A note to Brilliant Report readers: What follows is the transcript of a speech I gave to a gathering of college admissions counselors last week. In it, I try out some of the ideas that will appear in my forthcoming book. I'd love to hear your feedback about what you like, what you don't, what's not clear, etc. Gratefully—Annie

"I know this is a very well-read and well-educated group, so I’m sure many of you have encountered the Wallace Stevens poem 'Thirteen Ways of Looking At A Blackbird.' The genius of Stevens’s poem is that he takes something so familiar—an ordinary, black bird—and by looking at it from many different perspectives, he makes us think about it in new ways.
 
That’s what I want to do tonight for a subject that is, for all of you, very familiar, something you think about all the time in the course of your work: the intelligence and ability of the young people you help. I’m going to present eight ways of looking at intelligence—eight perspectives provided by the science of learning. And if you’re wondering why there are eight and not thirteen—well, that’s why Wallace Stevens is Wallace Stevens, and I’m just a workaday hack.
 
Before I jump into my eight ways, a few words about that term I just used, 'the science of learning.' The science of learning is a relatively new discipline born of an agglomeration of fields: cognitive science, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience. Its project is to apply the methods of science to human endeavors—teaching  and learning—that have for centuries been mostly treated as an art.
 
Although I am, very much, an advocate of the science of learning, I want to emphasize that—as with anything to do with our idiosyncratic and unpredictable species—there is still a lot of art involved in teaching and learning, and for that matter, in what you do as college admissions counselors. But I do think that the science of learning can offer some surprising and useful perspectives on how we guide and educate young people. And so: Eight Ways Of Looking At Intelligence.
 
The first way of looking at intelligence: Situations can make us smarter. This is really the overarching perspective that connects all the others I’m going to talk about tonight, so I’ll spend some time here explaining what I mean. The science of learning has demonstrated that we are powerfully shaped by the situations that we find ourselves in: situations that can either evoke or suppress our intelligence.
 
What do I mean by situations? Situations can be internal or external. They can be brief and transitory, or persistent and long-lasting. They can be as varied as the conditions under which a student studies, the conditions that prevail in the classroom or school a student attends, the conditions exerted by a student’s peer group. The physical conditions that students experience by way of how much stress they’re under and how much sleep and exercise they get, and the mental conditions students create for themselves by the levels of expertise and attention and motivation they’re able to achieve.
 
Situational intelligence, in other words, is the only kind of intelligence there is—because we are always doing our thinking in a particular situation, with a particular brain in a particular body.
 
On one level this is obvious, but on another it is really very radical. Radical, because, since its earliest beginnings, the study of intelligence has emphasized its inherent and fixed qualities. Intelligence has been conceptualized as an innate characteristic of the individual, invariant across time and place, determined mostly by genes (or before that, what was called 'heredity').
 
This was the view of Francis Galton, the Victorian gentleman who is the father of psychometric testing. He used the notion of inherent, fixed intelligence to show that it ran in the blood of England's most eminent families. This was the view of Lewis Terman, the creator of the modern intelligence test. He used the notion of inherent, fixed intelligence to identify and cultivate children who were 'gifted.' And this was the view of Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, authors of the notorious 1994 bookThe Bell Curve. They used the notion of inherent, fixed intelligence to argue that America's class structure was the inevitable product of the IQ levels of various racial and social groups.
 
So to assert that intelligence is in large part a product of the situations we find ourselves in is a departure, not only from the way science has traditionally thought about ability, but from the way many of us think about ability today—and certainly from the way many of the students you work with think about ability.
 
As I run through the rest of my 'ways of looking at intelligence,' I’d like you to be thinking of yourselves, not just as sources of information, not just as providers of counsel, but as situation-makers: creators of circumstances that evoke intelligence in your students.
 
On to the second way of looking at intelligence: Beliefs can make us smarter.Many of you have probably encountered the work of Carol Dweck, the Stanford psychologist who wrote the terrific book Mindset. Dweck distinguishes two types of mindsets: the fixed mindset, or the belief that ability is fixed and unchanging, and the growth mindset, or the belief that abilities can be developed through learning and practice.
 
These beliefs matter because they influence how think about our own abilities, how we perceive the world around us, and how we act when faced with a challenge or with adversity. The psychologist David Yeager, also of Stanford, notes that our mindset effectively creates the 'psychological world' in which we live. Students’ beliefs, whether they’re oriented around limits or around growth, constitute one of these internal situations that either suppresses or evokes intelligence.
 
The third way of looking at intelligence: Expertise can make us smarter. One very robust line of research within the science of learning is concerned with the psychology of expertise: what goes on in the mind of an expert. What researchers have found is that experts don’t just know more, they know differently, in ways that allow them to think and act especially intelligently within their domain of expertise.
 
An expert’s knowledge is deep, not shallow or superficial; it is well-organized, around a core of central principles; it is automatic, meaning that it has been streamlined into mental programs that run with very little conscious effort; it is flexible and transferable to new situations; it is self-aware, meaning that an expert can think well about his or her own thinking. Expertise takes a long time to develop, of course, but the adolescent and young adult years are not too soon to begin encouraging students to go deep in a subject area that interests them.
 
The fourth way of looking at intelligence: Attention can make us smarter. You’ve probably heard about the 'marshmallow test,' a famous experiment conducted by psychologist Walter Mischel in the late 1960s. Mischel found that children who could resist eating a marshmallow in return for the promise of two marshmallows later on did better in school and in their careers.
 
