Fading creativity

As IQ inches upwards, creativity is sagging, according to this Newsweek article:

Like intelligence tests, Torrance’s test—a 90-minute series of discrete tasks, administered by a psychologist—has been taken by millions worldwide in 50 languages. Yet there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.
Why is this happening? The article suggests some possible reasons. "One likely culprit is the number of hours kids now spend in front of the TV and playing videogames rather than engaging in creative activities. Another is the lack of creativity development in our schools."

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What is intelligence?

A few months ago, I collected many definitions of "intelligence." One version of intelligence measures the ability to use language well. It turns out that using language well can be affected greatly by practice. David Shenk reports on this topic in an Atlantic article titled, "The 32-Million Word Gap":

The differences were astounding. Children in professionals' homes were exposed to an average of more than fifteen hundred more spoken words per hour than children in welfare homes. Over one year, that amounted to a difference of nearly 8 million words, which, by age four, amounted to a total gap of 32 million words. They also found a substantial gap in tone and in the complexity of words being used. As they crunched the numbers, they discovered a direct correlation between the intensity of these early verbal experiences and later achievement. "We were astonished at the differences the data revealed," Hart and Risley wrote in their book Meaningful Differences. "The most impressive aspects [are] how different individual families and children are and how much and how important is children's cumulative experience before age 3."

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Take a nap to get smarter

This is a post to complement Huffington's "sleep challenge." U.C. Berkeley reports this good news for afternoon nappers:

In the recent UC Berkeley sleep study, 39 healthy young adults were divided into two groups — nap and no-nap. At noon, all the participants were subjected to a rigorous learning task intended to tax the hippocampus, a region of the brain that helps store fact-based memories. Both groups performed at comparable levels.

At 2 p.m., the nap group took a 90-minute siesta while the no-nap group stayed awake. Later that day, at 6 p.m., participants performed a new round of learning exercises. Those who remained awake throughout the day became worse at learning. In contrast, those who napped did markedly better and actually improved in their capacity to learn. Matthew Walker, assistant psychology professor, has found that a nap clears the brain to absorb new information.

These findings reinforce the researchers' hypothesis that sleep is needed to clear the brain’s short-term memory storage and make room for new information . . .

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What is intelligence?

What is intelligence? Let us count the ways. Actually, the many definitions you’ll find below are merely the tip of the iceberg. I have listed my sources at the end of this post. “I’ve become more aware of and impressed by how much of leadership is about emotional intelligence. The more you lead, the more you understand how much of it is about motivation – and motivation is about emotions…To lead, being smart isn’t sufficient. You have to connect with people so that they want to help you move the organization forward.” Robert Joss, Dean of Stanford University’s Business School. “Knowing a great deal is not the same as being smart; intelligence is not information alone but also judgment, the manner in which information is collected and used.” Carl Sagan “I not only use all the brains that I have, but all that I can borrow.” Woodrow Wilson “It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer” Albert Einstein “Continuous effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our potential.” Winston Churchill “Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.” Stephen Hawking "The capacity to acquire and apply knowledge, especially toward a purposeful goal." dictionary.com “We define emotional intelligence as the subset of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one's own and others' feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one's thinking and actions.” Salovey & Mayer, Emotional Intelligence (1990) “Does a president need to be smarter than his advisors? The key is how to define ‘smart.’ A president can hardly be more expert than, in sum, a collection of advisors…” Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty "Much evidence testifies that people who are emotionally adept -- who know and manage their own feelings well, and who read and deal effectively with other people's feelings -- are at an advantage in any domain of life, whether romance and intimate relationships or picking up the unspoken rules that govern success in organizational politics.” Daniel Goleman “Intelligence is solving a problem or creating a product that is valued in society.” Image by Brunosan at Flickr (creative commons) Image by Brunosan at Flickr (creative commons) Howard Gardner

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Intelligence as a display of healthy sperm

Psychologists found a strong correlation between high IQ and healthy sperm, as reported by the U.K. Telegraph:

The research, by the evolutionary psychologist Professor Geoffrey Miller of the University of New Mexico, centred around a study of 400 Vietnam War veterans who were put through extensive mental tests and were also asked to provide sperm samples. According to the test results, it was found that men who scored high on a battery of intelligence tests boasted high counts of healthy sperm. Whereas, low scorers tended to have fewer and more sickly sperm.
Miller points out that intelligence is sexually attractive to both sexes, and that intelligence co-evolved with sperm quality to advertise good genes.

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