Psychologists can’t agree on it. People make assumptions about it all the time. It is a very complex issue.

No one is just “smart” or “stupid.” Like most labels that are applied to human beings, these two describe aspects of a person, not the whole person. Smart at what? Stupid at what? High IQ? Low IQ? What are we really trying to say with these descriptors?

Does a smart person excel at every mental task? No. Multiple Intelligence theorists (Guilford, Gardner) split thinking/mental processing into different components. And since there is no absolute scale for “smartness”, our intelligence is relative to others’.

What objective measures of intelligence do most people use? IQ. Maybe school grades, which are actually measures of performance across a range of intellectual abilities and are skewed by values, interests and motivators. We don’t really have many widely used objective methods for determining one’s mental abilities.

Think about it this way. If someone is described as being physically strong, what are we talking about? Their arms? Legs? Chest? Back? Combinations of muscle groups? Is the strongest man the one that can dead lift the most weight? Is it possible for a strong man or woman to be weak in one of their muscle groups?

I believe that our minds operate like our muscles. We are born with a certain brain composition that provides the foundation of our relative strengths and weaknesses, our smarts and our stupids. External or environmental factors (injury, diet, etc.) can impact the development of our brain (or muscles.) Training and practice can improve our latent abilities, within a predetermined range.

How does one get stronger? One way is to exercise the specific muscle. Another way is to use the muscle in conjunction with other muscles on a regular basis. Is it likely that once adulthood has been reached that our muscles will increase in strength without regular use? No, it may in fact atrophy and decline into weakness. So, if our brains work under a similar principle, then regular use or specific exercise should improve our mental abilities. The challenge comes in when we try and isolate a specific mental ability. Want to become more creative? Trying to improve your memory? Want to think more logically? Even these are brain “groups” rather than individual intellectual abilities.

Think about “smart” people you know that can’t read a map, make stick figures for drawings, or can’t remember where they parked their car. A few minutes of thought will verify that you already understand this principle relating to intelligence. It may take longer to identify your own mental strengths and weaknesses. And once you do, what next? I like to ask people what they would do if they found out that they had a mental strength that was in the 99.999 percentile. Would they feel smarter? Would they seek ways to take advantage of it?

I guess it depends on how smart they are.