Today I’ll try to make sense about Guilford’s theory of intelligence versus mine.

Guilford’s Structure of Intellect

According to Guilford’s Structure of Intellect (SI) theory (1955), an individual’s performance on intelligence tests can be traced back to the underlying mental abilities or factors of intelligence. SI theory comprises up to 150 different intellectual abilities organized along three dimensions—Operations, Content, and Products.

My theory of cerebreffectiveness, which is more or less what Guilford’s “intellect” is, also posits numerous different intellectual abilities along with what might be called three dimensions: my charactration (unless I changed its name),  accommodance and accelerance.  Are they much like Guilford’s operations, content and products?  One way they definitely are not is that my three have a single mechanism over them which I consider the g factor (which he considered his theory to reject, although I don’t think it does).

It is a mechanism I call the “cerebrexecutive” which is responsible for supervising the interaction of the three cerebral dimensions responsible for all we think and do.  To describe the process simply, the cerebrexecutive oversees the flow of cerebral energy; that determines the way the three . . . “subcerebrexecutives” interact, which in turn determines which master-cells will be activated to produce the thoughts and behavior of the individual involved at that time.  Said master-cells contribute to many operations, perhaps the same ones  Guilford hypothesized, or ones similar to them.  They are the final determinants of cerebreffectiveness.

Note: I hope to get a decent name for my three operations.  Maybe “cerebreffectors.”  Or “cerebranisms.”

Eventually, I hope to provide detailed examples of thinking and behavior that will make all this much more clear than I suspect my previous paragraph does.

Operations dimension

SI includes six operations or general intellectual processes:

1. Cognition – The ability to understand, comprehend, discover, and become aware of information.
2. Memory recording – The ability to encode information.
3. Memory retention – The ability to recall information.
4. Divergent production – The ability to generate multiple solutions to a problem; creativity.
5. Convergent production – The ability to deduce a single solution to a problem; rule-following or problem-solving.
6. Evaluation – The ability to judge whether or not information is accurate, consistent, or valid.

Interesting.  It seems to me my theory treats cognition, memory recording and memory retention as a single process.  For me, sensory-cells are activated by stimuli in both the external and internal environments and, in turn activate master-cells (m-cells) in the cerebrum.  This activation the individual involved experiences as perceptual information.   At the same time, certain master-cells are activated whose activation the individual experiences as “retroceptual” information (or memories).  In other words, the individual becomes aware of a given moment’s information both from the immediate environments and recalled while data is recorded.

Note: I have no explanation for the individual’s consciousness of perceived and remember data.  That the individual exists with a consciousness that acts as I describe is the ground premise of my theory.  All I can say about it is that it exists.  (If it doesn’t exist, then I call what it does do as existing.)

At the same time that the individual becomes aware of what he perceives and remembers, he automatically forms a preliminary understanding, comprehension, discovery, idea, etc., of it.  Example: When little Willie sees a black cat, his nervous system activates m-cells whose activation he understands to mean “black cat.”  His nervous system also activates m-cells whose state he understands as “Max,” the name the actual cat reminds him is its.  We could call the three fused processes “cognition,” it seems to me.  Large forms of cognition, of course, occur; they simply take longer to do so, and include chains of moments rather than a single one.  Little Willie, watching his cat, connects it to the cockroach he saw scampering across the floor a moment ago (I’m drawing on my sad experience as an impoverished super-genius here–please send me some money) and may form an enlarged understanding of the situation.

Guilford’s other three operations are more complex.  Divergent production is what happens, according to my theory, when the cerebrexecutive puts the accommodance mechanism in charge of things.  What that does I will describe elsewhere.  Here, it suffices to say, it is the brain’s way of being creative.  (It causes the brain to become disorganized enough to form the novel linkages of data that creativity requires, to put it most simply.)

As for convergent production, that occurs, according to my theory, when the cerebrexecutive puts the charactration mechanism in charge (or, more exactly, leaves it in charge since it’s the cerebrum’s default boss).  This causes the narrowed concentration needed to follow a possible solution to a problem to its conclusion.  Accelerance will generally participate in both operations.  In divergence, it helps the brain pull quickly pull in a potential solution once recognized.  In convergence it strengthens and narrows the focus to defeat distraction until the solution is arrived at.

As for “evaluation,” I consider that a part of both divergent and convergent thinking.  If one’s cerebrexecutive is a good one, it will bring accelerance and accommodance into play in such a way as judge each attempted solution to a problem.

In short, it seems to me, that my theory contains all the operations Guilford’s does, although with much different mechanisms responsible for them–and, I suspect, with their nature, interactions and effects much more deeply worked out.

Content dimension

SI includes four broad areas of information to which the human intellect applies the six operations:

1. Figural – Concrete, real world information, tangible objects — things in the environment. It includes visual: information perceived through seeing; auditory: information perceived through hearing; and kinesthetic: information perceived through one’s own physical actions.
2. Symbolic – Information perceived as symbols or signs that stand for something else, e.g., Arabic numerals, the letters of an alphabet, or musical and scientific notations.
3. Semantic – Concerned with verbal meaning and ideas. Generally considered to be abstract in nature.
4. Behavioral – Information perceived as acts of people. (This dimension was not fully researched in Guilford’s project, remains theoretical, and is generally not included in the final model that he proposed for describing human intelligence.)

