In fact your pattern recognition ability is not only at the core of improving your intelligence – it is the core. It is literally the function of the brain. It is what we do everyday in order to survive and, hopefully, prosper. To improve IQ, we simply must improve our ability to discover patterns.
Patterns are everywhere. They are in our language, they are in our movements, they are in the ground that we walk upon.
But what do I mean by a pattern?
A pattern is simply something that repeats.
For example there is a pattern to how each person walks: they lift up a leg, they place it in front of them; then they pick up the other leg and place it in front of the first. This process repeats over and over again.
Our language has patterns: When I say: “chair” it consistently refers to a piece of furniture for sitting on. And our grammar is a description of how we put together our words to form sentences and meaning.
This may seem obvious, but we didn’t know these things when we were younger. We didn’t know how to talk, we didn’t know how to walk, and we didn’t know how to a whole load of other things that we now do without thinking.
But as children our pattern recognition powers were fully charged...
When we first begin, as babies, to learn our native language, we don’t realise that there is an underlying meaning to what people say. We are just interested in it because the people that we admire are so inclined to doing it. Eventually we discover that we can do it too. We recognise that by breathing out in a certain way we can make sounds that are similar (this is one of the first patterns we learn).
This gets a response from our parents and so we know that we have done it properly. So we watch more closely for more patterns in the way they speak. We recognise that they move their mouths about when they speak (another pattern), so we experiment with this, and soon we are making all kinds of different sounds.
We then see that simple sounds like “ma” get different responses from “la”. And soon we discover that saying “ma-ma” gets an even greater response.
Eventually we recognise that “mama” usually makes Mum come, and that “dada” usually brings Dad. And at this point we have begun to define some quite complex patterns.
By adulthood, these patterns seem so natural to us that we forget about them. But in our heads we have a record of how these patterns work – which we rely upon to communicate every day.
To do the tasks that are usually considered intelligent, we must find more patterns – patterns that are not part of common knowledge. By improving your abilities in pattern recognition you will be improving your intelligence.
Albert Einstein is probably the person most often quoted as being highly intelligent; so what did he do?
Simply he looked at what Newton had already told us about gravity, and found problems with the pattern that Newton had defined. It was not that Newton was wrong, but rather at more extreme conditions (such as when operating at the speed of light) the patterns aren’t flexible enough to accommodate the changing conditions. Einstein discovered what these more subtle patterns were, and he amended what Newton had defined earlier.
He was able to create his ‘theory of relativity’ because of his skill at pattern recognition.
This is a simplification of the process. But it is the underlying structure of how we operate. When we develop our ability to find patterns, we find the rules of how to solve problems, which is how we improve IQ.
Improving our pattern recognition abilities will be the discussion of future articles.