Intelligence Pt II

I received an email in response to my intelligence blog, and within it there was a reference to how this person saw intelligence as an opposite to physical strength.  I thought I might expand on my reply.

As I noted last blog in a ridiculous burst of wit and cleverality, intelligence is about being able to find a common ground for two previously unintroduced points to stand on.

The cool thing about intelligence as humans know it is that we have not only the intelligence of our minds, but of our bodies as well.

Of course, mind and body is the classic dualism.  However, that seperation does not exist.



That's right, you heard me.  Tell me where the mind ends and the body begins, and I'll hand you reams of evidence you can read till the end of time that will prove you wrong.  Thoughts, emotions, even morality (1) is being shown to be nothing but chemical and electrical impulses in our physical brains.

Here's the big idea though guys: Increasing your body intelligence increases your mind intelligence.

Every physical skill you learn and perform enhances your intelligence.  You have naturally found solutions to problems through movement, and when that movement became perfected, it led you to still finer and more delicate modes of intelligence.

This was you.  Remember?

The coolest part is that this intelligence often (and usually) informs us beyond the language level.  It becomes a sort of intuition.

Let me give you a personal example.

Chess.  Game of old Ukranian guys down at your local park, and stoners.  I played chess semi-seriously for about a year or two.  When I say semi-seriously, I mean that I read the occasional chess book, I played at least once a week, and I always played to win.  Cos I'm a competitive bastard :)

 Deep Blue XVI pooped his digital pants at Spock's quaddro-check

What I found was that after about six months or so my life became chess. I started thinking about my work, my play and my relationships in terms of tactics, defense, counter-attacks, and castling.  It wasn't an overt thing, I never consciously thought in these term. Rather, chess overlaid my everyday existence with a film of strategy.

So, I propose, does every sport at which one excels (or at least spends some amount of time performing).  Chess is a particularly cerebral sport, sure, but I challenge you to imagine what being inside Roger Federer's head would be like.



Or Messi's.

YouTube Messi Right Now

Or Marcusz Pudzianowski's.



Or Kasparov's.



To know a skill at such an incredible level... how does this inform their everyday existence?  Think- sport to the elites is nothing but problem solving. To play respected opponents who continue to demand complex and sophisticated solutions from you for hours at a time... this demands unprecedented levels of intelligence.  And this intelligence must undoubtedly appear in some way in their day-to-day lives.

References:

1. Functional Networks in Emotional Moral and Nonmoral Social Judgments; Jorge Moll,* Ricardo de Oliveira-Souza,* Ivanei E. Bramati,* and Jordan Grafman†;  November 15, 2001; NeuroImage 16,

YOU ARE STUPID. BUY THIS.

Advertising is sterile, the twenty second commercial is dead and the ad industry is a painted corpse that TV is attempting to resuscitate.

The people who should be taking note of this are not the advertisers. Parasites always suck until they die. It's their nature. But its the people who are selling the goods and services and employing them that should smell the air.

And to think that we once liked those ad-men... c'mon, let's go honey.

Take note, advertisers are not the only people in advertising. Commercial TV stations are in the advertising business. It is their sole source of revenue. Check how many shows on your favourite channel are merely for ads. Every cooking show, every current events show, every kids show. I would rather take a hammer to my own head than watch a morning show. How can two hours of television remain bereft of any information? Are the people on those shows human or clothed robots? I guess the local chemist does great deals on soul-anaesthetics and sleeping pills.

Please fork out my eyes immediately

I must confess, I do not own a television, and have not for at least seven years. I have missed it's presence only for the World Cup. But when I go to my mother-in-law's house, I am struck dumb by the utter inanity, the stupidity, the stereotypes, the complete absence of information of any kind and the unanimity of the call, "YOU ARE STUPID. BUY THIS."

Your local advertising "creative"

It seems that regular exposure to this white noise creates a type of reverse cynicism toward anyone who points out the hopelessness of this media. Because they see it regularly, they view it as a demented dribbling uncle, accepted simply because of his reassuring and familiar presence.

