UNCLE HERKIMER'S KORNER: ©1988
Wanting to articulate some thoughts on intelligence and prejudice, but failing to decide on a proper perspective, I decided to let the subject simmer for awhile. Rather than simplifying itself, as mulled ideas tend to do, the concept just kept branching out into additional issues. So with the warning that this column will be even less clearly organized than usual (but with a really clever rationalization for the disjunction coming up) I'll just plunge in. As if I were not capable of biting off more than I can chew, Mensa sources recently dropped two more orts of note in my mental stew, one of which will be along later.
Ort one: Since I probably couldn't get away with casually tossing in a quote from Marilyn Vos Savant (highest recorded IQ--228) while neglecting to mention the source, I'll just 'fess up and admit I saw her on the Geraldo Show; but the set was only turned on by accident when I dropped my copy of Nilsson's Synthetische Arbildung on it. Anyway, what she said was "if you're not liked, it's not because you're bright, it's because you have a rotten personality." One good thing about that quote is I can talk about the sentiment without having to take the heat for the comment; another is that I plan to take her words and run with them a bit. Marilyn went on to ascribe one reason for the seeming prejudice against bright people to what she classified as the skilled intellectually--people who read and memorize a lot and then inundate everyone in earshot with their recitations.
Ms. Vos Savant's comments reinforced one of my favorite prejudices, and while that was probably not her intent, prejudices are such resourceful critters they are adept at being reinforced unawares. She argues that IQ tests pick up both the "almost naturally intelligent" and the "intellectually skilled". To be fair, she did not state that being intellectually skilled and intelligent are mutually exclusive. But my prejudicial self responds as though they were. I hate being read to. The ability to read and recite facts is a meager substitute for the ability to respond to the concepts someone is talking about, albeit responding to ideas frequently includes knowledge that one gained from reading.
The idea lurking in the shadows of Vos Savant's comments, and more openly in my prejudices, is that being intellectually skilled is intrinsically inferior to being "naturally" intelligent. Unfortunately for the health and prosperity of prejudices everywhere, life is seldom as simple as their declarations claim. In an effort to demuddleize Vos Savant's terms, I argue that they have useful similarities to the term pairs right brained-left brained, as well as linear-conceptual. Column writing being basically an exercise in self-indulgence, I choose the terms conceptual thinking processes (CT) vs. linear thinking processes (LT) as most clearly representing the issues at hand. The conceptual minded of you now have some amorphous construct of how this is fitting into your own thinking, while the linear folks are upset because "demuddleize" is not an accepted word.
In looking for answers, CT's tend to wander apparently aimlessly from idea to idea, frequently unable to articulate exactly what they are doing, while LT's not only can describe exactly what they are doing, they probably have a step by step description of the process. CT's argue that Lt's never discover anything truly new--that they must follow blindly the properly proscribed steps in whatever process they are involved in, and when the steps come to an end, so does their progress. LT's claim CT's maintain such abstract thinking patterns that even if they think of something useful, it takes an LT to put it into usable form.
One element of this thesis is that both approaches are so incomplete, prejudice on the part of either faction represents a flagitious assault on the facts. Even if it makes sense to think of intelligence as a quantity of something, it does not follow that either approach is necessarily associated with a larger quantity of intelligence than the other. Whatever the differences are, they lie elsewhere than in the amount of information an individual has accumulated in his/her particular store of knowledge.
(Here I must take a rather lengthy aside, giving myself opportunity as well to discharge my rationalization commitment, which is that conceptual thinkers get their cues from such disparate sources, such excursions to side information are essential to the thinking process. This aside is a synopsis of a concept neuropsychologist Carl Pribram calls the holographic mind. He envisions memory as being stored in the brain much the same as information is stored on a holographic plate, distributed in the receptive field of each neuron. The synaptic events attendant to mental processes, recalling something for instance, occur in waves of nueral activity, and these synaptic event waves produce interference patterns which permit massive amounts of information to be stored in a tiny space, just as in a hologram.
