Lalo Martins

I want to argue for an unfashionable idea—one that tends to make people uncomfortable for reasons that have very little to do with evidence:

Intelligence is not primarily an innate trait. It is a process.

Not entirely a process. Biology matters. Injury matters. Development matters. Pretending otherwise would be irresponsible. But for the vast majority of people, the differences we casually label as “smart” or “stupid” are far better explained by how a mind operates than by what that mind is made of.

This isn’t a motivational slogan. It’s a claim about mechanisms.

What do we actually mean by intelligence?

Modern definitions—across cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and even artificial intelligence—converge on a familiar cluster:

• solving problems,
• making decisions under uncertainty,
• adapting behavior when new information arrives.

Not raw memory. Not speed alone. Not vocabulary size. Those are ingredients, not the meal.

What’s striking is that all three depend less on storage than on retrieval, control, and revision. Intelligence doesn’t live in what you know; it shows up in how you move through not knowing.

A mind can hold vast amounts of information and still behave unintelligently if it cannot:

• access the right knowledge at the right moment,
• tolerate uncertainty long enough to explore,
• or revise its internal models when they stop matching reality.

That already points away from intelligence as a fixed quantity.

The failure modes that get mislabeled as “low intelligence”

In everyday life, when people come off as “stupid,” what’s usually being observed isn’t lack of capacity. It’s one of a small number of predictable process failures.

Rigidity. The refusal to update beliefs in the face of evidence. This is the most damaging failure mode, because it hijacks intelligence itself: reasoning power gets redirected from learning to defending.

Avoidance. “I’m not a math person.” “This is too hard.” “I don’t like thinking about this.” These aren’t diagnoses; they’re self-protective narratives. They reduce discomfort now while quietly training the brain not to engage later.

Premature certainty. Finding an answer that works well enough and then clinging to it long past the point where it explains what’s happening. Shortcuts can be intelligent—until they aren’t. The skill lies in knowing when to let go.

Notice what’s missing here: raw intellect. None of these failures require a small brain. They require habits.

Intelligence as a loop, not a trait

A more useful way to think about intelligence is as a feedback loop:

1. Observe
2. Hypothesize
3. Test
4. Update

If this feels familiar, that’s not an accident. It’s the classical formulation of the scientific method. There’s a reason our species became collectively smarter once this loop was formalized, taught, and socially rewarded.

Break the loop anywhere and intelligence collapses—no matter how capable the underlying brain might be.

Crucially, every part of this loop is trainable.

Neuroscience supports this view. Executive function (the ability to plan and inhibit), attentional control, error monitoring, and cognitive flexibility are not fixed traits. They are plastic systems shaped by use, stress, feedback, and reward. Brains specialize in what they practice.

Practice:

• defending beliefs instead of revising them,
• avoiding confusion instead of sitting with it,
• speed instead of accuracy,

and the mind will reliably behave as if it were unintelligent—even if the hardware is perfectly fine.

Why this idea makes people uneasy

If intelligence were fixed, failure would be tragic but blameless. If intelligence is a process, improvement becomes possible—and that implies responsibility.

Not blame. Agency.

The claim here isn’t “anyone can become a genius.” It’s more modest, and more hopeful:

Many people operate far below their cognitive potential because they were never taught—nor rewarded—for using their minds well.

We reward confidence more than calibration, certainty more than accuracy, speed more than understanding. Then we act surprised when people struggle with complex, ambiguous systems.

The uncomfortable but optimistic conclusion

If intelligence is a process, then it can grow.

Not infinitely. Not uniformly. Not without limits.

But meaningfully.

People become more intelligent when they learn to:

• treat being wrong as information rather than failure,
• tolerate confusion without rushing to anesthetize it,
• revise their models of the world without experiencing it as a threat to identity.

None of this requires a different brain. It requires a different relationship with thinking.

That’s not self-help. It’s cognitive mechanics.

Which leads to a reframing I find hard to unsee:

Intelligence is not something you are. It’s something you do.

Sometimes clumsily. Sometimes elegantly. Almost always better with practice.

The most important question, then, isn’t “how smart am I?” It’s “how willing am I to update when reality disagrees with me?”

That question, unlike an IQ score, has an answer you can actually work on.