Take my ads OVER MY DEAD BODY!

But advertising pisses people off. It interrupts our shows. It gets in the way of our phone apps. It drowns out our favourite songs. It preaches desire. Listen to this, from an advertiser:

"Modern marketing and advertising professionals believe that the business has evolved into a much more sophisticated, more thought through, more professional and smarter business than it was say in the 1960s.

But how is it then that 99% of all advertising put in front of us is pretty much absolute shit?

Why do messages fall flat?
Why do they fail to connect with the man-on-the-street?
Why do people find advertising more annoying and less helpful than ever before?
Why does the advertising turn out to be so complicated that it is generally indecipherable, even if someone wanted to decipherable it.
Why, if advertising is so damn clever, is no one any the wiser as to whether a piece of advertising is actually going to work or not?

Why, if advertising is now so damn clever, is the stuff produced by modern ad agencies so consistently, terribly bad?

The modern advertising business is locked in an irreversible cycle of nonsense.
It's actually incredibly stupid compared to the business fifty years ago.
But it will never realise it."

http://sellsellblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/is-modern-advertising-more-stupider.html

 

So why not make advertising that people want to watch? Rather than changing the channel, make them search out your ad, try to find it. Hide it a little, so they can't immediately find it. Make it rewarding to find and watch.

Ad campaigns sans product, showing the logo or brand at the end, they are the future. Telling a story, a myth, a legend. That is the future. Giving meaning and information. That is the future.

Information=max; Noise=min

See the pattern? Giving, offering, communicating. Not taking, leeching, draining. If you are to spend your money on a product, should not it's communication be one of meaning and fulfilment rather than annoyance and patronisation?

Bring information back into advertising. Not trivia, Not factoids. Actual information. Ads could become a sought out medium. Limit the distribution and you have yourself a collectable media.

Imagine you are watching a show. A small bubble containing a captivating image floats into the bottom of the screen and disappears. You only have enough time to catch the merest glimpse of it's enthralling contents. You sit, waiting for the next, waiting to see what it was. Maybe it had a logo, maybe not. All you know is that it was beautiful. intricate, intoxicating.

 

You want to be a customer.

 

 

 

 

Next Blog: Information and Noise, misunderstand at your peril.

What is Intelligence?

The Random House definition:

1. capacity for learning, reasoning, understanding, and similar forms of mental activity; aptitude in grasping truths,relationships, facts, meanings, etc. 2. manifestation of a high mental capacity 3.the faculty of understanding.

The Merriam-Webster defintion of intelligence:

a (1) : the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations : reason; also : the skilled use of reason(2) : the ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one's environment or to think abstractly as measured by objective criteria (as tests)

My definition of intelligence:

The ability to correlate at least two previously unconnected points.

"Ummm, two LEDs carrying a ladder?"

Timothy Leary described the growth of a child's symbol manipulation skills as laryngeal-manual development, referring to the use of the voice and the hands as the primary conductors of symbolism.  Many people use the word intelligence to describe how well a person uses these muscles.  Sure, how well a person communicates will limit the information being transmitted.  But the thinking that goes behind the scenes, the stuff to be communicated... It's fairly rare that an adult human encounters a situation where she requires intelligence.  Memory and rote learning are usually enough to get us through the day.    But think about the times you have used intelligence. Playing football, you keep putting the ball over the crossbar when taking shots on goal.  You find that your successful shots depend on you placing your left foot next to the ball, and keeping your right foot toe down.  This can now be committed to memory to consistently improve your shot.                         Geekiest kickass footballer ever

 Einstein drew new correlations between mass and energy, space and time. Best thing about complex physics? The awesome TRON diagrams

C.L. Sholes found a relationship between the arrangement of letters and typing speed, thus creating the QWERTY typewriter.

