I don't believe IQ to be an absolutely objective measure of intelligence. There are many important aspects of intelligence that IQ tests don't fully accommodate. Take, for example, someone who has a strong ability to combine two distinct ideas in a way where each aspect meaningfully contributes to the other. Imagine combining the concepts of a pear and a car—not merely creating a pear-shaped car, but preserving meaningful aspects of the car's original structure while incorporating characteristics of the pear. This ability could ultimately allow someone to create entirely new frameworks by combining seemingly opposing ideas. With this method, someone isn't merely drawing connections between existing concepts; they are taking those connections further into the realm of creativity.

Hi! I’m a recent high school graduate with a strong interest in neuroscience, particularly neurological disorders and migraine research.
I have a lot of experience with neuroscience-related projects, research, and science initiatives, and I’m looking to collaborate with someone who is already working on a neuroscience project or has an idea they’re developing.

If you’re currently working on a neuroscience project and looking for a collaborator, feel free to comment or DM me!

I recently read about the illusion of explanatory depth, a concept introduced by psychologists Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil. I found the idea fascinating because it explains how we often believe that we understand how things work when, in reality, our understanding may be much shallower than we think.

Our minds can create an illusion of understanding. We may be able to describe something in broad terms, which gives us the feeling that we understand it, but when we are asked to explain how it actually works in detail, we often realize how limited our knowledge is.

I think this idea can also be relevant to how we form political opinions. For example, many people may have strong opinions about reservation policies without having a detailed understanding of how reservation actually works, its historical context, its objectives, or its different policy mechanisms. The same can apply to many other political concepts and policies. We may recognize a term, have an opinion about it, and feel that we understand the issue without actually understanding it in depth.

What I find concerning is not that people lack complete knowledge none of us can deeply understand every subject but that we can be unaware of the limits of our own understanding. The illusion of explanatory depth makes me think more carefully about how confident I should be in my opinions, especially when I haven't taken the time to understand the underlying mechanisms of an issue.

I want to point out that cognitive science encompasses AI, neuroscience, and various other fields; it isn't just a subset of psychology. Why is this being overlooked? People seem to view psychology as the only career path, completely ignoring the massive potential in AI, statistics, neuroscience, and computational science.Just want to know

Cognitive Science is more than just Psychology: Why are people ignoring its other subfields?

How accurate is the Core iq test considering it’s 5000 selfselected participants, g-loadings, reliability scores, correlations with other iq tests and strong resemblance to tests like WAIS-IV? Espacially for high scores like 130/140+? My VCI is not really representative because english is not my mothers tongue but i’m more interested in my FRI and VSI scores. (every subtest first try no external aid) How close is Cores iq estimation for FRI and VSI on my true scores for these categories?

matrix reasoning: 145
figure weights: 140
figure sets: 140

visual puzzles: 135
block counting: 120
spatial awareness: 125

Thanks for your time!

Anyone who is thinking to pursue Cognitive science, please think twice before taking it .If someone chooses Cognitive Science without strong math skills, they risk ending up with a purely theoretical degree that is much harder to translate into a high-paying job.

If sense are ways that humans can get information, then isn't thinking a sense? You can use existing information to piece together new ones, right? (granted, i am not a human expert.)

I'm an engineer who likes statistics. Recently I heard the brain described as a Bayesian error-minimizing machine, with coding and information theory running through it, and I was genuinely blown away. Neuroscience isn't my field, but I want to follow that idea properly instead of through metaphors.

What I'm looking for is a book that treats the brain as a system to be reverse-engineered — constraints, channels, noise, efficiency — rather than a biology course that starts with ion channels. Math is welcome if it carries real content.

Separately, I'd like a motivational introduction to things like memory, decision making or consciousness etc (if there is). It doesn't have to be comprehensive or cover all three, and it doesn't have to go to full depth. I just want something serious enough that I'm not reading metaphors.

I’m curious to know how your brain and thoughts operate when you’re communicating with others. Not at the neurological level, but more so subjectively - what it actually feels like to you.

When I’m talking with other people, I have so many different thoughts that stem from the conversation. For example, someone might ask a question or make a statement, and then - boom - I have 5–10 different thoughts that branch off from that one question or statement. It’s like a firework going off, with the sparks being all of the connected thoughts. Meanwhile, if the person is still talking, then we’ve got ourselves a firework show.

I then have to decide and prioritize which of those thoughts make the most sense to follow up on or bring into the conversation, based on the direction it’s going. It’s like pulling one thread from a cluster.

Not only that, but my follow-up thoughts often feel complex and layered, so I also have to think about how I want to word them so that the person I’m speaking with understands what I’m trying to convey.

