ABSTRACT
When Robert Sternberg asked randomly selected American citizens to define “intelligence”, he found that most of those he questioned accepted that some of us are “natural fast studies” who can master new information more quickly than others. Most people also thought that “intelligence” was an acquired capital of learned “smarts”: useful skills mastered to better manage our daily lives and professions. Some made a distinction between success at urban or business survival, the acquisition of “street smarts”, and the ability to solve abstract problems unrelated to the demands of everyday life. The first intelligence tests were Alfred Binet’s best attempts to predict how well young children were likely to cope with the nineteenth-century French school system. Scores on such tests often predicted children’s future gains better than teachers could. Until brain scanning became cheap and easy, there were few data to relate intelligence test scores to neurophysiology.
