Being loyal to a denomination, I’m no stranger to filling out forms and reporting stats. There are good reasons for this accountability, and we at 12Stone® Church are good team players in the Wesleyan Church. We report all numbers requested. I’m not saying it’s fun, but it’s a healthy practice.
We also keep a demographic spreadsheet of more numbers than you could imagine, from attendance to car counts. Again, these stats are kept for good and practical reasons. They help us in everything from decision-making to setting budgets. But I’ve been thinking about the things we care about, things that are more difficult if not near impossible to track, and started making a list.
I’m not sure how well we track all of them. Some we are good at, others we might need to improve. We do chase stories of life change, and that is a great practice, but I think there may be more to learn about strengthening a local church ministry by knowing some of these “other numbers.”
How about you, how close of a pulse do you have to these ten in your church?
1. Serving the Poor
Jesus speaks much about caring for those in need and those who are poor among us. A mark of a strong and healthy church is how it cares for people who may never attend and can do nothing for the church. Your church, and the one I serve, can’t help everyone, but I believe there are certain ones in need that God intends for us to serve.
2. Visitors That Don’t Look Like You
When I travel to churches I’m amazed at how similar everyone looks. That’s not bad, I fully understand natural connections, culture, and how people invite friends. All good. But recently I sat by a twenty-something with some cool looking tats, a full sleeve, piercings and carried a well worn bible. He worshiped with passion and was warm and genuine when we said hi. He looked the opposite of me, (and way cooler). I couldn’t help but think that was a good thing and that God smiled.
3. Next Generation Called to Ministry
I will admit a personal passion and bias for this one. It seems to me that for nearly twenty years or more, we are losing ground on young “sharpies” being called to full time ministry nation wide. The church today is not attracting them enough for God to get a chance to capture their hearts. Yes, I know that God can call young leaders any way He wants, but He often uses the local church. The future of the church depends on the “best and brightest” being called and committed to vocational ministry. That’s one of the reasons we are so fired-up about our two-year post college residency training program for ministry students.
4. Restored Marriages
Divorce is rampant. I think the accepted norm is that 50% of all marriages will end in divorce. We can’t settle for that as acceptable. Each time the ministry of your church helps to prevent a divorce that is a huge Kingdom win! That really matters! From pre-marital training, to biblical teaching, to workshops and referrals to professional therapists, all your efforts for strong marriages are worth it!
5. New Christians / Baptisms
This may be the most common number on this list, but I couldn’t write this article and not include it. Salvation is at the core of the Great Commission. A redeemed life is at the very epicenter of what we do! Each baptism represents an amazing story. I’m confident you feel the same about reaching people, and I want to encourage you to stay fired-up about seeing people come to Christ.
6. Addictions Broken and Fear Conquered
This may not be as common as divorce in our culture, but it’s more prevalent than I would have imagined, and far more so than twenty to twenty-five years ago. I won’t attempt to list addictions, the list is long, and we all understand fear. The point is that the freedom that comes from an individual breaking through and living out of bondage is incredibly powerful. Your church may not be equipped to deal with these complex issues, but there are organizations in your community you can partner with in order to help make a difference, even for a few.
7. First Time Tithers
When it comes to Christian maturity, the returning of a tithe from one’s income is often the last thing to happen in a Christian’s life. And for many, it never happens. It’s not about the money. Yes, your church needs money to operate, but it’s really about a surrendered life that chooses to trust God. Few things are more powerful than when someone realizes that they may be in charge but they are not in control. Be bold in your teaching about trusting God with finances!
8. New Leaders and Volunteers
Next to the favor of God, everything rises and falls on leadership. My personal belief is that it’s nearly impossible to over invest in leadership development. Leaders raise up volunteers and volunteers make ministry possible. Recruiting, inspiring, encouraging, training and empowering your volunteers is essential and your leaders will help you do that!
9. Hours Devoted to Prayer
I don’t really think we should count how many hours we pray, but I can’t help wonder what the correlation might actually be when you compare hours in prayer to the health and life change impact of a local church. I don’t think God is keeping score, but I do think He cares about what our heart treasures and how we chase after Him. Candidly, I believe prayer makes a huge difference, in fact, I think it is the true difference maker for any local church.
