INTELLIGENCE

Intelligence may be described as the capacity to comprehend, understand, and reason in a way that enables successful adaptations to changing environments. This is a distillation of several, often widely differing, definitions offered over the decades of a term that stems from the Latin intellectus, for PERCEPTION. In a famous project in 1921, the editors of the Journal of Educational Psychology solicited definitions from fourteen eminent psychologists. The responses ranged from the crisp ‘‘ABILITY to carry on abstract thinking’’ (Lewis S. Terman) through the pragmatic ‘‘capacity to learn or to profit from experience’’ (W. F. Dearborn) to the rather cryptic ‘‘capacity to acquire capacity’’ (H. Woodrow). Common to many offerings was the capacity to learn and abstract from actual experiences and to adapt to the environment. Contemporary psychologist Robert Sternberg brings these together in his definition: ‘‘the ability to make sense of and function adaptively in the environments in which one finds oneself.’’ Sternberg’s definition is well suited to sports, in which there is

often thought to be a specific form of intelligence. Journalists often praise ‘‘intelligent play’’ and compare intelligent athletes to their cruder counterparts who trade on raw power. The athlete who has the ability to make sense of and to play effectively and/or adaptively under competitive conditions (environments) has intelligence that is specific to sports. ‘‘Adaptively’’ also has a variety of meanings. A rookie learning a

certain type of play in a football team, a boxer modifying his or her style to accommodate a cut that opens up during a fight, a basketball player traded from another club who tailors his or her game to fit in with new colleagues, a baseball pitcher who alters every pitch to inconvenience different batters, a cricket captain who changes the field to discomfort batsmen: these are examples of adaptive play that occurs regularly in COMPETITION. The responses are instances of sporting intelligence. Many of the colossal disputes over intelligence and, particularly,

attempts to measure it with IQ tests, revolve around how conceptions of intelligence differ from CULTURE to culture. Whether or not the capacity we call intelligence actually is the same across or even within cultures, we should acknowledge that it is not universally regarded in precisely the

same way. What is intelligence in one culture may not be in another. So, while sport carries ‘‘jock’’ connotations and criticisms of its antiintellectual leanings, it should not be dismissed as unintelligent. A particular type and quality of intelligence operates in sport and, though, it has not been measured by conventional tests, evidence of it is abundant in any competition where tactics and good sense are required. John Eisenberg writes of a ‘‘creative athletic performance as intel-

ligent, as involving the highest functioning of the mind in conjunction with a highly skilled body.’’ Eisenberg’s argument is a robust refutation of INFORMATION PROCESSING approaches and begins from the observation that any athlete is ‘‘confronted by an intrinsic indeterminacy, an indeterminacy that precludes total, even substantial, understanding and CONTROL of our destinies.’’ Once competition begins, performers must be ‘‘receptive to inde-

terminacy’’—in other words, the situation is uncertain and can never be known in advance. So the athlete needs to use ‘‘transformative creativity’’ to try to use knowledge in a way that brings the contest under control. In some contexts, this may need accuracy and technique, while, in others, it will require innovation and originality. Eisensberg gives examples of transformative athletes, including Muhammad Ali, Dick Fosbury, the Canadian figure skater Toller Cranston, and the Bulgarian wrestler Valentin Jordanov, all of whom introduced technical innovations that reflected ‘‘bodily kinesthetic intelligence,’’ as Eisenberg calls it; though the implication of his thesis is that all athletes are involved in a form of creative thinking, if only by virtue of the uncertain circumstances of competition. This observation is supported by Daniel Gould et al.’s NOMETHIC study,

which revealed among some athletes, ‘‘the ability to analyze, being innovative relative to one’s sport technique, being a student of the sport, making good decisions, understanding the nature of elite sport, and being a quick learner.’’ The researchers described this as sport intelligence.