The Genius in All of Us: New Insights Into Genetics, Talent, and IQ (33 page)

    
“Intelligence,” he declared profoundly in 2005, “represents a set of competencies in development
.
”

Sternberg calls it “the model of developing expertise.” (Sternberg, “Intelligence, Competence, and Expertise,” p. 18.)

    
In other words, intelligence isn’t fixed
.
Intelligence isn’t general. Intelligence is not a thing. Intelligence is a dynamic, diffuse, and ongoing process.

   Sternberg argues that no current tests actually measure such built-in intelligence and that intelligence testers are instead relying on a dangerous circular logic: “Some intelligence theorists point to the stability of the alleged general (
g
) factor of human intelligence as evidence for the existence of some kind of stable and overriding structure of human intelligence. But … [w]ith different forms of schooling,
g
could be made either stronger or weaker. In effect, Western forms and related forms of schooling may, in part, create the
g
phenomenon by providing a kind of schooling that teaches in conjunction the various kinds of skills measured by tests of intellectual abilities.”

In other words: we are teaching certain skills in our schools—skills that do correlate reasonably well with Western job performance—and then measuring how well kids learn these skills. Then we pretend that the results reveal a person’s raw intelligence, when all they actually reveal is how well a child learned those skills. All we’re really learning from intelligence tests is that some kids do better than others in school. We are not, as intelligence testers claim, uncovering the innate cause of these differences.

Is Sternberg saying there’s no such thing as innate intelligence?

No. But he is saying that such intelligence is “not directly measurable,” that it is not one general ability which can be scored, and that it is not inherently limiting. The evidence shows that skills and abilities are inextricably interwoven and that all skills are modifiable.

“The main constraint in achieving expertise,” says Sternberg, “is not some fixed prior level of capacity, but purposeful engagement involving direct instruction, active participation, role modeling, and reward.”

What about the famous correlation between intelligence test scores on the one hand and job performance/life success on the other?

It’s a mirage. The correlation does exist, says Sternberg, but not because one causes the other; rather, it’s because they both measure the same abilities.

Or as Sternberg puts it: “Such correlations represent no intrinsic relation between intelligence and other kinds of performance, but rather overlap in the kinds of competencies needed to perform well under different kinds of circumstances. The greater the overlap in skills, in general, the higher the correlations.”

Sternberg then points to a series of studies demonstrating that practical expertise does not correlate well with analytical (“intelligence”) tests but
does
correlate very nicely with job performance and life success:

• The Yup’ik Eskimo children of Alaska have “extremely impressive competencies and even expertise for surviving in a difficult environment, but because these skills are not ones valued by teachers” they tend to do very poorly in school. (
  Grigorenko et al
  .)
  

• In Brazil, street children who are extremely successful in running street businesses, and highly expert in math skills necessary for those affairs, do very poorly in abstract, pencil-and-paper math problems. (
  Nunes
  )
  

• In Berkeley, California, there is “no correlation” between housewives’ impressive abilities in comparison shopping math and scores on pencil-and-paper math tests. (
  Lave
  )
  

The essential point being that whatever our innate abilities—which clearly exist but are still far from being understood and specified—they do not limit us in a way that IQ scores imply. Ultimately, life success is a function not of inherent abilities, but of highly developed skills.

Sternberg depicts a Western society having painted itself into a logical corner: as we’ve succeeded with our own brand of academia, we’ve devised tests—
g
, IQ, SAT, etc.—which we’ve convinced ourselves show actual innate intelligence, when all they show is achievements according to those particular standards. When you look around the world, you see there are all different kinds of intelligence. Western societies have nothing to be ashamed of in having created successful academies and economies, but we can’t let that success corrupt our judgment of where abilities actually come from.

Sternberg: “Skills develop as results of gene-environment covariation and interaction. If we wish to call them
intelligence
, that is certainly fine, so long as we recognize that what we are calling intelligence is a form of development competencies that can lead to expertise.”

Robert Sternberg, “Intelligence, Competence, and Expertise.” In
Handbook of Competence and Motivation
, edited by A. J. Elliot and C. S. Dweck, Guilford Publications, 2005.

Grigorenko, Elena. “The relationship between academic and practical intelligence: a case study of the tacit knowledge of native American Yup’ik people in Alaska.” Office of Educational Research and Improvement, December 2001.

Nunes, T. “Street Intelligence.” In
Encyclopedia of Human Intelligence
, edited by R. J. Sternberg. Macmillan, 1994, pp. 1045–49.

