches kids various skills of emotional literacy, being able to understand your emotions, being able to identify what you're feeling, and all these sorts of things, and he has found that that does predict various metrics in the school system, like school attendance, like even you know, I believe test performance in some ways. Now, is it going to be a better predictor than IQ? I think it'd be hard. It'd be hard to say

that it's a better predictor than IQ. Maybe some forms of school performance, but not all forms. But it certainly matters. I think we can conclude at the end of the day that emotional intelligence skills matter. But again, emotional intelligence has not made the G factor or general intelligence disappear.

At this point, it's really important to recognize as well that IQ is not the only predictor the best predictor of academic achievement, and that there are other factors that are really important in affecting academic achievement, not just internal factors. But external factors, so being intrinsically motivated and what you want to do. Having a cognitively stimulating home environment really matters. Research shows the amount of books on the bookshelf that you grew up on it with as a kid matters.

Having social support and high expectations from those in the classroom and in your media environment with your family matters. Having opportunities for academic enrichment really matters. Being able to learn active learning strategies such as taking notes and going

to the teacher after class really matters. Helping self control, self regulation, a lot of these things that come from emotional intelligence, and also having creative thinking or ability to address problems from many different angles is very important for

achievement in life as well as academic achievement. But something I've been criticizing is that if you look at a lot of the models of gifted education in our school system and how you know who is the gifted child, how do we identify giftedness, you tend to find that there still is a predominant focus on IQ testing and achievement standardized achievement tests, that is still very much the

focus in terms of identifying you for giftedness. Above, multiple specific abilities or talents, whatever you want to call them, specific intelligences or specific talents, Creativity much much less so considered important in the idea of what makes a gifted human. Leadership, ability, much much less, performing arts virtually no school, I mean just maybe three three states, three states consider performing arts

as important for ideas of giftedness. And then this last part really gets at the key of my own personal reconceptualization of intelligence, and that's that motivation is considered by very few schools, our school, district, or extra school or states as important and relevant at all to giftedness. And

I think that is really unfortunate and incorrect. We're leaving a lot of human potential on the table by our notions of what it means to be a gifted human and even what it means to be smart, and in a way in which I'm not even taking a multiple intelligence approach at the moment. Let me tell you about my approach. And I wanted to really review the approach from everyone else so you could make up your mind in totality. And I also didn't want to lead, you know,

with my own ideas. But I'd be remiss if I didn't tell you a little bit about my own read definition of intelligence, and you can think about whether or not you agree with it or not. As I wrote about in my book un Gifted, I argue that intelligence is the dynamic interplay of engagement and ability in pursuit of personal goals. Now, that is a definition that sounds very complex, so let me explain it. Let me break it down for you. Okay. Basically, I argue that there

is such a thing as general intelligence. There is in the sense that there are multiple cognitive mechanisms that interact and with developmental experiences that come together that can cause the development of someone to be generally smart. You know that there are people differences in people who are generally able to reason and problem solve and think on the spot and adapt to novel situations fluid what's called you know, we called fluid reasoning, and you can clearly see those

differences among people. However, personal intelligence matters just as much, if not more. I call it the theory of personal intelligence. I argue, while general intelligence is not something I'm ignoring as important, there is a certain kind of intelligence that seems to come about when we're really passionate and activated about something and we really are engaged in it over the long run, the long haul, we're really committed to

something real, truly committed to something. There's a certain intelligence you can only see when that when we give people a chance to realize their personal goal over a long period of time. And we also recognize that there's a dynamic interplay between ability and engagement in that when we gain more skills and abilities, our engagement arises in that domain. We get more interest in what we're doing. And the more that we get interested in what we're doing, the

more our ability increases. These things work together, and when we have tended to measure IQ tests over the past one hundred years, the way we have tended to measure the way we tend to measure intelligence is we stick someone in a room and we give them the battery of abstract tests that are completely divorced from their lives, and we do like a one snap shot of their intelligence, and we conclude all this about their life, life and

their future and their general intellectual functioning from that. And I'm not arguing we can't glean anything valuable from that. I've argued quite a bit today that there's a lot that we can glean from that, but leave out this personal intelligence, which may be the most important intelligence that matters to each individual human. I created this idea of intelligence before I really got into work on self actualization.

