by David Robson
By teaching his students this kind of approach, Shermer hopes that they will be able to maintain an open-minded outlook, while being more analytical about any source of new information. ‘It’s equipping them for the future, when they encounter some claim twenty years from now that I can’t even imagine, so they can think, well this is kind of like that thing we learned in Shermer’s class,’ he told me. ‘It’s just a toolkit for anyone to use, at any time . . . This is what all schools should be doing.’
Having first explored the foundations of the intelligence trap in Part 1, we’ve now seen how the new field of evidence-based wisdom outlines additional thinking skills and dispositions – such as intellectual humility, actively open-minded thinking, emotion differentiation and regulation, and cognitive reflection – and helps us to take control of the mind’s powerful thinking engine, circumventing the pitfalls that typically afflict intelligent and educated people.
We’ve also explored some practical strategies that allow you to improve your decision making. These include Benjamin Franklin’s moral algebra, self-distancing, mindfulness and reflective reasoning, as well as various techniques to increase your emotional self-awareness and fine-tune your intuition. And in this chapter, we have seen how these methods, combined with advanced critical thinking skills, can protect us from misinformation: they show us to beware of the trap of cognitive fluency, and they should help us to build wiser opinions on politics, health, the environment and business.
One common theme is the idea that the intelligence trap arises because we find it hard to pause and think beyond the ideas and feelings that are most readily accessible, and to take a step into a different vision of the world around us; it is often a failure of the imagination at a very basic level. These techniques teach us how to avoid that path, and as Silvia Mamede has shown, even a simple pause in our thinking can have a powerful effect.
Even more important than the particular strategies, however, these results are an invaluable proof of concept. They show that there are indeed many vital thinking skills, besides those that are measured in standard academic tests, that can guide your intelligence to ensure that you use it with greater precision and accuracy. And although these skills are not currently cultivated within a standard education, they can be taught. We can all train ourselves to think more wisely.
In Part 3, we will expand on this idea to explore the ways that evidence-based wisdom can also boost the ways we learn and remember – firmly putting to rest the idea that the cultivation of these qualities will come at the cost of more traditional measures of intelligence. And for that, we first need to meet one of the world’s most curious men.
Part 3
The art of successful learning: How evidence-based wisdom can improve your memory
7
Tortoises and hares: Why smart people fail to learn
Let’s return to the USA in the late 1920s. In California, Lewis Terman’s geniuses have just started to attend high school, the vision of a glittering future still stretching out before them, but we are more interested in a young boy called Ritty, tinkering away in his home laboratory in Far Rockaway, New York.
The ‘lab’ comprised an old wooden packing box, equipped with shelves, a heater, a storage battery, and an electric circuit of light bulbs, switches and resistors. One of Ritty’s proudest projects was a home-made burglar alarm, so that a bell would sound whenever his parents entered his room. He used a microscope to study the natural world and he would sometimes take his chemistry set into the street to perform shows for the other children.
The experiments did not always end as he had planned. One day, he began to play with the ignition coil from a Ford car. Could the sparks punch holes through a piece of paper, he wondered? They did, but before he knew it the paper was ablaze. When it became too hot to hold, Ritty dropped it into a wastepaper bin – which itself caught light. Conscious of his mother playing bridge downstairs, he carefully closed the door, and smothered the fire with an old magazine, before shaking the embers onto the street below.1
None of this necessarily marks Ritty as anything out of the ordinary: myriad children of his generation will have owned chemistry sets, played with electric circuits and studied the natural world with a microscope. He was, by his own admission, a ‘goody-goody’ at school, but by no means remarkable: he struggled with literature, drawing and foreign languages. Perhaps because of his poorer verbal skills, he apparently scored 125 in a school IQ test, which is above average but nowhere near the level of the ‘geniuses’ in California.2 Lewis Terman would not have given him much thought compared to the likes of Beatrice Carter, with her astronomical score of 192.
But Ritty kept learning anyway. He devoured the family encyclopaedia, and as a young adolescent he soon took to teaching himself from a series of mathematics primers – filling his notebooks with trigonometry, calculus and analytic geometry, often creating his own exercises to stretch his mind.3 When he moved to the Far Rockaway High School, he joined a physics club and entered the Interscholastic Algebra League. He eventually reached the top place in New York University’s annual maths championship – ahead of students from all the city’s schools. The next year, he began his degree at MIT – and the rest is history.
Schoolchildren would later learn Ritty’s full name – Richard Feynman ? as one of the most influential physicists of the twentieth century. His new approach to the field of quantum electrodynamics revolutionised the study of subatomic particles4 – research that won him a Nobel Prize in 1965 with Sin-Itiro Tomonaga and Julian Schwinger.5 (It was an accolade that none of Terman’s cohort would achieve.) Feynman also helped uncover the physics behind radioactive decay, and made vital contributions to America’s development of the atomic bomb during the Second World War, a role that he later deeply regretted.
