Smart People Really Do Think Faster.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102169531

by amichail • 17 years ago

32 30 17 years ago

sofal2• 17 years ago

I haven't taken an IQ test, so I don't know exactly what that is like, but I've taken PSAT/ACT/GRE/GMAT tests, and it seems obvious to me that your performance on those tests is greatly influenced by how fast you can think.

If the IQ tests are anything like the other standardized tests, it is of absolutely no surprise to me that quick thinkers have higher IQs and I don't understand why it should come as a surprise to anyone else. Furthermore, assuming that IQ score depends on quick thinking, I'm not at all convinced that being smarter implies that you think faster.

amichail• 17 years ago

You make a good point. A slow thinker might be able to accomplish great things given enough time. Maybe we should consider such a person intelligent.

But even then I suspect that a quicker thinker with similar experience would be able to accomplish even greater things in that same period of time.

xenophanes• 17 years ago

For philosophy, I don't think thinking speed is an important bottleneck.

For a startup rushing a product to market, then it's one of several bottlenecks to watch out for.

sofal2• 17 years ago

I think you may be able to hold the accomplishments/time ratio constant while varying the quickness of thought. However, the quickness of thought that I'm talking about may be different than what the article is addressing.

For example, in a math class it may take me a while to comprehend each step that the teacher is taking which makes me lag behind the rest of the class, but given enough time to fully understand everything, I can outperform the average without too much trouble. So it can be in the way that I attack problems. I slowly and methodically learn about all of its parts until I finally comprehend it all and then conquer it relatively quickly, whereas others may quickly learn about something but have to repeat the process a few more times to get it to sink in.

Maybe this kind of slowness has nothing to do with the speed at which nerve impulses travel, but it sure doesn't help with job interviews.

dejb3• 17 years ago

It's possible though that this is analogous with running. An IQ test could be seem as a relative sprint whereas the business of solving genuinely complex problems might be a marathon.

A 'sprinting test' may actually provide a rough gauge of general fitness and physical ability - and in so doing be a rough predictor of marathon performance in the general populace. But at the higher levels those with fast twitch muscles are actually at a disadvantage in a marathon against those with slow twitch muscles. Extrapolating the sprint result to the marathon only works at the very crudest level.

Of course I'm not saying this is actually the case with intelligence but in certainly could be.

randallsquared• 17 years ago

"it is of absolutely no surprise to me that quick thinkers have higher IQs and I don't understand why it should come as a surprise to anyone else."

It's surprising to me because I do fairly well on IQ tests (top 2%), and yet I think more slowly than most people, and I have friends who are at least as intelligent as I (it seems to me) who are even slower than I am at figuring things out, but they do eventually get there, and often surpass me. It takes me longer to find the correct answer than many other people around me in almost any situation where they do find the correct answer. The difference seems more like finding the correct answer more often, rather than more quickly. While quickness of thought can provide the illusion of higher intelligence, I don't think it can have much to do with it in the long run; it doesn't matter how much you speed up a dog, he'll never figure out lots of things a chimpanzee can figure out -- intelligence seems almost orthogonal to speed to me.

rgrieselhuber• 17 years ago

Reminds me of the OODA loop (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_Loop).

If this is true, then it seems plausible to optimize for response cycle speed and iteration to evaluate solutions to problems, regardless of one's raw intelligence (whatever that means).

This measure does, however, tend to lean towards problem-solving speed as the primary indicator of intelligence and that's probably not the most accurate way of measuring it.

staunch• 17 years ago

It would be fun to know how "fast" my brain is. I'd pay multiple dollars to find out.

donaq• 17 years ago

And Thompson notes that our brains, unlike our bodies, peak relatively late in life.

"The wires between the brain cells, the connections, are the things that you can modify throughout life," he says. "They change and they improve through your 40s and 50s and 60s."

I wonder how this squares with the following --> http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=516949

Do we peak at 27 or 60?

ShardPhoenix• 17 years ago

Both can be true - you can improve specific mental abilities by practice even in old age, but your overall mental performance will probably decline.

DTrejo• 17 years ago

Neither could be true, in many ways we learn the most during childhood, and in a very short time (e.g language, motor skills, sight).

euroclydon• 17 years ago

Smart people tend to be good ping pong players too, if they try, because you have to process so much information in such a short time, and then act on it.

bluishgreen• 17 years ago

If you think while playing then you cant play well. I play reasonable good ping pong, and many times I am also watching me play.I do not know what I will do because I did not decide consciously.

zmimon• 17 years ago

This is really just pointing out that IQ tests are time based and so people who think faster do better at them. Measures of intelligence that are not time based might not show the same difference.

I often found in school / college that I could answer all the questions on tests and exams but not in the time given. It always felt a little unfair that others who were actually less capable sometimes got higher scores simply because they were faster at those parts they could do.

siong1987• 17 years ago

The more practice you have done, the faster you can finish your questions. So, I dont really think that they are just smarter. They may be just more hardworking.

derefr2• 17 years ago

Intelligence is speed, but not in the linear way we think of it. When people think faster, they can put slightly more time into examining each possible solution branch, which allows them to discard the ones that resolve as "bad." This, then, culls those branches from their memory, allowing them to process the rest of the solution tree even faster. Someone who knows a little more CS than I do could actually give a definite answer to just how much faster it makes someone, assuming, just for the sake of argument, that solution trees are binary.

Anyway, there are certain problems that require a "minimum mental speed" to accomplish; Mensa test questions are basically designed so that your working memory capacity will be exhausted by extraneous branches unless your mind can cull them as quickly as it can think of them.

dejb3• 17 years ago

> Anyway, there are certain problems that require a "minimum mental speed" to accomplish; Mensa test questions are basically designed so that your working memory capacity will be exhausted by extraneous branches unless your mind can cull them as quickly as it can think of them.

