Intelligence as a Superconcept

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What a joy it was yesterday to finally share my journey and learning in my first time as a guest lecturer at UCL university, sharing intelligence as a super concept. The video will come soon…

What I want to articulate here is my response to the great, open minded, articulate questions I received at the end of the session, that were looking for clarity with a deep sense of curiosity, it was a privilege for me to be in such a culture at UCL’s Arts & Sciences Course run by the unmatched Carl Gombrich.

There were 2 questions that stumped me which you will hear if you watch the lecture. The first was asking ‘How is Learning different from ‘Intelligence?’ and the other was something like ‘Is creativity a prerequisite for Intelligence?’ My responses were slow and completely non-commital,  mainly because the differences between the words are so nuanced, I needed more time to consider and clarify.

Upon sleeping on it I am happy to say that the 3 interrelated stages of the intelligence flow  (1. perception of stimulus 2. metabolisation 3. expression) can be otherwise described as a system’s process of learning and creativity.

Learning makes up the part of perceiving and metabolising information to create understanding and creativity seems to kick off in the metabolisation part and becoming obvious in the expression part which clearly in turn creates new information to learn from. This trinity is a flow and is not easily separated but worth thinking about distinctly.

I think looking at the relationship between learning and creativity and how to get the most effective flow between them is a fascinating area for discovery, if there are any learnings out there please do share them.

To you wonderful BASc students, thank you for collaborating with me (without even knowing it) I must find your names so that I can credit you on helping me find this language – Red jumper man on feedback loop, Bali woman front left on learning and 2nd or 3rd woman in on left block 3rd row I believe on creativity – Oh and the two of you who mentioned good studies on cellular intelligence please please do send! – Thank you.

  • *Added – Cheers Katie Rawlins, Jina Lim, Lucas Stanley & Alia Cachafeiro Maiz

If you are interested in forming part of the working group looking further into this and fleshing it out please email hello@solvey.com