10. Kids Treated with Respect
Jesus had some very clear thoughts about how we are to treat the children. How strong is your children’s ministry? Do you put as much effort toward the kids as you do the adults in “big church”? It’s not a competition, but doing your best in children’s ministry really matters. If your children’s ministry needs a lot of work, don’t stress over it, but commit to improving it a little bit at a time and you’ll be surprised at what can be accomplished in 6 to 9 months!
So there you have it –a list of ten different numbers. How would you evaluate your ministry with these ten? Are there one or two that you want to focus on? What would you take off this list? What would you add?
Making a genius
In his new science series "Genius" on PBS, Stephen Hawking is testing out the idea that anyone can "think like a genius." By posing big questions — for instance, "Can we travel through time?" — to people with average intelligence, the famed theoretical physicist aims to find the answers through the sheer power of the human mind."It's a fun show that tries to find out if ordinary people are smart enough to think like the greatest minds who ever lived," Hawking said in a statement. "Being an optimist, I think they will." [Mad Geniuses: 10 Odd Tales About Famous Scientists]
Optimism aside, answering a genius-level question does not a genius make — at least, not according to psychologist Frank Lawlis, supervisory testing director for American Mensa.
"The geniuses ask questions. They don't know the answers, but they know a lot of questions and their curiosity takes them into their fields," Lawlis told Live Science. "[They're] somebody that has the capacity to inquire at that high level and to be curious to pursue that high level of understanding and then be able to communicate it to the rest of us."
You must statistically be a genius to qualify for Mensa, with a measured intelligence that exceeds 98 percent of the rest of the population. However, Lawlis said even these tests can exclude some of the most brilliant of thinkers.
"The way you put items together to test for intelligence is that you already know the answer," Lawlis said. "That's the whole point. You create questions that have real answers."
For instance, Albert Einstein would have likely done poorly on IQ tests, Lawlis said.
"It really comes down to thinking outside the box, and you really can't test that," Lawlis said. "When they take these tests, instead of directing their attention to the correct answer, they think of a jillion other answers that would also work, so consequently they get confused and do very poorly."
A genius's process
Consisting of a mixture of intelligence, creativity and contribution to society, genius is hard to pinpoint, saidDean Keith Simonton, a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis.In the Scientific American Mind magazine's special issue on genius, Simonton hypothesized that all geniuses use the same general process to make their contributions to the world.
They start with a search for ideas, not necessarily a problem in need of a solution. From this search, geniuses will generate a number of questions, and begin a long series of trials and errors. They then find a solution, for a problem others may not have even been aware of.
"Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see," Simonton said, quoting the 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.
"Exceptional thinkers, it turns out, stand on common ground when they launch their arrows into the unknown," Simonton said.
Inside the brain of a genius
In an attempt to "discern what combination of elements tends to produce particularly creative brains," psychiatrist and neuroscientist Nancy Andreasen at the University of Iowa used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures brain activity by detecting changes associated with blood flow.Andreasen selected the creative subjects from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, and a control group from a mixture of professions. The control group was matched to the writers based on age, education and IQ — with both test and control groups averaging an IQ of 120, considered very smart but not exceptionally so, according to Andreasen.
Based on these controls, Andreasen looked for what separated the creative’s brains from the controls.
During the fMRI scans of participants, the subjects were asked to perform three different tasks: word association, picture association and pattern recognition. The creatives' brains showed stronger activations in their association cortices. These are the most extensively developed regions in the human brain and help interpret and utilize visual, auditory, sensory and motor information.
Andreasen set out to find what else, in addition to brain processes, linked the 13 creatives’ brains.
"Some people see things others cannot, and they are right, and we call them creative geniuses," Andreasen wrote in The Atlantic, referring to participants in her study. "Some people see things others cannot, and they are wrong, and we call them mentally ill."
And then there are people who fit into both categories.
What Andreasen found is that there is another common mark of creative genius: mental illness.
Through interviews and extensive research, Andreasen discovered that the creatives she studied had a higher rate of mental illness, which included a family history of mental illness. The most common diagnoses were bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety and alcoholism. The question now is whether the mental illness contributes to the genius or if it's the other way around, she said.