While memory is holographically distributed, coding and retrieval operations are highly localized; roughly analogous to the reference and reconstruction beams in a hologram. Karl's work can be interpreted as suggesting that retrieval procedures may follow an individual style. In recalling something, a conceptual thinker would activate a more diverse set of wave patterns, while a linear thinker would rely on a more parsimonious path of associations.)
Persons who display the contents of their memory to the degree that others think them obnoxious, typically think of themselves as being helpful and logical, and are frequently unaware or resentful of others response to them. Pribram's work might suggest that their presentation is partly a function of the physiological method of codification and retrieval that individual uses rather than some perverse personality trait.
The second tangy tidbit came in the form of the Mensa 23.Research Journal, which deals with intelligence studies bearing partly on the subject herein...and well beyond. Writing this would have been a much simpler task had the report come out at a later time, and I would just ignore it presently but for one aspect too intriguing to pass up.
Unfortunately, the part I want is not the area of most social impact; essentially requiring me to acknowledge the issue of largest controversy. The study is another in the area of racial differences in intelligence, the most notorious of which are the publications of Jenson and Herrnstein regarding the differences in IQ scores between Blacks and Whites in America. These studies have attracted attention far beyond any utilitarian purposes they might conceivably serve. The studies have been vigorously attacked by some as inflaming the problem of racism, and hailed by others as evidence of the superiority of the white race. (In my own timorous way, I must observe that I have never heard an individual claiming the superiority of the white race, who personally exhibited the superior characteristics she/he claimed as legacy. Au contraire...) The present study was done by Richard Lynn, and compares the IQ scores of Whites (Caucasiods) with Orientals (Mongoloids) The study found (and here my little knee-jerk liberal mentality giggles gleefully if not justifiably.) that Mongoloids score higher on standard IQ tests than Caucasoids. Leaving for the time being the red-necks who argued that Jenson's results proved the superiority of Whites over Blacks with the formidable task of explaining how Lynn's results don't make them inferior to the Orientals, I'll get to the more relevant part of the study.
Lynn concluded that the divergent mental characteristics of the three major races are demonstrated in neurological studies once the measure of intelligence is further broken down into verbal and visuospatial abilities as well as the measure of general intelligence. He visualizes these characteristics as evolutionary responses to varying environmental pressures on the groups. Specifically, he observes that evolutionary changes occur in "jumps followed by long periods of equilibrium". One of these jumps occurred during the last ice age. The future Mongoloids were trapped north of the Himalayas, and physical adaptations to conditions there resulted in the characteristics currently measured.
Accepting Lynn's thesis tentatively, which is much easier for CT's than LT's, that extraordinary environmental circumstances resulted in divergent methods of processing information (in this case, increased emphasis on either verbal or visiospatial abilities most needed as survival skills within a given environment) makes the recognition of racial differences somewhat more palatable.
Conditions at the time of the Ice Age required massive changes in information processing to insure survival. But many argue that conditions today also present challenges that require massive changes in the way we process information. The greatest of these challenges may in fact be the overwhelming amount of disparate information we must cope with. If that is true, and another evolutionary "jump" is at hand, the changes now required are convergent, rather than divergent. Now our greatest challenges come not from some whim of climate but result principally from changes we are making in our own environment, and whatever evolutionary adaptations will permit our survival must occur to all of us irrespective of race, indeed irrespective of most of the ways we currently differentiate ourselves.
And so to wrap it up with another oh-shit-here-I-am-out-of-space-again, the moral of the story is that the next time someone holds forth too long in their recitation of tired facts you could read for yourself, simply say to them. "Listen you, I'm not saying I'm better than you, but you'd best get on the evolutionary bandwagon and stop processing and dispensing information in that linear fashion, because times are a'changing, and if you don't develop the time and space saving method of conceptual information processing, you will be left behind just like the dinosaurs." They might just call you a bigot and hit you. Oh, well.
