Scott Barry Kaufman

This is the data.

When you go take an IQ test, it tends to be divorced entirely from the context of your own life.

That's by design.

They want to see how good are you at abstract reasoning, and that's thought to be the height of intelligence.

However, so much of life is not decontextualized from our life.

In fact, most of our life.

When we're excited about certain things, our attentional system is directed towards it.

This engagement aspect is absolutely essential to our understanding of someone's potential.

The more we engage in something, we learn.

And the more that we learn something, the more it makes us want to engage in something.

Because once we start becoming good at something, then we start to invest more of our time and energy into it.

So it's a very strong dynamic cycle.

When you look at the neuroscience of creativity, those who have the most imaginative sort of ideas are the kind of brains that show reduction of gray volume in what's called the prefrontal cortex area.

So sometimes you actually find that some of the brains that look the least intelligent are actually the most creative.

That's the point I'm trying to make here.

So it depends a lot on your ability to sometimes put aside all the prior expertise you have, maybe even put aside your critical thinking facilities and be able to really have more associative processes.

I like to say it's really important to be really open-minded, but not so open-minded that your brain falls out.

So that's why I think intelligence is important.

I'm not saying intelligence isn't important, but it depends on the thing that you're creating.

I actually published a paper showing the distinction between the arts and the sciences and its prediction of IQ and the extent to which IQ predicts these things.