I think we need replace that '/' mark. Your question lists three separate qualities but they are linked and can influence each other. I would define them as:-
Intelligence is the general ability to learn and to solve problems. Talent is the ability to develop a particular branch of knowledge or skill - but does not mean you can be skilled at anything else. Creativity is really an expression of imagination but requires appropriate knowledge and skill to express it.
If you are intelligent it will help you learn how to express your ideas; if you also have a particular talent for learning the skill appropriate to the ideas you are likely to be able to develop those ideas to a higher level than those around you who may be just as intelligent but have no particular talent.
The straightforward answer would be that a low IQ assessed in the usual ways would make it hard to learn the skills necessary to express the creative ideas.
That though does not answer the question itself, but do standard IQ tests ask the wrong questions to investigate creativity? Can it hide talent?
I wonder if someone who is creative and imaginative but has a low IQ-test score might not have the confidence to try because he or she would feel thought of as not bright enough to produce anything of interest to others.
To illustrate this by example, I like music and according to my medical records I was once highly intelligent - though not as intelligent as those two film-stars. However I was always a slow learner, and I have no talent for music. So although I sometimes have musical ideas I could not learn to play an instrument and write music so could not express my ideas in sounds and page-fulls of "tadpoles".
(I have no idea of my IQ now - probably a lot lower, but I do not know how to find out.) X
There must be tests you can take to find out. There may well be businesses that do just that. I expect there are some jobs that require highly intelligent people and maybe one of things they have to do is be tested for being intelligent. Problem solvers are always good employees. Now you say you are a slow learner or you were. Do you think quickly or are you slow? Are you a problem-solver? I just wonder if there might have been some learning disability like dyslexia that made things very hard for you? And why do you think your current IQ is 'lower" than it used to be since you have not been tested? Generally normally typically one's IQ increases over time. Not dramatically or drastically of course but with life's experiences you usually are smarter than you were when you were very young. So I wonder why you think you aren't following the typical path? Thank you for your thoughtful analysis. I think of talent/creativity as one thing with two parts. But your wanting to separate them is fine with me m'dear! I think if you were tested you might be very surprised at how intelligent you are. :)
I did find an IQ test on-line but soon discovered it was trying to sell the service, but it did not have the courage to tell me that on the first page!
Also it's not possible to know how reliable it is - it might be just a "puzzle-book".
No, I don't think very quickly and sometimes miss the point! I tend to complicate problems rather than simplifying them, too. I was never dyslexic, far from it in fact, although that was not recognised in my school days.
Well , either my IQ has diminished or the original test over-estimated it; but I think experiences increase wisdom, which I would define as a product of knowledge and understanding, not IQ itself. I don't think I am untypical though. I expect there are many people like me!
A point on learning certain things though, is that it can be affected by how they are taught, or how you encounter them later.
For example, I was never much good at Mathematics, but saw the light for two topics long after I had left school. The first was Logarithms, ,no longer taught in schools merely because they being no longer needed for ordinary multiplication, division and power "sums". Schools teach other things instead, such as Matrices, an even more abstract and specialised technique! Logs though are vital to some technical calculations, such as the Decibel scale used for measuring sound and electrical signals. Working in a factory that developed and made sonar equipment, I discovered the decibel is the stock-in-trade unit in that industry; and I sort of worked backwards to understand decibels hence Logarithms. The other was Differentiation, and Calculus had defeated me at school in any but rote-using its formulae for the exercises - not the same as understanding it. Then one day, in a geology-club tutorial on analysing the gradients of rivers, I suddenly realised the simple little formula it uses is actually a very basic form of Differentiation, and it clicked!
(Why analyse a river's gradient mathematically? The graph you plot highlights sudden changes of slope due to the river crossing geological boundaries hidden by the valley floor deposits, vegetation, buildings, etc. As I recall one of the first professional examples I saw is that for the Shenandoah; but our exercise used our own, much more modest, local river! They all work in the same ways though.)
