Why do people care so much about intelligence and how to get smarter is something that has intruiged me for a long time, I always struggled to define what intelligence really means, it seemed to me that it is a subjective term, it's a quality that is task-oriented, I saw intelligent mathematicians who are really bad at doing very simple tasks, like operating a washing machine, I saw great programmers who keep forgetting where they put their keys. When I was 14 I took an IQ test at school, the test was introduced to me as an intelligence test that "measured my mental capacities", I got good scores, but to be honest, I wasn't really impressed with the whole idea of putting a number on something as complex as human intelligence,
I consider myself a reasonably intelligent person, people tend to ask me for advise, when it comes to solving logical problems and such, This however doesn't change the fact that I know that I'm lacking in other aspects of life, that could be considered intelligence related, For instance, I'm really bad at remembering directions, I still can't easily remember my way back home from school, even though I've been there at least a thousand times. It's not that I haven't tried, it's that my sense of direction is totally messed up. That said, I don't deny the fact that when it comes to specific aspects of intelligence, like mathematical problem solving and logical thinking, people who excel at these elements tend to generally be seen as intelligent human beings, and even though they might be lacking in one particular aspect, they're still perceived as intelligent in most situations.
I came across this website the other day called How To Get Smarter, it talks about how scientists were able to find a link between intelligence and working memory, I thought it's interesting since it confirmed my belief that intelligence is just a mechanical process, the circuirty used by working memory happened to be the same circuitry used while taking IQ tests, not only that, but it has been found that by training people with a simple short-memory game, resulted in their IQ tests getting 20 points higher on average, that is pretty significant, considering that the average IQ is 100 and that someone with an IQ of 120 is considered to be highly intelligent.
Now if the brain is indeed a mechanical machine, then we can train it just like a muscle, then that means practing things like sports or video games might have positive implications that are not immediately obvious, since many of these tasks and challenges share the same brain areas.
