Reading is my excuse for travelling, and so it was good that I had an opportunity to go travelling to Vancouver recently as I have been working on this book for a year without making progress.

I originally bought The Making of Intelligence by Ken Richardson because I was fascinated with the gap between the rational intelligence of humans and the instinctive intelligence of animals. What is it that separates us from monkeys and allows us to write poetry instead of squabbling over bananas? I was hoping for examples of animal intelligence and its differences as well as a discussion of how we (as humans) think. Failing that, I was hoping for a discussion on how humans think. Unfortunately neither of these happened.

The book discussed a lot about the measurement of intelligence, such as the (in)validity of IQ tests, and briefly on how we might be more intelligent than animals. It discussed everything in scientific/research terms and felt very much like reading a survey of intelligence papers. That was, I think, the main reason why it was so boring. I’m not a researcher in this field and was only looking for some cursory knowledge, which the book was not written for. I have a habit of wanting to finish the books I start, which seems to me like a bad habit in certain situations, and I think this was one of them.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: reading, research, vancouver