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> For example, my neighbor in California - he had an ability to look at an equation and actually visualize the plot of it like a graphing calculator. That is certainly intelligence.

That is certainly something you develop - and even make a conscious effort to develop - if you work a lot with equations. Some level of mathematical intelligence might be a necessary prerequisite for learning it, sure, but it is something that quantitatively inclined people can learn to do.

Source: I'm a theoretical physicist, and visualizing equations is certainly the traditional way work in this field (although nowadays computer simulations are also there)

For an anecdotal case:

I've never taken an actual IQ test but I've always done very well at academic testing in the abstract with basically any subject I encountered (with some knock-on effects; for example, nobody ever teaching how or why to study anything, leading to a crash-and-burn in college).

I have almost zero visual recall, to the point that I would describe myself as mostly aphantasic. For example, without a reference photo, I'm literally unable to describe most peoples' faces outside of the most generic details ("white guy with uhhh, intact face and no beard?"), even if I know them well.

I always had 19.5/20 at school no matter the subject, if the subject involved logic and even if I didn't learn anything. On the other part, my grades in other subjects such as history were much more "ordinary". I skimmed through the academic part of my life without paying any attention to what the teachers were telling, drawing stuff in a notebook.

On the other hand, I cannot remember simple things such as where to go to <enter the name of a place> and I often have to wander and explore when I ride my car ...

Also, if you ask me what I did yesterday, it is highly probable that I won't be able to tell.

Also, I never know what day of the week we are, and sometimes I don't even know what month we are.

For every other aspect, learning new things is like learning things I already know.

I had the exact same experience. Top grades in math etc without paying attention or studying for tests etc. Terrible at history and similar classes that mostly require you to remember trivia.

Also struggle to remember directions, I lean heavily on Google maps and might use it 3-5 times before I actually remember the route. Terrible with faces and names. Get easily distracted but some times I can focus for hours at a time. Other times I can't focus for the life of me, it's like my brain just isn't working.

I feel I am in a perpetual day-dream; hence space and time go unnoticed by my "brain".

Logical articulation, -and I don't know why- resonnates perfectly with my state of mind. If the "memory task" can be represented as a tree or axioms and theorems, then it feels like I already know it by heart (the information is compressed and can be developped from a small piece of information, be it a formula or a fact).

The weirdest is that some aesthetical ability in my brain allow me, through some kind of hallucination (There's no other word) to perceive logical articulation where it doesn't exist: I can remember phone numbers only because I see a "discourse" or articulation in them, when truly that's plainly wrong.

I also noticed I was much more "affected" by signs that weren't part of the road signalization when driving, and sometimes I know where a graffiti is, for example, better than I know which of the next two village is the nearest. (But at least I make people laugh).

I am amazed by my wife that is able to travel a whole country knowing almost exactly which town and village we will go through without looking at a map, while telling me about the names of the different mountains, hills and vegetal species around us (??????).

Respectfully no, I don't think they are. They are talents. Your neighbor probably cannot not teach someone how to look at an equation and visualize a plot of it. That's just a thing he can do.

Bill Clinton probably cannot teach someone how to remember a rando's name after several years. That's just something he can do that makes him a uniquely talented politician.

Intelligence is intended to be a metric, and that requires commonality. Mostly anyone can be taught to read, write, do basic math, recognize patterns in shapes, etc. That's why these things are used as indicators of intelligence. Saying that someone is more intelligent than everyone else because they possess a certain non-replicable talent undermines the entire endeavor.

The idea of general intelligence arose out of correlation between test performances, and that there was a more "general" capability that people were tapping into to solve the plethora of different intelligence tests.

I disagree. There is no qualifier in intelligence that would require the person to be able to transfer it to another person.

In fact, I think the IQ as a metric is fundamentally flawed. IIRC it rose from detecting learning disabilities, like if you are 10 years old and still don't know that if I write 1, 2, 3 and you don't guess the next number is 4, then there is likely something wrong and your IQ is below average. So, they took that test and wrote new, more advanced questions, like 2, 3, 5, what's next? Could be 7 (primes) or could be 8 (Fibonacci).