Wanting to articulate some thoughts on intelligence and prejudice, but failing to decide on a proper perspective, I decided to let the subject simmer for awhile. Rather than simplifying itself, as mulled ideas tend to do, the concept just kept branching out into additional issues. So with the warning that this column will be even less clearly organized than usual (but with a really clever rationalization for the disjunction coming up) I'll just plunge in. As if I were not capable of biting off more than I can chew, Mensa sources recently dropped two more orts of note in my mental stew, one of which will be along later.
Ort one: Since I probably couldn't get away with casually tossing in a quote from Marilyn Vos Savant (highest recorded IQ--228) while neglecting to mention the source, I'll just 'fess up and admit I saw her on the Geraldo Show; but the set was only turned on by accident when I dropped my copy of Nilsson's Synthetische Arbildung on it. Anyway, what she said was "if you're not liked, it's not because you're bright, it's because you have a rotten personality." One good thing about that quote is I can talk about the sentiment without having to take the heat for the comment; another is that I plan to take her words and run with them a bit. Marilyn went on to ascribe one reason for the seeming prejudice against bright people to what she classified as the skilled intellectually--people who read and memorize a lot and then inundate everyone in earshot with their recitations.
Ms. Vos Savant's comments reinforced one of my favorite prejudices, and while that was probably not her intent, prejudices are such resourceful critters they are adept at being reinforced unawares. She argues that IQ tests pick up both the "almost naturally intelligent" and the "intellectually skilled". To be fair, she did not state that being intellectually skilled and intelligent are mutually exclusive. But my prejudicial self responds as though they were. I hate being read to. The ability to read and recite facts is a meager substitute for the ability to respond to the concepts someone is talking about, albeit responding to ideas frequently includes knowledge that one gained from reading.
The idea lurking in the shadows of Vos Savant's comments, and more openly in my prejudices, is that being intellectually skilled is intrinsically inferior to being "naturally" intelligent. Unfortunately for the health and prosperity of prejudices everywhere, life is seldom as simple as their declarations claim. In an effort to demuddleize Vos Savant's terms, I argue that they have useful similarities to the term pairs right brained-left brained, as well as linear-conceptual. Column writing being basically an exercise in self-indulgence, I choose the terms conceptual thinking processes (CT) vs. linear thinking processes (LT) as most clearly representing the issues at hand. The conceptual minded of you now have some amorphous construct of how this is fitting into your own thinking, while the linear folks are upset because "demuddleize" is not an accepted word.
In looking for answers, CT's tend to wander apparently aimlessly from idea to idea, frequently unable to articulate exactly what they are doing, while LT's not only can describe exactly what they are doing, they probably have a step by step description of the process. CT's argue that Lt's never discover anything truly new--that they must follow blindly the properly proscribed steps in whatever process they are involved in, and when the steps come to an end, so does their progress. LT's claim CT's maintain such abstract thinking patterns that even if they think of something useful, it takes an LT to put it into usable form.
One element of this thesis is that both approaches are so incomplete, prejudice on the part of either faction represents a flagitious assault on the facts. Even if it makes sense to think of intelligence as a quantity of something, it does not follow that either approach is necessarily associated with a larger quantity of intelligence than the other. Whatever the differences are, they lie elsewhere than in the amount of information an individual has accumulated in his/her particular store of knowledge.
(Here I must take a rather lengthy aside, giving myself opportunity as well to discharge my rationalization commitment, which is that conceptual thinkers get their cues from such disparate sources, such excursions to side information are essential to the thinking process. This aside is a synopsis of a concept neuropsychologist Carl Pribram calls the holographic mind. He envisions memory as being stored in the brain much the same as information is stored on a holographic plate, distributed in the receptive field of each neuron. The synaptic events attendant to mental processes, recalling something for instance, occur in waves of nueral activity, and these synaptic event waves produce interference patterns which permit massive amounts of information to be stored in a tiny space, just as in a hologram.
