Categories: general-nonsense
Date: 06 January 2013 19:21:00
Last night Karl and I enjoyed Britain's Brightest. It's a new quiz show which looks at different types of intelligence and gives contestants a variety of tasks to do. It's like a twenty first century version of the Krypton Factor, but without the assault course.
I found it interesting watching it with Karl because it showed how your understanding of what it means to be bright or clever depends upon your own abilities to some extent.
I watched it as I guess most others did being astounded by the abilities of one of the contestants in particular. Additionally when they did a test which showed how what you hear can differ according to what you see or listen to I found it fascinating as I did hear it differently with my eyes open and closed.
It was fascinating watching it with Karl though. Karl has a high level of ability when it comes to maths particularly, but also relating to logic and grammar. He also has synesthesia and in his case this takes the form of seeing colours and colours having sounds.
In the part of the programme which had the clip showing how what we hear differs he said that when I said what I thought it was, which is what most people would have heard with the visuals, it didn't seem right because it gave him the wrong colour. What the rest of us heard only when we closed our eyes was what gave him the colour indicating that it was correct.
During the maths bit there were some short cuts shown. Karl managed to get the answers in a shorter time than the contestant we were most amazed with had her answer lit up with a tick. Fair enough his academic area is mathematical physics. What happened in the second round of this task was fascinating though, he stopped shouting out the answer and got that glazed thinking look. I enquired what was going on and he said was thinking of the equation for the short cut given and testing it to make sure it was an absolute rule without exception, apparently it was and it gave him the colour green which he gets for "beautiful maths". He then went on to say he'd not used the first short cut as he finds it quicker to do it the standard way when there is a possible exception, that doesn't give the same colours.
Then after I was agreeing with the presenter that the winner had been outstanding Karl asked in pure innocence "isn't that normal?". We had a fascinating discussion of the sort we have every so often in which I have to explain that the way he sees the world and the way others do is some what different when it comes to matters of maths and logic problems and that to most of us the ability to do these things is associated with "really clever" or "bright" people.
The discussion moved on to what is intelligence and how it's measured. We agree there are a range of different forms of intelligence, (as Howard Gardiner outlined in his theory), and that was what the programme was seeking to show, but whilst focusing on a narrower band of intelligences than Gardiner looks at. Culturally some intelligence gets viewed as more impressive than others and it is interesting how those who have that type of intelligence sometimes don't understand why it is viewed as it is because for them it is simply "normal".