The Mental Progress
Dr.Wagner Paulon
2008
The sharp increase of physical development of adolescents is accompanied by another - equally important, though less obvious - in his mental capacity. An individual average of 14 or 15 years, is able to easily and efficiently carry out many kinds of intellectual tasks and problems that an average child of 10 years would be impossible - or at least very difficult - to resolve, but we should not wait, with that, they remember to get their own bed or replace the cap on the tube of toothpaste after using it.
The intelligence - subtlety, intelligence, wit: there is no agreement to respect what is in it, although we recognize when we see it - is manifested in many different ways.
Most people find that it comes out relatively better in certain types of mental activity than in other, perhaps better performance in verbal ability and leave it less well on tasks that involve math or understanding of the mechanical operation of certain objects. Therefore, people who plan the tests of intelligence try to measure the widest range of mental ability, in the hope that a set of measures for each of these capabilities provide an estimate of intelligence of the person, who is general enough to be compared with estimates for other people, or with the estimate made for the same person at different times of life. There is a very serious danger in relying on such measures, but they seem to have a valid practice very useful, for example, to compare the mental growth at different stages of life.
So when large numbers of individuals are routinely subjected to tests for many years, it appears that the general mental ability increases rapidly during the years of childhood and adolescence, then to drop sharply at maturity. Such tests also show that the years that mediate between puberty and adulthood is very important for the development of intellectual or cognitive person. It is during this period that much of our ability to acquire and use knowledge - not knowledge itself - reached its maximum point of efficiency. The specific capabilities do not develop - or decline - in the same rhythm. (That is why the failure to develop the intellectual potential in the formative years can be difficult to remedy later.) Those that reflect "pure" biological capacity, including perception of speed, power and flexibility of intellectual analysis, there are faster during childhood and adolescence and decline a little sooner and faster during the years of adulthood, than the subject more capacities to the influx of experience, for example, the verbal fluency.
This explains, at least in part, why the mathematicians tend to produce their work much earlier than, for example, historians or philosophers.