Your Intelligence Is Not Permanent: Write-Up Inspired by Donald Trump

It is not a joke

Preface:

I have seen people getting smarter and dumber. But I was not quite sure if it was their intelligence getting better or worse. Your IQ can change over time, Science says so. Can it go down? I never thought about it. All of us are focused on getting better at everything and we strive towards it each day. The thought of getting dumber came to my head after watching an old interview of Donald Trump’s. It was not a mind-blowing interview, but it was mind-blowing in the sense that Mr.Trump has changed a lot over the years. He was more articulate back then. What happened to him?

Donald Trump’s Conversations: Then and Now

A special note as we move into this section: Intentions of Mr.Trump and the and the kind of attitude that he bears right now has been incredibly consistent! The only fact that I am trying to put forward is that he was more articulate in voicing his intentions, he seemed more sophisticated and intelligent.

Transcript from Trump’s Interview with Rona Barrett(1980):

Rona Barrett: A big deal, a small deal, no matter what deal you’re ever in, even though you may win in the final 17 analysis, sometimes a door gets closed in your face. How do you get those doors opened? What makes you go on?

Donald Trump: Well, you do get many doors closed. There’s no question about that, Rona. That’s something that has happened in many cases, and I guess you just have to keep going. I guess you really just have to keep pushing and just get going, and a funny thing is once you open the first door, it becomes a lot easier to open the second door. I mean, for instance, today, it’s much easier for me to have things happen than it would have been five years ago before any of these conceptions or conceptual ideas really came into fruition. Today, it’s much easier for me to make a phone call and trying to have something happen than it was five years ago.

I cannot imagine Trump speaking like this anymore — with the kind of clarity of thoughts and framing of sentences he was able to pull off years back.

Now his dialogues seem erratic, like a toddler trying to put the words together, but in vain because it does not make any sense most of the times.

Transcript from Trump’s Interview with the Time Magazine(2019):

TIME: I want to talk about some of the big themes of your campaign. I’ve been to a lot of your rallies, here are signs that say “Promises Made, Promises Kept.” At the current rate, it’s very unlikely that your wall will be built by the time Election Day comes around.

TRUMP: No, we’ll have — we’ll have, over 400, We’re building the wall right now. People don’t understand. We are building the wall right now. It is under major construction.

Trump uses simpler vocabulary and half baked sentences now. Earlier he was able to frame larger sentences and use a diverse set of words.

In 2017, STAT published an article where they tried to explain this change — they had experts on board and tried to look at the change from a scientific perspective.

If you are interested, here is the link to that article:

Trump Speaks at the Level of Eight-Year-Old

This came out of an analysis that was conducted two years back — Trump scored the lowest of any of the past 15 presidents!

The comparison was conducted based on numerous interviews, speeches and conferences for all the presidents starting from 1929. The data was compiled by a company called Factba.se. Factba.SE also maintains a database of all of Mr.Trump’s speeches, conferences, interviews and tweets — you can search for any keyword to find all that Trump has spoken related to that keyword.

If you would like to explore this online tool, here is the link:

Our IQ

We get smarter as we learn new things, but there is a capacity for each of us. My intellectual capacity is capped at some level. Can I push that further? If I am better at a lot of things, can it go worse because of external factors? Trump’s linguistic deterioration is one such example, he is getting worse.

Our Intelligence Quotient is not fixed, it changes at different life stages. A study was conducted among a bunch of youngsters that revealed significant changes in IQ owing to external patterns. The study says that what happens during the teenage years can change brain structure and cognitive ability. A lot of things can act as a catalyst — drugs, social stress, poor education or a combination of all these. Basically your surroundings have a huge impact on how your brain develops or deteriorates. This is huge, because this means that there are a lot of people who can contribute a lot of things, but unfortunately are submerged under a lack of luck.

More about this study below:

There are no authoritative studies that can claim that IQ and Age have an inverse relationship. From our observations, we can clearly state that some of the intellectual abilities reduce as people age. Donald Trump is 74 years old. To put it into perspective, Obama is just 58 years old! Had Trump been the President when he was 58, could he have acted differently? No one can tell, but it is food for thought.

Based on a particular research, our ability to think quickly and recall information peaks at 18 and then reduces as age increases. But the experts also say that at any age, all of us are getting better at something and worse at something else.

Also, there may not be an age where an Individual peaks at everything!

Find out about this research below:

Wrapping Thoughts:

I believe it is important to be well-read. I was not the brightest student in the class, but there was stuff I was good at. I believe it is important to find that thing that makes us ‘US’. Read a lot and work on yourself- work on your skills and abilities. Work so much that it makes impossible for someone else to come and embarrass you in your fort — basically you build your fort with high walls and strong base.

Old age and worries about getting old are better off left not thought about. It is inevitable and it shall happen — but how we go through it is decided by us.