ABSTRACT
When Robert Sternberg asked randomly selected American citizens to define “intelligence” he found that all accepted that some of us are “natural fast studies” who can learn new information faster than most, but also thought that “intelligence” was a learned capital of “smarts”: useful skills that we have mastered to better manage our daily lives and professions. Since smarts are a bonus that we can only earn by experience, we might expect them to become an increasingly important toolkit as we grow older. Even the most able of us find it hard to learn, let alone invent a new skill. Even if all the separate components of the new knowledge are very simple, we will make embarrassing mistakes until we have mastered all of them and understood how they work together. Initial bewilderments are overcome and turn into barely conscious routines which we can use to effortlessly cope with problems that even the cleverest beginners find impossible. This is not just true for our individual lives but also for our species.
