To name a few: genetics, nutrition and stimulation during adolescence would all I’d think play a key role.
I expect you’ll find that stimulation (e.g reading stories from books) by parents during childhood is at least as important as what happens during adolescence.
I study 1 month for a test, 5 hours a day, and I get 83%. My friend study’s zero hours, plays computer games all month and gets 98%. When I asked him he said, “I just listen in class and read the book once”. I know he’s telling the truth because he’s my roommate. Basically what I’m asking is, are people born smart? Or do they become smart from studying etc. I personally think we’re born with it, but how does it all work? Did Albert Einstein study 24 hours a day to get where he got? Or was he born with a gift?
(im not sure if you’ve already read this… I typed it on my original post but i cant see it)
You might think of the Kentucky Derby as acceptably analogous. A jackass won’t have the same chance of success as a Thoroughbred (there’s your genetics) but a well trained Thoroughbred will like fare better than one confined to a stall 24/7. Both elemrnts are required.
As to Albert… he and Secretariat were one in a hundred million.
I’m not a valleyboy.
Please understand “will like fare better” was meant to be “will likely fare better”.
It’s a mostly unknown balance of genetics and environmental influences. I study a lot like your friend does and I do well because memorization and retention are two abilities I developed naturally. But my social skills and skills on a sports field are generally lacking, nobody’s perfect. The best advice I suppose is to utilize your “god-given” skills to their fullest while working to strengthen skills that don’t come as easily.
And, Einstein definately didn’t work 24/7 in school. IIRC, he rather didn’t like school.
jeez, where are my manners
Welcome to the SDMB, Cryptic
A good friend of mine drank like a parched fish but he never made a B in our well-regarded college and was number 1 in his class in law school.
He later admitted to me that he had a photographic memory. During for instance a calculus test, he’d just read the formulas right off the page stored, quite conveniently, in his mind.
thanks, yeah i’m a noobie
Yeah the thing with me is… I’m not the worse at anything, but i’m also never the best.
Some people are dumb, but good at sports and vise versa. I’m always flat in the middle. Never the worse, but never the best at anything. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
I still kinda wish i had photographic memory like your friend though. I could store in all my playboy pictures and never go spare.
[Will Geer voice]
You’ll go far, pilgrim.
[/Will Geer voice]
Would it satisfy you if we simply said that nobody knows? There are lots of theories about what the influences on intelligence are. Nobody agrees on the relative contributions of environment and heredity. Nobody even agrees about whether there is a unified thing called intelligence or whether it’s just a bunch of different abilities that we’ve arbitrarily put together. We could write a book on this subject. Indeed, many books have been written on the subject. We’ve done this before in many threads and frequently the thread ends up going to Great Debates because the discussion gets into controversial matters.
Anyone want to venture an educated guess on the respective roles that genetics and environment play in intelligence. While I agree with the stock answer that there isn’t clear, absolute evidence, it does appear that genetics plays a much larger role than previously supposed. Studies of monozygotic twins, siblings and unrelated individuals, both raised together and apart suggest a strong correlation of “measured intelligence” with genetics. The real question, of course, is how do we measure “intelligence.”
Ok I’ll admit I’m one of those smart guys everyone hates. I never study. For my finals I glanced at my notes for about 10 minutes. My friends spent 3 hours or so. For every subject my scores were over 90%, they barely broke 80. Really all I do is pay attention in class. I don’t have a photographic memory but I would say I have a better than average memory. I don’t eat very well. I used to live on sugar and junk but now I’m trying to cut down on it. I guess my genes are alright. Both my parents are smart although my dad dropped out of college. I never worked to get smart, its just a natural thing. Although intelligence has its downsides. I can’t get any work done because people keep asking me for help. Oh well, such is life ;).
What kind of food do you guys suggest before a test? I tried coffee, honey, suger anything sweet. But it doesn’t work. I get a high for about 40min but come test time i get a low because of the high i had gotten 30min prior.
I hear that food had alot to do with how you think. I just don’t know what foods.
Food doesn’t have beans to do with it, if you forgive the pun. Don’t overeat, don’t undereat.
There’s evidence that caffeine (a drug) speeds thinking without too much negative effect, but I’ve noticed there are some kinds of problems requiring concentration which are adversely affected – sometimes very adversely.
Although this isn’t always the case, in my experience in high school and college often students who zip though tests already know the material. It’s not hard to excel at math if one of your parents has a Ph.D. in it.
The one thing that will definitely improve your ability to take tests is to take lots of tests. There are several reasons this is so. Get a hold of practice tests for the SAT, LSAT, MCAT, Civil Servant Entrance examinations – whatever – and sharpen your ability to think under pressure, and to get inside the minds of the test givers.
I think it’s safe to say we don’t know. What’s interesting are some people suddenly become much more intelligent.
I think I remember from Pysch class that more intelligent people use their brains in slightly different ways then less intelligent people. For instance when you hear speech, you brain has to go through a series of functions such as converting the audio signals, matching words to definitions, searching memory for similar instances, etc… Well, I think a study was done on savants and their brain patterns would take slightly different paths or use other areas of the brain in conjunction with the areas normally used. I don’t have a pysch book with me so I can’t back this up with cites just yet.
Cryptic, please understand that not only can we not exactly define “intelligence” we have to admit that the ability to take a test successfully is not an indication of it.
Some people freeze up on tests (my sister), while others (myself) tend to do quite well on them.
There’s also the hard work factor. Almost anyone with a basic aptitude for a subject will become “smarter” (at least in terms of test taking) if they drill themselves hour after hour, day after day.
I got slightly below a B average in high school, and almost exactly a B average in college. But my college board scores were among the highest in my high school’s history. Which indicator is a better mark of how smart I really was?
The smart people read the Straight Dope.
What else? 