The Element (6 page)

If you didn’t guess right away that the
other
sense was balance, don’t take it too hard. The fact is that most of the people I speak with don’t guess it either. And yet this sense is at least as important as the five we take for granted. And it isn’t alone among those we fail to consider.

Physiologists largely agree that in addition to the five we all know about, there are four more. The first is our sense of temperature (thermoception). This is different from our sense of touch. We don’t need to be touching anything to feel hot or cold. This is a crucial sense, given that we can only survive as human beings within a relatively narrow band of temperatures. This is one of the reasons we wear clothes. One of them.

Another is the sense of pain (nociception). Scientists now generally agree that this is a different sensory system from either touch or temperature. There also seem to be separate systems for registering pains that originate from the inside or the outside of our bodies. Next is the vestibular sense (equilibrioception), which includes our sense of balance and acceleration. And then there is the kinesthetic sense (proprioception), which gives us our understanding of where our limbs and the rest of our body are in space and in relationship to each other. This is essential for getting up, getting around, and getting back again. The sense of intuition doesn’t seem to make the cut with most physiologists. I’ll come back to it later.

All of these senses contribute to our feelings of being in the world and to our ability to function in it. There are also some unusual variations in the senses of particular people. Some experience a phenomenon known as synesthesia, in which their senses seems to mingle or overlap: they may see sounds and hear colors. These are abnormalities, and seem to challenge even further our commonsense ideas about our common senses. But they illustrate how profoundly our senses, however many we have and however they work, actually affect our understanding of the world and of ourselves. Yet many of us don’t know or have never thought about some of them.

Not all of us take our sense of balance or other senses for granted. Take Bart, for example. When he was a baby in Morton Grove, Illinois, Bart wasn’t particularly active. But when he was around six years old, he started to do something very unusual. It turned out that he could walk on his hands nearly as well as he could walk on his feet. This wasn’t an elegant sight, but it did get him lots of smiles, laughter, and approval from his family. Whenever visitors came to the house, and at family parties, people prompted Bart to perform his signature move. With no further cajoling—after all, he quite enjoyed both his trick and the attention it generated—he dropped onto his hands, flipped up, and proudly teetered around upside down. As he got older, he even trained himself to go up and down the stairs on his hands.

None of this was of much practical use, of course. After all, it wasn’t as though the ability to walk on his hands was a skill that led to higher test scores or was marketable in any way. However, it did do wonders for his popularity—a person who can climb stairs upside down is fun to be around.

Then one day, when he was ten, with his mother’s approval, his grade-school physical education teacher took him to a local gymnastics center. As he walked in, Bart’s eyes bulged in amazement. He’d never seen anything so wondrous in his life. There were ropes, parallel bars, trapezes, ladders, trampolines, hurdles—all kinds of things upon which he could climb, cavort, and swing. It was like visiting Santa’s workshop and Disneyland at the same time. It was also the ideal place for him. His life turned in that moment. Suddenly his innate skills were good for something more than amusing himself and others.

Eight years later, after countless hours of jumping, stretching, vaulting, and lifting, Bart Conner stepped onto the mat in the gymnastics hall at the Montreal Olympics to represent the United States of America. He went on to become America’s most decorated male gymnast ever and the first American to win medals at every level of national and international competition. He has been a USA champion, an NCAA champion, a Pan-American Games champion, a World champion, a World Cup champion, and an Olympic champion. He was a member of three Olympic teams, in 1976, 1980, and 1984. In a legendary performance in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, Bart made a dramatic comeback from a torn biceps injury to win two gold medals. In 1991, he was inducted into the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame, and in 1996 into the International Gymnastics Hall of Fame.

Conner now facilitates the passion for gymnastics in others. He owns a flourishing gymnastics school with his wife, Olympic champion Nadia Comaneci. They also own
International Gymnast
magazine and a television production company.

Athletes like Bart Conner and Nadia Comaneci have a profound sense of the capacities of their physical bodies, and their achievements show how limited our everyday ideas about human ability really are. If you watch athletes, dancers, musicians, and other performers of their class at work, you can see that they are thinking, as well as performing, in extraordinary ways. As they practice, they engage their whole bodies in developing and memorizing the routines they are shaping up. In the process, they are relying on what some call “muscle memory.” In performance, they are usually moving too quickly and in ways that are simply too complex to rely on the ordinary conscious processes of thinking and decision-making. They draw from the deep reserves of feeling and intuition and of physical reflex and coordination that use the whole brain and not only the parts at the front that we associate with rational thinking. If they did that, their careers would never get off the ground, and neither would they.

In these ways, athletes and all sorts of other performers help to challenge something else about human capacity that too many people take for granted and also get wrong—our ideas about intelligence.

Another thing I do when I speak to groups is to ask people to rate their intelligence on a 1-to-10 scale, with 10 being the top. Typically, one or two people will rate themselves a 10. When these people raise their hands, I suggest that they go home; they have more important things to do than listen to me.

Beyond this, I’ll get a sprinkling of 9s and a heavier concentration of 8s. Invariably, though, the bulk of any audience puts itself at 7 or 6. The responses decline from there, though I admit I never actually complete the survey. I stop at 2, preferring to save anyone who would actually claim an intelligence level of 1 the embarrassment of acknowledging it in public. Why do I always get the bell-shaped curve? I believe it is because we’ve come to take for granted certain ideas about intelligence.

What’s interesting is that most people do put their hands up and rate themselves on this question. They don’t seem to see any problem with the question itself and are happy to put themselves somewhere on the scale. Only a few have challenged the form of the question and asked what I mean by intelligence. I think that’s what everyone should do. I’m convinced that taking the definition of intelligence for granted is one of the main reasons why so many people underestimate their true intellectual abilities and fail to find their Element.

