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Comment by zzt123 | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know if Jeff Hawkins would agree, but it seems to me that if his ideas involving cortical columns are true, intelligence is indeed capable of being compressed to a single number with statistical significance, due to underlying efficiency differences in the base components which are replicated across the whole neocortex.

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That seems easily testable. Strength sports and fine motor skills have a huge neural component. You can look at people at the top of their fields in lifting in lower weight classes, gymnastics, MLB pitchers, anything that isn't being totally confounded by sheer muscle mass, and see if their success in any way correlates with IQ. Something that makes the entire brain more efficient should have a positive impact on both purely cognitive tasks as well as motor tasks with a large neural component.

A decent amount of work has already been done in this area. One common experimental apparatus is a "Jensen box" which is basically a whack-a-mole game, and it turns out that performance does correlate with common general psychometric measures of intelligence, even though it's really not the sort of task you'd think of as requiring intellect.

I wasn’t aware of this. Wouldn’t the Jensen Box imply a correlation between intelligence and simple reaction time, which seems to be a contentious point?

I’m also reminded of the lack of correlation between the Wonderlic Test and NFL performance, although perhaps that speaks more about the test than it does about any correlation with intelligence.

Not necessarily I think. As I understand, Hawkins envisions motor skills as involving a kind of “system call” to the old brain, and the fact that the cortical columns are more efficient does not seem to necessarily imply that old brain structures are similarly more efficient. So, I’m not sure there would have to be a clear correlation between professional sports and general intelligence.

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