It’s true. The modern conveniences are great, once you know how to do things the old-fashioned, by-hand way. But if you’ve always used the conveniences, and never bothered to learn the hard way of doing something, you’re cheating yourself.

I see it all the time in programming. People who started out with a high-level language and never bothered to learn how things work under the hood have no clue what’s really going on in the system, so when something goes wrong, they don’t know how to identify or fix it. Someone who learned the hard way can often look at the problem and instantly know what’s going wrong.

Intelligence is defined as the capacity for learning, reasoning, and understanding, usually measured by IQ, and people consider it a fixed number controlled entirely by genetics. I claim otherwise: actual intelligence might be fixed, but I believe that most people’s IQs can be raised by at least 50% because I see so many places where muddled and rigid thinking keeps people from intelligence. People can learn to be more flexible in the way they think about things, and they can learn logic — nobody is born with immaculate logic skills, those who have them have had to learn them too.

It would likely take several years of practice to raise your IQ by that amount, but you can start learning the needed flexibility in minutes, and it doesn’t have to be work. The best way to learn essentially anything is by play. GoddessJ and I have excellent spelling skills, for instance, and in talking with her I’ve found that both her parents and mine liked to play aloud with words. For example, in English, many words are pronounced in ways that that are completely different from their spellings. As a way of being funny, our parents would sometimes pronounce a word the way it’s spelled (“good night” would become “good nighut”), or with a very pronounced inflection (“are you clean?” became “are you kha-leeeeen?”).

Even something as small as that gives you a different perspective on language, and actively looking for amusing ways you can twist a word and still have it recognizable to others breeds more flexibility in the way you think — no only about words, but about things in general, which raises your IQ because you now have an additional mental tool to use on things. In the same way, increasing your IQ in one area affects many other areas as well, because a new way of thinking about one thing (how you can twist the pronunciation of words and still have them recognizable) affects others that might seem only tangentially related (learning excellent spelling skills) and more importantly, more general skills as well (how to twist problems to see them in a different way, to equate them to other problems that you already know how to solve).

This is very useful for anyone, but it helps children far more than you’d expect, because even a slight increase in the angle of learning gives a markedly different result after a few years. (Which is another example of applying a relationship that isn’t obvious — geometry and child learning.)

I’ve been studying learning and intelligence very intently for most of my life, especially in the last few years (those of you who know me well will immediately know why). It fascinates me in a way that few other problems can, for reasons that I’ll probably share here someday.

I’ll finish this entry with a quotation:

Everyone is a genius, but if you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it is stupid.
— Albert Einstein

Think about it.