• MonkderDritte@feddit.de
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    5 months ago

    Unlikely. Brain is like a muscle; it gets better with training. Average IQ gets up since the 20. century, because we have more knowledge/understanding and more mental tools, a complexer environment.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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      5 months ago

      The brain evolved like everything else. There has not been enough time for evolution to change the structure and size of our brains.

      Furthermore, IQ is a measurement of the ability to take IQ tests. An indigenous Amazonian might be the smartest person in the world but will fail practically every IQ test you can give them.

      IQ suggests there is only one sort of intelligence, which is nonsense and easily disproven by autistic people who have great difficulty achieving tasks by people determined to be of average intelligence but are able to do mathematics at a level that the average person couldn’t even comprehend.

      Kim Peek had a tested IQ of 87.

      https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-superhuman-mind/201212/kim-peek-the-real-rain-man

      He could read both pages of an open book at once, one page with one eye and the other with the other eye. This style of reading continued until his death in 2009. His reading comprehension was impressive. He would retain 98 percent of the information he read. Since he spent most of his days in the library with his dad, he quickly made it through thousands of books, encyclopedias, and maps. He could read a thick book in an hour and remember just about anything in it.

      Because he could quickly absorb loads of information and recall it when necessary, his condition made him a living encyclopedia and a walking GPS. He could provide driving directions between almost any two cities in the world. He could also do calendar calculations (“Which day was June 15, 1632?”) and remember old baseball scores and a vast amount of musical, historical, and political facts. His memory abilities were astounding.

      How does IQ make any sense as an accurate measurement of intelligence in the face of people like Kim Peek?

      Also, I have no idea why you think ‘training’ a brain would be any different now than it was 5000 years ago. That just means keeping your thinking skills active.

      • MonkderDritte@feddit.de
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        5 months ago

        This is not on the scale of evolution but about mental tools and training, limited to ones lifetime. For example, did ancient egyptians know the concept of “zero”? And there are plenty of examples of neglected children (especially in china because one-child policy) being dumber on the verge to being disabled – because they lacked stimmulation, mental training.

        Yes, IQ is limited as measurement, still an indicator.

        Kim peek was likely a Savant, different issue.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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          5 months ago

          Why do you have to know the existence of zero to do mental training? What does mental training have to do with numbers? I am betting that indigenous Amazonian I brought up, spending all of his life hunting, does constant mental training out of necessity.

    • Snowclone@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Do you ever think about looking into things before you decide you need to insist publicly they work this way?

      They weren’t primative, the Greek and Egyptian civilizations, some of the very first civilizations that existed, developed and exchanged technology, art, and information that we still use to this day. Western civilization wouldn’t exist without them.

    • HaleHirsute@infosec.pub
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      5 months ago

      Their world was just as complex for them to survive in as ours is, and maybe more so. They came up with ideas and solutions to problems and their thinking gave us that tech we have today.