In a study of the brain of one of the most famous geniuses in history, Einstein, scientists found distinct physical features, which may help to explain his genius, Live Science reported when the study came out in the journal Brain in 2012.
Previously unpublished photographs of the physicist's brain revealed that Einstein had extra folding in his gray matter, the part of the brain that processes conscious thinking, the study researchers found. His frontal lobes, the brain regions tied to abstract thought and planning, had particularly elaborate folding. [See Images of Albert Einstein's Brain]
"It's a really sophisticated part of the human brain," Dean Falk, study co-author and an anthropologist at Florida State University, told Live Science, referring to gray matter. "And [Einstein's] is extraordinary."
Be it high IQ, curiosity or creativity, the factor that makes someone a genius may remain a mystery. Though Mensa can continue to test for quantitative intelligence in areas such as verbal capacity and spatial reasoning, there is no test for the next Einstein, Lawlis said.
"I don't know anybody that could really predict this extremely high level of intelligence and contribution," Lawlis said. "That's the mystery."
- See more at: http://www.livescience.com/55028-what-makes-a-genius.html#sthash.aMGRZa1G.dpuf
Making a genius
In his new science series "Genius" on PBS, Stephen Hawking is testing out the idea that anyone can "think like a genius." By posing big questions — for instance, "Can we travel through time?" — to people with average intelligence, the famed theoretical physicist aims to find the answers through the sheer power of the human mind."It's a fun show that tries to find out if ordinary people are smart enough to think like the greatest minds who ever lived," Hawking said in a statement. "Being an optimist, I think they will." [Mad Geniuses: 10 Odd Tales About Famous Scientists]
Optimism aside, answering a genius-level question does not a genius make — at least, not according to psychologist Frank Lawlis, supervisory testing director for American Mensa.
"The geniuses ask questions. They don't know the answers, but they know a lot of questions and their curiosity takes them into their fields," Lawlis told Live Science. "[They're] somebody that has the capacity to inquire at that high level and to be curious to pursue that high level of understanding and then be able to communicate it to the rest of us."
You must statistically be a genius to qualify for Mensa, with a measured intelligence that exceeds 98 percent of the rest of the population. However, Lawlis said even these tests can exclude some of the most brilliant of thinkers.
"The way you put items together to test for intelligence is that you already know the answer," Lawlis said. "That's the whole point. You create questions that have real answers."
For instance, Albert Einstein would have likely done poorly on IQ tests, Lawlis said.
"It really comes down to thinking outside the box, and you really can't test that," Lawlis said. "When they take these tests, instead of directing their attention to the correct answer, they think of a jillion other answers that would also work, so consequently they get confused and do very poorly."
A genius's process
Consisting of a mixture of intelligence, creativity and contribution to society, genius is hard to pinpoint, saidDean Keith Simonton, a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis.In the Scientific American Mind magazine's special issue on genius, Simonton hypothesized that all geniuses use the same general process to make their contributions to the world.
They start with a search for ideas, not necessarily a problem in need of a solution. From this search, geniuses will generate a number of questions, and begin a long series of trials and errors. They then find a solution, for a problem others may not have even been aware of.
"Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see," Simonton said, quoting the 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.
"Exceptional thinkers, it turns out, stand on common ground when they launch their arrows into the unknown," Simonton said.
Inside the brain of a genius
In an attempt to "discern what combination of elements tends to produce particularly creative brains," psychiatrist and neuroscientist Nancy Andreasen at the University of Iowa used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures brain activity by detecting changes associated with blood flow.Andreasen selected the creative subjects from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, and a control group from a mixture of professions. The control group was matched to the writers based on age, education and IQ — with both test and control groups averaging an IQ of 120, considered very smart but not exceptionally so, according to Andreasen.
Based on these controls, Andreasen looked for what separated the creative’s brains from the controls.
During the fMRI scans of participants, the subjects were asked to perform three different tasks: word association, picture association and pattern recognition. The creatives' brains showed stronger activations in their association cortices. These are the most extensively developed regions in the human brain and help interpret and utilize visual, auditory, sensory and motor information.
