High Cognitive Minds

"I have no great quickness of apprehension or wit which is so remarkable in some clever men... I am therefore a poor critic: a paper or a book, when first read, generally excites my admiration, and it is only after considerable reflection that I perceive the weak points. My power to follow a long and purely abstract train of thought is very limited... My memory is extensive, yet hazy: it suffices to make me cautious by vaguely telling me that I have observed or read something opposed to the conclusion which I am drawing, or on the other hand in favour of it; and after a time I can generally recollect where to search fro my authority. So poor in one sense is my memory, that I have never been able to remember for more than a few days a single date or a line of poetry."    

IQ tests, and many of the other tests which we take throughout our schooling, emphasize speed and memory. Both are considered so important in determining intelligence, that we would have to judge the above quotation as the statement of a real loser. He would be a terrible bore at a party, unable to appreciate the witty back and forth banter or join in games which depend on the fast identification of bits of cultural trivia. And he'd certainly never qualify as a quiz show contestant. Who would want such a plodder as either a friend or a colleague?

We're taught that the race goes to the swift, and are constantly pressured to do more and do it faster. But what is it that we're doing, and who will even remember it once it's done? How much of our lives do we spend running races that go nowhere? Maybe we need to stop and take some time to think about the author of the quote. Charles Darwin took more than twenty years to accomplish something that changed the world: the publication of On The Origin of Species.

1. He said of himself: "When I left the school I was for my age neither high nor low in it; and I believe that I was considered by all my masters and by my Father as a very ordinary boy, rather below the common standard in intellect." He had such a poor memory that material he memorized one day was gone the next. He was slow at "getting it," needing time to reread and absorb what others seemed to grasp immediately.Yet he turned the world of biology upside down and ignited a controversy that continues to this day, almost 150 years later.

2. His IQ was merely a "respectable" 125. Possibly his scorn for and lack of background in the "finer" subjects like literature outweighed his extraordinary math ability. But he won a Nobel Prize, discovered the cause of a major space disaster, and was considered by his colleagues not only a genius, but a "magician."

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