If you were to describe someone as “in shape” or “athletic,” you could be describing a number of different qualities. Maybe that person is very fast. Maybe they have great hand-eye coordination. Maybe they’re super strong, or an awesome jumper, or win a lot of wrestling matches. You wouldn’t necessarily assume they were all of those things, though.
Maybe because so much of that is assessable visually, we don’t tend to think that, by default, a very strong weight lifter is necessarily going to be a very fast runner or be able to accurately throw a ball. We recognize those as different skills, even if they fall under a broader category of “athleticism.”
We definitely don’t do that with intelligence, though. When it comes to brainpower, we tend to assume that if someone is “smart” then they’re smart on all possible metrics. If there is a quality that we associate with being smart, then we assume all smart people have that quality.
But “smart” can mean a lot of things, too! It can mean you have a good memory, or it can mean you’re good at puzzles, or it can mean you’re good at visualization, or it can mean you’re quick to understand concepts, etc. It absolutely doesn’t automatically mean all of those things.
In the scientific sense, there’s a lot about the brain we don’t know. But even in the everyday social sense, there’s a lot about how we treat intelligence that we get wrong. The important takeaway is this: if you observe someone with an unusual mental trait, don’t assume any others. That just wouldn’t be smart.
The Opportunity Machine 