Andreasen set out to find what else, in addition to brain processes, linked the 13 creatives’ brains.
"Some people see things others cannot, and they are right, and we call them creative geniuses," Andreasen wrote in The Atlantic, referring to participants in her study. "Some people see things others cannot, and they are wrong, and we call them mentally ill."
And then there are people who fit into both categories.
What Andreasen found is that there is another common mark of creative genius: mental illness.
Through interviews and extensive research, Andreasen discovered that the creatives she studied had a higher rate of mental illness, which included a family history of mental illness. The most common diagnoses were bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety and alcoholism. The question now is whether the mental illness contributes to the genius or if it's the other way around, she said.
In a study of the brain of one of the most famous geniuses in history, Einstein, scientists found distinct physical features, which may help to explain his genius, Live Science reported when the study came out in the journal Brain in 2012.
Previously unpublished photographs of the physicist's brain revealed that Einstein had extra folding in his gray matter, the part of the brain that processes conscious thinking, the study researchers found. His frontal lobes, the brain regions tied to abstract thought and planning, had particularly elaborate folding. [See Images of Albert Einstein's Brain]
"It's a really sophisticated part of the human brain," Dean Falk, study co-author and an anthropologist at Florida State University, told Live Science, referring to gray matter. "And [Einstein's] is extraordinary."
Be it high IQ, curiosity or creativity, the factor that makes someone a genius may remain a mystery. Though Mensa can continue to test for quantitative intelligence in areas such as verbal capacity and spatial reasoning, there is no test for the next Einstein, Lawlis said.
"I don't know anybody that could really predict this extremely high level of intelligence and contribution," Lawlis said. "That's the mystery."
- See more at: http://www.livescience.com/55028-what-makes-a-genius.html#sthash.aMGRZa1G.dpuf
Making a genius
In his new science series "Genius" on PBS, Stephen Hawking is testing out the idea that anyone can "think like a genius." By posing big questions — for instance, "Can we travel through time?" — to people with average intelligence, the famed theoretical physicist aims to find the answers through the sheer power of the human mind."It's a fun show that tries to find out if ordinary people are smart enough to think like the greatest minds who ever lived," Hawking said in a statement. "Being an optimist, I think they will." [Mad Geniuses: 10 Odd Tales About Famous Scientists]
Optimism aside, answering a genius-level question does not a genius make — at least, not according to psychologist Frank Lawlis, supervisory testing director for American Mensa.
"The geniuses ask questions. They don't know the answers, but they know a lot of questions and their curiosity takes them into their fields," Lawlis told Live Science. "[They're] somebody that has the capacity to inquire at that high level and to be curious to pursue that high level of understanding and then be able to communicate it to the rest of us."
You must statistically be a genius to qualify for Mensa, with a measured intelligence that exceeds 98 percent of the rest of the population. However, Lawlis said even these tests can exclude some of the most brilliant of thinkers.
"The way you put items together to test for intelligence is that you already know the answer," Lawlis said. "That's the whole point. You create questions that have real answers."
For instance, Albert Einstein would have likely done poorly on IQ tests, Lawlis said.
"It really comes down to thinking outside the box, and you really can't test that," Lawlis said. "When they take these tests, instead of directing their attention to the correct answer, they think of a jillion other answers that would also work, so consequently they get confused and do very poorly."
A genius's process
Consisting of a mixture of intelligence, creativity and contribution to society, genius is hard to pinpoint, saidDean Keith Simonton, a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis.In the Scientific American Mind magazine's special issue on genius, Simonton hypothesized that all geniuses use the same general process to make their contributions to the world.
They start with a search for ideas, not necessarily a problem in need of a solution. From this search, geniuses will generate a number of questions, and begin a long series of trials and errors. They then find a solution, for a problem others may not have even been aware of.
"Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see," Simonton said, quoting the 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.
"Exceptional thinkers, it turns out, stand on common ground when they launch their arrows into the unknown," Simonton said.