Other scientists believed that the depths of his thinking were almost unfathomable. ‘There are two kinds of geniuses: the “ordinary” and the “magicians” ’, the Polish mathematician Mark Kac wrote in his autobiography. ‘An ordinary genius is a fellow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what they have done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with magicians . . . the working of their minds is for all intents and purposes incomprehensible. Even after we understand what they have done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark . . . Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest calibre.’6
But Feynman’s genius did not end with physics. During a sabbatical from his physics research at Caltech, he applied himself to the study of genetics, discovering the ways that some mutations within a gene may suppress each other. Despite his apparent inaptitude for drawing and foreign languages, he later learnt to be a credible artist, to speak Portuguese and Japanese, and to read Mayan hieroglyphs – all with the relentlessness that had driven his education as a child. Other projects included a study of ant behaviour, bongo drumming, and a long-standing fascination with radio repair. After the 1986 Challenger disaster, it was Feynman’s tenacious inquiring mind that exposed the engineering flaw that had caused the space shuttle to explode.
As Feynman’s biographer James Gleick wrote in a New York Times obituary: ‘He was never content with what he knew, or what other people knew . . . He pursued knowledge without prejudice.’7
The stories of Lewis Terman’s ‘geniuses’ have already shown us how people of great general intelligence often fail to build on their initial potential. Despite their early promise, many of the Termites reached old age with the uneasy feeling that they could have done more with their talents. Like the hare in Aesop’s most famous fable, they began with a natural advantage but failed to capitalise on that potential.
Feynman, in contrast, claimed to have started out with a ‘limited intelligence’,8 but he then applied it in the most productive way possible, as he continued to grow and expand his mind throughout adulthood. ‘The real fun of life’, he
wrote to a fan in 1986, just two years before he died, ‘is this perpetual testing to realize how far out you can go with any potentialities.’9
The latest psychological research on learning and personal development has now started to see an astonishing convergence with the theory of evidence-based wisdom that we have explored so far in this book, revealing additional cognitive qualities and mental habits, besides intelligence, that may determine whether or not we flourish like Feynman.
By encouraging us to engage and stretch our minds, these characteristics can boost our learning and ensure that we thrive when we face new challenges, ensuring that we make the most of our natural potential. Crucially, however, they also provide an antidote to the cognitive miserliness and one-sided thinking that contributes to some forms of the intelligence trap – meaning that they also result in wiser, less biased reasoning overall.
These insights may be of particular interest to parents and people working in education, but they can also empower anyone to apply their intelligence more effectively.
Let’s first consider curiosity, a trait that appears common in many other high achievers besides Feynman.
Charles Darwin, for instance, had failed to excel in his early education and, like Feynman, he certainly didn’t consider himself to be of above average intelligence, claiming that he had ‘no great quickness of apprehension or wit which is so remarkable in some clever men’.10
‘When I left the school I was for my age neither high nor low in it,’ he wrote in an autobiographical essay.
And I believe that I was considered by all my masters and by my father as a very ordinary boy, rather below the common standard in intellect . . . Looking back as well as I can at my character during my school life, the only qualities which at this period promised well for the future were that I had strong and diversified tastes, much zeal for whatever interested me, and a keen pleasure in understanding any complex subject or thing.11
It is difficult to imagine that Darwin could have ever conducted his painstaking work on the Beagle – and during the years afterwards – if he had not been driven by a hunger for knowledge and understanding. He certainly wasn’t looking for immediate riches or fame: the research took decades with little payoff. But his desire to learn more caused him to look further and question the dogma around him.
Besides his ground-breaking work on evolution, Darwin’s ceaseless interest in the world around him would lead to some of the first scientific writings on the subject of curiosity, too, describing how young children naturally learn about the world about them through tireless experimentation.12
As later child psychologists noted, this ‘need to know more’ was almost like a basic biological drive, or hunger, for a young infant. Despite this scientific pedigree, however, modern psychologists had largely neglected to systematically explore its broader role in our later lives, or the reasons that some people are naturally more curious than others.13 We knew that curiosity was crucial for taking our first intellectual steps in the world – but little after that.
That was partly due to practical difficulties. Unlike general intelligence, there are no definitive standardised tests, meaning that psychologists have instead relied on more tangential indicators. You can observe how often a child asks questions, for instance, or how intensely they explore their environment; you can also design toys with hidden features and puzzles, and measure how long the child engages with them. With adults, meanwhile, one can use self-reported questionnaires, or behavioural tests that examine whether someone will read and probe new material or if they are happy to ignore it. And when modern psychologists have turned to these tools, they have found that curiosity can rival general intelligence in its importance over our development throughout childhood, adolescence and beyond.