What about people who have a larger or longer-lasting working memory capacity? Or those who have better culling algorithms? They may be able to solve classes of problems that 'faster' thinkers could never solve. They might do well at the Mensa test but on a simpler speed-based test they could do poorly.

Intelligence is not speed.

weiser2• 17 years ago

So what happens when each node in the decision tree has probability attached to it. Worse still, what happens when you do not know the true probabilities of these nodes. Now imagine you have to deal problems all day with uncertain characteristics, i.e., decision trees have nodes with unknown probabilities. You will be stuck, unable to make decision.

This also reminds of the study in which a person's emotional part of the brain was removed (forgot name of the part, its the one that uses hueristics). So, he would have to make every decision completely rationally. That caused him to take a very long time to make even the simplest decisions, like which pencil to choose amongst a set pencils to write with.

Retric2• 17 years ago

Many IQ tests are not timed.

tokenadult• 17 years ago

Ai. Once more a journalistic report that confuses having a high IQ with being smart. This is not the current thinking among the best researchers on human intelligence.

http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Tests-Miss-Psycholog...

As the current researchers put it, you can be "intelligent" (= score high on IQ tests) without being "rational" (above reference) or wise (below reference).

http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Beyond-Flynn-Effect/...

But this idea goes back a lot further, all the way to the beginning of IQ testing. Lewis Terman himself wrote, "There are, however, certain characteristics of age scores with which the reader should be familiar. For one thing, it is necessary to bear in mind that the true mental age as we have used it refers to the mental age on a particular intelligence test. A subject's mental age in this sense may not coincide with the age score he would make in tests of musical ability, mechanical ability, social adjustment, etc. A subject has, strictly speaking, a number of mental ages; we are here concerned only with that which depends on the abilities tested by the new Stanford-Binet scales." (Terman & Merrill 1937, p. 25)

Ian Deary has very trenchant comments on how poorly understood "ability to think quickly" is in his book Looking Down on Human Intelligence: From Psychometrics to the Brain

http://www.amazon.com/Looking-Down-Human-Intelligence-Psycho...

But, really, the obligatory link for any discussion of a report on a research result like that is the article by Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, on how to interpret scientific research.

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

Check each news story you read for how many of the important issues in interpreting research are NOT discussed in the story.

P.S. I saw another news story about this research announcement,

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126993.300-highspeed...

and it included this interesting paragraph:

"Just because intelligence is strongly genetic, that doesn't mean it cannot be improved. 'It's just the opposite,' says Richard Haier, of the University of California, Irvine, who works with Thompson. 'If it's genetic, it's biochemical, and we have all kinds of ways of influencing biochemistry.'"

known• 17 years ago

time = distance/speed

maurycy• 17 years ago

Does it really matter whether you think faster or better, actually?

Life is not a 100m run; more like a marathon.

koningrobot• 17 years ago

I've always thought of myself as really slow mentally. It always baffles me when I see and hear people in an oral discussion come up with interesting thoughts while they are talking. For me it always takes a couple of days of silent contemplation to see the interesting implications of something.

When people talk to me I sometimes just can't hear what they're saying, but whatever it is I stash the sound of it somewhere in my head so I can focus on processing it once they stop talking. The problem is of course that often people don't stop talking and the stack gets higher and higher until the bottom falls out and I stop paying attention completely. And if there's a TV in the room, it'll suck me in before anyone even says a word, and they'll have to yell and wave to get me back.

But when it does work out, I can recall their entire monologue word for word. I can still recall some of the things people have told me as much as 15 years ago, word for word. (My memory is a total sieve for other things though.)

Regardless, I'm pretty capable of thinking "big thoughts", say a recurring closure and how it affects/relates to the scope chain, the call stack, the namespace chain (Ruby is weird this way), and maybe a couple other complicating dimensions. It just takes a while to think big thoughts (though I've developed a gut feel for navigating scopes and such by now and it's pretty much instant).

All that said, I'm pretty sure it works this way for more people.

alnayyir• 17 years ago

Don't fret, some believe Da Vinci and Einstein were the same way.

It's people like you that come up with the most worthwhile and well thought out ideas.

People like me (rapid prototyping/speedy hashers of ideas) are mostly useless. It's beyond words difficult for me to put feet to floor and completely formulate, systematize, and write out a philosophical idea.

I come up with neat ideas, but they die just as quickly.

I systematized the entirety of order and chaos once, connected it with primitive human origins, and have mostly let it lie and do nothing for example.

Useless.

tocomment• 17 years ago

The argument against this I've heard is that if a dog could think 1000x faster, it would still only have dog thoughts but a 1000x more of them.

There must be something more to intelligence than just speed. Perhaps working memory is very important? Perhaps it's just having the right software in your head i.e., knowing how to solve problems and frame things?

robg• 17 years ago

Speed has been inferred based on the connectivity of the anatomy. It's a fair conclusion to draw but speed, per se, wasn't measured.

http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/abstract/29/7/2212

weiser2• 17 years ago

These guys (http://www.visualspatial.com/) would not be happy with the way results of this research are framed.

This research seems to be suggesting that auditory-sequential (AS) learners are more intelligent, i.e., have higher IQ, than visual spatial (VS) learners.

If IQ is the measure of intelligence, then certainly, AS would be regarded as more intelligent. That is why AS learners do better at every single test that is timed or requires quickness of thought, be it SAT/GRE, mensa or job interviews at microsoft/google or a wall street bank or hedge fund.

Smart People Really Do Think Faster.

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