Inside the brain of a genius
In an attempt to "discern what combination of elements tends to produce particularly creative brains," psychiatrist and neuroscientist Nancy Andreasen at the University of Iowa used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures brain activity by detecting changes associated with blood flow.Andreasen selected the creative subjects from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, and a control group from a mixture of professions. The control group was matched to the writers based on age, education and IQ — with both test and control groups averaging an IQ of 120, considered very smart but not exceptionally so, according to Andreasen.
Based on these controls, Andreasen looked for what separated the creative’s brains from the controls.
During the fMRI scans of participants, the subjects were asked to perform three different tasks: word association, picture association and pattern recognition. The creatives' brains showed stronger activations in their association cortices. These are the most extensively developed regions in the human brain and help interpret and utilize visual, auditory, sensory and motor information.
Andreasen set out to find what else, in addition to brain processes, linked the 13 creatives’ brains.
"Some people see things others cannot, and they are right, and we call them creative geniuses," Andreasen wrote in The Atlantic, referring to participants in her study. "Some people see things others cannot, and they are wrong, and we call them mentally ill."
And then there are people who fit into both categories.
What Andreasen found is that there is another common mark of creative genius: mental illness.
Through interviews and extensive research, Andreasen discovered that the creatives she studied had a higher rate of mental illness, which included a family history of mental illness. The most common diagnoses were bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety and alcoholism. The question now is whether the mental illness contributes to the genius or if it's the other way around, she said.
In a study of the brain of one of the most famous geniuses in history, Einstein, scientists found distinct physical features, which may help to explain his genius, Live Science reported when the study came out in the journal Brain in 2012.
Previously unpublished photographs of the physicist's brain revealed that Einstein had extra folding in his gray matter, the part of the brain that processes conscious thinking, the study researchers found. His frontal lobes, the brain regions tied to abstract thought and planning, had particularly elaborate folding. [See Images of Albert Einstein's Brain]
"It's a really sophisticated part of the human brain," Dean Falk, study co-author and an anthropologist at Florida State University, told Live Science, referring to gray matter. "And [Einstein's] is extraordinary."
Be it high IQ, curiosity or creativity, the factor that makes someone a genius may remain a mystery. Though Mensa can continue to test for quantitative intelligence in areas such as verbal capacity and spatial reasoning, there is no test for the next Einstein, Lawlis said.
"I don't know anybody that could really predict this extremely high level of intelligence and contribution," Lawlis said. "That's the mystery."
- See more at: http://www.livescience.com/55028-what-makes-a-genius.html#sthash.aMGRZa1G.dpuf
Making a genius
In his new science series "Genius" on PBS, Stephen Hawking is testing out the idea that anyone can "think like a genius." By posing big questions — for instance, "Can we travel through time?" — to people with average intelligence, the famed theoretical physicist aims to find the answers through the sheer power of the human mind."It's a fun show that tries to find out if ordinary people are smart enough to think like the greatest minds who ever lived," Hawking said in a statement. "Being an optimist, I think they will." [Mad Geniuses: 10 Odd Tales About Famous Scientists]
Optimism aside, answering a genius-level question does not a genius make — at least, not according to psychologist Frank Lawlis, supervisory testing director for American Mensa.
"The geniuses ask questions. They don't know the answers, but they know a lot of questions and their curiosity takes them into their fields," Lawlis told Live Science. "[They're] somebody that has the capacity to inquire at that high level and to be curious to pursue that high level of understanding and then be able to communicate it to the rest of us."
You must statistically be a genius to qualify for Mensa, with a measured intelligence that exceeds 98 percent of the rest of the population. However, Lawlis said even these tests can exclude some of the most brilliant of thinkers.
"The way you put items together to test for intelligence is that you already know the answer," Lawlis said. "That's the whole point. You create questions that have real answers."
For instance, Albert Einstein would have likely done poorly on IQ tests, Lawlis said.
"It really comes down to thinking outside the box, and you really can't test that," Lawlis said. "When they take these tests, instead of directing their attention to the correct answer, they think of a jillion other answers that would also work, so consequently they get confused and do very poorly."
A genius's process
Consisting of a mixture of intelligence, creativity and contribution to society, genius is hard to pinpoint, saidDean Keith Simonton, a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis.In the Scientific American Mind magazine's special issue on genius, Simonton hypothesized that all geniuses use the same general process to make their contributions to the world.
