Fluid Intelligence and Creativity

Fluid Intelligence and Creativity

Fluid Intelligence

One textbook defines fluid intelligence as the “ability to deal with novel problem-solving situations for which personal experience does not supply a solution. That's a pretty broad definition. It's probably made clearer by describing what it does not include.

Fluid intelligence does not rely on experience. It relies on things like inductive reasoning, abstract reasoning, and pattern matching. It deeply engages your ability to come up with unique solutions when presented with vexing stimuli. This not the realm of experience dependence. That's why the definition includes problem-solving skills.

From an evolutionary perspective, we think that these talents spring directly from the geological and meteorological instability of our East African birthplace. If we couldn't solve a problem on the spot, if we didn't have robust fluid intelligence abilities, given our biological wimpiness, we'd be dead.

Many brainteasers exercise fluid intelligence. If you're good at them, you may have strong fluid intelligence scores.

Inductive reasoning, problem solving, and pattern matching are all skills that engage the more creative aspects of our psychological selves. Exactly what does creativity mean under these conditions? How does it relate to fluid intelligence? There is a relationship between fluid intelligence and creativity; they may actually intersect at a memory system and may even be two sided of the same coin.

Creativity

Creativity may involve a balance between two cognitions on opposite sides of a catwalk. On one side, we have something called cognitive disinhibition; on the other side, we have something called latent inhibition.

Noted Harvard psychologist Shelley Carson defines cognitive disinhibition as the failure to disregard information that is irrelevant to some preestablished goal, thought process, or activity. Simply put, you choose not to remove extraneous facts from your conscious awareness, even if those facts are irrelevant to whatever goal you are trying to achieve.

One way to illustrate cognitive disinhibition is to find new uses for something. Laboratory instruments have been devised that measure it – instruments called tests of divergent thinking.

People who have unrestrained, or unrestrainable cognitive disinhibition often have a mental health issue, such as schizophrenia. Photo by Elena.

One famous example involves finding new uses for a brick. If you are not particularly creative, you might respond by explaining that it could be a paperweight or doorstop. Someone who scores high on divergent thinking tests might say that he or she would scrape the brick with sandpaper, mix the dust with water, and use the concoction to paint something.

Unfortunately, not all disinhibited responses are signs of creativity. For some people, cognitive disinhibition is a weapon of mass distraction. It results in the collapse of something we call cognitive filtering, which itself has many complex neurological processes associated with it.

On the opposite end of the catwalk is latent inhibition. Put simply, latent inhibition is the ability to block out options in pursuit of some goal, such as communicating with someone. It is a filtering system, and we use it all the time. It can even be measured in the laboratory.

If you have high latent inhibition scores, you can block out a lot of the options being offered to you in pursuit of a goal. If you have low latent inhibition scores, you become willing to entertain more and more unusual – potentially irrelevant, certainly uninhitibted – ideas. It is very possibly that these data are revealing the internal circuitry of narrow-mindedness and also the intoxicating freedom of choice.

There has been a great deal of interest in these filtering systems in the mental health community. Indeed, some researchers say that the presence of creativity and the presence of mental illness go hand in hand. Others simply say that it is a matter of perspective. 

Cognitive dishinhibition and latent inhibition reside side by side, in tension in typically functioning human beings. You don't get creativity with both. How do these relate to fluid intelligence? Where they may find common ground lies at the intersection of creativity and a memory system known as working memory, or short-term memory.

Some researchers say that the presence of creativity and the presence of mental illness go hand in hand. Illustration by Elena.

Working Memory

Working Memory

Working memory is a temporary storage, whereas long-term memory is permanent. Although they reside in one brain, they are separate systems.

British scientists Alan Baddeley has done a lot of research to characterize the many facets of working memory. He conceived of working memory as a temporary workspace, like a desktop, with lots of items on it. Working memory is a temporary storage space in your brain. Its job is to bring information into your conscious awareness and then hold it for a short period of time, usually to support some activity you have chosen to engage in.

For example, you use working memory when you decide to call someone, inserting the phone number into working memory while you punch in the number. You also use it when you are reading, holding pieces of previously exposed text in a temporary buffer while you take in new information. You use it when you are drawing things or when remembering an artistic work someone else drew.

Working memory has a number of complicated associated subsystems, according to Baddeley. There is a subsystem within working memory that mainly processes verbal information. Baddeley calls this the phonological loop neurons of working memory. There is another subsystem that mainly processes visual information, called the visual-spatial sketchpad neurons of working memory. Finally, there is a subsystem in the brain that supervises the work of the other two subsystems, called the central executive. These three components work together in a coordinated fashion to help you read text, see objects, and generally get along in life.

