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Showing posts from December, 2015

Creativity and IQ: What 1500 Kids Can Teach Us

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How does your IQ affect your creativity? One might assume that having a super high IQ would garner you more powerful creative flights of fancy, and more control over the process, whether top-down or bottom-up. But as is so often the case with preconceived ideas, things are not always what they seem. We can trace the American fixation on IQ back to the beginning of our involvement in World War One. The U.S. War Department was searching for ways to rank their recruits by intelligence, and to identify who would be best suited for which jobs, from scouts to officers. For help in making these judgments, the military turned to psychologists like Lewis Terman of Stanford University. Terman had tweaked an intelligence test devised by the famed French psychologist Alfred Binet to create a new version called the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales. He initially promoted this as a tool for classifying developmentally disabled children, but the U.S. military was so impressed with Terman'

Consciousness: Signals in the Noise

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In February’s blog post, How your Brain is Like an Ant Colony , we discussed how neural networks follow the concept of emergence: when it comes to connections between neurons, much of the order arises by neurons organizing themselves, without top-down direction. Arne Dietrich, the author of How Creativity Happens in the Brain , writes that some of those networks are hardwired and some are flexible and built in the moment. What determines the strength and intensity of a neural network include “a person’s unique past experience, opinions, preferences, and expertise." He explains that, in the same way "lightning follows the path of least resistance," the strongest connections send the fastest signals, taking over brain regions in a phenomenon called "spreading activation." The lack of an overall leader makes ant colonies fascinating. But if our own thoughts (activated neural networks) are all just a matter of signal strength, what is the self? How does sel