They start with a search for ideas, not necessarily a problem in need of a solution. From this search, geniuses will generate a number of questions, and begin a long series of trials and errors. They then find a solution, for a problem others may not have even been aware of.
"Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see," Simonton said, quoting the 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.
"Exceptional thinkers, it turns out, stand on common ground when they launch their arrows into the unknown," Simonton said.
Inside the brain of a genius
In an attempt to "discern what combination of elements tends to produce particularly creative brains," psychiatrist and neuroscientist Nancy Andreasen at the University of Iowa used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures brain activity by detecting changes associated with blood flow.Andreasen selected the creative subjects from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, and a control group from a mixture of professions. The control group was matched to the writers based on age, education and IQ — with both test and control groups averaging an IQ of 120, considered very smart but not exceptionally so, according to Andreasen.
Based on these controls, Andreasen looked for what separated the creative’s brains from the controls.
During the fMRI scans of participants, the subjects were asked to perform three different tasks: word association, picture association and pattern recognition. The creatives' brains showed stronger activations in their association cortices. These are the most extensively developed regions in the human brain and help interpret and utilize visual, auditory, sensory and motor information.
Andreasen set out to find what else, in addition to brain processes, linked the 13 creatives’ brains.
"Some people see things others cannot, and they are right, and we call them creative geniuses," Andreasen wrote in The Atlantic, referring to participants in her study. "Some people see things others cannot, and they are wrong, and we call them mentally ill."
And then there are people who fit into both categories.
What Andreasen found is that there is another common mark of creative genius: mental illness.
Through interviews and extensive research, Andreasen discovered that the creatives she studied had a higher rate of mental illness, which included a family history of mental illness. The most common diagnoses were bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety and alcoholism. The question now is whether the mental illness contributes to the genius or if it's the other way around, she said.
In a study of the brain of one of the most famous geniuses in history, Einstein, scientists found distinct physical features, which may help to explain his genius, Live Science reported when the study came out in the journal Brain in 2012.
Previously unpublished photographs of the physicist's brain revealed that Einstein had extra folding in his gray matter, the part of the brain that processes conscious thinking, the study researchers found. His frontal lobes, the brain regions tied to abstract thought and planning, had particularly elaborate folding. [See Images of Albert Einstein's Brain]
"It's a really sophisticated part of the human brain," Dean Falk, study co-author and an anthropologist at Florida State University, told Live Science, referring to gray matter. "And [Einstein's] is extraordinary."
Be it high IQ, curiosity or creativity, the factor that makes someone a genius may remain a mystery. Though Mensa can continue to test for quantitative intelligence in areas such as verbal capacity and spatial reasoning, there is no test for the next Einstein, Lawlis said.
"I don't know anybody that could really predict this extremely high level of intelligence and contribution," Lawlis said. "That's the mystery."
- See more at: http://www.livescience.com/55028-what-makes-a-genius.html#sthash.aMGRZa1G.dpuf
Making a genius
In his new science series "Genius" on PBS, Stephen Hawking is testing out the idea that anyone can "think like a genius." By posing big questions — for instance, "Can we travel through time?" — to people with average intelligence, the famed theoretical physicist aims to find the answers through the sheer power of the human mind."It's a fun show that tries to find out if ordinary people are smart enough to think like the greatest minds who ever lived," Hawking said in a statement. "Being an optimist, I think they will." [Mad Geniuses: 10 Odd Tales About Famous Scientists]
Optimism aside, answering a genius-level question does not a genius make — at least, not according to psychologist Frank Lawlis, supervisory testing director for American Mensa.
"The geniuses ask questions. They don't know the answers, but they know a lot of questions and their curiosity takes them into their fields," Lawlis told Live Science. "[They're] somebody that has the capacity to inquire at that high level and to be curious to pursue that high level of understanding and then be able to communicate it to the rest of us."
You must statistically be a genius to qualify for Mensa, with a measured intelligence that exceeds 98 percent of the rest of the population. However, Lawlis said even these tests can exclude some of the most brilliant of thinkers.
