G.A.S. Spells Stress As with so many wondrous discoveries of science and medicine, it was by chance that Hungarian-born Hans Selye (1907-1982) stumbled upon the idea of the General Adaptation Syndrome (G.A.S.), which he first wrote about in the British journal Nature in the summer of 1936. The G.A.S., alternately known as the stress syndrome, [...]
I.Q. tests are traditionally viewed as a quantitative measure of a person’s intelligence. Children who score very well on I.Q. tests are often tracked into programs for the “gifted,” while those who do very poorly are tracked into “remedial” programs. Despite their prevalence, the true meaning and import of I.Q. tests are subjects of some [...]
The Nature of Things There is something ethereal about human intelligence, something hard-to-pin-down. It’s hard even to define. Is intelligence the ability to reason? Does it have to do with memory? Is it aptitude with language? With mathematics? All of the above? Plenty of folks would go so far as to say that you just [...]
To survive and thrive, we have to understand how the world’s various systems function. This encompasses such things as knowing the flow of days and seasons; whether a dropped object will bounce, splat, or break; and how water shifts among its fluid, frozen, and gaseous states. Human life is a major subset of the world’s [...]
The three previous columns focused on recent proposals about the roles of prediction, intuition, and wisdom in intelligent thought and behavior. This column will focus on the role of formal education in the development of intelligence. Human consciousness allows us to go beyond the here and now when we confront challenges. Our brain has a [...]
