> I’ve often wondered how IQ correlates with the ability to visualize or recall audio of certain things. Discussing these kinds of differing facets of intellig

> I’ve often wondered how IQ correlates with the ability to visualize or recall audio of certain things. Discussing these kinds of differing facets of intelligence with friends and co-workers over the years, my sense is that rather than one linear scale, intelligence is best modeled as being along a varying number of different dimensions. I picture these each as a vector shooting off in divergent directions and the scales on each can differ and be non-linear. Frequent examples include sensory types like visual, audible, spatial, tactile, etc but they can be far more granular and specific than people initially assume. One common area of difference is how the ability expresses itself, for example, in superior processing or superior recall. Sometimes these two correlate but not always. There are a variety of such independent variables like speed and depth which don't always correlate and can vary widely from dimension to dimension in the same person. This degree of variety makes thinking about and assessing relative intelligence far more complex and interesting than typically assumed. For example, my wife and I are both good Scrabble players, however our mental approaches couldn't be more different. Her searches are faster but not as deep as mine. I'm slower but find more multi-word crossing combos based on obscure words. Who wins depends almost entirely on the turn time we set for the game. Another area where we're highly divergent is spatial processing. I always have a general sense of my spatial orientation, whereas she has to stop and think about which way to turn even on familiar local streets. We jokingly say that she "has no Tab key" based on the key often used in RPG games to bring up the overhead map. However, when it comes to processing a complex visual field and identifying a different pattern among many similar patterns, I'm objectively terrible. She says I'm "Where's Waldo challenged." This is to the extent that she won't even ask me to pick up something at the store if she knows I don't know what it looks like and she can't tell me exactly which shelf it's on. I could spend five minutes trying to find an unfamiliar box on a packed 12-foot wide section of seven foot tall store shelving. When I'm buying items I've bought before in a store I've been to before, I'm the world's fastest shopper because I know exactly where each item is and my brain intuitively maps an optimized path to collect everything. And all this occurs with no conscious effort on my part. Yet, I'm super slow when in an unfamiliar store or trying to find items I haven't logged a location for.