"The way you put items together to test for intelligence is that you already know the answer," Lawlis said. "That's the whole point. You create questions that have real answers."
For instance, Albert Einstein would have likely done poorly on IQ tests, Lawlis said.
"It really comes down to thinking outside the box, and you really can't test that," Lawlis said. "When they take these tests, instead of directing their attention to the correct answer, they think of a jillion other answers that would also work, so consequently they get confused and do very poorly."
A genius's process
Consisting of a mixture of intelligence, creativity and contribution to society, genius is hard to pinpoint, saidDean Keith Simonton, a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis.In the Scientific American Mind magazine's special issue on genius, Simonton hypothesized that all geniuses use the same general process to make their contributions to the world.
They start with a search for ideas, not necessarily a problem in need of a solution. From this search, geniuses will generate a number of questions, and begin a long series of trials and errors. They then find a solution, for a problem others may not have even been aware of.
"Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see," Simonton said, quoting the 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.
"Exceptional thinkers, it turns out, stand on common ground when they launch their arrows into the unknown," Simonton said.
Inside the brain of a genius
In an attempt to "discern what combination of elements tends to produce particularly creative brains," psychiatrist and neuroscientist Nancy Andreasen at the University of Iowa used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures brain activity by detecting changes associated with blood flow.Andreasen selected the creative subjects from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, and a control group from a mixture of professions. The control group was matched to the writers based on age, education and IQ — with both test and control groups averaging an IQ of 120, considered very smart but not exceptionally so, according to Andreasen.
Based on these controls, Andreasen looked for what separated the creative’s brains from the controls.
During the fMRI scans of participants, the subjects were asked to perform three different tasks: word association, picture association and pattern recognition. The creatives' brains showed stronger activations in their association cortices. These are the most extensively developed regions in the human brain and help interpret and utilize visual, auditory, sensory and motor information.
Andreasen set out to find what else, in addition to brain processes, linked the 13 creatives’ brains.
"Some people see things others cannot, and they are right, and we call them creative geniuses," Andreasen wrote in The Atlantic, referring to participants in her study. "Some people see things others cannot, and they are wrong, and we call them mentally ill."
And then there are people who fit into both categories.
What Andreasen found is that there is another common mark of creative genius: mental illness.
Through interviews and extensive research, Andreasen discovered that the creatives she studied had a higher rate of mental illness, which included a family history of mental illness. The most common diagnoses were bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety and alcoholism. The question now is whether the mental illness contributes to the genius or if it's the other way around, she said.
In a study of the brain of one of the most famous geniuses in history, Einstein, scientists found distinct physical features, which may help to explain his genius, Live Science reported when the study came out in the journal Brain in 2012.
Previously unpublished photographs of the physicist's brain revealed that Einstein had extra folding in his gray matter, the part of the brain that processes conscious thinking, the study researchers found. His frontal lobes, the brain regions tied to abstract thought and planning, had particularly elaborate folding. [See Images of Albert Einstein's Brain]
"It's a really sophisticated part of the human brain," Dean Falk, study co-author and an anthropologist at Florida State University, told Live Science, referring to gray matter. "And [Einstein's] is extraordinary."
Be it high IQ, curiosity or creativity, the factor that makes someone a genius may remain a mystery. Though Mensa can continue to test for quantitative intelligence in areas such as verbal capacity and spatial reasoning, there is no test for the next Einstein, Lawlis said.
"I don't know anybody that could really predict this extremely high level of intelligence and contribution," Lawlis said. "That's the mystery."
- See more at: http://www.livescience.com/55028-what-makes-a-genius.html#sthash.aMGRZa1G.dpuf
Making a genius
In his new science series "Genius" on PBS, Stephen Hawking is testing out the idea that anyone can "think like a genius." By posing big questions — for instance, "Can we travel through time?" — to people with average intelligence, the famed theoretical physicist aims to find the answers through the sheer power of the human mind."It's a fun show that tries to find out if ordinary people are smart enough to think like the greatest minds who ever lived," Hawking said in a statement. "Being an optimist, I think they will." [Mad Geniuses: 10 Odd Tales About Famous Scientists]
Optimism aside, answering a genius-level question does not a genius make — at least, not according to psychologist Frank Lawlis, supervisory testing director for American Mensa.