And the problem with that is that they really rely on what you are learning or not learning in school. The math example above might be passable but what about similes in literacy or what sides does this dodecahedron disassemble to. The former where somewhat taught in my school but not well and the latter... well, the children are supposed to experiment with shapes in their own time, apparently.

I do agree with you that it's some metric, but it just measures how well the material in the IQ test is taught in schools, it does not measure a person's intelligence, which is IMHO an innate quality.

I'm not defending or critiquing IQ tests. I am saying that defining individual or quirky talents as "intelligence" is not useful. By saying, "You're not as politically intelligent as Bill Clinton because he can remember the name of someone he met in a crowd three decades ago", all you're saying is, "You're not Bill Clinton".

Intelligence is a standard which is usually defined by your ability to make predictions about systems in various domains.

Now if you said, "You're not as politically intelligent as Bill Clinton because he was able to understand that by positioning himself these ways on these issues, he'd win over a lot of voters without appearing self-contradictory or disingenuous," that's a much more defensible example of intelligence in a non-traditional sense.

It isn't unqiue, Dale Carnegie Jr talked about that sort of easy recollection of names and gave explanations of how people who did recall names a decade later do it.

I think the way our memory works shapes a lot of what we become. I can remember numbers, algorithms, weird words and 3D shapes. But struggle with music (piano), names, what I did a week ago, and what your birthday is. That shapes what I become interested in, because I can't progress my abilities if I can't remember. E.g. I could hit keys at the piano, but I could never remember ("have a feel for") the music I was playing. And I lost interest.

Another example is chess. I always sucked at chess, because I can't remember opening books, prior games and other useful information. It both means I can't progress in games, and that I'm not fun in a social chess setting.

What I'm proposing, I guess, is that IQ tests are really judging what type of information you can remember/recall. E.g. extending number series: you can solve them either by remembering rules you can apply, or instances of them you've seen before. If you can remember instances, you'll be named a prodigy because you can do it much faster than learning rules. If you tend to remember instances, you'll probably want to continue finding examples to learn, as a dopamine hit.

I think when it comes to "super recognizers," their fusiform face area (FFA) in the temporal cortex of the brain may be better/differently connected. The opposite end of this spectrum is prosopagnosia, where you can't remember any face. There is also prosopometamorphosia, where you perceive faces to be wildly disproportionate and demon-like (google it). So these might not be necessarily correlated with IQ as much as they are related to specific neural pathways/circuitry. Same can be true for visualization of data. There are many autistic savants who can perform specifically remarkable feats, but this isn't really translated perfectly onto the IQ test. The IQ test is probably an imperfect measure of all types of intelligence, but for general intelligence, it provides some level of useful data, but I don't think you can say that data covers all different specific scenarios like those described, sometimes it certainly might. There are probably people who can score 150 on an IQ test, but are actually unable to do any productive creative activity meaningfully.

I've become convinced of the idea that everything on some level is a matter of practice, and that effortless practice comes from enjoyment.

Maybe your neighbor can visualize graphs because he practiced visualizing graphs a lot. And he did that because he found an odd joy in it that others didn't.

Bill Clinton knew he wanted to be in politics at a very early age by all accounts. And considering he didn't exactly come from a powerful political family with a clear path forward, it's likely he decided to practice remembering people and by the time anyone could comment on it, he'd had decades of practice. But honestly maybe he just had fun seeing what he could remember about the people he met and that turned it into a fun game for him that paid off big.

When I was young, I played a game where I would count the letters in the words people were saying to determine whether the total sentence was divisible by three. So for a time in my life I was unusually good at doing modulo division on people's conversation.

I've since lost that ability (not much use to it), but I wasn't some savant. My mother worked early shifts at the hospital and would drive me and my siblings to my grandmother's house, and the fog and dew would cling to the windshield regardless of whether it was raining so the windshield wipers would be on. And I would sync the voices on the AM radio to the three positions of the wipers, left, middle, right, left, middle, right. It was a game to pass the time because I couldn't fall back asleep after being woken up. By the time I could do it as a party trick, I'd had hundred of hours of practice.

I think you underestimate the role that hardware acceleration plays. Take the Clinton example — about 2% of the population has prosopagnosia (“face blindness”), where no amount of practice will improve recognition because of defects in the fusiform gyrus.

