The mind is more powerful than the pen.

What makes us intelligent?

While this blog may be named 'Intellectual mindlessness', I believe intelligence itself has not been a subject of pondering so far. However, it is a part of a person's psyche, it apparently shows how logical the person is, and whether or not he or she has a good memory. That is generally the case when one thinks of IQ tests - they are not just testing logical derivations, they also test cultural knowledge. That is the reason why there can't be a standard test for everyone in the whole wide world - cultures differ from one another. Even in small areas it is difficult to create a test which would assess only the person's cleverness. People are taught different algorithms, different ways of thinking. A test that focuses more on 3D mental projections has to undervalue the ability to see through simple puzzles. Overeducated brains often have difficulties with the simplest of tasks that children can solve without any problems. Intelligence comes in a variety of shapes and sizes.

Nowadays, the memory part of intelligence has met with a huge setback - the infamous Internet. People tend not to memorize data that is easily accessible because it is not worth the effort. Sure it might take two minutes to check it, but that also means your memory has to be burdened less. In a way, a person's knowledge is as great as the Internet's. It often takes more time to try to recall something than check it from the great tube system using nothing more than your personal cell phone. Because so much information is at arm's length, we know more, and because of that, we know less. We no longer need to memorize everything we need to know, we can let some servers do it for us.

It is the same as cooperation. Transactive memory is a concept conjured up by Daniel Wegner about three decades ago, and it is a type of hive mind. It is a phenomenon that people who work in a group or in pairs for a long time develop a sort of shared memory. "A transactive memory system consists of the knowledge stored in each individual's memory combined with metamemory containing information regarding the different teammate's domains of expertise". It explains why it is so efficient to have a long-term team as opposed to constantly alternating team members. And it expands a person's ability to store and access information, much like the Internet does.

People become more intelligent when they work together. People's knowledge is expanded by artificial databanks filled with binary data. But even these phenomena have their limits. A group of people the size of a country can hardly work together efficiently, even a hundred politicians is often enough to cease any kind of cooperation. And cat videos hardly increase our mental abilities. The only thing that we can change significantly is how we use the knowledge that is at our fingertips. How do we make logical conclusions using the data we have, what we decide to do after having assessed the information, how do we make connections between different phenomena. We need to learn to think, because that makes us wise.

Via Tjadens