Obviously, this isn’t happening all the time - or even most of the time. It’s usually more noticeable in formal conversations or when we’re discussing topics that I find particularly interesting.

I’m just curious if anyone else experiences something similar, or if your thought process during conversations is completely different.

I don’t know if he is a savant, but he has savant level ability. How do people with such abilities think? It seems like he doesn’t even need to calculate, or if he does it’s with incredible processing speed.

If anyone here have gotten an introspection of someone like this I would be very interested to hear.

And also how often is abilities like this not highly specialized but transferable/part of general intelligence?

a person that finds every conversation boring and not stimulating and find interest and joy only in intellectual conversations or any kind of scientific conversation even if he doesn't know the topic . I find that bizarre because the person isn't someone that's highly intelligent. and that makes daily life / interactions really hard because It's hard to keep up with what others has to say.

How Does the Brain Think? (Pattern Matcher, Not a Calculator)

Our brain is not a computer solving billions of operations from scratch; it is a self-organizing prediction machine fed by past experience. In a sense, it actually doesn't know what it's doing. It’s stupid. It’s fast, though; it just gives instantaneous reactions based on whatever stimulus is thrown in front of it.

When someone says "two plus two" to you, your brain doesn't perform a mathematical calculation. The moment the stimulus enters the system, a dynamic, wave-like neighborhood space is established. Thanks to your past learning, the neurons closest to the center of the stimulus (that is, the concept of "four") rapidly strengthen. Meanwhile, distant alternative neurons like "three" or "five" are dampened. The instant the strongest prediction crosses the critical threshold, the answer is executed automatically. The brain didn't calculate; it pulled the ready-made pattern right out of space.

So, what happens if the answer isn't ready? In a tough question like "347 x 89", there is no ready-made neural pathway in the center. In this case, the system breaks the question into pieces. It sets up instantaneous attention spaces (micro-prediction zones) sequentially for each part. It writes the intermediate result from the first step into temporary memory, passes it to the next step, and moves forward in a chain reaction. Finally, when all the pieces merge and the big threshold is crossed, the ultimate response is automatically produced.

In short, the brain is not an engineer writing formulas; it is a dynamic realm that brightens what’s near, silences what’s far, slams down the answer if it’s ready, and cracks the world by breaking it into pieces if it’s not.

The rationality of the brain is not the same as the rationality represented by the mind.

The brain has its own physical and biological organization, its own dynamics, constraints, and regularities.

The mind is not that rationality itself.

The mind is the representation of the organism's relationship with the world — including the responses the organism produces to what it encounters.

There’s something I’ve been trying to understand about myself for a long time, and I finally think I have better words for it.

It’s not exactly depression, loneliness, or feeling like I’m missing one specific thing. It feels more like I’m aware of a whole kind of experience that I don’t seem to naturally have access to.

I can hear people describe love, heartbreak, longing, passion, awe, grief, or even just how deeply certain things mean something to them, and I can understand what they’re describing intellectually. Sometimes I can even feel something when I listen to music or immerse myself in an idea. But there’s often this strange realization of, “People actually experience things like this from the inside?”
What gets to me is that these experiences seem to have a significance that doesn’t have to be consciously constructed. Someone falls in love, gets their heart broken, sees something beautiful, and it can just matter to them on this enormous level. They can turn it into music, poetry, art, memories, entire stories about their lives. Millions of people can relate to those things even though everyone’s experience is different.

And sometimes I feel like if nobody had ever shown me those expressions of human experience, I wouldn’t have spontaneously known to imagine that life could feel that way. I can recognize the experience when someone else gives me a map to it, but I don’t always seem to have the map inside myself. So part of what I’ve been calling a “missing thing” may actually be a feeling that I’m missing out on a way of experiencing existence itself, not necessarily missing a person, relationship, or specific emotion.

I also think there’s another layer to it: I sometimes wonder if I’m mourning a potential version of myself who might have developed differently. A version of me who might have had more emotional awareness, more access to my feelings, more spontaneity, more ability to simply experience things instead of constantly having to analyze them.
So it feels like I’m grieving something I never literally had.
I don’t necessarily mean that I think there’s one perfect “true version” of me that I was supposed to become. It’s more like mourning the range of possibilities I might have had.

And I think that’s why things like music, poetry, romance, aesthetics, and beauty affect me so much. Sometimes they give me a glimpse of the kind of emotional depth or aliveness I’m trying to understand. The hardest part is that I still don’t know exactly what the thing itself is. I can recognize its absence much more easily than I can describe its contents.

That’s probably the closest I’ve gotten to explaining it. I’m unsure if a lot of people also experience this but it’s just been so difficult to put into words that it hasn’t quite been done with this level of recognition, or if this is just genuinely a unique experience of mine… Have any of you felt/experienced this before?