“It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.”

― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

Kids are innocent. They are simple. They are uncluttered in their minds. Give them a puzzle, they will come up with a simple answer. Well, that’s not the case with adults.

Let’s take a small puzzle. How many of you can make six from the below figure on a piece of paper without lifting your pen?

I X

I am quite sure that many adults must have thought of many complex solutions for this puzzle. We, claimed to be adults, at times make certain simple things unnecessary complex. We belief this solution can’t be so simple. There must be some complex solution and need to do more brainstorming to arrive to it. Alas! Our creativity gets stuck here. Is a kid more intelligent than us?

Raymond Cattell, British and American psychologist introduced the concept of Fluid and Crystallize intelligence to explain why there is a difference in the problem-solving approach of a kid and an adult. Crystallized Intelligence comes from acquired knowledge being reinforced through experiences. It can help someone to solve problems with missing information and experience will help to fill in the gaps. If information is analogous to water, then using information over and over turned it into a solid crystal, like ice. Eventually, that information becomes fully reliable to trust upon based on the experiences. It’s not necessary that the information acquired should be accurate.  On the other hand, Fluid Intelligence is the type of intelligence that allows us to take in new information, process it fast and act on it. The wallet of experience is almost empty for a kid. Kids see a problem and come up with an easy way out as he/she hardly have any reliable information stored in their cerebral. They are “street smarts”.  Their intelligence is free flowing like a fluid, as the hindrance comes it finds another way.

Imagine you are waiting in the airport to board your flight. So many people around you. Someone tall, someone short, someone fair, someone dark. Some are with superb sense of fashion and some just made you laugh with their choice of attire. We find it difficult to breach discussion with someone stranger. Seeing the physical appearance, we make lot of notions in head. Truth is we carry preconceived notions in our mind based on our past experiences. We start judging a person before even talking to him/her. On the other hand, in the similar scenario try to recollect what have you observed when two tiny tots see each other in approachable distance? They start interacting in their own ways until and unless their parents asked them not to do so. Together, they play, laugh, cry, and even fight. For kids, everything is so simple in this world.

When it comes to decision making, it’s our instinct to want to be right in taking a decision. We don’t want others to judge us. We take more time to gather information, analyse the clues if there is any. Take the example of the “IX” puzzle, most of us must have thought that it’s a trick and there is some obscure visual information that possibly we are missing. We look harder and scrutinize every single detail and finally get lost. This is Analysis Paralysis. It’s better to curb our curiosity at times.

Before I digress from the topic and you lose interest in reading my blog, let me quickly overbore you with certain biological terms.

Is our creativity dying? The hard truth is yes. We become boring souls when we grow old. In 2008, a study was published, “Improving Fluid Intelligence with Training on Working Memory”, by Jaeggi, Buschkuehl, Jonides, and Perrig. It was showed for the first time that fluid intelligence can be acquired significantly through training. Research shows that fluid intelligence is trainable, the more you train the more you gain.  Research shows 5 primary principles that is involved in increasing fluid intelligence.

1. Search for Novelty: Scientifically, seeking novelty triggers dopamine which creates higher motivational state, stimulates creation of new neurons, and prepares our brain for learning. You just need to feed your hunger.
2. Challenge yourself: Memorizing and fluency type of games help to train our brain. Continuously challenging our brain can help to improve our intellect. This helps in initial explosion of cognitive growth but for the longer run we need to challenge ourselves with new games before our brain get used to it.
3. Think Creatively: It’s not the work of the right brain to think creatively. It is required to engage both left and right hemispheres of the brain and work in conjunction with each other. Creative and multimodal teaching method, such as Design Thinking, has a big role to play here. Creative cognition involves divergent thinking, cognitive flexibility by exploring both conventional and unconventional thinking.
4. Do things the hard way: We run after improving efficiency and we think we are saving our muscle and brain energy and time but the consequences are different and unexpected. With the lack of use of our brain and muscle, atrophy sets it. For once, just turn off the “Google Map” and try to navigate in a new city. Our brain needs exercise as well. What will happen to our brain if we stop using problem- solving, logical and cognitive skills? Definitely it will betray us and go on strike one day. Technology has made our life lot easier, faster, and efficient but in the long run we are going to pay for it.
5. Network: By opening to new people, ideas, and environments, we are opening ourselves to new opportunities for cognitive growth. Learning is all about exposing ourselves to new things and take in some meaningful and unique information to make new insight.

I will end this with a parting thought. Where the millennial’s generation is heading towards? Still we have the same old education system and an unnoticeable space is left for innovation. Still our focus is on bookish knowledge and we measure the intellect of a child with examination grades. We have overexposed their childhood with gadgets and technology and quickly their intelligence is waning. We can only bring the change. Instead of giving access to internet at an early age, we can give them the access to the wider world where they can acquire their own knowledge by their own experiences and mistakes. We had scientists and mathematicians like Homi. J. Bhabha, Satyendra Nath Bose and many from era where technology was unborn.

Notes: Articles referred from Scientific American, Forbes, Psychology Today.

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