What Makes Us Smart: Our Knowledge Content, Technology That We Have or Something Else?

Ahmed Tanović

Professor Mohamed Elsayed Yahia

HUM 101

23 December 2014

What makes us smart: our knowledge content, technology that we have or something else?

Socrates famously said that “the only true knowledge lies in knowing that you know nothing.”

Many factors affect on our intelligence such as genetic predisposition, environment, technology, education. So, we need to look at all this factors as a whole, not seperately.

An IQ test is a series of brainteasers. You translate codes using a key, fit abstract shapes together, sort numbers or letters into ascending order in your mind. Studies make it clear that IQ is strongly correlated with the ability to solve all sorts of abstract problems, whether they involve language, math, or visual patterns.

However, IQ researchers are far from in agreement about whether scores can be validly compared between groups of people—men and women, blacks and whites—who experience very different environments even within the same country. Variations within groups are often greater than the variations between them, making it impossible to draw conclusions about someone based on their group.

But on an individual level, the evidence points toward a strong genetic component in IQ. Based on studies of twins, siblings, and adoption, contemporary estimates put the heritability of IQ at 50 to 80 percent, and recent studies that measure the genetic similarity of unrelated people seem to have pushed the estimate to the high end of that range. Identical twins raised separately have very similar IQ’s and scores correlate fairly well with later professional success in intellectual fields. Another curious thing about IQ scores is that they keep rising, by about 3 points per decade.

So, we can say that genetic predisposition affect on our intelligence.

Research shows that people don't tend to rely on their memories for things they can easily access – because of high development of technology. So for this part we can say that we actually know is how to rapidly access the information.

In experiment – which want to show us that environment affect on our intelligence - couples were asked to come into the lab to take a memory  test. Half the couples were kept together, and half were reassigned to pair up with someone they did not know. The pairs that were made up of a couple in a relationship could remember more items.

What happened, according to Daniel Wegner from Harvard University, was that the couples in a relationship had a good understanding of their partners. Because of this they would tacitly divide up the work between them, so that, say, one partner would remember words to do with technology, assuming the other would remember the words to do with sports. In this way, each partner could concentrate on their strengths, and so individually they outperformed people in couples where no mental division of labour was possible. Just as you rely on a search engine for answers, so you can rely on people you deal with regularly to think about certain things, developing a shared system for committing items to memory and bringing them out again, what Wegner called “transactive memory”.