Your brain grew rapidly throughout early childhood, when the neuron connections or “synapses” were generated at a prodigious rate and then pruned to adapt to the environment–deleting the synapses that were stimulated the least and increasing those that supported cognitive demands. The next dramatic phase in your brain growth occurred just before puberty when a …
There is no absolute standard for measuring a person’s worth because there is no universal agreement on what constitutes “worth.” Furthermore, a person’s worth is assessed differently by different people and different generations. Worth as an absolute measure If we grow up in a family that values education, we tend to adopt those values and …
How is a person’s worth measured? Can anyone truly have a quantifiable value? Read More »
Sports psychologists are recognizing that excellence in sports is more mental than physical. In his book Empowerment: The Competitive Edge in Sports, Business & Life, psychologist Gene Landrum profiled 13 of the world’s greatest athletes, from Jim Thorpe to Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods. In his in-depth study of the personality and cerebral qualities that led …
We have some fairly precise information about the percentage of people who have abnormal intelligence as measured by IQ, but much less information about the percentages of people of various personality types. The normal curve, that displays the distribution of IQ, across the human population, shows the IQ percentiles from 0 to an upper bound …
What is the percentage of people who have abnormal intelligence or personality type? Read More »
There are some professions that require a very high level of intelligence and others that merely require a higher-than-average level of intelligence. Furthermore, there is a great deal of variation in intelligence within the professions. (Statisticians would say that the variance in intelligence within a profession is greater than the variance in intelligence between professions.) …
The Meaning of the term “Emotional Intelligence.” Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, that appeared in 1936 during the Great Depression, sold more than 15 million copies and became the seminal work in the art of salesmanship. In his book, Carnegie stressed the importance of empathizing with your client, seeing things from his …
Historical evidence seems to suggest that all math geniuses are intelligent, but not all intelligent people are math geniuses. Many people who are intellectually brilliant have a capacity for abstraction and pattern discovery that would enable them to solve deep problems in mathematics. However, they often have different interests and their mathematical capabilities are never …
How do “Math Geniuses” differ from most intelligent people? Read More »
Our intellectual potential, like all our physical characteristics is contained in our DNA. However, environmental factors play a very significant role in determining the extent to which we reach that potential. The connection between genes and intelligence was established unequivocally by Bouchard and others during the 1990’s in their study of identical twins who were …
As people of IQ less than 200, it’s difficult for us to imagine how a society might look if our species were magnitudes more intelligent than we are today. Our evolution has hard-wired us for survival and with that has come what psychologists call “ingroup-outgroup” cognitive bias. In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin describes …
In the early part of the 20th century, there was a reluctance to talk about either the subconscious or the unconscious. Their existence was somewhat suspect, simply because, by definition, the unconscious is not observable. However, by the late 20th century, experiments in cognitive science had revealed that the unconscious is, indeed, an important element …