I agree talent and creativity often go hand-in-hand, but I separated them because although talent helps you express related creative ideas, you can be talented in something without being creative.
Such as a talent for athletics, or learning maths, or playing the piano. They need a lot of talent to reach a high level, but are not intrinsically creative. However, you might see a way to use the maths to make some technical breakthrough in mathematics itself or in some scientific endeavour, or you might play the piano well enough to write significant original music - and then you are both talented and creative, as a mathematician or musician. Yet you might win Gold at the Olympics, but though that is a display of great talent and considerable hard work, athletics does not actually create anything.
Or you can be creative in having the imagination, but do not have sufficient talent to express your original ideas to their best. Reversing the above, you might spot a link or pattern in something that might be numerical, or a tune might pop into your head; but you'd be unable to do anything about it.
(Beethoven exemplified both, and is said to have carried a notebook and pencil to save any musical ideas that occurred to him during the rural walks that were his favourite relaxation.)
Sometimes I grasp things immediately and sometimes I just can't fathom it. I wonder if the brain has "blind spots" Durdle? Something is going on because sometimes I totally miss the obvious because I too am searching for complexification. Why that is I don't know but I think it has something to do with seeing everything as the tip of its own iceberg and what it really is exists beneath the surface where you can't perceive it. So I go digging all the time and sometimes it's right in front of me! That's when I feel stupid! We're all wired differently of course which is a good thing I guess. Of course if we were all wired the same there'd be no misunderstanding of one another. I shall ask. Also FYI most of what you wrote went SWOOSH way over my head about the higher math. As a Retired Internal Auditor who loves numbers I realize that we operate at the level of simple logic not above and beyond into the esoteric. Also vis a vis talent and creativity often the very talented are creative in the way they exhibit that talent! A cut above the norm. I admire talent and creativity a lot and I wish I could be like that but it's enough that I am exposed to it from time to time so I can learn from others what is possible! My mind always worked very quickly. My Jim is very methodical and thoughtful but his mind works slower than mine and so sometimes I get very impatient waiting for the lightbulb to go on. Then I feel very bad for that impatience because HE IS VERY PATIENT WITH ME WHEN I DON"T GRASP SOMETHING. Sigh. Thank you for your reply m'dear! :)
If brains can have blind spots, mine certainly has plenty!
I don't know what it is that leads to them , and sometimes you can overcome the block by seeing the problem in a new way, or in a definite context, as I did with logarithms and differentiation.*
A curious trait I have found , and been caught by myself, is that of failing to solve a practical problem because the real solution is too easy!
For example, I once saw a group of very highly-qualified and experienced scientists dismayed to find their handiwork not working when they were testing it. It was connected to electronic test-instruments linked in such a way you could trace the electrical signals through the system, which was one they did not normally use. I showed them how to do that tracing, and in doing so spotted the "fault" almost immediately - a switch had been wrongly set, as revealed simply by the pattern of switches on the control-panel! We set it correctly and everything worked perfectly, to great relief and red faces!
As simple as that - a human error so basic no-one could imagine making it.
I was caught when I helped a friend restore a water-mill back to milling flour. Not long after it started production, it began suffer damage from sudden changes in the stream level feeding the wheel; caused by the actions of water-supply borehole pumps near the spring, responding to fluctuations in demand. We could do nothing about that, so we sketched assorted complicated arrangements of screws and gears and things, to make a special sluice to divert the extra water harmlessly away from the wheel. When we next met he said, "I've solved it!" and pointed to some blocks of wood on a shelf. "Those blocks stand on the walls each side of the wheel and support a plank at just the right height - that's all it needs!"
So we'd not made a mistake as in the electronics problem, but had been over-thinking the solution.
[Just pausing to view progress on a cake I'm baking - it's nearly there... No, not nearly there enough]
As for being patient, I is I with whom I become impatient more than anyone else, frustrated by being unable to learn something to the level I want, or at all.
