By Vicki Mata
How quickly do you adapt to a new place of work, study, or residence? How quickly do you master new responsibilities at a new job, remember where and what is located after moving to a new city, and meet new people where you have not been before?
How easily do you accept changes in your surroundings, from new fashions, music, movies, and a new "remote" work format? Essay writers believe that adaptive intelligence enables in improving the ability to write academic papers.
What is adaptive intelligence: from the background
Adaptability is a quality inherent in any living organism on a reflexive level. Any residing organism adapts to the change of day and night, winter and summer. Seeds of plants caught in an unfavorable environment adapt to it and manage to sprout even through asphalt or on a steep rocky slope.
Protozoa react to stimuli through reflex reactions. We remember experiments from school when a frog with its head cut off "yanked" its foot away from the sulfuric acid instead of "waiting" for it to eat it.
The mammalian animal world adapts to its environment more consciously:
- Seeking shelter from predators
- Stalking prey
- Hiding from bad weather and people
- Recognizing poisoned bait
Adaptability is the key to survival in the animal world, just as it was for humans at the dawn of civilization.
Now we do not need to hide from predators, but in the city, we need to adapt to heavy traffic because the pedestrian is always proper, but not always alive. We don't need to go hunting, but we need to adapt our needs to our income or our income to our needs because with any imbalance, we would have nothing to eat.
We need to adapt and socialize in society because otherwise, we will face great difficulties building communication, finding our second half, employment, and career. It will be difficult to survive in the modern world without all this. Is it possible to go "to the village, in the middle of nowhere, in Saratov" and master subsistence farming? Then will we adapt to the lack of resources and constantly changing weather conditions?
The difference between humans and animals is that humans can choose, in principle, what to adapt to and what survival strategy they prefer. And it is this capacity for conscious adaptation that constitutes the essence of adaptive intelligence.
The first person to talk about the adaptive nature of intelligence was Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896-1980). According to his views, intelligence development occurs through the adaptation of the subject to the changing environment. Still, the success of adaptation to changes largely depends on the subject's intelligence. Thus, these are reciprocal and interdependent processes.
Today, scientists and practitioners operate with such concepts as the coefficient of mental intelligence, which means the level of mental development (IQ), the coefficient of emotional intelligence (EQ), positive intelligence (PQ), and adaptive intelligence (AQ).
Like other coefficients, adaptive quotient attempts to measure and present incalculable units. Thus, you can find an English-language test for AQ, an online questionnaire with nine questions where you get final scores and comments based on your answers.
There are variations of tests where the coefficient of adaptive intelligence is determined along with other indicators. Depending on the ratio of the results obtained for each indicator, a person's suitability for a particular activity is determined.
These are variations of the PAEI and AEI tests, the names of which are just folded from the first letters that indicate different types of intelligence:
- Positive quotient (PQ).
- Adaptability quotient (AQ).
- Emotional quotient (EQ).
- Intelligence quotient (IQ).
One way or another, adaptability and adaptive intelligence are important to humans. So important that scientists are developing adaptive artificial intelligence and thinking about how to implement adaptive learning with artificial intelligence, for example, in the context of adaptive physical education for children with intellectual disabilities, where artificial intelligence could impartially assess the child's real needs and abilities to adapt to the world around them.
These are all topics for a separate study, but today we will talk about how humans can develop their adaptive intelligence throughout their lives.
How do you develop adaptive intelligence?
So, how can you develop adaptive intelligence if you feel that adapting to rapidly changing circumstances is not easy for you? Let's take a look at what the experts advise us and turn to:
Top 7 ways to develop adaptive intelligence:
- Perform tasks that are completely new to you, up to and including trying to solve problems from your high school algebra or physics course that you haven't touched since high school. New tasks stimulate the development of new neural connections and flexibility of thinking.
- Choose the unknown more often and act in new ways more often. You can start with little things. Let's say getting up 10 minutes early in the morning and starting your day... by reading a book rather than a cup of coffee and watching the news. You should do the same everywhere. So, if you are offered to participate in a new and still little-understood project, do not rush to refuse.
- Try to do familiar things differently than usual. For example, make a new route to work, cook an omelet with different seasoning, postpone the general cleaning from Saturday to Thursday, and on Saturday, go for a walk without thinking that you have household chores at home.
- Incorporate new habits into your life. You don't have to read a book every morning, but you can make it a rule to do a short two-minute warm-up or exercise if you haven't done it so far. Or, for example, memorize a dozen new words on Monday and then check how many of those words are left in memory on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday.
- Use the navigator less often and rely more on your memory and your ability to spatial orientation. It's not difficult at all if you just leave 10 minutes early.
- Make it a habit to think through different scenarios before you do anything. If your activity does not involve making independent decisions, fantasize about what you will do if tomorrow your house, for example, is blown apart by an explosion, which is not such an abstraction in our turbulent world.
- Interact with members of other professions outside of your field. It broadens your horizons and often suggests new solutions to unfamiliar problems.
It should be noted that there are many more opportunities to broaden one's horizons by communicating with representatives of other professions than one might think at first glance. It is not for nothing that marketers would do a better job of improving students' academic performance than teachers do now.
Marketers would allow math to be studied from the age of 18, deliver math textbooks in opaque black bags like pornographic magazines, and have doctors lecture schools about the dangers of math, which causes nearsightedness, scoliosis, and flatfootedness. To the question "Why flat-footedness?" you can make just be mysteriously silent or say that the answer is in the biology textbook, the study of which will be banned next month.
In general, expanding the circle of communication will benefit you enormously. The book "The Power of Others. The environment defines us." [G. Cloud, 2018]. It is, first of all, a lot of stories from life, which you can just read or look at them a little differently than if you perceive them without the help of the author of the book. You could even say that reading a book itself already broadens your social circle as if you met a fellow traveler on the train on a long trip and heard a cautionary tale from him.
What else do the experts advise? Venture capitalist and investment advisor Natalie Fratto shared in one of her talks that when she needs to quickly navigate whether a startup has prospects and whether it's worth allocating funding to a petitioner, she first tries to determine whether the petitioner has the quality of adaptability.
Why adaptability? Simply because there will always be many surprises at the start of any project, and many things will not go according to plan. If a person does not have the necessary level of adaptive intelligence, he will not cope with unexpected circumstances. Thus, adaptive intelligence determines how an entrepreneur will survive in the stormy sea of business and whether he will get a chance to start his own business.
6 nuances on the road to adaptability:
- Alternatives - Require that any proposal necessarily contain multiple alternatives offered. It promotes cognitive and organizational flexibility.
- Disruptors - ask yourself what is disrupting your business from the inside out and on the periphery, rather than focusing only on what your competitors are doing.
- Assumptions - get in the habit of thinking and asking questions about what you think you kind of "know." It may be that many formerly obvious things are not as immutable today as they were just yesterday.
- Plans - Make it a habit to reflect on plans that take your business beyond what you know. For starters, it's worth asking yourself the questions: What are megatrends? What are you under-exploiting? What might you not know?
- Threats - it pays to treat threats or risks to your business as an important part of the planning process and respond with counter initiatives.
- Speed - you should think about increasing your own "clock speed" and making your planning faster and more flexible.
Bio: Vicki Mata is an experienced education writer who provides information about education in general and helpful tips. Vicki displays her expertise on the WowEssays blog and other independent platforms.
