We’ve been looking at intelligence all wrong, explains a neuroscientist.
Our society has an obsession with quantifying everything, often applying measurements and numerical values where they aren’t necessary. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, a neuroscientist and professor at USC, argues that we’ve taken this approach with intelligence, and it might not be the right path.
Immordino-Yang uses standardized testing as an example, explaining how modern-day education systems equate high test scores with high intelligence levels. However, these tests usually only measure a student’s ability to perform under specific conditions, focusing narrowly on memorization and regurgitation of predetermined answers.
Instead, Mary Helen suggests a more dynamic concept of intelligence, considering a child’s ability to navigate complex situations, understand new information, and innovate in real-time. This kind of intelligence is adaptive and essential for societal progress, as it allows for a more well-rounded perception of the world and situations that occur within it.
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: I don't know that there's a need to measure intelligence. We have this incredible drive in our culture to enumerate everything and measure everything- and I'm not sure that we need to do that.
From my perspective, our current education system measures intelligence by a young person's ability to perform on a predetermined, pre-designed assessment at a particular time and to give back the answers that are expected given what was given to them. That system of measurement does tell you something about what they can do under those conditions, but it doesn't tell you anything about their potential.
So one of the real problems with this way of thinking about achievement, which often morphs over into intelligence, is that it undermines agency in a sort of broader sense, and instead teaches kids to focus very narrowly on the problem spaces that have already been invented, that are being given to them and formulated by somebody else on somebody else's terms.
Some of that is fine, but the problem is that becomes the privileged and oftentimes only way of knowing what a child knows, how smart a child is, rather than looking at what I would call a more dynamic, lived, ecologically valid sort of emergent kind of intelligence- which is the ability to manage yourself in complex context and make sense out of things and invent in real-time on the fly. That is a much more adaptive sort of ecological kind of intelligence, and I think it's essential for society and we really should do more to support it.
