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Mind over Computer 29

In the vast, inhospitable Outback it is vitally important you remember that water can be found at the two rocks near the old gnarled tree. Forget this and you will die of thirst. It was once thought the skill evolved through natural selection, but this might not be the correct explanation. Recent studies show many of us can use mnemonic tricks to significantly improve our memory. Aboriginal skills might actually be learned and passed on from generation to generation.

IQ gives us a way to sum up intelligence using a single number but is this too simplistic? We all have friends who would be our first call if we met that special someone or lost our jobs. They are often not the smartest people we know, but they are highly empathetic. These people have ‘social intelligence’. Other friends may fail academic tests yet demonstrate wonderful musical or artistic ability. They have creative intelligence. As we dig deeper, more talents emerge: sporting prowess, organizational brilliance, the ability to inspire loyalty. All these traits appear independently of academic brilliance.

During the last century, scientists worked hard to understand these different intelligence traits. The most influential theory came out of studies done at the United States Army Educational testing service, by Raymond Cattell and John Horn, and later added to by John Carroll. Their initials give the theory its name. CHC theory breaks down the general idea of intelligence into many different subgroups: ‘G’ factors.

If you are good at recalling all the kings and queens of England in chronological order, or can name every member of the 1966 English World Cup team or, perhaps, all the members of the baseball Hall of Fame, you would have high ‘crystalized intelligence’ – ‘Gc’. It measures the sum total of all the things you have learned and retained in your long-term memory, your store of useful, and useless, facts. On the other hand there is innate intelligence, the sort that allows you to solve problems where tapping memory banks is not useful. My family often buy me puzzles for Christmas, the sort where you manipulate bits of bent metal that appear linked, but can be separated with a little ingenuity. These puzzles test our ability to work with problems we have never seen before and is called ‘fluid intelligence’ – ‘Gf’.

We can go further. A good tennis player will have high ‘Gt’ and ‘Gv’ scores: ‘t’ for time and ‘v’ for vision, a good pub quiz

Metal Puzzle

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