What are the specific tools of intelligence?

Monitoring. Intelligence is heavily influenced by the way you monitor the world around you. How subjectively or objectively you interpret things—how much information you bring to each situation and how much information you seek—how alert and tuned in you are—how effectively you see and observe and hear and listen and feel and read. Sherlock Holmes—the fictional detective—monitored the world around him intelligently and was therefore highly effective at what he did.

Knowledge base. An extensive and continually updated knowledge base is a prerequisite to intelligence and intelligent living. The more extensive and updated your knowledge base the greater your reference base and therefore the more quickly new information will fall into place and become integrated. When an information base is shallow or closed off new information will not find a reference base to fit in and therefore it is less likely that you will have the information-assist to act intelligently.

Information-process. As noted earlier taking in a mass of information is one thing. Processing the information is quite another. Information trickles down an elaborate sieve of personal prejudices and hardened ideas. As a rule the more fluid the knowledge base the better the information-process. The more granitelike the ideas you carry the poorer the processing of new information.

Feedback. People who do not actively seek feedback—in whatever they do and with whomever they interact—are disconnected and under-informed and therefore likely to act unintelligently. Ask yourself: How much feedback do I continually seek and obtain from my parents— children—lovers—spouse—students—employees—colleagues— clients—friends—others? People who only talk and seldom listen obtain very little feedback. The more questions you ask the more feedback you obtain.

Playback. How accurately do you playback events? Studies have shown that one week after exposure most people tend to remember:

—Around 10% of what they read.

—Around 20% of what they hear.

—Around 30% of what they see.

—Around 50% of what they see and hear.

Memory fade-out continues in ensuing weeks and months. Eventually very little is retained. Why? —Memory degradation.

—Selective editing (squelching and rearranging information to suit our emotional needs).

Imagine if you had an onbody audio/visual recorder to register events (conversations—meetings—sights—etc.) for later playback and study. Your intelligence would continually benefit from a powerful assist.

Simulation. How thoroughly do you think things through? "What if I try this approach. What if I try the other approach. What if . . . What if . . ." We all automatically test out options all the time. The critical factor is how rigorously or sloppily we think things through. Because we do not carefully think ahead we often produce unintelligent results. Psychopaths are extreme examples of people who do poor simulation —never thinking ahead or considering consequences of their actions.

Error correction. Most people automatically playback a situation that went bad. But how often do you sit down to examine exactly what went wrong? The result: poor fault-isolation and the tendency to repeat errors.

We all deploy these component parts of our intelligence automati­cally. The level of intelligence depends largely on how well these processes operate individually and jointly.

Date: 2015-02-28; view: 769