Essay: What's So Great About Acuity?

Genius goes only so far—at least in the current, cybernetic sense. In terms of sheer neurological acuity, how would Jesus or the Buddha have ranked? And how would your dear old grandfather have scored—that guy who could whittle a cottonwood twig all day and invent new bedtime stories every night? How often, now that the fellow isn't around, do you catch yourself wishing he'd been sharper, swifter? Quite often, perhaps, if Grandpa suffered from Alzheimer's, but what if he was just a wee bit... plodding?

It's unrealistic to expect that people will forgo easy intelligence enhancement out of some fear that it may turn them into sociopaths obsessed with the goings-on inside their skulls and negligent about the outside world. The rat race keeps accelerating, and the labyrinths in which it is run are growing more complicated by the hour, it seems—as are the technological devices that are meant to help us through their tricky passages. If many more features are added in the next year to the average cell phone, for example, I may have to retire to a cave and survive on campfire-roasted venison. My synapses are on overload as it is.

Still, it seems important to remember that intelligence—human intelligence—involves a lot more than problem-solving skills or memory capacity. Sometimes the challenge of being a person is to recognize that the task at hand should be performed later, considered from a new angle or, if it's a waste of time, ignored. That's why, at age 43, I'm not at work on a 600,000-piece jigsaw puzzle depicting Australia's Great Barrier Reef. I was smart enough to know at 10 that it's not what one can do that matters but what's worth doing.