This commonsense view goes something like this: We are all born with a fixed amount of intelligence. It’s a trait, like blue or green eyes, or long or short limbs. Intelligence shows itself in certain types of activity, especially in math and our use of words. It’s possible to measure how much intelligence we have through pencil-and-paper tests, and to express this as a numerical grade. That’s it.

Put as bluntly as this, I trust this definition of intelligence sounds as questionable as it is. But essentially this definition runs through much of Western culture, and a good bit of Eastern culture as well. It is at the heart of our education systems and underpins a good deal of the multibillion-dollar testing industries that feed off public education throughout the world. It’s at the heart of the idea of academic ability, dominates college entrance examinations, underpins the hierarchy of subjects in education, and stands as the foundation for the whole idea of IQ.

This way of thinking about intelligence has a long history in Western culture and dates back at least to the days of the great Greek philosophers, Aristotle and Plato. Its most recent flowering was in the great period of intellectual advances of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that we know as the Enlightenment. Philosophers and scholars aimed to establish a firm basis for human knowledge and to end the superstitions and mythologies about human existence that they believed had clouded the minds of previous generations.

One of the pillars of this new movement was a firm belief in the importance of logic and critical reasoning. Philosophers argued that we should not accept as knowledge anything that could not be proved through logical reasoning, especially in words and mathematical proofs. The problem was where to begin this process without taking anything for granted that might be logically questionable. The famous conclusion of the philosopher René Descartes was that the only thing that he could take for granted was his own existence; otherwise, he couldn’t have these thoughts in the first place. His thesis was, “I think, therefore I am.”

The other pillar of the Enlightenment was a growing belief in the importance of evidence in support of scientific ideas—evidence that one could observe through the human senses—rather than superstition or hearsay. These two pillars of reason and evidence became the foundations of an intellectual revolution that transformed the outlook and achievements of the Western world. It led to the growth of the scientific method and an avalanche of insights, analysis, and classification of ideas, objects, and phenomena that have extended the reach of human knowledge to the depths of the earth and to the far ends of the known universe. It led too to the spectacular advances in practical technology that gave rise to the Industrial Revolution and to the supreme domination of these forms of thought in scholarship, in politics, in commerce, and in education.

The influence of logic and evidence extended beyond the “hard” sciences. They also shaped the formative theories in the human sciences, including psychology, sociology, anthropology, and medicine. As public education grew in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it too was based on these newly dominant ideas about knowledge and intelligence. As mass education grew to meet the growing demands of the Industrial Revolution, there was also a need for quick and easy forms of selection and assessment. The new science of psychology was on hand with new theories about how intelligence could be tested and measured. For the most part, intelligence was defined in terms of verbal and mathematical reasoning. These were also processes that were used to quantify the results. The most significant idea in the middle of all this was IQ.

So it is that we came to think of real intelligence in terms of logical analysis: believing that rationalist forms of thinking were superior to feeling and emotion, and that the ideas that really count can be conveyed in words or through mathematical expressions. In addition, we believed that we could quantify intelligence and rely on IQ tests and standardized tests like the SAT to identify who among us is truly intelligent and deserving of exalted treatment.

Ironically, Alfred Binet, one of the creators of the IQ test, intended the test to serve precisely the opposite function. In fact, he originally designed it (on commission from the French government) exclusively to identify children with special needs so they could get appropriate forms of schooling. He never intended it to identify degrees of intelligence or “mental worth.” In fact, Binet noted that the scale he created “does not permit the measure of intelligence, because intellectual qualities are not superposable, and therefore cannot be measured as linear surfaces are measured.”

Nor did he ever intend it to suggest that a person could not become more intelligent over time. “Some recent thinkers,” he said, “[have affirmed] that an individual’s intelligence is a fixed quantity, a quantity that cannot be increased. We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism; we must try to demonstrate that it is founded on nothing.”

Still, some educators and psychologists took—and continue to take—IQ numbers to absurd lengths. In 1916, Lewis Terman of Stanford University published a revision of Binet’s IQ test. Known as the Stanford-Binet test, now in its fifth version, it is the basis of the modern IQ test. It is interesting to note, though, that Terman had a sadly extreme view of human capacity. These are his words, from the textbook
The Measurement of Intelligence
: “Among laboring men and servant girls there are thousands like them feebleminded. They are the world’s ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water.’ And yet, as far as intelligence is concerned, the tests have told the truth. . . . No amount of school instruction will ever make them intelligent voters or capable voters in the true sense of the word.”

Terman was an active player in one of the darker stages of education and public policy, one there is a good chance you are unaware of because most historians choose to leave it unmentioned, the way they might a crazy aunt or an unfortunate drinking incident in college. The eugenics movement sought to weed out entire sectors of the population by arguing that such traits as criminality and pauperism were hereditary, and that it was possible to identify these traits through intelligence testing. Perhaps most appalling among the movement’s claims was the notion that entire ethnic groups, including southern Europeans, Jews, Africans, and Latinos fell into such categories. “The fact that one meets this type with such frequency among Indians, Mexicans, and Negroes suggests quite forcibly that the whole question of racial differences in mental traits will have to be taken up anew and by experimental methods,” Terman wrote.

“Children of this group should be segregated in special classes and be given instruction which is concrete and practical. They cannot master, but they can often be made efficient workers, able to look out for themselves. There is no possibility at present of convincing society that they should not be allowed to reproduce, although from a eugenic point of view they constitute a grave problem because of their unusually prolific breeding.”