Balanced Intelligence and Knowledge. How Education Trains You to Miss What is Right in Front of You. By A Midwestern Doctor (10/15/24)

NOTE: This is a beautifully abridged version of a previously published article that discusses the importance of balanced intelligence and strategies for cultivating it.

Story at a Glance

• Intelligence is much more than “intellectual intelligence.”

• We need other forms of intelligence to connect to our deeper wisdom and not be easily lead astray.

• Unbalanced intelligence leads to patchy and incomplete knowledge.

• A century ago, American education was hijacked by oligarchs like Rockefeller and Carnegie who focused on training widespread compliance rather than cultivating critical thinking and deep knowledge.

• Modern education trains us use linear thinking, which often misses critical details and prevents us from seeing the broader picture. This linear education leads to many problems in medicine.

• Having a conversation with left brain thinkers is challenging because such thinkers both aggressively assert their ideology and can only see that which proves they are right.

Key Topics

• Modern Education

• The Transformation of Modern Education

• Counterproductive Cognitive Algorithms (Right Brain vs. Left Brain)

• Debating Cognitive Algorithms

• Anchoring to Reality

• Conclusion

I was raised to believe that all types of intelligence mattered and that excessively developing one at the expense of the others was highly detrimental. This was because beyond it creating massive blindspots, it would create an imbalance within you that could cause the excessive type of intelligence to become deranged.

Likewise, my teachers repeatedly taught me that if your goal was to develop one type of intelligence (e.g., intellectual intelligence) it was often far more effective to cultivate a related type of intelligence that would support your primary target than it was to just focus on refining the desired intelligence. ~ A Midwestern Doctor