Intelligence
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Intelligence is a person’s mental ability. It can mean a broad ability or a more specific one. Because people live in different cultures and environments, there is no full agreement about which mental abilities should be counted as intelligence. In 1927, the English psychologist Charles Spearman said that the word “intelligence” had gained so many meanings that it was becoming unclear.[1] The word intelligence comes from the Latin word intelligo, which means “to choose between different options”. From a brain point of view, intelligence involves efficient coordination between the frontal lobes and parietal lobes of the brain. Studies of Albert Einstein’s brain showed that he had an unusually wide parietal lobe. The parietal lobe is linked to mathematics, abstract reasoning (thinking about ideas that are not physical or directly visible), and visual imagination.
Intelligence helps people solve problems and learn from experience. It is often seen as a quality of the mind that can be developed and trained. For example, when a person finds an answer to a problem and remembers it, they can solve the same problem faster the next time. This process is called learning. Both genetics and environment affect intelligence and learning. One alone is usually not enough to fully support development.
Intelligence Quotient (IQ) tests are used as an approximate way to measure intelligence. They measure a person’s mental power and speed. These tests usually ask people to solve many problems within a set amount of time. Many of the questions involve seeing patterns, understanding shapes, or deciding what a rotated object would look like. Some questions involve mathematics, such as finding the next number in a sequence. Other questions test words, reasoning, and understanding language. It is believed that average IQ scores increased across many countries during the 20th century because modern life, education, and science made people highly responsive to the kinds of questions and thinking used in IQ tests. This increase is known as the Flynn effect. However, a high IQ score does not automatically mean a person has better adaptive functioning, practical life skills, or better judgment in real-life situations.[2]
Intelligent machines
[change | change source]Computer engineers try to build machines that can act in intelligent ways. This field is called Artificial intelligence (AI), which means human-made “intelligence.” AI is connected to computer science and often uses machine learning. Machine learning allows computers to learn from data and examples instead of only following fixed instructions written by people. The computer looks for patterns in the data and improves its answers over time by calculations. In some ways, this is similar to how living things learn from experience and adapt their own internal patterns. After training, the machine can solve similar problems much faster by using the patterns it learned before.
Intelligence in animals and plants
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Intelligence is not limited to humans. Many animals also show signs of intelligence: animals also need to solve problems, and remembering how a problem is solved is useful to them. Many animals use tools to solve problems. These animals include the Great Apes, dogs, dolphins, elephants, rats and mice, and some birds. All these animals are vertebrates, but tool use isn't limited to these: Even cephalopods and arthropods show signs of intelligence. To be able to compare the behaviours of different species, scientists need to adapt the notion of intelligence.
It has been argued that plants should also be classified as intelligent: they are able to sense and model external and internal environments and adjust their morphology, physiology and phenotype accordingly to ensure self-preservation and reproduction.[3][4] A counter argument is that intelligence is commonly understood to involve the creation and use of persistent memories.
Fungal mycelium, which is the branching underground network of fungi, and plants both show complex ways of sensing and responding to their environment even though they do not have brains or nervous systems like animals. Mycelium networks use chemical and electrical signals to react to changes around them, move nutrients, change growth patterns, and sometimes solve simple space-related problems, such as finding efficient paths through mazes. Plants also do more than simple automatic reactions. They can detect light, touch, gravity, water, chemicals, and damage, and they change their growth and behavior in response. Research shows that plants can keep forms of biological “memory” from past experiences, communicate through chemical signals, and make carefully controlled responses to stress such as drought, heat, insects, or injury. However, this is not intelligence in the same way humans or animals think consciously. Instead, it is a spread-out biological system for sensing, signaling, adapting, and surviving.[5][6][7]
Related pages
[change | change source]References
[change | change source]- ↑ O'Reilly, Gary; Carr, Alan (2014-01-02). "Evaluating intelligence across the life-span: integrating theory, research and measurement". Taylor & Francis.
in truth, "intelligence" has become a mere vocal sound, a word with so many meanings that finally it has none
- ↑ Flynn, James R. (2007-08-27). What Is Intelligence?: Beyond the Flynn Effect. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-139-46704-9.
- ↑ Trewavas, Anthony (September 2005). "Green plants as intelligent organisms". Trends in Plant Science. 10 (9): 413–419. doi:10.1016/j.tplants.2005.07.005. PMID 16054860.
- ↑ Trewavas, A. (2002). "Mindless mastery". Nature. 415 (6874): 841. doi:10.1038/415841a. PMID 11859344. S2CID 4350140.
- ↑ Goh, C. H.; Nam, H. G.; Park, Y. S. (2003). "Stress memory in plants: A negative regulation of stomatal response and transient induction of rd22 gene to light in abscisic acid-entrained Arabidopsis plants". The Plant Journal. 36 (2): 240–255. doi:10.1046/j.1365-313X.2003.01872.x. PMID 14535888.
- ↑ Volkov, A. G.; Carrell, H.; Baldwin, A.; Markin, V. S. (2009). "Electrical memory in Venus flytrap". Bioelectrochemistry. 75 (2): 142–147. doi:10.1016/j.bioelechem.2009.03.005. PMID 19356999.
- ↑ Rensing, L.; Koch, M.; Becker, A. (2009). "A comparative approach to the principal mechanisms of different memory systems". Naturwissenschaften. 96 (12): 1373–1384. Bibcode:2009NW.....96.1373R. doi:10.1007/s00114-009-0591-0. PMID 19680619. S2CID 29195832.
