Not everyone wants to be a genius....
Like Creativity , intelligence is difficult to Quantify. An Entire field of study is devoted to it, Viz Psychometrics According to conventional wisdom, geniuses are different from everyone else.
They can think faster and better than other people.
In addition, many people think that all that extra brainpower leads to eccentric or quirky behavior.
And although geniuses are fairly easy to spot, defining exactly what makes one person a genius is a little trickier.
Figuring out how that person became a genius is even tougher.
IQ tests as we know them began at the dusk of the 19th century but even before that they were used by Chinese emperors to employ civil servants. The IQ tests give us a vague idea of g, You can think of g as a unit of measure or a way of expressing the amount of intelligence a person has..
Psychologists and Neuroscientists study intelligence extensively and yet there are many differences among them about how it should be analysed. Even though Intelligence is central to Genius not all Geniuses score well in IQ tests.
Does this mean that Intelligence is not essential to Ceativity? Are geniuses un-creative people?
IQ tests measure the Spatial, Linguistic and Mathematical abilities, which in my opinion are all left brain and as said by Roger Sperry and Robert Ornstein (1960s and early 1970’s). Left is for Logic.
Also Hermann(1996) clearly shows which function in humans is related to which hemisphere of the brain.
But this leads us to another question; Is a creative person un-intelligent?
Another less restrictive theory is Robert J. Sternberg's triarchic theory of human intelligence. According to Sternberg, human intelligence includes:
Creative intelligence, or the ability to generate new, interesting ideas
Analytical intelligence, or the ability to examine facts and draw conclusions
Practical intelligence, or the ability to fit into one's environment.
If intelligence is defined as above, it can be said that an intelligent person has to be creative.
Researcher David Galenson theorizes that the reason for this is that creative people come in two main types:
Conceptual innovators: think in bold, dramatic leaps and do their best work when young
Experimental innovators: learn through trial and error and do their best work after lengthy experimentation.I agree with Critics who say Galenson's theories overlook people who produce exceptional work throughout their lives. His latest research suggests that creativity can be expressed as a continuum. Instead of being either experimental or conceptual, people can be mostly one or the other, or they can be somewhere in the middle.
One theory that tries to provide a more complete view of intelligence is Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences (MI). According to Gardner, there are seven types of intelligence:
· Linguistic
· Logical-mathematic
· Musical
· Bodily-kinesthetic
· Spatial
· Interpersonal
· Intrapersonal
Concluding from the above few theories and my own understanding of the subject, I would say that Intelligence and Creativity OVERLAP and a GENIUS is what we get at the CONJUNCTION.
We may never be able to pin point where creativity comes from , why some people use their creativity more than others or why some people are most creative during specific times in their lives. How a person ends up with the right balance of brainpower, intelligence and creativity to become a genius. But it's clear that geniuses are indispensable to advancements in science, technology and understanding. Without geniuses, our understanding of mathematics, literature and music would be completely different; The concepts that we take for granted like gravity, addition, musical notes or alphabets might still be undiscovered.