Is It Time to Think About Your Thinking? |
Once upon a time, we thought that people with a high intelligence quotient (IQ) were the crème-de-la-crème of humanity. However, times changed, ideas shifted, and people with a high emotional intelligence or emotional quotient (EQ) were thought of as more clever still, and became the more valued. However, according to the latest research, the trait that separates the truly intelligent from the rest of us—the quality that can’t be beat—is something known as metacognition, or the ability to think about your thoughts. But, not just think about them, but also do something about them.
According to a study published in the popular science journal Nature, people with a metacognitive ability are not only aware of their thought processes (metacognitive knowledge) but are also able to regulate these processes more effectively (metacognitive control) and then respond accordingly. 1
The study itself is a review of all the literature on the subject, and the authors acknowledge the need for further investigation, but several studies have suggested that metacognition is very important in learning environments and with academic achievement. They also claim that the ability to analyse and challenge your thoughts is a key intelligence marker. In various educational activities, high-performance people tended to present with it more than the lower performers.
Elsewhere, another study found that people with this metacognitive ability were better at both divergent thinking (the ability to generate new and creative ideas by combining diverse information in novel ways) and convergent thinking (logically analysing something, then narrowing it down towards a single, correct........