Intelligence

Intelligence: intellect, understanding; quickness of understanding, sagacity; rational being. This is a typical dictionary definition. Intelligence is purported to be the ability for high degrees of comprehension and for heightened reasoning.

Psychologists generally define intelligence as that which intelligence tests measure. And IQ tests usually contain items deemed sufficient to measure abilities in comprehension, general information, memory, clerical speed, hand dexterity and such other skills and talents believed to be factors of intelligence.

And ordinary men have ways of allegedly identifying intelligent individuals or behaviors –a manner of skirting the issue, perhaps because defining intelligence has always been found to be much more difficult than recognizing it. The size of the head has been said to be telling of intellectual superiority. A similar notion is that the more intelligent a person, the bigger the brain. A bigger mass of brain must require a bigger skull, and a bigger skull results to a larger head. Another contention is that intelligent people have convex foreheads. The basis : the seat of intelligence is the cerebral cortex, and hence the more massive this is, the more convex the forehead, since this is where the front of the cortex is. For many ability to memorize and rattle off prayers, poems and arithmetic operations is indicative of higher intelligence. Parents usually exhibit such children, knowing that such performances will reap praises for their precious ones –and for themselves too perhaps, because intelligence is commonly accepted to be genetically passed on. In schools, high academic performance is equated to heightened intellectual abilities. Then also, English speaking members of non-English speaking races are believed to be intellectually superior.

And just how is intelligence had ? Hereditary according to some. Others claim it somehow emerges sometime in life. Still others think that it is had through diligent study. The coup de grace: intelligence is a divine grant, a gift from the Supreme Being and to a select group of mortals.

Intelligence Quotient

Ratio of a person’s intelligence to average normal intelligence of persons of the same age. The widely used formula for IQ is :: mental age divided by chronological age, times 100 (to eliminate the decimal point). This was devised by Alfred Binet (1857-1911), a French psychologist. Mental age is determined after a psychological test on intelligence ; the score of an examinee is compared to the age scores in a norm. Intelligence tests have pre-established norms of average normal intelligence for the various ages. These were constructed after administration of the tests to samples of age populations.