[Voyager]

Hello community.

I would like to explore some differences between intellectual limits and clarity issues when performing mental tasks.

How do you know when you've reached the limits of your intellectual reasoning ability?

Does it manifest as requiring increased effort to keep necessary information in short term memory when your performing complex, multi part tasks such as essay writing, programming, problem solving, etc?

And how do you distinguish this from issues surrounding mental clarity, focus, fogginess, or whatever similar words happen to fit?

thankyou

I guess... You probably never do know when you have reached the limits of your intellectual reasoning ability. There are things you can do to improve your performance (practice, etc), but I guess you will never know whether you aren't improving because you have hit your limit or whether there is something else that you could do to improve it that you simply haven't tried yet.

All sorts of things affect our ability to reason. Emotional state. Tiredness. Etc.

'Intelligence' is a really general notion. Problem solving is one measure of intelligence, but it isn't the be all and end all. People aren't very good at multi-tasking. People can only keep 7 items (plus or minus two) on the 'workbench' of short term memory (thats why phone numbers are 7 digits long - so we can look them up and retain them in memory while dialing). Not that I can do that lol.

It can be hard to know whether feeling unfocused / foggy is impacting negatively on memory or whether it isn't - it just makes you worry that it might be impacting negatively. Retaining information on the workbench is a different ability to retaining information long term, however. And reasoning ability is different again. And all of those are distinguishable from intelligence (though sometimes are used as partial measures for it).

I worried that being on anti-p's would impact negatively on my reasoning ability, my attention to focus such that stuff was on the workbench, and the transfer from short term to long term memory. Attention can affect all that... Though attention isn't usually thought to be a measure of intelligence (or ADHD would count as a disorder of intelligence, presumably).

Hard to say...

[Perna]

One thing with intelligence would be vocabularly as you cannot think or imagine without the words to do so. Other things being equal (normal brain versus idiot savant) one's "intelligence" would go up as their vocabulary went up.

If I'm a high school dropout mechanic and I want to be my own boss, I'd have to be able to imagine/master bookkeeping/accounting and advertising and other business subjects and parts department, hiring employees and just the whole "overview" of how a business operated. If I had never been exposed to that in any way/shape/form I wouldn't know "how" to think about it. There would be a foggy void at some point. But if I learned those words and what they meant, did some reading or apprenticed in a locally owned shop where the owner helped me learn other aspects of the business, that would increase my intelligence/knowledge.

I think that's where people getting wiser as they get older comes in; the experience of living teaches us new things whether we want to learn them or not.

Some of how much one could learn, the "limit" would have to do with time and background. I think life is like a pyramid of sorts so one wants as big a base as one can get so one can get higher. The more experience one has the more likely one is going to have ways and means to have alternate ways to think about things and come up with more ideas on how to solve a problem. One has known really bright professors who live in ivory towers and don't have much "life" experience because they were studying books but one also knows "practical" people who are similarly "intelligent" from having experienced many different scenarios and had adequate schooling/words to make sense of their surroundings and those scenarios. I'm not talking about "street smarts" they are usually not practical other than in keeping a person "alive" in a hostile environment and tend to enforce the belief that all environments are hostile. But there are engineers with similar degrees but one is a "design" engineer, inventing real hardware/software solutions and there is an "administrative" engineer, being a paper pusher. I want the design engineer with me on the desert island, Gilligan's "Professor", not the PhD, esoteric, how many angels dance on the head of a pin guy.

Mental clarity seems simple to think about :-) at first because of the word "clarity". Intelligence and fogginess don't go together for me. Mental clarity problems would indicate a breakdown in the physical, chemical, whatever for me; a lacking of resources, whereas the edge of intelligence would have to do with the edge of experience. The rate/ability of learning is an inherited thing, I think. I watched as my stepsister's children struggled in school whereas my brothers and I went through school without breathing hard. That's only perhaps one type of intelligence though and it's possible that some of the other types compensate and mold the experience in another way. But one's ability to grasp experience quickly would make a difference I would think.

[(JD)]

Hi voyager.

I first am wondering why you are seeking this information. Are you having issues along these lines yourself? Do you have a psychologist to discuss this with? I hope it doesn't apply to you, but then, PC forums are not a resource for research or test answers

Can you give us more information so we can help you personally?