What actually is intelligence? One seldom agrees on this question. For one, someone is intelligent who performs well in school. Someone who can answer IQ test gratis without difficulty. For another, it is someone who can solve difficult logic puzzles, even if it is of no relevance in everyday life.

IQ test: A Brief History of Intelligence

Even in antiquity, people came to the conclusion that intelligence is divided into two parts. The first form of intelligence comprises a person’s education and experience. The second form is the ability to acquire them.

In the Middle Ages, this term changed and both styles merged into one. This leads to the ignorant attitude that someone could not be called educated who did not speak Latin. It was not until the Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries that people returned to the knowledge of ancient scholars.

The seat of intelligence was assumed to be in the brain and this was understood as a machine whose function one has to measure and fathom in order to arrive at the solution to the question.

IQ test: What does modern science understand by intelligence?

Today’s science is based on the tradition of ancient theories again from a two-part division of intelligence. The experiences a person has in the course of his life and the facts he learns are known as crystalline intelligence. The ability to acquire this, on the other hand, as fluid intelligence. These terms go back to the American personality psychologist Raymond Bernard Cattel, who introduced it in 1971, so crystalline intelligence can be seen as a kind of personal possession.

Fluid intelligence, on the other hand, is the tool that you need to acquire it. Just as you can’t build a house without tools, even if it’s just your hands, you can’t acquire skills or knowledge if you don’t have fluid intelligence. A high level of fluid intelligence is necessary in order to quickly find one’s way in unfamiliar situations and to acquire new skills and facts.

IQ test: What diminishes fluid intelligence?

Children and adolescents are constantly confronted with new things in school. They also live out a high degree of frequently changing social contacts and confrontations. This is more often no longer the case with older people. Ultimately, however, it is the people themselves who change less and less. This lack of change and challenge is one of the reasons that compromise fluid intelligence. This makes you slow to grasp things.