Much of that research on curiosity had examined its role in memory and learning,14 showing that someone’s curiosity can determine the amount of material that is remembered, the depth of the understanding, and the length of time that the material is retained.15 This isn’t just a question of motivation: even when their additional effort and enthusiasm is taken into consideration, people with greater curiosity still appear to be able to remember facts more easily.
Brain scans can now tell us why this is, revealing that curiosity activates a network of regions known as the ‘dopaminergic system’. The neurotransmitter dopamine is usually implicated in desire for food, drugs or sex – suggesting that, at a neural level, curiosity really is a form of hunger or lust. But the neurotransmitter also appears to strengthen the long-term storage of memories in the hippocampus, neatly explaining why curious people are not only more motivated to learn, but will also remember more, even when you account for the amount of work they have devoted to a subject.16
The most interesting discovery has been the observation of a ‘spill-over effect’ – meaning that once the participants’ interest has been piqued by something that genuinely interests them, and they have received that shot of dopamine, they subsequently find it easier to memorise incidental information too. It primes the brain for learning anything.
Importantly, the research shows that some people are consistently more interested in the world around them. And these individual differences in curiosity are only modestly related to general intelligence. This means that two people of the same IQ may have radically different trajectories depending solely on their curiosity, and a genuine interest in the material will be more important than a determination to succeed.
For this reason, some psychologists now consider that general intelligence, curiosity and conscientiousness are together the ‘three pillars’ of academic success; if you lack any one of these qualities, you are going to suffer.
The benefits do not end with education. At work, curiosity is crucial for us to pick up the ‘tacit knowledge’ that we explored in Chapter 1, and it can protect us from stress and burnout, helping us to remain motivated even when the going gets tough. It also powers our creative intelligence, by encouraging us to probe problems that others had not even considered, and by triggering counter-factual thinking as we ask ourselves ‘what if . . .?’17
A genuine interest in the other person’s needs even improves our social skills and helps us to uncover the best potential compromise – boosting our emotional intelligence.18 By encouraging us to look more deeply for unspoken motivations in this way, curiosity seems to lead to better business negotiations.
The result is a richer and more fulfilling life. One landmark study tracked the lives of nearly eight hundred people over the course of two six-month periods, questioning them about their personal goals. Using self-reported questionnaires to measure ten separate traits – including self-control and engagement – the researchers found that curiosity best predicted their ability to achieve those goals.19
If you are wondering how you would compare to these participants, consider the following sample questions and score how accurately they reflect the way you feel and behave, from 1 (not at all) to 5 (extremely):
I actively seek as much new information as I can in new situations.
Everywhere I go, I am out looking for new things or experiences.
I am the kind of person who embraces unfamiliar people, events and places.20
The people who strongly endorsed these kinds of statements were more likely to succeed at whatever they set their mind to achieve. Curiosity was also the only trait that consistently boosted wellbeing during those twelve months. In other words, it didn’t just increase their chances of success; it made sure that they enjoyed the process too.
All of which helps us to understand how people like Darwin and Feynman could achieve so much in their lives. The hunger to explore had exposed them to new experiences and ideas that didn’t fit with the current orthodoxy; it then drove them to dig deeper to understand what they were seeing and to find novel solutions to the problems they uncovered.
Someone with greater intelligence might have initially found it easier to process complex information
than either of these two men, but if they lacked a natural curiosity they are unlikely to have been able to maintain that advantage. It shows us, again, that general intelligence is one crucial ingredient of good thinking – but it needs many other complementary traits to truly flourish.
The real mystery is why so few of us manage to maintain that childlike interest, with many studies showing that most people’s curiosity drops rapidly after infancy. If we are all born with a natural hunger to learn, and that trait can bring us so many benefits well into adulthood, what causes so many people to lose it as we age? And how can we stop that decline?
Susan Engel, at Williams College, Massachusetts, has spent the best part of the last two decades looking for answers – and the results are shocking. In her book The Hungry Mind, she points to one experiment, in which a group of kindergarten children were allowed to watch one of their parents in a separate room through one-way glass. The parents were either asked to play with the objects on a table, to simply look at the table, or to ignore the objects completely as they chatted to another adult. Later on, the children were given the objects to inspect – and they were far more likely to touch and explore them if they had seen their parents doing the same.
Through the subtlest of actions, their parents’ behaviour had shown the children whether exploration was desired or discouraged, enhancing or damping their interest, and over time, these attitudes could become ingrained in their minds. ‘Curiosity is contagious, and it’s very difficult to encourage curiosity in kids if you don’t have any experience of curiosity in your own life,’ Engel said.