But! Just like some percentage don’t have the neurons to be great at recognizing people, there are “super recognizers” where the fusiform gyrus overperforms. fMRI studies have shown these people have more activity in this area.

Some skills, like your letter counting, probably do not have an evolved area of the brain and are purely cognitive, so perhaps more amenable to training. But even then there may be aspects that are hardware accelerated with some intrinsic genetic predisposition to be good / bad at.

Sure, maybe. Some people might have some level of cognitive multiplier, but most of us aren't Ramanujan, most of us are some gradient of normal. Putting emphasis on practice and hard work and finding joy in getting good at something would pay greater dividends generally than trying to pinpoint a perfectly quantifiable intelligence.

I don’t disagree, with the caveat that setting expectations that anyone can be a [notably exceptional person] with practice and hard work is a recipe for creating unhappiness.

A face blind person will never have eidetic memory for someone they met 30 years ago, an average person will never be Ramanujan, and there are mediocre athletes who work harder than Jordan ever did. We excel when we align hard work to areas where we won the genetic lottery.

Famously, Michael Jordan was cut from his sophomore high school team.

I won't deny there are people who have disabilities or genetic advantages. But we overestimate the necessity of innate talent and severely underestimate the potential of practice, hard work and mentorship (and raw obsession if we're being honest) in most people, outliers notwithstanding.

Yeah, I think “outlier” is the key word there. Within the realm of typical physiology, typical genetics, typical nurture (say within two standard deviations for all of those), there’s huge opportunity for hard work and growth.

> fMRI studies have shown these people have more activity in this area.

Neuroscience is paradoxically a poor indicator for how the brain works in response to stimuli. The reason is that what you do literally reshapes your brain and how you respond to things. For a common example a chess master and a chess amateur use different parts of then brain when analyzing positions. Here [1] is some random study on it - there's a bunch. It's well known and not controversial. But the thing is, that chess master was also once a chess amateur. And so practice literally changes how your brain responds to various stimuli to the point of complete shifting the area used for processing.

So showing that [people of this group] have [this distinct brain activity] in response to [whatever] doesn't really say anything at all, which it makes for endless easy mode studies for now. Hence people exposed to [video games, porn, gender dysmorphia, etc] all 'change the brain' and/or have 'different brains than normal.' Well duh, now so do you after reading this paragraph.

That said, I obviously would not dispute that people are inherently different, but I think the most obvious ways to try to demonstrate that are irreparably flawed.

[1] - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brain-study-shows...

>But the thing is, that chess master was also once a chess amateur. And so practice literally changes how your brain responds to various stimuli to the point of complete shifting the area used for processing.

How do we know that people that go on to become chess masters don't just have better brains for chess? Have studies tracked people learning chess and shown different brain structures being used later in chess careers? Or looked at kids and then looked again at them as adults and seen the ones that became chess masters moved their chess processing?

I wouldnt be surprised at either outcome.

I can speak from personal experience there, for myself, or for students. I've worked with students from when they were complete beginners all the way to master, and they were still very much amateurs (with 'amateur brain') at the beginning. And in fact while you can kind of get some vague impressions, you can't really tell who's going to excel.

Famously, Mikhail Botvinnik (a world champion seen as the 'patriarch' of the Soviet Chess school) chided a young Anatoly Karpov who showed up to one of his chess schools, "The boy doesn't have a clue about Chess, and there's no future at all for him in this profession." Anatoly Karpov would go on to be one of the most dominant world champions of all time.

Even Magnus Carlsen - he is arguably the strongest player of all time and had one of the most meteoric rises to the top. Yet he was at one time rated 900. A year later, with world class coaching and living and breathing chess, he made extremely rapid progress (to about 1900) yet that's still very far from master class.

> I’ve often wondered how IQ correlates with the ability to visualize or recall audio of certain things.

Discussing these kinds of differing facets of intelligence with friends and co-workers over the years, my sense is that rather than one linear scale, intelligence is best modeled as being along a varying number of different dimensions. I picture these each as a vector shooting off in divergent directions and the scales on each can differ and be non-linear. Frequent examples include sensory types like visual, audible, spatial, tactile, etc but they can be far more granular and specific than people initially assume. One common area of difference is how the ability expresses itself, for example, in superior processing or superior recall. Sometimes these two correlate but not always. There are a variety of such independent variables like speed and depth which don't always correlate and can vary widely from dimension to dimension in the same person.

