People value their powers of thinking, and most of us are interested in why some people seem to drive a highly tuned Maserati brain while others potter along with a merely serviceable Chery QQ. The fact that the broad powers of human intelligence show differences has been recognized since antiquity. Some people reliably obtain more correct answers, and often achieve these faster. How do they score better on mathematics, science, or any realm where problem solving plays a prominent role?
Some hold the view that the phenomenon indicates some basic different limitations in everyone’s brain to cope with incoming information. They have even compared it to the clock speed of a computer: that is, the people with the better inspection times are similar to computers with faster clock speeds. They go about the world taking in and chewing up information at a quicker rate than others.
But this is just a reasonable hypothesis, not a scientific statement. We are still a long way from having a mechanistic account of how the brain thinks, emotes, and wills. Therefore, it cannot be surprising that our understanding of what makes some brains more efficient than others is still fairly rudimentary. Let alone that brain function does not assess all important qualities. Personality, social adroitness, leadership, charisma, altruism, and many other things that we value can not be totally measured by hardware performance.
In fact, smartness isn’t merely something you are; it’s something you become. The simplification ability in our minds’ toolbox can be accessed and employed to solve the problem at hand. A mathematical demonstration is always based on simplifying assumptions. Good decisions do not require amassing large amounts of information.
Using fast and frugal heuristic, a person who knows less than another can make systematically more accurate inferences. More is not necessarily better. A computationally simple strategy that uses only some of the available information can be more robust, making more accurate predictions for new data, than a computationally complex, information-guzzling strategy that overfits.
In Walden, Thoreau thought deeply about the relationship that people have with their life. His advice is simplicity in modeling minds: “Our life is frittered away by detail… I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand… Simplify, simplify”. A bit of trust in the simplifying ability of the mind and it may help us to see how real-world problems can be solved quickly and well.