What is the ability or abilities to acquire and use knowledge for solving problems and adapting to the world?

Intelligence refers to one's cognitive abilities, including memory, comprehension, understanding, reasoning, and abstract thought. Intelligence is not quite the same as IQ, although people use the terms interchangeably. IQ, which stands for "Intelligence Quotient," is a score determined by an IQ test. IQ tests are designed to measure a person's intelligence, a general ability.

Inhaltsverzeichnis Show

Intelligence as a General Ability
Intelligence Beyond the General Abilities
Closing Thoughts
What is human intelligence?
Is the Internet lowering human intelligence and "making us stupid"?
Read a brief summary of this topic
Theories of intelligence
What is the ability to solve problems and to adapt and learn from experiences?
Who said intelligence is the ability to acquire knowledge?
What is your definition of intelligence?
What does cognitive intelligence mean?

Intelligence as a General Ability

According to Peter Taylor in The Birth of Project Intelligence, this general ability can be broken down into six separate abilities:

Adaptability to a new environment or changes in the current environment
Capacity for knowledge and the ability to acquire it
Capacity for reason and abstract thought
Ability to comprehend relationships
Ability to evaluate and judge
Capacity for original and productive thought

Humans are, by nature, adaptable. When circumstances in their environment change, they can adapt. However, this adaptation doesn't just mean making and wearing heavy clothing such as coats to adjust to a cold-weather environment. Although that is part of adapting, the environment, in this case, refers to more than the natural environment. It also refers to one's immediate surroundings, which include home, school, and work, as well as any other physical environment - and the people in those surroundings.

Intelligence also includes the capacity for knowledge and the ability to acquire it.

Without knowledge, there can be little else in terms of mental faculties. For example, if you are unable to acquire and maintain knowledge, you don't have much to think about and evaluate. Gathering information and storing it in memory allows you to attempt to understand it. Understanding is also a part of intelligence since without understanding what you know - the information you have gathered has little basis for evaluating and judging that information.

Interestingly, these abilities coincide with the levels of intellectual skills in Bloom's Taxonomy. The higher-level skills in that taxonomy include evaluation and synthesis, which is the ability to use reason to combine pieces of information. For example, the synthesis would allow you to consider a modern Romeo and Juliet. To do that, you would first need to know about Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and understand their characteristics and difficulties. You would also need to know something about the life and problems of modern teens. Combining that knowledge would allow you to create a modern-day Romeo and Juliet.

Intelligence Beyond the General Abilities

Intelligence is more than those general abilities, which is why intelligence and IQ aren't the same. Since our immediate environment can include other people, we need to be able to understand them. To understand them, we must have what is called a "Theory of Mind.," which means that we must be able to recognize that others have mental states of their own. They have their own feelings, ideas, and beliefs.

Theory of Mind allows us to "mentalize," which refers to the automatic and spontaneous sense we have of another person. We can read other people's intentions and feelings through our communication with them. We can use our other intellectual abilities in our interactions as well. For example, we might read that a friend of ours seems depressed based on what we notice in our interaction with her. We might search our memory for something she had told us that might have led to a depressed state. Perhaps we remember an event that occurred long ago, so we can reason that it is not the cause of the present depression. We might then think of how we had dealt with a similar situation with another friend. Knowing the two friends are the difference, we can apply the method we used with the other friend to something a little different we might do with this friend.

Closing Thoughts

Intelligence, then, is not quite the same as IQ. IQ is not a measure of anything but our general intellectual abilities. Intelligence includes our ability to learn from and interact with everything in our immediate environment, including other people.

Verywell Family uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read our editorial process to learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.

By Carol Bainbridge
Carol Bainbridge has provided advice to parents of gifted children for decades, and was a member of the Indiana Association for the Gifted.

Thanks for your feedback!

Home Health & Medicine Psychology & Mental Health

What is human intelligence?

Is the Internet lowering human intelligence and "making us stupid"?

Summary

Read a brief summary of this topic

human intelligence, mental quality that consists of the abilities to learn from experience, adapt to new situations, understand and handle abstract concepts, and use knowledge to manipulate one’s environment.

Much of the excitement among investigators in the field of intelligence derives from their attempts to determine exactly what intelligence is. Different investigators have emphasized different aspects of intelligence in their definitions. For example, in a 1921 symposium the American psychologists Lewis Terman and Edward L. Thorndike differed over the definition of intelligence, Terman stressing the ability to think abstractly and Thorndike emphasizing learning and the ability to give good responses to questions. More recently, however, psychologists have generally agreed that adaptation to the environment is the key to understanding both what intelligence is and what it does. Such adaptation may occur in a variety of settings: a student in school learns the material he needs to know in order to do well in a course; a physician treating a patient with unfamiliar symptoms learns about the underlying disease; or an artist reworks a painting to convey a more coherent impression. For the most part, adaptation involves making a change in oneself in order to cope more effectively with the environment, but it can also mean changing the environment or finding an entirely new one.

Effective adaptation draws upon a number of cognitive processes, such as perception, learning, memory, reasoning, and problem solving. The main emphasis in a definition of intelligence, then, is that it is not a cognitive or mental process per se but rather a selective combination of these processes that is purposively directed toward effective adaptation. Thus, the physician who learns about a new disease adapts by perceiving material on the disease in medical literature, learning what the material contains, remembering the crucial aspects that are needed to treat the patient, and then utilizing reason to solve the problem of applying the information to the needs of the patient. Intelligence, in total, has come to be regarded not as a single ability but as an effective drawing together of many abilities. This has not always been obvious to investigators of the subject, however; indeed, much of the history of the field revolves around arguments regarding the nature and abilities that constitute intelligence.

Theories of intelligence

Theories of intelligence, as is the case with most scientific theories, have evolved through a succession of models. Four of the most influential paradigms have been psychological measurement, also known as psychometrics; cognitive psychology, which concerns itself with the processes by which the mind functions; cognitivism and contextualism, a combined approach that studies the interaction between the environment and mental processes; and biological science, which considers the neural bases of intelligence. What follows is a discussion of developments within these four areas.

What is the ability to solve problems and to adapt and learn from experiences?

Intelligence is the ability to think, to learn from experience, to solve problems, and to adapt to new situations. Intelligence is important because it has an impact on many human behaviours.

Who said intelligence is the ability to acquire knowledge?

In the 1940s, Raymond Cattell proposed a theory of intelligence that divided general intelligence into two components: crystallized intelligence and fluid intelligence (Cattell, 1963). Crystallized intelligence is characterized as acquired knowledge and the ability to retrieve it.

What is your definition of intelligence?

Definition of intelligence 1a(1) : the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations : reason also : the skilled use of reason. (2) : the ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one's environment or to think abstractly as measured by objective criteria (such as tests)

What does cognitive intelligence mean?

Cognitive intelligence is referred to as human mental ability and understanding developed through thinking, experiences and senses. It is the ability to generate knowledge by using existing information. It also includes other intellectual functions such as attention, learning, memory, judgment and reasoning.