Brain Power Types

One of my longer blogs, but intriguing nonetheless…

A marvelous person sent me this article from the NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/14/books/14dumb.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5087&em&en=2c9bff2541865fdc&ex=1203570000

It got me thinking…One of my eccentricities is people-watching. For example, I can spend hours sitting at the food court in a mall—or any other place—just watching people. In all my time people-watching and observing, and spurred on by this article, it occurred to me that for years I have been classifying people based on what I call “brain power”. Hey, it’s what scientists love to do: classify things!

I categorize brain power into six types: Intelligent, Smart, Clever, Ingenious, Unaware, and Naïve. Now, by “brain power”, I mean the way people attain and use knowledge.

In a thesaurus, intelligent & smart are synonyms; so are clever & ingenious and unaware & naïve, respectively. But when I say someone is “smart”, I mean something different that “intelligent”. And likewise for all of my BPTs (brain power types). And it’s much more than semantics, I think…Here’s what I mean:

Intelligent: good at book learning; reading comprehension; able to remember things (even if their information was gleaned from reading some article in the newspaper 20 years ago)—would read about how electricity works rather than sticking their finger in an electrical outlet to discover the shocking experience.

Smart: uses common sense; inherently knows what to avoid; always makes the “right” decision—would never be caught sticking their finger in an electrical outlet because they’ve heard stories...

Clever: figures out ways around things; likes to bend rules; manipulates things—would get someone else to stick their finger in the electrical outlet to see what happens (even though they probably already know…)

Ingenious: resourceful; uses practical means to accomplish endeavors; devises inventive ways for discovering something—would build some machine that would test the electrical output in the electrical socket or create a model of how electrical output might be measured to see how much danger there was.

Unaware: uninformed about (certain) knowledge; ignorant in (certain) areas; takes (certain) things for granted—expects the alarm clock to always work because it’s “plugged in” and “that means there’s electricity”!

Naïve: inexperienced; innocent; blissfully oblivious—never realizes where the electrical outlets are in the first place (until they need to use them…then they have to search for them)!

Now, I do believe that everyone could exhibit each of the BPTs depending on the situation. However, I also believe that some people choose otherwise. And that’s fine! Each is different…neither good nor bad…just different. It’s merely a categorization based on my observations of (lots of) people.

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