Some researchers believe that working memory can directly affect your fluid intelligence abilities – and for a simple reason: It determines the number of temporary variables you can hold in your head simultaneously. The bigger your capacity, the more you can hold.

This is a skill you need if you are going to attempt to pattern match, solve problems, do abstract reasoning, or use any of the cognitive gadgets that characterize fluid intelligence. Cattell and Horn believe that the many skills involved in fluid intelligence need a fairly robust desktop to function adequately. It's the same space you need to be creative.

The ideas of Cattell and Horn both require memory processing. They say that crystallized intelligence involves long-term memory systems. Fluid intelligence involves short-term memory systems.

The presence of both short-term and long-term memory is another terrific way to show that memory is not a unified concept. The concept is mature enough that we even know some of the neurological systems involved in each. We needed both to survive in the unstable world of the Serengeti.

We have many senses which work together to give us perceptions of reality. Illustration by Elena.

Luna - Moon Rising

Luna – Moon Rising

By Ian McDonald

She cries out. She is in Boa Vista again, Boa Vista full of green and life, light and water and warmth. The serene, full-lipped faces of the orixas watch over her as she explores the river, wading barefoot through pools, scrambling up the small cascades and falls, her dress soaked through. A drone floats over her head, her madrinha's watching presence. The detail goes far beyond her own memory; she hears every leaf stir, sees every shadow and ripple, imagines she feels the cool cool water between her toes, smells the warm verdure of old Boa Vista. Noises from a stand of tall, swaying bamboo distract her from her mission: there are paths cut through the canes, irresistible to young explorers. The tracks wind in: she glimpses movement through the screen of wands. The path delivers her to a clearing in the centre of the grove. There is Lucasinho, on the growing edge of kidhood, wearing a long-skirted, flowing sky-blue dress and make-up.

“Lady Luna, Quuen of the Moon!” he cries and curtsies deep to Luna. “Yemenja Queen of the Waters welcomes you to her grand ball!” He bends down to take her hands and half-squatting, half-bounding they dance around the clearing, laughing and laughing and laughing.

“How old was I ?” she asks Luna-familiar.

Three, says the grey-silver ball hovering over her chest. Lucasinho was thirteen.

Now he is fifteen and she is five and they are in his apartment in Xango's eye. He has tasked some long-armed, high precision bots and they are passing a long evening playing with faces. Each programs their bot to spray-paint them a new face: the winner is the one who gets the biggest reaction. She remembers this.  She doesn't want to see it again, in detail that time has dimmed. The animal faces, the theatre masks, the high-fashion make ups and the fight-faces of the martial artists. Demons and angels, skulls and bones. Then Lucasinho turns away from her and the bot arm is busier than she has ever seen it, weaving and dancing and dodging in and out, drawing circles, making sudden runs across Lucasinho's hidden face.

He turns back to her.

His face is eyes. Nothing but eyes. A hundred eyes.

She screamed then. She screams now. She fled then, but she stays now. She can look at the face of a hundred eyes. She has seen worse.

Now she is six and she goes by her secret path to her special pool that is fed by Iansa's tears but Lucasinho has found the secret path to her special pool and he's in it, with a friend, and they're both naked and looking at each other and when she says, This is my pool, they turn round and go “Oh, hey” and step away from each other. Now Luna can understand what they were doing but the all she said was, “Well, I'm going to join you” and they fled like she had poured poison into the water.

The boy's name was Daystar Olawepu, Luna-familiar tells her. He was in Lucasinho's colloquium in Joao de Deus. Luna realises now that the reason they ran was not because she had caught them playing with each other's penises, but because Lucasinho had smuggled the boy through the security grid. And she thinks, “but he didn't get past the security grid, because the security grid checked everyone. Daystar was let through. And she thinks, Daystar is a pretty name.

Now she is seven and Boa Vista is full of movement and music and lights and peuple in wonderful clothes and she is chasing ornamental butterflies between the guests. She is in a white dress with bold red peonies and wherever she goes she is told how pretty she looks.

Demons and angels, skulls and bones. Photo by Elena.

Evolutionary Reasons for Memory

Fallibility and the Evolutionary Reasons for Memory

A characteristic of long-term memory systems that is important to many fields, such as law enforcement and standard testing, is their relative stability or instability. Human memory is a sap that isn't always very sickly.

An example of this instability can be found in your answer to the following question: What were you doing when John Kennedy was assassinated? If you were around during that time, you probably believe that you can answer that question very accurately.

