This phrase is the signature of the most brilliant minds according to psychologists. She betrays great humility and a thirst for learning.
In the collective unconscious, we imagine geniuses as eccentric scientists scribbling complex equations in chalk on a blackboard, like Einstein or Newton. However, high intelligence is much more discreet and hides in details that often go unnoticed. “People with higher cognitive ability do not realize this themselves, because they consider their way of perceiving the world as “normal“, psychologist Dana Castro told us during a previous interview on “zebra” people.
Highly intelligent people have an attitude that is intriguing: they are extremely observant and absorb everything around them. Where most people walk through a room or place on “autopilot”, genius analyzes textures, patterns, social interactions, surrounding noises. This “Curiosity Quotient” (CQ) is measured via the “Curiosity and Exploration Inventory” (CEI-II) test which assesses two qualities: exploration (search for new information) and absorption (ability to be totally captivated by an activity). “Intellectual curiosity is the hidden engine behind cognitive performance: it is as powerful a predictor of success as traditional IQ“, underlines Professor Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, professor of psychology in his work.
Unlike IQ, where the number 130 marks the official boundary of “giftedness”, the Curiosity Quotient is not expressed by a single score. It is measured in comparison to others: researchers estimate that a person falls into the category of high curiosity potential if their CEI-II test results place them among the 10% to 15% most curious of the population. Concretely, someone who is the type to get lost for two hours on Wikipedia after reading a single unknown word will probably have a curiosity quotient well above average. The most reliable verbal indicator is, paradoxically, a sentence that seems the least “intelligent” at first glance. A genius who ignores himself will very often say: “I don’t know, but I want to understand“.
Where a person of average intelligence will tend to hide their shortcomings for fear of judgment, the genius is obsessed with the truth more than with their social image. This is the concrete application of the Dunning-Kruger effect invented by psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger: the more intelligent we are, the more we are aware of the immensity of what we have left to learn. This intellectual humility is the signature of the most brilliant minds. The good news is that high intelligence is not just a question of genetics, it is also a mental discipline that can be cultivated every day.
First, you have to practice active observation: during a simple walk, force yourself to notice five details that you have never seen before (the shape of a roof, the color of a door, the rhythm of a noise). Two, adopt “divergent thinking”: when faced with a simple problem, you should not stop at the first obvious solution, but force yourself to find three others, even if they seem absurd at first. Three, cultivate your “hunger” for knowledge: never leave a question unanswered. For example, if a word or concept is unknown to us during a conversation, we must immediately look for its meaning.
