Slashdot Mirror
Slow Starters Have Higher IQ?
lockefire writes "Science Daily is reporting that children with 'superior' IQ's tend to have a slow start in the development of their cortex. These children have a 'delayed but prolonged' spurt that causes their cortex thickness to peak later than their peers and thin much quicker. This effect is most evident in the pre-frontal cortex. 'People with very agile minds tend to have a very agile cortex,' says Dr. Philip Shaw of the NIMH."
Also, there are so many different kinds of intelligence that an IQ test is pretty much meaningless. I've worked with plenty of people who had a very high IQ but were completely ineffective either because of psychological weirdnesses or because they couldn't focus enough to get anything done.
Free Conference Call -- No Spam, High Quality
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I think it's politically incorrect to say this because no one should ever hear that they are "doomed to be dumb". I actually agree that no one should hear this, but denying that nature has a large effect on intellegence isn't the way.
People need to realise that there are many types of intelligence, and that not having a high IQ really only related to a small number of them. There is acedemic intelligence (heck you can often find a person who is great in one subject area and not another), there is emotional intelligence, there is interpersonal/social intelligence, there is technical (hands on) aptitudes that are also intelligences.
Nature affecting IQ doesn't mean that someone who has "bad" genes is dumb. It just means that they will probably use some other intelligence or talent to make their contribution to the world.
So they don't close their minds, as fast as their average IQ counterparts. to new ideas because they have been humbled enough to realize what they know may not be always correct.
I don't know if this is generally true, but my experience growing up was similar to what you theorize. Before grade school, some "professionals" were recommending to my parents that they put me in a special ed class and take the short yellow bus to school. Apparently, I had problems listening and communicating. They thought I had hearing problems because I often didn't respond when people talked to me. They did hearing tests on me and discovered no problem with my hearing. I also had some speech impediments. Thankfully, they decided to sit in one of the special ed classes and saw how all the other kids acted. There was no way in hell they were gonna leave me alone with those kids. I ended up being held back a year in kindergarten. I had some small issues with writing things in first grade. By the time I reached 3rd grade, my reading level was higher than most kids. By 6th grade, I had a 12th grade reading level, and I placed the highest in this standardized math test at my middle school. I skipped a grade in math starting at 8th grade. I did attain a sort of perfectionist attitude where I would get mad at myself at making mistakes, and I never really considered myself intelligent (maybe just less stupid).
Abaddon: An Xbox 360 Indie game
That's only one of the two problems with that idea. The other, and bigger is that "No child left behind." ends up as "No child gets ahead." Teachers spend so much time dragging along the slowest learners, the ones who really need to be left behind because the need that extra time, that they can't give the best and the brightest the attention they need and deserve. Thus, trying to bring the slowest up to standard means the best have to be held back.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Regarding not being able to learn music, there are several possibilities (I don't know enough about your personal background (actually, I know nothing about your musical background) so these may not apply to you.) Sorry if any of these sounds like insults, it's just conversation and mental excercise
1) You were not taught how to play a musical instrunment at an early enough age. Music is an expressive form, which can essentially communicate ideas or at least emotions, likely very similar to language. It is vastly easier for people to learn new languages at a certain age (I think younger than about 6 years old? Someone more versed in developmental psychology may feel free to correct me here.) After that age, it becomes more and more difficult to learn a foreign language. Although learning any foreign language in this critical time appears to make it much easier to learn a different foreign language later in life than if the person only learned their native tongue. My guess is that translating between languages is a skill that must be learned early to be fully effective.
2) It is possible that you are simply tone deaf. Not meant to be an insult. Some people have innate "perfect pitch" and can replicate any tone given to them. Some people are on the other end of the spectrum and have a very difficult time differentiating between any pitches. This seems to be mostly a physiological limitation of some sort, although practice can move one significantly closer to the "perfect pitch" end of the spectrum. (Personally, I don't have "traditional" perfect pitch in which I can hear a tone and tell if it middle C or not, but am fairly decent at discerning relative pitches... E.G. if one note is four steps above another, if one pitch is an octave double of another, etc etc.)
3) The people who tried to teach you how to read music may have simply not been good teachers in this particular field.
4) Whether or not the reading music was in an attempt to learn an instrunment that you are interested in playing can make a big difference. And some instrunments are more suited for learning to read music: the piano being pretty much ideal as it is laid out in pretty much the exact form that sheet music is written in. But I think whether or not you are actually interested in learning that particular instrunment is more important (assuming a melodic instrunment... learning to play drums or other rhythmic instrunments would not help.)
5) Many of the other details in your post imply that you are an extremely visual thinker as opposed to verbal. Your relative ability to play tetris over doing a crossword puzzle is very telling of this. Even your doing poorly early on in school and then finally racing ahead is very telling. Much of early education seems to be rote memorization, which is done better in a verbal mindframe. Since speech is a linear process it would seem logical that memorizing lists of facts etc would come easier to a verbal thinker. Defining a visual thinker is a bit difficult to do with words, but it is my opinion that the thought processes are not nearly as linear and there are multiple parallel concepts being processed at the same time. This allows for a greater ease in learning certain abstract topics which would only come into play later in an academic career. I believe that visual thinkers have a little bit more difficult time learning a completely foreign topic. This is because (in my opinion) that visual thinkers need to compare the thing being learned to other related ideas. But once a few key concepts in the area are known, it becomes quite trivial for the visual learner to visualize the patterns of how other concepts link into the framework of the entire topic or discipline. This could possibly be compared to object oriented programming, where once a class is set up all the information and functions contained within can then be reused by something which needs it. A visual mode of thinking means that you have to have a baseline knowledge built up to be a
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
IQ as a measure of ability is reductive and almost useless. People are good at different things, and many many skills are not measured by "IQ" that are highly correlated with success in the world. Leadership, confidence, self-image, creativity, organizing the external world, etc. etc. etc. Jung and other have made extremely good models that provide better measures for people's abilities and skills.