But how well is that long-term memory trace laid down during your experience of Kennedy's assassination? How about those of your friends? There's a way to test this. You could ask people to write down their activities just after some natural disaster occurred. You would then hold onto their answers for a period of time – years even – and then ask them to recall what they were doing when the disaster occurred. Your task would be to compare their years-later recollections to the responses made immediately after the dramatic event occurred.

Such research has been done. Memories of what people were doing when the space shuttle “Challenger” blew up, and during other events, have been assessed. Two consistent findings have emerged from such ghoulish research: People are very confident about the accuracy of their memories, and they are mostly wrong.

Memory degradation occurs very quickly with time, even for important memories. The 9/11 study showed that only two years after the tragedy, 55 percent of those queried were making errors in their autobiographical recollections. And it got worse with time. This was a surprise to nearly everybody who enrolled in the study. They thought that they had perfect recall of what they were doing.

The old memory no longer exists and is no longer accessible. Photo by Elena.

It's a sad fact for mots of us, but one of the first characteristics we discover about our memory traces is their susceptibility to erosion. Different types of memories efface at different rates. You easily forget 98 percent of the semantic memory content in a classroom 30 days after you've had the lecture.

Exactly how does that instability occur? Why does it occur? It all has to do with the mechanisms the brain uses to retrieve information. The interesting fact is that you have different retrieval gadgets, and you use them differentially over time.

Consider the case of semantic memory, or memory for things. When a semantic memory is first established, you are busy taking in the moment, and you can see all of the details. This doesn't require much effort. Your recall is robust.

This more stable form of recollection is sometimes called reproductive retrieval memory, because you are reproducing what you experienced on the spot. It doesn't stay stable, unfortunately. As time goes by, original pieces of the memory begin to fade. You lose small details of the memory trace and large details of the memory trace. You begin confusing information from other memory traces with the memory trace in question. The memory is eroding and getting confused.

If you want to retrieve this older memory, you are going to have do some reassembly. The old memory no longer exists or is no longer accessible. You will begin reassembling your memory from component parts as you recall strategies. We call this type of recall reconstructive retrieval memory.

Reconstructive retrieval is almost never as accurate as reproductive retrieval. Original details may get left out entirely as you attempt your reassembly. Details not in the old memory – often from other memories – may get mistakenly inserted into your reconstruction efforts. Astonishingly, you often don't recognize the error and swear they are part of the original.

As time passes, we move from reproductive memory to reconstructive memory. That's why the test subjects' 9/11 recollections failed two years out. At first, their recall was very accurate. But as time passed, the less-accurate reconstructive retrieval systems kicked in, complete with their 55 percent inaccuracy rates.

The most surprising thing about this research is out blind confidence that such a thing was not happening. But it does happen, made worse as we get older – at least for most of us. Oddly enough, the loss is uneven. Ts there something in our evolutionary history that favored retrieval systems to be unevenly fragile and increasingly inaccurate, always with limited initial capacity?

It's an inefficient design if memory is supposed to be providing us with an archive so that we can accurately remember the past. It erodes far too quickly to be a reliable library. Some researchers think that what's wrong with this explanation is not our memories but our conception of what purpose memories actually serve. Some researchers believe that we have misinterpreted the evolutionary intention of memory.

They think that our memory systems are not built to remember what happened previously so that we can remember yesterday. Instead, they are built so that we can make more accurate predictions about what might occur tomorrow. You don't need it to be photographic if you are trying to reimagine what might happen to you. Accuracy is only modestly required; you just need an approximation In this view, memory systems are gadgets for the future, not the past.

Memories vanish as time goes by. Photo by Elena.

Suggestions for Improving memory

Suggestions for Improving Memory

Researchers offer several suggestions for improving memory. Let's suppose that you have to take a test that will require you to regurgitate, at least in part, declarative information. 

• Practice overlearning. Researchers suggest that you repeat declarative information in timed intervals, over and over again until you've memorized it. And have that memorizing finished a week before you're scheduled to take the test. Seven days prior to the test, practice what researchers call oeverlearning, which means continually reexposing yourself to the information you've already memorized. Do it over and over again in spaced intervals.
• Don't pull all-nighters. A great deal of information processing occurs at night.
• Don't cram. Research also shows that regularly timed exposures stretched over a period of days creates learning far superior to cramming for an exam a day before you take it. Let's say that you only have 10 times to study for a test. The memory is much more robust if you studied once a day for 10 days rather than do 100 exposures the day, the night, the hour before you take the exam.

There are many other tricks you can use to help your brain limp past its Serengeti heritage, from doing something we call elaborative rehearsal to mnemonic strategies to using mental imagery.

If you dig down deeper into human memory, things get very complicated fast. Memory is not like a camera on a cell phone. Photo by Elena.