+++++
*A logarithm of a number is an index that raises the "base" of the log. scale to that number: 10^2 = 100 so log(100) = 2, when the log's base is 10, the same base as we count in, in fact. A table of Logarithms and its opposite, the Antilogarithms, was a very powerful tool before the days of calculators because it turns very difficult or impossible multiplication and power calculations into simple arithmetic. Nowadays logarithms have retired to the lofty heights of scientific laws that are naturally logarithmic, such as our own ears' response to the loudness of sounds.
Differentiation investigates how one thing is changing with respect to a set change in another, if the change is mathematically regular. If you draw a graph representing the behaviour, differentiation gives the slope of the line at the point of interest, hence my seeing it from the slope of a river. More importantly it lets you analyse that point, and without having to plot the graph. Differentiation and Integration are the two "sides" of a vast mathematics area called Calculus, found in all manner of science and engineering applications. Speed is a simple example - it is the Difference in Distance travelled, with respect to a given Difference in Time.
I'd mentioned Matrices. Very odd beasts that defeated me because though at a basic level they are just grids of simple "sums" carried out in particular orders, they were taught as abstract concepts with no obvious meanings or purposes. That lack of any "hook" on which to hang them, nor definitions of their manipulations beyond merely how to do them, meant I had no way to understand them. Matrices' ancestry goes back centuries, but I did discover they are used nowadays in certain, very specialised, technical calculations and computer-programming applications. I don't know if they are used in high-level accountancy and economics.
Thank you for your very detailed and very comprehensive explanation of what you wrote before. I read it twice m'dear and I am going to read it again and I still won't really understand some of it. I appreciate that you take so much time trying to find a way to explain something. In line with that on one thread awhile ago Walt was trying to explain something to me and I kept coming up objections and more questions because what he was telling me made no sense. Then I asked if he could put it in the context of food. I'm a foodie and I thought maybe that way I'd get it. GUESS WHAT? He did and I did and it is so very simple. It had to do with the half lives of radiation or something. Rates of deterioration/dying/death over time. I wasn't getting it. Then he said "ever have some cheese that looks spoiled on the outside but you cut that away and it's still edible?" Yes I have and VOILA it computed. He got through to me on a level I could understand. So maybe what I'm saying is we can learn lots of things but it matters how they are taught whether we get it or not. So simple a thing right in front of me and I still had to be led by the hand! Thank you for your splendid reply. This next question may be quite silly but here it goes. Is there anything in what you've learned about what you wrote that really EXCITED you? I'm going to ask a question that will reflect that. You will recognize it when you see it! :)
This post was edited by RosieG at October 2, 2020 4:25 AM MDT
Not necessarily, hence the term "idiot savant". Einstein was almost certainly on the autism spectrum, although brilliant in the field of physics he was particularly hopeless at life in general. He frequently forgot to put his socks on before his shoes, and couldn't pack a suitcase. Dirac is another, taciturn to the point of rudeness. One colleague quipped, "Paul doesn't use one word where none suffices". He related better to numbers than to people. Tesla loved his pigeons but died without a single human friend. Mozart was into toilet humour, as displayed by his four-part harmony for a male chorus, "Leck Mich im Arsch" (literally "lick me in the a**" but semantically equivalent to "kiss my a*").
All of those people were very intelligent, very talented in their own fields and creative - but socially inept or found day-to-day life difficult in different ways.
I would not like to say if those eccentricities alone would be signs of autism, which is a convenient label, but could be among the effects perhaps.
Too much theory and not much agreement among professionals.
Remember Dustin Hoffman's character in Rainman?---he had savant syndrome
Approximately 1 out of 1400 people with mental retardation or CNS deficits other than autism do have savant skills, so such abilities are not limited to autistic disorder. Hence not all autistic persons are savants, and not all savants are autistic.
Durdle 