Lave, J.
Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics, and Culture in Everyday Life
. Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Along the way, a person is not developing a single intelligence, but many different types of intelligence. How many are there? Harvard’s Howard Gardner has famously suggested that there are eight different types of intelligence:

Linguistic: the spoken and written word

Logical/mathematical: numbers and reasoning

Musical: rhythm and melody

Spatial intelligence: the ability to form a picture or mental model (highly developed in sailors, engineers, surgeons, sculptors, and painters)

Bodily kinesthetic: intuition and control over one’s own body (dancers, athletes, surgeons, craftspeople)

Interpersonal: the ability to understand other people

Intrapersonal: the ability to understand oneself

Naturalist: appreciation and understanding of nature

“Intelligence,” writes Gardner, “is a biopsychological potential.” It’s not an entity, but a living thing. (Gardner,
Intelligence Reframed
, p 34.)

  Or, as Alfred Binet said in 1909: “With practice, training, and above all method, we manage to increase our attention, our memory, our judgment, and literally to become more intelligent than we were before.” (Binet,
Les idées modernes sur les enfants
, pp. 105–6; this work has been reprinted in Elliot and Dweck, eds.,
Handbook of Competence and Motivation;
see p. 124.)

    
“high academic achievers are not necessarily born ‘smarter’
”:
Csikszentmihályi, Rathunde, and Whalen,
Talented Teenagers
, p. 6.

    
How will that child measure up tomorrow?

   “One moves along the continuum,” says Sternberg, “as one acquires a broader range of skills, a deeper level of the skills one already has, and increased efficiency in the utilization of these skills.”

Sternberg recalibrated it, in other words, from a thing to a process. The word “intelligence,” he realized, is only a crude symbol for a snapshot of the
process in motion. Like any still photograph, it can capture some truth, but it fundamentally misses the ongoing procedure, which is driven, explains Sternberg, by five key elements: metacognitive skills (control of one’s own cognition), learning skills, thinking skills, knowledge, and motivation.

Intelligence is not how good you are at something. It’s how good you are on your way to becoming.

“At the center, driving the elements,” observed Sternberg, “is motivation.” (Sternberg, “Intelligence, Competence, and Expertise.”)

CHAPTER 3: THE END OF “GIFTEDNESS”
(AND THE TRUE SOURCE OF TALENT)

PRIMARY SOURCES

Eisenberg, Leon. “Nature, niche, and nurture: the role of social experience in transforming genotype into phenotype.”
Academic Psychiatry
22 (December 1998): 213–22.

Ericsson, K. Anders. “Deliberate practice and the modifiability of body and mind: toward a science of the structure and acquisition of expert and elite performance.”
International Journal of Sport Psychology
38 (2007): 4–34.

Ericsson, K. A., W. G. Chase, and S. Faloon. “Acquisition of a memory skill.”
Science
208 (1980): 1181–82.

Howe, Michael J. A., J. W. Davidson, and J. A. Sloboda. “Innate talents: reality or myth.”
Behavioural and Brain Sciences
21 (1998): 399–442.

Lehmann, A. C., and K. A. Ericsson. “The Historical Development of Domains of Expertise: Performance Standards and Innovations in Music.” In
Genius and the Mind
, edited by A. Steptoe. Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 67–94.

Levitin, Daniel J.
This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession
. Dutton, 2006.

CHAPTER NOTES

    
explore the implications of chunking
:
Chase,
Visual Information Processing
, pp. 215–81.

    
Phone numbers, for example, are not stored in our brains as ten separate numbers but in three easy chunks
:
513-673-8754.

   This is my mom’s cell phone number. Call her, tell her how much you like the book so far. Believe me, she won’t mind.

    
While our long-term memory capacity is apparently limitless, new memories are almost pathetically fragile
:
the average healthy adult can reliably juxtapose only three or four new, unrelated items. Such a limit, noted Ericsson and Chase, “places severe constraints on the human ability to process information and solve problems.”

Seven items are remembered correctly 50 percent of the time. (Ericsson, Chase, and Faloon, “Acquisition of a memory skill,” pp. 1181–82.)

Excerpt from my earlier book
The Forgetting
, on the importance of a limited memory:

Why? Why would millions of years of evolution produce a machine so otherwise sophisticated but with an apparent built-in fuzziness, a tendency to regularly forget, repress and distort information and experience?

The answer, it turns out, is that fuzziness is not a severe limitation but a highly advanced feature. As a matter of engineering, the brain does not have any physical limitations in the amount of information it can hold. It is designed specifically to forget most of the details it comes across, so that it may allow us to form general impressions, and from there useful judgments. Forgetting is not a failure at all, but an active metabolic process, a flushing out of data in the pursuit of knowledge and meaning.