Mama, Am I Smart?

An exploration of intelligence

“Mama, am I smart?” 

I looked over at the little head studiously bent over coloring pages and homeschool books and smiled.  His chubby hand grasped crayons awkwardly as misshapen letters and numbers floated across the page with little regard for assigned boxes or numbered lines. Was he smart? What does that even mean? 

What a question.  

It’s a question we feel challenged by on a regular basis. In a digital world where expansive innovation happens minute by minute it's easy to feel left behind and ignorant if you lose sight of even the smallest detail.   
 
The education that seemed so all inclusive back then shrinks in relevance to the fluctuation of skills required to not only comprehend where you are in the world but to function in it as well. We aren’t even talking about mastering skills or achievement.  Just surviving long enough to get to the next leap in technology or society hoping we can adapt, expand, achieve, and, if all the stars align, even be successful.  

But what does it mean to be smart?  

Depending on your source?  

There are as few as 4 and as many as 19 types of intelligence. And, by the time I got to the guy who said there were 19, I figured they were just making it up. Since it’s not an exact science I’ll tell you about the ways I see intelligence around me. Now, full disclosure, I’m not an expert. I’m an armchair philosopher with a brain that tends to spin off in odd directions.  

Cunning, adaptive, academic, intuitive, social. 

As someone who pays attention to people those are the five types I see most often. These aren’t enneagrams or a Meyers Briggs rubric and I’m not giving you a test to find your “type”.  

I think we have the capacity to grow in all these areas. True, some just come more naturally to us than others but it is very unwise to limit yourself to only the one area you find most comfortable and fail to grow in the areas you find more challenging. That kind of blindness can be disastrous. 

Also, as a side note? If someone must remind you how smart they are by an endless quoting of IQ numbers and test scores? They have already shown they aren’t smart enough to keep having a conversation that matters. Sometimes those “misunderstood geniuses” are misunderstood because they aren’t saying anything coherent and not just because no one else is smart enough to understand them.  

The most easily measured intelligence is academic. Success is measured in reliable ways like grades and a capacity for the most right answers according to standardized and widely accepted “right answer” metrics.  

Academic intelligence manifests often as an aptitude for ingesting information, processing it, and using that information in ways related to the source material. Without that ability, or without easy access to it, you don’t test well. Poor testing puts limits on proving your capacity to incorporate new data into your existing paradigm and repeat it back with understanding.   
 
Academics are super easy for the people who seem to live in a sort of blank slate world where new information scrawls across their consciousness and becomes intrinsic to their perception of the world. If life was only made of gathering facts, parsing them, and then regurgitating those same facts to the world? They would be solid rock stars.   

We all too often put a high value on people who navigate their way successfully through the halls of academia and, after giving them letters to put after their name and certificates to hang on their walls, indulge in a conditioned response to defer to the letters and certificates as though their studies and achievements have elevated them beyond flaws and mistakes. Those who are less academic often see themselves as having less value, perception, and even voice in the world they inhabit.  

It always makes me laugh a little and feel sad when I see wild appeals to authority on social media. Dr. Whojamaflip, Ph.D. has offered an opinion on Name That Thing. The crowd goes wild.   
 
Until you realize his Ph.D. is in a completely unrelated field, or worse yet honorary, and he just waxed long and eloquently on the impact of Not Following the Party Line on Name That Thing's current crisis.  But really.... Go buy his book for $24.99 at all available retail outlets.  

There are people who see this sham for what it is far more readily than others because their intelligence gifts lie in a more subtle form.  A cunning type of intelligence that looks a lot like street-smart.  

Jackie, the Irish Italian friend from New Jersey, looked over at me one day as I rattled off a bunch of interesting facts relating to the bible study we were in together and, in her East Coast twang, said, “Heidi, you are smart.  But I’m street-smart.”   
 
I didn’t really know what she meant at the time. I’d spent most of my life with my nose in a book and the value I put on Knowing Things was... disproportionately directed.   
 
Still, she wasn’t wrong.   

Jackie could read a group dynamic, sell ice to a snowman, and outmaneuver most people in a battle of wills. She didn’t need to know about the rise and fall of Constantinople to recognize authority structures, navigate complicated business deals, and see the emptiness of someone who knows things but has no idea how to live.  

Being street-smart is a marvelous thing to behold. The ease with which my friends who have this sort of intelligence navigate the world is enviable. They have the ability to recognize the pitfalls and the potholes long before others and adjust accordingly.  There is no Master in Knowing How Not To Get Ripped Off, but there should be.   

Closely associated with cunning is intuitive intelligence.  This kind is known as “Gut Feeling”.   Where you don’t really understand what the direction needs to be but you just... know it is or isn’t that way. Intuitive intelligence is fascinating because it doesn’t seem to require much life experience to manifest.  It’s the toddler who just doesn’t like the nursery worker.  The teens become instant best friends. The job interview feels wrong the minute you walk in the door. The way you instantly click with someone at a first meeting.  I’m sure there is something in quantum physics capable of attempting an explanation. I’m pretty sure you know what I’m talking about. We’ve all seen it and even experienced it to some degree or another.   

