There is not truly any such thing as dispassionate analysis. At the highest levels, intelligence is, in my view, deeply passionate. It is a music. You cannot go high or far without strong emotions.
I can feel this strongly even in such mundane things as Lumosity, which I’ve mentioned from time to time. When my emotions are aligned I do better. When I am conflicted, afflicted: I do worse. I am slower. The patterns appear to me more slowly.
The process of building intelligence from an IQ perspective, from a pattern formation, memory, information processing perspective–really, from a computational perspective–is neurologically not severable from the process of developing both emotional calm, as well as the capacity for deep passion, and intense emotional engagement.
I just hit 99.4 in my age group–and I will note this is among people who are paying members–which makes me prouder than it should. I was wondering if a mature Sartre–I have some weird love/hate thing with him–would have ever cited test scores with pride. Probably not, but maybe. He and I are not that different.
And I like to think my own ideas are more useful. You can be brilliant and stupid at the same time. Beyond any possible doubt he was vastly more erudite than me.
But as I like to say, the guy who can tell you the bathroom is the third unmarked door on the right is more useful than the one capable of delivering a three hour disquisition on Marxism. It’s not even close. In the first case a small intelligence is being shared. In the other, intelligence is being actively sucked out of the room.