What are the major differences between Smartness, Intelligence, Brilliance & Genius?

 

 

These are just words, and they don't have generally-agreed-upon specific meanings.

I'm going to try and wing it as I go along so forgive any contradictions that creep into the answer. Also, I suspect I'm going to need Venn diagrams for this exercise. Let's begin:

Intelligence is something that's acquired by reading books, through academia and it implies knowledge, retention and recall. If I were to plot knowledge vs application on a graph, Intelligence would gravitate more towards the knowledge side of it.

Smartness is the ability to improvise given the limited resources at hand. The resources can include information as well. Smartness – from the perspective of word's dictionary meaning –  alludes to wit, and being quick on the uptake. So maybe smart people can learn quickly and therefore acquire intelligence.

Brilliance, in my opinion, is simply a higher degree of smartness. Someone who is really really smart is automatically labelled brilliant.

Genius is perhaps the intersection of all of these.

I'd say, roughly speaking, that many people use "smart" and "intelligent" as synonyms when referring to someone who is above-average in terms of knowledge acquisition, problem-solving ability, or creativity.

"He has a 4.0 average! He's really smart."

"She has speaks seven languages. She's really intelligent."

People tend to use "brilliant" and "genius" to mean "super-intelligent" or "way above average." As with "smart" and "intelligent," many people use "brilliant" and "genius" as synonyms.

"Shakespeare was able to write the best plays in the English language because he was brilliant."

"You'll never be able to understand Stephen Hawking's work. He's a genius!"

But, again, these are trends or tendencies. A particular person might say, "I think of 'smart' and 'intelligent' as different..."

I am full of "theories" -- one of my theories is that intelligent people have more chances of survival in the face of an apocalypse than educated people.... seems a bit hard to see in the beginning, however there is a great comedy show that shows this theory to perfection.

-- In the Big Bang Theory, Dr. Sheldon Cooper's character is extremely educated, however when he is facing situations where he has no background knowledge, he fails or has to try very hard to begin grasping the knowledge of how it works, or what decision to take.

-- Dr. Sheldon Cooper is a genius. He has inmense knowledge on many different fields. In one episode he was to face someone else on a basketball match... none of the two people had ever even touched a basketball, and both are very well educated. - To make the long story short... none of them was even capable of bounce the ball on the floor successfully -- Now in the other hand, if the person in the same position as Dr. Cooper was his neighbor "Penny", whom he considers and is portrait as a little bit of a "air head" and not well educated at all, would have figured out how to bounce that ball within seconds.

---- This is one of the examples why I say, the human race will survive on Intelligent people, not educated ones. --
Some people are on complete extremes, very well educated to extremely intelligent... some are fortunate enough to have both in a good balance, but others are not so lucky.

Fortunately, Intelligent people solve their handicaps" by getting educated.... (A lot of intelligent people have issues studying and learning with the same ease as others do, in their mind there is a lot of information out there that is not necessary to get the job or task done - so their 'intelligent' brain bypasses that "junk" information and grasps the concept quickly - they use their common sense!) - educated people have a much harder time getting that common sense' that come to smart people so easily! - Yes educated people can gather all the necessary information and make a more 'educated' decision than the intelligent ones.... however if you are facing mayhem, the time you take to make that decision is crucial.

- One last example..... if both the intelligent and the educated people are standing on the ground and the ground is crumbing under their feet, and they find two paths... one of roads will be on safe ground that won't crumble into an abyss, the other road will disintegrate and kill the person who chose it. The intelligent person will go with their gut and make a decision... this means they have a 50% of survival.... the educated person on the other hand, will stop and consider what are the conditions on the two choices and thinks about which one has the highest chances of survival.... however, in the time that it takes them to think, the ground would have crumble under them, and they will certainly die... giving them 0% of survival. - so yeah... humanity's future is in the hand of intelligent people.. not educated ones... so gloat all you want about your "Book Smarts" - that is not what is going to save you in the end....

What type of person do you think you are? - no need to post your answer just think about it... where do you tend to lean towards the most? Are most of your first reactions correct, and you confirmed it when things went wrong because you took another route after over analyzing it? Or are you most of the time right because you go with that first instinct or "gut feeling" you get?