Steve Jobs (And Neuroscience) Says This Is What Makes Remarkably Intelligent People Different

This expert opinion by Jeff Haden was originally published on Inc.com.

Studies show that the most intelligent people tend to love spending time alone. Studies show that the smarter you are, the more likely you are to believe you are good at spotting patterns and predicting outcomes, although research shows you’re probably not as good at it as you might believe. (Hi, Dunning-Kruger effect!)

Jeff Bezos says the best indicator of high intelligence is the willingness to change your mind.

Steve Jobs had a different take. Here’s the Apple co-founder on high intelligence:

A lot of it (intelligence) is memory. But a lot of it is the ability to zoom out.
Like you’re in a city, and you could look at the whole thing from the 80th floor. While other people are trying to figure out how to get from point A to point B, reading these stupid little maps, you can just see it all in front of you. You can see the whole thing.
You can make connections that seem obvious because you can see the whole thing.

To Jobs, intelligence is based on making connections. On connecting dots other people haven’t connected.

Let’s break that down. While psychologists identify at least eight different forms of intelligence, we’ll focus on two.

Crystallized intelligence refers to accumulated knowledge. Facts. Figures. In simple terms, book smarts.

Yet some highly educated people are not necessarily smart, and that’s where fluid intelligence comes into play: the ability to learn and retain new information and use it to solve a problem, or learn a new skill, or recall existing memories and modify them with new knowledge.

In simple terms, street smarts.

Plenty of people are book smart. Plenty of people are street smart. Those who are both are more rare, if only because the process of increasing crystallized intelligence tends to be fundamentally different from the process of increasing fluid intelligence.

If you want to become more educated on a particular subject or skill, the process is simple. The deeper you dive into that topic, the more you’ll know. Improving fluid intelligence is harder, because it requires you to take a deep dive, and then move on to something new, over and over and over again.

Why? Work to learn something new, and for a time your brain’s cortical thickness and cortical activity increases. Both are signs of an increase in neural connections and learned expertise. Yet after those first few weeks, cortical thickness and activity actually starts to decrease, eventually returning to a baseline level. 

The result? You definitely know more, or can do more, but once you acquire that knowledge or skill — once you’ve figured it out — your brain doesn’t have to work as hard. 

That’s why the only way to improve your fluid intelligence and keep it high is to continue to experience new things. To learn new things. To try new things. To constantly challenge yourself. At work. At home.

Everywhere.

Do that, and not only will you benefit from a constant flow of new information and skill, your brain will stay “thicker,” and will keep forging new neural connections.

Which makes it easier to keep learning and getting smarter.

All of which brings us back to what Jobs had to say on the subject:

If you’re going to make connections which are innovative, to connect two experiences together, you have to not have the same bag of experiences as everyone else. Or else you’ll make the same connections and you won’t be innovative. So you have to get different experiences.
You can hear stories about all [highly intelligent] people, but the key thing that comes through is that they had a variety of experiences they could draw upon in order to solve a problem or attack a dilemma in a unique way. 

The more you know, and the broader your experiences, the more you can leverage the power of associative learning: the process of relating something new to something you already know by spotting the relationship between seemingly unrelated things. 

In simple terms, whenever you say, “I get it: This is like that,” you’re using associative learning. And whenever you think, “Wait I could apply this to that,” you’re using what you’ve learned to make smart connections.

Like how Steve Jobs used his experience auditing a calligraphy class in college as the inspiration for Apple’s early typefaces. Or how Kevin Plank used his experience playing college football to develop Under Armour’s moisture-wicking garments. Or how Sara Blakely built a company based on nothing but an idea and a willingness to learn everything else: to write patent applications, to develop prototypes, to design packaging, to find suppliers, to persuade retailers to take a chance on her …

Each experience resulted in experiences she could draw from to find new ways to keep solving problems.

The more you learn, the more likely you will be able to connect old knowledge to new things. Then you’ll only need to learn differences or nuances — and you’ll be able to apply greater context, which also helps with memory storage and retrieval, to the new information you learned.

And to the new experiences you acquire.

All of which makes learning even easier, which research shows will result in your being able to learn even more quickly — and retain a lot more.

Which will make you even more intelligent than you already are.