People high in intuitive intelligence have an amplified capacity to read people and situations. Perhaps they are more highly empathic and emotionally sensitive, giving them an advantage in the ability to read the subtle and not-so-subtle physical and vocal cues people give all the time about their well-being and engagement.  It’s not an exact understanding of the world around them but it fills in the subtext, the innuendo, the implied in ways that provide color to the black and white.  Makes for one heck of a manipulator if they are so inclined, to be fair. 

Social intelligence is often marketed.  “10 Ways to Make People Love You” and so on. It can be an acquired skill. But no number of flash-card drills will ever make you innately capable of casually working the room the way a person high in social intelligence does. They sparkle.  

But it’s more than just a lovely personality or great perfume.  This intelligence is often reflected in a wide circle of relationships, carefully curated and tended.  These are people who often become caregivers and the heartbeat of communities because they create connections wherever they go.  What would be a tedious exercise to the streetwise or bullet-points on an academics to-do list is as easy as breathing.  It’s simply how they see the world.  By relating to the people in it.  

The fifth type of intelligence I'm talking about is adaptive.  And, as with all the others, while it manifests itself in every person to some degree, it is an awesome thing to watch in the very young.  

Babies are extraordinarily gifted with adaptive intelligence. They come out of the womb, a noodle-neck sack of need, and within days are gleaning information about the world around them and adjusting themselves and their capacity to communicate.  By the time they are 6 months old, they have created a complex (given where they started) series of means to function within the world and by the time they are 4 years old they have mastered the rudiments of language, social integration, motor skills, and engagement with beings far more advanced than themselves.  In fact, they are so good at it that we don’t even consider that they have adapted us to their needs far more quickly than we are able to adapt them to ours.   

Adaptive adults also manifest with extraordinary creativity and have, in my observation, a truly magical way of molding themselves to fit into nearly any situation with grace. It’s like they are filling in the gaps where awkward lives are and smoothing the sharp edges where personalities clash. As with the intuitive, I see this a lot in caregiver types. They refill empty cups and coax wallflowers into the conversation before others tend to. Maybe it’s because they have often found their uniqueness unseen.  There can be a tendency to struggle with what I call the “chameleon effect” in the adaptive. A skill that is integral to survival in babies can become a handicap in the adult world.  People who have become so good at adapting to their surroundings search for a fundamental sense of self.  Much of their security comes from being able to blend in and become part of a pre-existing group. Who are they alone? 

Why does any of this matter at all?  
 
Because whichever one of the cherry-picked intelligence I’ve magically pulled out of the collective hat today resonates most deeply with you will influence how successful you feel in your culture. Your life. And will often be seen as a means of measuring whether you are valuable in society.  
 
But this is where I have headed all along.  

I love smart people. For a long time, the idea of “smart” equated itself with an encyclopedic understanding of C.S Lewis, pedantic shared guffaws at the Luddite who doesn’t understand the basics of English grammar, a vocabulary not primarily comprised of 3 syllable words and just, overall?  
 
A grotesque amplification of academic intelligence. Which, at this stage of my life is, frankly, just embarrassing to admit.  

Give me a redneck in a zombie apocalypse any day, amirite?  

The value of intelligence, the ability to understand spatial relationships and logical patterns in a standardized test to the satisfaction of the guy with the bell and the kudos has its place. The discipline necessary to train a mind to think of philosophies and mysteries within history and the sciences is, in my opinion, part of the fruit of an advanced and complex modern society.  

In context. In. Context... 

Nobody cares if you can code in the Amazonian jungles. Frankly, no one cares if you use big words when their heart is breaking. Which of all the intelligence ranked throughout history, has merit and necessity for the survival and growth of humanity? Literacy, big words, and a staunch defense of Socratic thought rank low compared to breakfast and a warm place to sleep. 

In 2022 western civilization where we slave over a keyboard crafting pithy text, words matter. Words. Matter.  

Literacy matters.  

We do have a responsibility to be wise and gracious with it. And to be humble as we expand our capacity to appreciate the brilliance around us. Sometimes manifest in little boys who refuse to learn the alphabet until the logical reason for those words in that order is explained to their satisfaction.  

Don’t lose sight of the value in the way our grandparents moved within the simple community, during wars and want, without the complexity and pressure of blue check marks.  

Academic, adaptive, cunning, intuitive, social...  

I like the absolutes of the test takers and the note-keepers. I find myself highly challenged by the malleable state of the adaptive and intuitive while I lack the strategic capacity of the cunning and the social. That’s why I need them. Maybe they need me too because we should all understand the impact of a well-placed adverb. 

If we pigeonhole the smart into a tightly closed inbox of Acceptable and label everyone else Ignorant, we have lost the capacity to see humanity as a whole. We have divided ourselves into degrees of Mattering based on access to information and not the capacity to learn, live, adjust, and survive.  

“Mama, am I smart?” he asked. His big brown eyes locked on mine. Not challenging. Not fearful. Searching.  

He wasn’t asking where he ranked in relation to his peers in standardized testing. He was asking if the way he saw the world and interacted with it mattered. Could I assure him he had the capacity to succeed?  

“Absolutely, sweetheart. You have a most beautiful brain.”