Guilford’s  “content” translates readily into my theory of awarenesses.  His “figural” is the same as the content of my fundaceptual awareness, which is where all our fundamental perceptions of our inner and outer environments are recorded as they occur or are remembered.  His “symbolic” content is the content of my reducticeptual awareness.  His semantic content is in this awareness, too–in the verboceptual subawareness of the reducticeptual awareness–since it is also symbolic.  It is, in fact, a dominant region of that awareness.  Guilford’s behavioral dimension is not researched at all in my project but is definitely part of it.  But it supplies the content of an awareness with much else in it, the anthroceptual awareness, which has to do with all human acts, our own as well as those of others, and the acts of all living creatures as well (and supernatural ones, too!)

My theory also has a behavraceptual awareness, but its function is to carry out our own behavior.  Like all the awarenesses, it interacts with other awarenesses, so contributes to the anthroceptual awareness to possibly help it do some of the things one’s behavioral dimension does.  My theory covers many more kinds of content than Guilford’s does, for it has, at last count, ten major awarenesses, most of them with many sub-awarenesses.  These I will introduce later.

Product dimension

As the name suggests, this dimension contains results of applying particular operations to specific contents. The SI model includes six products, in increasing complexity:

1. Units – Single items of knowledge.
2. Classes – Sets of units sharing common attributes.
3. Relations – Units linked as opposites or in associations, sequences, or analogies.
4. Systems – Multiple relations interrelated to comprise structures or networks.
5. Transformations – Changes, perspectives, conversions, or mutations to knowledge.
6. Implications – Predictions, inferences, consequences, or anticipations of knowledge.

Therefore, according to Guilford there are 5 x 3 x 6 = 90 intellectual abilities or factors (his research only confirmed about three behavioral abilities, so it is generally not included in the model). Each ability stands for a particular operation in a particular content area and results in a specific product, such as Comprehension of Figural Units or Evaluation of Semantic Implications.

I’m not entirely sure just how parallel my theory is to Guilford’s idea of products.  His units suggest my knowlecules, or units of data concerning one stimulus or stimulus cluster the individual takes as a unified whole (or not, depending on the context–e.g., a horse is such a unified whole, but so is a horse’s mane, or a herd of horses.  His classes are like what I call “knowleplexes”–for data more complicated than single units, like the entire field of zoology.  I consider his other products as simply different combinations of knowlecules.

I believe my theory contains elements his does not.  I’m thinking of mechanisms for determining cerebral pain and pleasure, which contribute greatly to cerebreffectiveness.  It’s what tags thoughts as errors or acts of a Grumman.  I mean, of genius.  Also the etiologiplex (or whatever I’m calling it) which is responsible for apprehending a thing’s cause or effect and recording it, which is obviously important cerebreffectively.  Ah, and there are many instincts in my theory such as fear of snakes, recognition of human faces, vicarious sympathy, etc., that could be considered products like Guilford’s.  A set of innate personae like Jung’s, too.

Guilford’s original model was composed of 120 components (when the behavioral component is included) because he had not separated Figural Content into separate Auditory and Visual contents, nor had he separated Memory into Memory Recording and Memory Retention. When he separated Figural into Auditory and Visual contents, his model increased to 5 x 5 x 6 = 150 categories. When Guilford separated the Memory functions, his model finally increased to 180 factors.

I suspect if I carried out the same calculation with my equivalents of Guilford’s operations, content and products, I’d get a lot more categories than 150.  I think I’d have at least one more set of factors, too–at the tail end of each sequence when muscles or glands turn a cerebreffect (i.e., the final result of a cerebrexecutive command) into an action (which isn’t always the case because many sequences end in thoughts or feeling only).  At this tail end, purely physical abilities convert the cerebreffective portion of the sequence into anthreffectiveness, the success of which can be due in great part to the effectiveness of the muscles’ or glands’ contribution.  But here my concern is only with Guilford’s idea of intelligence, or intellectual ability, and mine of cerebreffectiveness.

Criticism

Various researchers have criticized the statistical techniques used by Guilford. According to Jensen (1998), Guilford’s contention that a g-factor was untenable was influenced by his observation that cognitive tests of U.S. Air Force personnel did not show correlations significantly different from zero. According to one reanalysis, this resulted from artifacts and methodological errors. Applying more robust methodologies, the correlations in Guilford’s data sets are positive.  In another reanalysis, randomly generated models were found to be as well supported as Guilford’s own theory.

My criticism is merely that Guilford never had a chance to discuss his theory with me.  I think mine does what he was trying to do.  I doubt the application of statistics to his theory or competitors of it have much chance of being of value.  Too many variables concerned.

I’m pleased I got into Guilford.  His theory suggests to me that I’m not that much of a crank.  No doubt I’m finding it more like mine than it really is.  Still, I didn’t feel like I was straining too much to reveal the possible similarities I did.  Another plus of my adventure is that I think I learned a little more about what I’m doing.  Best of all, I had fun!  Zah-goo!

.