Article:"What makes us intelligent?"

[IdeasNotTheProblem]

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20121120-what-makes-us-intelligent"What happened, according to Wegner, was that the couples in a relationship had a good understanding of their partners. Because of this they would tacitly divide up the work between them, so that, say, one partner would remember words to do with technology, assuming the other would remember the words to do with sports. In this way, each partner could concentrate on their strengths, and so individually they outperformed people in couples where no mental division of labour was possible. Just as you rely on a search engine for answers, so you can rely on people you deal with regularly to think about certain things, developing a shared system for committing items to memory and bringing them out again, what Wegner called “transactive memory”.
Having minds that work this way is one of the great strengths of the human species. Rather than being forced to rely on our own resources for everything, we can share our knowledge and so pool our understanding." -Tom Stafford

Just thought I would share an article I found interesting. Kind of replaces the "calculator" with the internet. It has ideas on all sorts of topics, but this one on "transactive memory" got me thinking.

Would a tribal society benefit from having a group with diverse cognitive functions enough for it have a greater chance of survival than a less diverse group? And could that have been the origin of the diverse psychological types we all talk about today?

 

[EyeSeeCold]

Would a tribal society benefit from having a group with diverse cognitive functions enough for it have a greater chance of survival than a less diverse group?

Definitely, you can already see this with people who have diverse contacts and therefore connections to a wide range of, or exclusive, resources.

I have thought a few times what it would be like if the Jungian types were placed in a technologically and scientifically primitive society. What I came up with was something similar to the phenomenon of guilds and apprenticeship, and the mutual trading of knowledge / skills(e.g. SiTe service for a TiNe product etc).

And could that have been the origin of the diverse psychological types we all talk about today?

If so, it definitely would have to be more nuanced than 16 types and 8 functions. That is interesting if it is though, which could mean some functions / types are probably obsolete.

So as well as having a physical environment – like the rooms or buildings we live or work in – we also have a mental environment. Which means that when I ask you where your mind is, you shouldn’t point toward the centre of your forehead. As research on areas like transactive memory shows, our minds are made up just as much by the people and tools around us as they are by the brain cells inside our skull.

This is an interesting quote. I definitely agree that the mental environment, though it may feel like a vacuum inside your head, is actually a psychic relation to the world around you, filled with abstracted objects of reality that enter your mental space.

 

[IdeasNotTheProblem]

Definitely, you can already see this with people who have diverse contacts and therefore connections to a wide range of, or exclusive, resources.

I have thought a few times what it would be like if the Jungian types were placed in a technologically and scientifically primitive society. What I came up with was something similar to the phenomenon of guilds and apprenticeship, and the mutual trading of knowledge / skills(e.g. SiTe service for a TiNe product etc).

If so, it definitely would have to be more nuanced than 16 types and 8 functions. That is interesting if it is though, which could mean some functions / types are probably obsolete.


This is an interesting quote. I definitely agree that the mental environment, though it may feel like a vacuum inside your head, is actually a psychic relation to the world around you, filled with abstracted objects of reality that enter your mental space.

That is a good point. I don't remember where I heard this, but someone did a study and found that the stress levels of people living in cities were significantly higher than those in rural environments. Perhaps the primary cause is that the human mind is naturally unequipped to comprehend such a complex mental environment.