Do you know people with extremely high IQs who don’t make decisions, avoid risks, are fanatical about fixed ideas, react impulsively on social media, judge without empathy, lack resilience, shy away from starting something new, or don’t even notice the obvious? Well, yes.
The best and most reliable IQ tests, with the Wechsler Scale as the gold standard, go beyond measuring logic, accurately mapping four fundamental pillars of cognitive architecture:
1 Fluid Intelligence: The raw ability to reason, solve new problems and identify logical patterns, associated with the dorsolateral and parietal prefrontal cortex.
2 Crystallized Intelligence: The depth of accumulated verbal and cultural knowledge, influenced by education and cultural context.
3 Working Memory: The efficiency of the mental ‘notepad’ for retaining and manipulating information in real time, dependent on the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.
4 Processing Speed: The speed at which simple visual information is processed, linked to parietal attention networks.
The overwhelming majority of other tests, especially those available online, fail to reliably assess this complete set of skills.
Despite their high technical reliability, these tests are blind to essential dimensions of human intelligence. They fail to capture intuitive creativity, that spark that ignites without warning and changes a life or the world, nor the depth of emotional intelligence or the complexity of social skills.
Simply put:
During an IQ test, the brain optimizes logical processing and, to this end, reduces activity in regions such as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, orbitofrontal cortex, amygdala, and superior temporal sulcus—areas essential for refined emotional reading, behavioral self-regulation, socially sensitive decision-making, affective interpretation of the environment, and the subjectivity of deep thinking that ignites ideas with emotion.
Interestingly, it is precisely these regions, silenced during abstract reasoning, that often sustain disruptive ideas, creative intuition, and imaginative leaps. In other words, what can truly change the world.
Therefore, a few years ago, I defined the concept of DWRI Intelligence—in short, the state of full development of all brain subregions involved in cognition. This concept was recently validated by Howard Gardner, via institutional email, in a conversation with researcher Flávia Ceccarto, a Harvard professor and author of the Theory of Multiple Intelligences, which I consider to be skills developed from cognitive precursors
. In other words, a high IQ may indicate cognitive efficiency, but it says nothing about affective intelligence, emotional resilience, or subjective creativity, the kind that moves toward new things, transforms environments, and builds solutions without a prior script.
Perhaps the most accurate name for what they call “emotional intelligence” is actually affective intelligence: the ability to feel deeply, reframe experiences, and adapt with humanity.
Real intelligence is more than calculation. It is presence, intuition, and impact.
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