But a lot of ways, I'm just talking about self actualizing intelligence, the kind of intelligence that you, and only you can display by your own unique constellation of abilities and interests. So look, in some ways, what I'm arguing is there's no such thing as multiple intelligences. There are infinite intelligences, you know, that's one way of looking at it.

You know, who am I to say, sit in my chair with a tweed jacket, you know, in my ivory tower, and say, ah, I have decided there's only these intelligences, the intelligences that counts, and no other intelligences count. That other one doesn't count. Who am I to say that there's a certain personal form of intelligence that can wow everyone when you give them a chance to tell us what their personal dreams are, what are their goals? In what way do they want to be judged by their

intelligence anyway? In fact, probably no one wants to be judged. No one likes being judged. So there's a sense in which I'm saying that they're infinite intelligences. But before you roll your eyes, if you're an intelligence researcher, oh my gosh, infinite intelligences, multiple intelligences was bad enough. Also recognize that

I'm a real nerd about g and general intelligence. I do think that working memory capacity, you know, the kind of cognitive mechanisms that underlie general intelligence, like working memory capacity, your ability like processing speed, your ability to form quick associations between things. These are important skills, and that people do differ in each other on those skills and in

flood reasoning. But I really am remiss to take that fact, take those facts and stop there and not say that there isn't a more deeply personal kind of intelligence that exists in all of us when we actually are motivated, when we're activated, we're inspired. I know personally that when I'm uninspired by something and you stick a test on me,

I can look pretty dumb. But then when I'm activated like I am right now, like I am today, and in my excitement and explaining to you all the fashioning mysteries of intelligence theory and multiple intelligences, there's a I would assume I appear smarter, you know, and I appear more intellectually alive, so to speak. I've never quite used

that phrase before. And you know, I've worked with I've seen it it up front, you know, I've I've worked with an organization, an educational nonprofit called the Future Project UH, and I really love what they do. They have like the Office of the Dream Director where any student can go to the Office of the Dream Director and and UH and tell the student, and the student can tell the Dream Director what their dreams are in life and

and what they want to do. You know, they'll say like, oh, I want to end bullying or oh I want to I want to make the world a better place and do this and that and and you know, the dream Director says, great, let's help you get there, no questions asked. It's not like, you know, we have to give you an IQ test to see whether or not you meet a certain criteria to be able to make the world

a better place. No, it's just like, give you that that personal that that opportunity to display your personal intelligence. And you see a lot of these kids transform. A lot of these kids who were written off really become alive and and people are like, wow, that person's pretty darn smart after all. So where are we at with

this question that started this whole topic today? So I think that I hope I have shown you today that certainly multiple abilities exist, and the more cognitively complex they are, in the sense that the more those cognitive abilities are on the spot and abstract and divorced from our life and can apply to a variety of situations, the more they will be positively correlated with each other, forming a

general intelligence factor. So general intelligence does exist. But I'm gonna be nuanced here and say that general intelligence exists and multiple intelligences exist. Both are true at the same time. You often see some people like Kwa Garner will say multiple intelligence exists, therefore there's no such thing as general intelligence.

But I'm not saying that. I think that both multiple intelligence exist and general intelligences exist, and personal intelligence exists, which can only be seen when someone actually asks you what wlights you up and gives you the resources an opportunity to realize your dreams. Well, what do you all think?

This is my first standalone episode. I really hope you found it informative and I hope it generated discussion, So please weigh in in the commons section message the Psychology Podcast and let us know what kinds of topics you would like us to cover on this special series of standalone episodes that we're calling the Human Potential Lab. I hope everyone enjoy this and until next time, stay smart in your own way peace. Thanks for listening to this

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