Who is really intelligent?

s intelligence a specific skill set or the general ability to adapt to your environment and people around you?

Looking at a profile on Facebook, my son exclaimed, "Wow mom, this friend of yours must be really, really intelligent!" I took a look and realised he was looking at the page of an acquaintance who was highly qualified, with degrees from enviable international universities.

However, I also knew that the man was pretty inflexible and egoistic. Divorced and living all alone, he had no contact with his former wife and children. How intelligent was that, I wondered silently. Not wanting to discourage my kid from aspiring for good degrees, but still struggling to get a correct perspective along with him, I pursued the discussion. Would he say an unlettered man could be intelligent? We both agreed yes.

So, intelligence isn’t about education, we concluded. We quickly agreed that being book-smart isn’t necessarily the same as being intelligent either. Getting good marks too isn’t what intelligence is about! Is not a person who is well-aware and learned, intelligent, I asked. Well, not if he just rests on his laurels and doesn’t do anything significant with that learning, we decided.

Was Einstein intelligent? The answer was a loud affirmative. Why were we so sure about that one? It was here that a very clear answer came from the young man. Well, we are all taught lessons at school. We either learn them by rote or understand them. Neither makes us intelligent. But here is a man who actually discovered, analysed and put into perspective the things we are taught today. If any of us takes off from the point Einstein left off at, and added to that knowledge, that would really make us intelligent! Absolutely, I agreed. But Einstein had a tragic personal life, living apart from his family for many years before divorcing his wife. Did that make him any less intelligent? No, it didn't,we agreed after some discussion.

Is intelligence then just related to the mind and does it have nothing to do with the way you play out your relationships? That not true either. How can you make repeated mistakes in your dealings with people, especially your loved ones? How can you not learn from your own experiences and from those of others, and still consider yourself intelligent? And yet Einstein was intelligent! How is that so?

There are many aspects to intelligence, it seems. And no one person can possibly fulfil all those. But if one person is exceedingly intelligent in one area, that doesn’t take away from another’s use of his intelligence in another field, which may not be as relevant to the rest of the world. If Einstein is considered a genius for his contribution to science, wouldn't you say a housewife who keeps her home together with her ability to balance different elements and personalities of her household, is intelligent as well? She requires a certain skill set, needs to make the right choices and know the exact moment to play out those choices. Now that is intelligent, wouldn't you agree.

It would seem that there are two kinds of intelligence. One that is specific, such as that of a scientist, a mathematician or a musician or writer, and another general intelligence, which refers to our understanding of our experiences and the world around, and to the application of that learning to our lives. Those who are able to apply the learning better and aptly, are more intelligent than the others. Intelligence, when it is sharply focused in one area, becomes genius. And as is true of all extremes, a genius in one field is bound to be less than intelligent in others, many of which lesser intelligent people may take for granted. As a result, no genius has really been known to have led a happy personal life!

Proving this phenomenon is the rather strange incidence of divorce of 60 per cent (159 of 265) of the married women nominated for Oscars from the beginning of modern Oscars in 1936 to the present! This unfortunate statistic has come to be known as the Oscar Curse! Let us understand intelligence as a general ability that may include several specific abilities. While general intelligence is a measure of how you interact with the environment around and adapt to it, specific intelligence would include your level of creativity,innovation,ability to solve problems, evaluation and judgmental skills and capacity for reasoning and lateral thinking.

Put all these together and what you have is unbelievable! It wouldn’t be humanly possible for any one person to straddle all aspects of intelligence. You may have some, and not others. And when someone chooses to focus on just one aspect, the sharpness of focus has the potential to take it to the level of genius! And so coming back to our man on Facebook, was he really intelligent? Finally, I decided to concede a bit and say, maybe. His rigidity and ego notwithstanding, the man must have had some ability to meet the stringent criteria of his awesome alma maters!

So ok son, yes the man on Facebook is intelligent as well, at least academically. He knew how to utilise his learning enough to get into the right institutes even though he could learn a lesson or two in intelligent dealings in other aspects of life