While memory is holographically distributed, coding and retrieval operations are highly localized; roughly analogous to the reference and reconstruction beams in a hologram. Karl's work can be interpreted as suggesting that retrieval procedures may follow an individual style. In recalling something, a conceptual thinker would activate a more diverse set of wave patterns, while a linear thinker would rely on a more parsimonious path of associations.)
Persons who display the contents of their memory to the degree that others think them obnoxious, typically think of themselves as being helpful and logical, and are frequently unaware or resentful of others response to them. Pribram's work might suggest that their presentation is partly a function of the physiological method of codification and retrieval that individual uses rather than some perverse personality trait.
The second tangy tidbit came in the form of the Mensa 23.Research Journal, which deals with intelligence studies bearing partly on the subject herein...and well beyond. Writing this would have been a much simpler task had the report come out at a later time, and I would just ignore it presently but for one aspect too intriguing to pass up.
Unfortunately, the part I want is not the area of most social impact; essentially requiring me to acknowledge the issue of largest controversy. The study is another in the area of racial differences in intelligence, the most notorious of which are the publications of Jenson and Herrnstein regarding the differences in IQ scores between Blacks and Whites in America. These studies have attracted attention far beyond any utilitarian purposes they might conceivably serve. The studies have been vigorously attacked by some as inflaming the problem of racism, and hailed by others as evidence of the superiority of the white race. (In my own timorous way, I must observe that I have never heard an individual claiming the superiority of the white race, who personally exhibited the superior characteristics she/he claimed as legacy. Au contraire...) The present study was done by Richard Lynn, and compares the IQ scores of Whites (Caucasiods) with Orientals (Mongoloids) The study found (and here my little knee-jerk liberal mentality giggles gleefully if not justifiably.) that Mongoloids score higher on standard IQ tests than Caucasoids. Leaving for the time being the red-necks who argued that Jenson's results proved the superiority of Whites over Blacks with the formidable task of explaining how Lynn's results don't make them inferior to the Orientals, I'll get to the more relevant part of the study.
Lynn concluded that the divergent mental characteristics of the three major races are demonstrated in neurological studies once the measure of intelligence is further broken down into verbal and visuospatial abilities as well as the measure of general intelligence. He visualizes these characteristics as evolutionary responses to varying environmental pressures on the groups. Specifically, he observes that evolutionary changes occur in "jumps followed by long periods of equilibrium". One of these jumps occurred during the last ice age. The future Mongoloids were trapped north of the Himalayas, and physical adaptations to conditions there resulted in the characteristics currently measured.
Accepting Lynn's thesis tentatively, which is much easier for CT's than LT's, that extraordinary environmental circumstances resulted in divergent methods of processing information (in this case, increased emphasis on either verbal or visiospatial abilities most needed as survival skills within a given environment) makes the recognition of racial differences somewhat more palatable.
Conditions at the time of the Ice Age required massive changes in information processing to insure survival. But many argue that conditions today also present challenges that require massive changes in the way we process information. The greatest of these challenges may in fact be the overwhelming amount of disparate information we must cope with. If that is true, and another evolutionary "jump" is at hand, the changes now required are convergent, rather than divergent. Now our greatest challenges come not from some whim of climate but result principally from changes we are making in our own environment, and whatever evolutionary adaptations will permit our survival must occur to all of us irrespective of race, indeed irrespective of most of the ways we currently differentiate ourselves.
And so to wrap it up with another oh-shit-here-I-am-out-of-space-again, the moral of the story is that the next time someone holds forth too long in their recitation of tired facts you could read for yourself, simply say to them. "Listen you, I'm not saying I'm better than you, but you'd best get on the evolutionary bandwagon and stop processing and dispensing information in that linear fashion, because times are a'changing, and if you don't develop the time and space saving method of conceptual information processing, you will be left behind just like the dinosaurs." They might just call you a bigot and hit you. Oh, well.
MensaMuse, Boulder, Colorado, Jim Moore
Back to the curator's desk.
