18/12/21 17:34 Understanding the mind to Increase your own IQ - Journey for Intelligence

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Fábio E. Arruda 
Fascinated by observing how the mind works my whole life · 3y

Understanding the mind to Increase your own IQ

Axioms

1. Every thought in the brain is encoded into sensory perception, be it conscious or

subconscious.

2. Every idea/chunk has a threshold of intensity/wholeness to be triggered.

3. The brain is divided into specialized regions, which see different aspects of things.

4. The brain works on demand, just like your muscles.

5. The brain can only use ideas that have already been triggered.

6. Understanding comes from knowing the meaning, and meaning of X is how X

affect the context in which X is.

Justification of axiom 1 - which you can skip if that makes sense to you

Everything is meaningless, until it is relative to something else. Meaning is born at the very
moment we compare two things. A single thing by itself have no meaning. Close
observation of how meaning arises shows that.

Some consequences of the axioms

Axiom 1

If no sensory information can be referenced, you can’t understand or perceive it.

Axiom 2

Thinking about something with no intensity, and it will not trigger any other
thoughts and will not activate chunks in other brain regions.

Axiom 2 and 3

An idea might be activated in a region and not in another, even if it is part of a

whole. So that you can only see a few aspects of it without seeing other aspects.

Axiom 4

Without stimulation, your brain won’t adapt, because it doesn’t have what to
adapt to.

Axiom 5

You might have all the elements required for a solution in your brain, but if there
was no cue for you to trigger those elements, you can find a solution.

Even if you have the complete solution memorized, you can only use it if you
remember it at the moment.

Axiom 2 and 5

High intensity in thinking will lead to greater activation of related ideas and
therefore larger set of ideas to work with.

How does that integrate with the layers of giftedness that is documented?

Let’s check what have been noticed:

The review — Understanding the Profoundly Gifted — made by Colleen Farrelly,

Profoundly Gifted herself, mentions:

1. At lower gifted levels of intelligence (I think she refers to 120~150 IQ range),

people need fewer repetitions and solve problems faster.

2. At above 160/170 IQ range (Profoundly Gifted range), problems are solved

differently and information is stored differently.
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3. PG (Profoundly Gifted) range has the traits:

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a. Extreme need for stimulation;

b. The simple is complex and the complex is simple;

c. Projection of self inside problems to find solutions;

d. Preference/ability to think in analogies;

e. Interconnecting knowledge;

f. Combining steps in problem solving as one large step;

g. Intensity in personality traits;

h. Divergent Thinking;

Some traits of profoundly gifted children —Raising Wizards | What is a profoundly

gifted child? — include:

1. Need for constant mental stimulation

2. Inability to focus on a task that is not intellectually challenging

3. Capacity for parallel processing (doing two things at the same time)

4. Early development of abstract thinking; ability to learn in an intuitive, non-linear

manner; early use of metaphors and symbols

5. Need to explore subjects in unusual depth

6. Extraordinary speed in processing information

7. Ability to learn and process complex information rapidly

8. Unusual ability to see patterns and underlying structures in ideas

9. Learning in leaps and bounds (integrating several steps into one jump)

10. Unusually good memory

11. Extensive vocabulary

12. Fascination with ideas and words

13. Ability to focus intently on a subject of interest for a long time

14. Ability to find alternative meanings in simple issues; ability to see many sides of
an issue

15. Highly idiosyncratic interpretations of events

16. Ability to visualize models

17. Need for precision in thinking and expression (corrects errors and argues)

18. Extraordinarily high energy level

19. Extraordinary vulnerability (intellectual, social, emotional problems)

20. Understanding the world holistically (seeing connectivity among disparate things)

21. Difficulty distinguishing between what is real and what is imagined

22. Disappointment results in profoundly internalized grief

23. Exaggerated emotional responses; unusual depth of feeling

24. Intense need for others to listen, support and nurture

25. Insatiable curiosity, especially about how things work

26. Need for the world to be logical and fair

27. Highly developed morals and ethics

Where do all those traits come from?

INTENSITY as a possibility:

Intensity can to be the difference between an average 100 IQ and all levels of giftedness to
the right of the distribution. To do that I need to express what I mean and experienced with
intensity.

By intensity I mean that the electricity from one neuron to another is stronger, which leads to
increased myelination and that related chunks/ideas get triggered.

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The idea is that with enough intensity, all specialized brain regions will get triggered and
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the matter can be seem as a whole. Enabling one to use all know related aspects of the
matter to think consciously and subconsciously about it.

Intensity is the energy that boosts the same idea to spread through the entire brain and
bind things together.

My experience experimenting with intensity

Let’s say that a model have 5 aspects and that 5 specialized brain region is responsible
from comprehending each.

I start aware of just one of these aspects in mind, let’s call it A1. As I increase intensity, the
thresholds for activating each of A2, A3, A4 and A5 gets matched and one by the intensity.
Myelination happen and the threshold becomes lower to activate all 5 aspects at the same
time again.

Each person should have a different order of aspects being activated defined by their
white matter connections, which is defined by genetics.

In my case, logic/consequences seems to be the last activated aspect. As if it couldn’t be

clearer than that. As intensity seems to make things clearer and clearer.

What do intensity alone cover in the traits?

The habitual features that intensity covers over time cover PG gifted traits from 6 to 27.
And Colleen’s review from 3.e to 3.h.

What about the remaining traits?

As axiom 1 states, the language of the brain is sensory. So that when other ideas get
triggered, all of them have sensory information attached to them too. That leads intensity
to favor analogies, which cover PG children traits 4 and 5 and Colleen’s review traits 3.b to
3.d.

3.b - The simple is complex and the complex is simple

This might not be so obvious why it is covered, so, let me clarify.

Think that the common person thinks simple as few elements and few connections
between them, and complex as being with many elements and with many
connections. Well, the intense brain of the PG can handle that complexity of many
elements easily, bind things together and seeing the thorough whole.

What is single for the average person, it is hard for the PG because it has an
illogical component and it doesn’t fit in many of the aspects they perceive, but as
the average person see fewer aspects, the average person can’t see the problem.

If you’ve noticed, there are two traits I didn’t cover yet — Capacity for Parallel Thinking and
Extreme need for stimulation.

Capacity for parallel thinking

I believe enough intensity can lead to that, as the brain will learn to evolve thought without
much attention to them and the important resources to each matter are myelinated and
might get used subconsciously. I haven’t confirmed that yet, as I am experimenting with
intensity for just a few days, but that seemed to have happened in a second before I
noticed and my attention dismissed it.

Extreme need for stimulation

I don’t know what causes this yet… My only hypotheses, for now, would be that boredom is
also more intense, as PG traits apply to all aspects of their life, including their personalities,
as mentioned.

Thanks for reading!

Please feel free to leave your opinion.

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About the Author

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Fábio E. Arruda
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Fascinated by observing how the mind works my whole life
Lives in Brazil 1994–present

Knows Portuguese

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Joined July 2014

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