Wednesday, August 24, 2005

 

Smarter Than What?

I stated at the beginning that my personal definition of an apex is "where an individual achieves their maximum mean combined levels in the areas of physical performance, mental acuity and spirituality". By mental acuity, I was referring to intelligence - and how does someone increase their intelligence? First of all, intelligence is a bit hard to define - after all, there is the view that "intelligence is whatever an intelligence test measures." Sternberg wrote in 1985 that the three characteristics of intelligence are the possession of knowledge, the ability to use knowledge to reason about the world, and the ability to use that reasoning adaptively in different contexts. Of particular interest to my goal here is that perceptual speed declines after the age of 25, numeric ability declines after 60, and other abilities such reasoning and verbal ability increase until middle age before beginning a gradually declining. This gives me hope I can still gain some ground!

All joking aside, this topic will take a couple posts to cover. I have very mixed feelings about intelligence that I will cover in more depth tommorow night when I have some time to reflect while Kerri is at work.

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