  Intelligence is a skill.  All skills require the input of patterns from which future choices can be made, known as engrams. Wikipedia definition of engram:

Engrams are a hypothetical means by which memory traces are stored as biophysical or biochemical changes in the brain (and other neural tissue) in response to external stimuli.

Although a hypothetical idea, I find engrams useful for compartmentalizing skill blocks when learning.

  Rock climbing has a number of different styles, one of which is crack climbing, as above.  You may notice she has her hands in a crack, duh. Now, let's say she has climbed several routes like the one above.  Perhaps this one:

and this one:

You can see that all the routes are different, but they all have similarities too; they are all on rock, they all have cracks to climb, they are all vertical.  Our climber has built up a decent skill set on cracks; a set of engrams she can call upon whenever she encounters cracks.  The more engrams she has to call upon, the more likely her chance of success on any given crack climb. Our climber then encounters this (horrors!):

Although she has never done a route like this before, her experience and engrams will allow her to make intelligent choices and correlations between her past and present climbs. So too with intelligence.  The more problems you can solve, the more goals you achieve, the more experience you will gain, and the more engrams you will develop.  All this experience will give you a wider range of options when it comes to your solution. At heart it's the need for a successful result that drives intelligence.  To improve your intelligence you must search out problems that need solutions and goals that need achieving, then find the points to correlate for a solution.

References:

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/intelligence

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/intelligence

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engram_(neuropsychology)

So what is the Idea Collective anyway?

"Musicians today, if they're clever, put new compositions out on the web, like pies set to cool on a window ledge, and wait for other people to anonymously rework them.  Ten will be all wrong, but the eleventh will be genius.  It's as though the creative process is no longer contained within one individual skull, if indeed it ever was.  Everything, today, is to some extent the reflection of something else."

William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

So heaps of people have been emailing me wanting to know what TIC is all about.  Actually, no, I've received no emails, but I'm gonna tell you anyway. Think of The Idea Collective as an idea dump for your unwanted ideas.  I have ideas all the time. I have a few put away that I am working on to generate an income.  But the surplus that pours out of my head, well, someone else can use them.

I figure there's no point putting stuff away that will never see the light of day.  A lot of it will be complete shite, some of it might be average, and perhaps there will be a gem or two.  But someone else with the time and the inclination can use these ideas to help themselves out, and hopefully do some good in the world. The best part is that we can all help each other to improve each and every idea.  If you can see a more efficient, more intelligent, and plain old better way of doing something, then you need to let everyone know.  It could be YOUR contribution that creates gold from dross.  It could be a few words of yours on a page that inspires a world-changing idea in someone else's head.  And that someone else could be YOU one day.

This network we are creating is the natural evolution of creativity.  Imagine a point of intersection in a spider's web.  That point is YOUR contribution.  It spins away in a myriad of directions, those threads being other people's thought patterns. Some threads might soon come to a dead stop, others may wind their way through the web, forming the unbreakable backbone of the entire structure.

                In this case, all threads lead to A Particular Singularity
There is no way to know what impact a single phrase, one image, a sound could have on a human being's consciousness.

The Idea Collective

The Idea Collective is one of many new forms of media that will represent the future of technology and how it is created.

It can be outlined as such:

1. Within every person's mind there lies the potential for world-changing ideas.



2. These ideas can often be triggered into consciousness with the help of outside influences such as art, music, reading about interests, conversation with your fellow men and women.



3. The greatest creative output occurs with regular interaction with other people to stimulate, redefine and focus ideas


4. Efficient and effective idea-to-product generation occurs when participants give feedback on the subjects they are experienced in.


So let's have a conversation about our ideas.  Your ideas and my ideas.  This blog is an evolving page, as is the forum site linked on the right-hand side of this page.  Anything that is useful is kept, anything redundant is discarded.

I'm going to pop many ideas I have onto the blog and the forum.  Feel free to add to them, edit them, tear them down and start anew.  Existing ideas are the malleable building blocks of the 21st century and as such, we need to mould useful items of modernity from the wistful idols of tradition.

Let's build together.