"The geniuses ask questions. They don't know the answers, but they know a lot of questions and their curiosity takes them into their fields," Lawlis told Live Science. "[They're] somebody that has the capacity to inquire at that high level and to be curious to pursue that high level of understanding and then be able to communicate it to the rest of us."
You must statistically be a genius to qualify for Mensa, with a measured intelligence that exceeds 98 percent of the rest of the population. However, Lawlis said even these tests can exclude some of the most brilliant of thinkers.
"The way you put items together to test for intelligence is that you already know the answer," Lawlis said. "That's the whole point. You create questions that have real answers."
For instance, Albert Einstein would have likely done poorly on IQ tests, Lawlis said.
"It really comes down to thinking outside the box, and you really can't test that," Lawlis said. "When they take these tests, instead of directing their attention to the correct answer, they think of a jillion other answers that would also work, so consequently they get confused and do very poorly."
A genius's process
Consisting of a mixture of intelligence, creativity and contribution to society, genius is hard to pinpoint, saidDean Keith Simonton, a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis.In the Scientific American Mind magazine's special issue on genius, Simonton hypothesized that all geniuses use the same general process to make their contributions to the world.
They start with a search for ideas, not necessarily a problem in need of a solution. From this search, geniuses will generate a number of questions, and begin a long series of trials and errors. They then find a solution, for a problem others may not have even been aware of.
"Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see," Simonton said, quoting the 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.
"Exceptional thinkers, it turns out, stand on common ground when they launch their arrows into the unknown," Simonton said.
Inside the brain of a genius
In an attempt to "discern what combination of elements tends to produce particularly creative brains," psychiatrist and neuroscientist Nancy Andreasen at the University of Iowa used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures brain activity by detecting changes associated with blood flow.Andreasen selected the creative subjects from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, and a control group from a mixture of professions. The control group was matched to the writers based on age, education and IQ — with both test and control groups averaging an IQ of 120, considered very smart but not exceptionally so, according to Andreasen.
Based on these controls, Andreasen looked for what separated the creative’s brains from the controls.
During the fMRI scans of participants, the subjects were asked to perform three different tasks: word association, picture association and pattern recognition. The creatives' brains showed stronger activations in their association cortices. These are the most extensively developed regions in the human brain and help interpret and utilize visual, auditory, sensory and motor information.
Andreasen set out to find what else, in addition to brain processes, linked the 13 creatives’ brains.
"Some people see things others cannot, and they are right, and we call them creative geniuses," Andreasen wrote in The Atlantic, referring to participants in her study. "Some people see things others cannot, and they are wrong, and we call them mentally ill."
And then there are people who fit into both categories.
What Andreasen found is that there is another common mark of creative genius: mental illness.
Through interviews and extensive research, Andreasen discovered that the creatives she studied had a higher rate of mental illness, which included a family history of mental illness. The most common diagnoses were bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety and alcoholism. The question now is whether the mental illness contributes to the genius or if it's the other way around, she said.
In a study of the brain of one of the most famous geniuses in history, Einstein, scientists found distinct physical features, which may help to explain his genius, Live Science reported when the study came out in the journal Brain in 2012.
Previously unpublished photographs of the physicist's brain revealed that Einstein had extra folding in his gray matter, the part of the brain that processes conscious thinking, the study researchers found. His frontal lobes, the brain regions tied to abstract thought and planning, had particularly elaborate folding. [See Images of Albert Einstein's Brain]
"It's a really sophisticated part of the human brain," Dean Falk, study co-author and an anthropologist at Florida State University, told Live Science, referring to gray matter. "And [Einstein's] is extraordinary."
Be it high IQ, curiosity or creativity, the factor that makes someone a genius may remain a mystery. Though Mensa can continue to test for quantitative intelligence in areas such as verbal capacity and spatial reasoning, there is no test for the next Einstein, Lawlis said.
"I don't know anybody that could really predict this extremely high level of intelligence and contribution," Lawlis said. "That's the mystery."
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