Well, there’s a new marshmallow test that is faced every day, almost every minute by our students: it’s the ability to resist the urge to check one’s email, to respond to a text, to see what’s happening on Facebook or Twitter. I know we’ve all heard that 'digital natives' grew up multitasking and therefore excel at it, but the fact is that there are information-processing bottlenecks in the brain—everybody’s brain—that prevent us from paying attention to two things at the same time. The state of focused attention is a very important internal situation that students must cultivate in order to fully express their intelligence.
 
The fifth way of looking at intelligence: Emotions can make us smarter. We sometimes give short shrift to emotions when we’re talking about academic success, but the science of learning is demonstrating that our emotional state represents a crucial internal situation that influences how intelligently we think and act.
 
When we’re in a positive mood, for example, we tend to think more expansively and creatively. When we feel anxious—for instance, when we’re about to take a dreaded math test—that anxiety uses up some of the working memory capacity we need to solve problems, leaving us, literally, with less intelligence to apply to the exam.
 
One of my favorite lines of investigation within the science of learning has to do with the feeling of hope—an emotion that I’m sure you’re familiar with as college admissions counselors. Research in this area has found that a feeling of hopefulness actually leads us to try harder and persist longer—but only if it is paired with practical plans for achieving our goals, and—this is the really interesting part—specific, concrete actions we’ll take when and if (usually when) our original plans don’t work out as expected.
 
The sixth way of looking at intelligence: Technology can make us smarter.There’s a fascinating line of research in philosophy and cognitive science investigating what’s called the extended mind. This is the idea that the mind doesn’t stop at the skull—that it reaches out and loops in our bodies, our tools, even other people, to use in our thinking processes.
 
Brain-scanning studies have found that when we use a tool, say a rake we’re using to reach an object that’s out of our grasp, our brains actually designate neurons to represent the end of the rake—as if it were the tips of our own fingers. The human mind has evolved to make our tools—including our technological devices—into extensions of itself.
 
The problem is that our devices so often make us dumber instead of smarter. I’ve already alluded to the way in which technology can divide our attention, producing learning that is spottier, shallower, and less flexible than learning that occurs under conditions of full concentration. Technology can also make us dumber when we allow key skills to atrophy from disuse, or fail to develop those skills in the first place.
 
To give you a common example: The ready availability of technology may persuade students that they don’t need to learn facts anymore, because they can always 'just Google it.' In fact, research from cognitive science shows that the so-called '21^stcentury skills' that we’re always hearing about—critical thinking, problem-solving, collaboration, creativity—can’t emerge in a content-free vacuum. They must developin the context of a rich base of fact knowledge: knowledge that’s stored on the original hard drive, one’s own brain.
 
In order for tech to make our students smarter and not dumber, we need to help them understand when to take full advantage of their devices, and when to put them away.
 
The seventh way of looking at intelligence: Our bodies can make us smarter. A line of inquiry related to the 'extended mind' research I mentioned earlier is the work now being done on what’s called 'embodied cognition.'
 
Ever since the cognitive science revolution of the 1970s, the dominant metaphor for the brain has been the computer: a machine that processes abstract symbols. The science of learning is demonstrating that the computer metaphor is seriously flawed when it comes to describing the human brain. It might be more accurate, in fact, to compare the brain to the heart. All the tings that make the heart work better—good nutrition, adequate sleep, regular exercise, moderate stress—make the brain work better too.
 
I’ll take up the issue of sleep as an example, since sleep is something so many of today’s students are lacking. They—and we—often don’t recognize that sleep is actually a key part of the learning process. It’s during sleep that the brain consolidates the memories it formed during waking hours—meaning that it sorts through those memories, weakening the ones that are trivial, strengthening the ones that are important, and connecting up these new memories to the memory structures that already exist in the brain.
 
If we don’t get enough sleep after learning, or if that sleep is of low quality, the learning process is truncated, and we remember that information less well and less flexibly. That’s just one example of how physical state of our bodies is a key conditions under which our brain operates and under which our intelligence is evoked or suppressed.
 
Lastly, the eighth way of looking at intelligence: Relationships can make us smarter. I mentioned earlier that the human mind is very adept at looping in our bodies, our tools, and even other people to use as instruments of our own thinking.
 
You’ve experienced this if you have a spouse or significant other: it’s likely that one of you is 'in charge' of remembering when the car needs to go in for inspection, while the other is “in charge” of remembering relatives’ birthdays. This is called transactive memory, and it’s just one of the ways that relationships with others can make us smarter than we would be on our own.
 
There’s one particular kind of relationship I want to finish up with tonight, and that is the relationship that students have to their academic institution and to their fellow students. The science of learning has demonstrated that a feeling of belonging is critical to the full expression of students’ ability and intelligence.
 
The notion of promoting a sense of belonging goes against some of what we’ve traditionally done in academia. We’ve all heard that old line, 'Look to the right, look to the left; only one of you will be passing this course'—and while professors may not say those words anymore, there are plenty of courses that are intended to 'weed' students out, and plenty of situations in high school and college in which students feel very much left on their own, to sink or to swim.
 
So let me end by reminding you of something I said earlier in this speech, about seeing your role as 'situation creators,' and by asking you: What situations can you create, or help your students create for themselves, that will give them a sense that they are not numbers in a database, but members of a community?
 
A community, perhaps, something like the one gathered here, which has in my short acquaintance with it given every indication of allowing probing questions and stimulating conversation to flourish—of allowing intelligence to bloom."

(Want to read past issues of The Brilliant Report? You'll find them here.)