Intelligence and Social Environment

"You are never the smartest person in the room, if you are then you are in the wrong room".

This quote is weirdly inspiring, I am used to being in groups where I am mostly the dumbest person and it always made me think how some people are awestruck-ingly smart.

 What makes them so damn good at whatever they do?

What are the factors on which someone's intelligence depends?

What defines the amount of grey matter in our brain?

Is it genetics? Is it nourishment?

Is it practice? Or Is it just almonds?

These questions had been in my mind for a long time.

Intelligence is nothing but the ability to grasp or understand something (not just mental ability but physical too), it depends on how your brain is structured/wired and how quickly it functions.

This literally depends on how many neurons you have, how those are connected, and how this whole mapping shapes your brain in a very refined way. In regular scenarios, our brains are 90% identical in terms of construction but very different and unique in terms of expressions, just like fingerprints.

Fun Fact: It is claimed that Einstein's brain was missing a furrow or fissure, which increased his mental capacity by 12%, giving way to superhuman intelligence.

Mental ability just like physical ability depends a lot on genetics, yes there are ways to defy genetics, but in a natural state, it is very difficult to override the coding that exists in our genes which are ultimately expressed as our characteristics or traits.

Some phenotypes (physical genetic expressions) are pretty straightforward like eye and hair color, some are a little complex like blood type, moles, dimples and some are just beyond human calculation like Intelligence and proneness to diseases.

 For Intelligence some researchers say, there is a 50%-50% dependency on genetics and environment for Intellectual growth. Some people might find it disheartening that the intelligence of their ancestors has a role to play in how smart they become, but it is somewhat true if you are born to smart parents, the chances of you being smart are very high.

BUT the exact truth is somewhat different, your parents bring a lot more to your intelligence than just genes.

There are a lot of neurons in your brain, but it is believed we hardly use more than 10% of our brain's capacity, but why is that we can't we train ourselves to get better at being intelligent.

As Robert Kiyosaki mentions in his books,

"Brain is just like any other muscle, exercising it helps to grow",

because, in reality, it is not just like any other muscle.

The human brain is one of the most complex entities on this earth, the real processing does happen in neurons but it is not the neurons that define the level of intelligence, it's actually the synapses (connection among the neurons) that define the whole intelligence part, how quick you are in finding the correct brain cell, which path the electrical charge in your brain takes defines how smart you would be.

These neurons and synapses are abundant in our brain and very few animal species have more neurons than humans, one of those being dolphins. A newborn human baby can have up to 100 billion neurons and 15,000 synapses per neuron making it 125 trillion synapses in total.

 Now if you refer to the work of Matthew Walker in neuroscience these synapses are wired during infancy and, rewired and finalized during adolescence, specifically when we sleep, that's why babies sleep 15 hours a day and during our teenage, we should sleep a lot.

Inference: This seems to justify why there are a lot of chess prodigies but when they grow to adulthood the ability to improve the game seems to stagnate.

These synapses can die or become dormant if the connections are not utilized, the brain needs to be stimulated else it will drop its intelligence level. In simple words, you are born amazingly smart and you just get dumber as you grow up unless you strive to remain intelligent.

This whole elucidation is to put forward that someone being intelligent is a lot more dependent on the environment the brain operates in than genetics because the environment you live in can stimulate your brain at so many levels.

Though the starting point i.e. genetics definitely has a huge role to play in the level of intelligence you have, growth and nurturing have a larger role to play. This includes the upbringing you have, the social circle you make, the literature you consume, and the beliefs you develop and follow.

 In other words, your environment is the MOST important factor in defining how intelligent you would be, your environment stimulates your brain which keeps those synapses active.

 Remember it was mentioned being born to smart parents makes it very probable that you will end up highly intelligent and it is not completely due to genetics, well the more appropriate reason is that smart parents create such an environment around their child that they develop a significantly higher level of intelligence very early in their lives.

This might not be apparent always because we have a prejudice toward measuring intelligence with our left brain activities and completely ignoring the right brain activities like performing or literary arts, imagination, intuition, emotion, and even sports.

 So it is very much possible that a kid of a Harvard Law school graduate is a professional e-gamer.

• This video of Aviral Bhatnagar shows how having both parents from IIT Kanpur influenced his early age intellectual development - https://youtu.be/B4xWL5yQUIk
• Jairam Ramesh, ex-MP and MIT-IIT Graduate is the son of an IIT Bombay professor.
• Jayant Sinha, an HBS-IIT graduate is the son of Yashwant Sinha, who served as a union minister and was an IAS officer prior to that.
•  Koneru Humpy, the first-ever Indian Female GM in Chess is the daughter of a former renowned chess player Koneru Ashok.
•  Another example of Right-Brain people having highly intellectual parents could be Kenny Sebastian (Father from IIT), or Vedant Madhavan (Son of R Madhavan).

This list is just too long to explain the privilege that someone might have just by being born into educated families,

please notice that the privilege here is of having an environment of knowledge and not wealth.

But this is just good enough to give someone a head start, unless the person capitalizes on it, they will not be able to achieve the anticipated growth and this brings us to the most important part, what can someone do if they don't have that privilege of knowing in their environment, not everybody can have it.

Fortunately, we are in the age of digitization, now you can define your environment the way you want, but it will take a conscious effort unlike the few people mentioned above who have had it by default.

Once you build that environment, you will naturally feel the pressure to keep up, and please note that pressure can be a good thing if applied in the right environment and right time.

1. Build a network of people smarter than you, interact with them to know what is the rationale for whatever they do, you might just get better at something by merely copying someone. This makes me restate the first statement, "You are never the smartest person in the room, if you are then you are in the wrong room". Now you have the ability the build that virtual room and fill it with handpicked people of your choice.
2.  Read/Watch - Reading is the most obvious way to enhance your intellect, and with the new era of videos, the same information can be consumed in an easier and quicker way, but this has a cost, reading demands you to be intellectually smart to comprehend the information, but videos spoon-feed you the same content, with almost 0 intellectual stimulation, you need to optimize and get best of both.
3.  Filtering - With the increase in information overload, you will have to be smart to consume important information. The Fear Of Missing Out kicks in whenever we feel we are missing out on something, this feeling will be there always, you have to realize your pace and take the strides accordingly.
4.  Practice - this is the most underrated tool, whatever you learn be it information or a skill, you will have to practice it time-to-time to keep your brain aware that those synapses are needed.
5. Mentors - Having a mentor or guide could change multiple aspects, it makes you answerable, it allows you the space to have doubts and get them cleared, and it also serves as an example of someone who has already done it. You can have multiple mentors for each goal and constantly strive towards achieving those goals with their help.

The human brain has potential beyond comprehension and is sometimes more in a dormant state than in an active state. Conscious effort can trigger the best out of it.

P.S. - As for almonds, it is full of vitamin E, which is known to preserve memory longer by boosting alertness, and preventing cognitive decline.