“Intelligence is genetic.”

I have had conversations on the nature of intelligence with several people in the last few months. The talks start softly, rise to animated levels and end without a climax. If I’ve concluded anything it’s that people don’t know enough to argue one way or another on the subject matter.

The first problem we stumbled upon was the definition of intelligence. What does it mean to be intelligent? Does it mean you can solve mathematical problems easily? Or that you pick up new information quickly? Are you intelligent if you have several college degrees? Or is it related to street-smarts? What about an amazing painter, is he intelligent?

I find intelligence to be extremely difficult to define. Everyone seems to have his or her own mis-definition, misconception, or bias. But no one can give me an all-encompassing definition. And don’t even get me started on those so-called intelligence quotient tests.

Even though one cannot talk about how a characteristic is obtained when one cannot even define the attributes of that characteristic, we can move to the next issue of how one becomes intelligent. The idea that intelligence is inherited is too limited for me.

If intelligence is inherited, then why do we bother to push the limits? Why do we go to school and work so hard? It’s all a useless endeavor to grow gray cells.

If it’s something passed down from your parents, how come the world has intelligent and stupid people? Wouldn’t the stupid people be weeded out by now?

The idea that you’re locked into an intelligence level at birth is so depressing to me. That means, no matter how hard you try and how much you work, you can never improve your level of intelligence. Doesn’t the idea make you want to cry too?

I like to believe that intelligence is a multi-threaded personality trait. It’s like an octopus with lots of tentacles, each defining a different aspect of intelligence. I also like to think that we’re each born with a capacity of unlimited intelligence, whatever that means, and all we have to do is water the seeds given to us.

I understand that different people have knacks for different things inherently, though even that can possibly be attributed to nurture but that’s a side issue. Even if one person is quicker with addition than another, it doesn’t mean that person was born more intelligent.

Maybe I’m too optimistic or naive, but I’m going to keep believing that everyone is capable of being extremely intelligent until someone can prove me otherwise. In the meantime I’m hitting the books on this subject matter. Howard Gardner seems to have written a lot on the issue. Do you know of anyone else?

Previously? Special Moments.

I’m in the process of watching “Sound and Fury.” If you are, or ever have been interested in the deaf culture, I would highly recommend seeing this movie.

It tells the story of two families, one hearing, one deaf, both of which have deaf children. The hearing family decides to get a cochlear implant for their son. And the daughter of the deaf family says she wants an implant as well. She says she wants to hear the sound of babies crying, of cars crashing, talk on the phone, hear alarms.

The little girl’s parents do a lot of research, speaking with deaf and hearing families whose children have gotten cochlear implants. The father, of the girl, is against getting the implant cause he’s worried that the girl will lose her deaf identity and not be able to grow up with the deaf culture. The mother decides to extend her research and goes to the medical labs to find out if she, for herself, could get the implant. The representative at the lab explains to her that it’s much easier if the deaf individual is younger, so her daughter, at five, could get the implant without much adjustment, but for the mother it would be a major life change and it’s likely that the mom would keep signing.

The film shows the devastated deaf grandparents of the boy whose parents decide to get the cochlear implant and the crying grandmother whose deaf son decides not to get the implant for his daughter. I watched the movie, amazed at how similar it was to other common arguments I grew up with. A Jewish family whose daughter wants to marry a non-Jew, interracial couplings, a parent who moves into another country but wants to raise her children immersed in the culture she grew up with. At first look, there appears to be little difference between this argument and one of a French mother trying to send her kids to French-only schools and surrounding them with other French speaking children.

But then deafness is a disability.

Or so people say. And such, the issue becomes one of “if you could convert your child from a disabled one to a ‘normal’ one, wouldn’t you choose to?”

The movie addressed two main issues. One was specific to this girl whose parents were convinced that allowing her to have a cochlear implant would strip all of her deaf culture away. The father, keenly, observes that a girl who grows up with an implant and deaf parents, cannot speak English properly whereas a girl with hearing parents knows nothing about sign language or deafness. Such, they worry that the implant would mean she would end up belonging in neither the deaf nor the speaking world.

On a bigger scale, deaf people are concerned that if cochlear implants take over, every parent will implant one in their deaf baby and deaf culture will eventually disappear. Like Spanish people would cry at the loss of their culture, deaf people were crying at the potential death of theirs.

As a speaking person, it’s easy to judge. It’s easy to say that deafness is a disability and that if the girl could possibly hear, the parents owe it to the girl to explore that option. It’s easy to assume that since we can hear, hearing people must have a better life, more options. After all, I can sign and I can hear, so don’t I have the best of both worlds?

And yet, the movie made me think that maybe it’s not better. Maybe deafness is a culture just like ethnicity and religion. Maybe this girl will feel a stronger sense of belonging if she grows up deaf in the deaf community of her parents. Maybe much of life is accepting who you are and not forcing to fit in with the norm, assuming we even know what the norm is.

Maybe.

Or maybe not.

Previously? A Fickle Relationship .