This degree of variety makes thinking about and assessing relative intelligence far more complex and interesting than typically assumed. For example, my wife and I are both good Scrabble players, however our mental approaches couldn't be more different. Her searches are faster but not as deep as mine. I'm slower but find more multi-word crossing combos based on obscure words. Who wins depends almost entirely on the turn time we set for the game.

Another area where we're highly divergent is spatial processing. I always have a general sense of my spatial orientation, whereas she has to stop and think about which way to turn even on familiar local streets. We jokingly say that she "has no Tab key" based on the key often used in RPG games to bring up the overhead map. However, when it comes to processing a complex visual field and identifying a different pattern among many similar patterns, I'm objectively terrible. She says I'm "Where's Waldo challenged." This is to the extent that she won't even ask me to pick up something at the store if she knows I don't know what it looks like and she can't tell me exactly which shelf it's on. I could spend five minutes trying to find an unfamiliar box on a packed 12-foot wide section of seven foot tall store shelving. When I'm buying items I've bought before in a store I've been to before, I'm the world's fastest shopper because I know exactly where each item is and my brain intuitively maps an optimized path to collect everything. And all this occurs with no conscious effort on my part. Yet, I'm super slow when in an unfamiliar store or trying to find items I haven't logged a location for.

Well stated. These abilities amplify the effectiveness of mental models we use to build useful systems i.e. they're force multipliers in discrete domains. People with these unique cognitive strengths become what we know as "principals." They can push beyond normal limitations in their areas.

Further, an organization that spots this dynamic and builds around it gains a real edge, assuming the company culture supports it.

what you are desribing is a mental state, sometimes called "flow" where everything is on top ie: zero latency it's fun and effortless, but dependent on a general feeling of wellbieng there is a dark cousin, that works in.a do or die situation, that can dredge up poorly understood information, and present a plausible action genius is best described as an idea that once put forward, everyone else can recognise and say "of course" ie: its implimentable and imediatly usefull and an iq test is fine as general indicator of mental agility, but will miss many exceptionaly intelligent people, for the simple reason, that they are "bored now" and are playing to loose and others that are distracted in one of the inumerable possible ways, to be distracted, revealing the fundamental flaw in "testing" is that the first "test" is to submit, and sit down and comply, and fill in the shit forms, and so reveals "pleasers" and "malcontents" as much as anything else

> For example, my neighbor in California - he had an ability to look at an equation and actually visualize the plot of it like a graphing calculator

This actually isn’t too hard for common functions if you know a few simple rules. Polynomials, quadratics, trig functions, exponentials, logarithmic functions, and rational functions are pretty easy to do this for.

IQ tests measure certain intellectual skills—solving certain visual problems, interpreting and synthesizing language, audio-visual processing, memory for nonsense—but not all intellectual skills. There are so many ways of being “intelligent” that it’s silly to pretend one number is meaningful as an overall universal measure.

Excellent points. I’d add that the idea of intelligence diversity extends beyond people. We have extremely biased definitions intelligence that are very conveniently aligned with human strengths.

when i was a child i was tested in this manner. the test was called the "woodcock johnson iv" (har)

i remember a big chunk of the test was repeating back increasingly long auditory digit strings in reverse and drawing increasingly more complex ensembles of basic shapes from memory.

sat and classic iq tests seem more achievement focused, where this thing seemed to be instead trying to measure properties of raw cognitive function like working memory size.

But apparently it's possible for anyone to learn mental math with very large numbers with practice, which suggests either the working memory can be extended, or at least specialized for numbers.

Yeah, there’s so much variance in abilities,

I struggle to remember faces, but I remember audio exactly - I have like “photographic memory” but for sound - and this includes conversations.

I can remember long conversations, exactly word-for-word of each participant, 10 years later. But if I meet someone on zoom, and then in real life, I really struggle to notice it’s the same person.

Aren’t our brains weird?!

You are likely highly intelligent give your strong recall!