Fluid intelligence comprises the ability to reason, perceptual speed, and to learn new things. Crystallized intelligence comprises the ability to use prior facts, past experiences, and follow learned patterns.
Fluid thoughts are important for solving new problems that you have not seen before, while crystallized thoughts are important for solving known quantities efficiently. The difference between developing a new recipe and repeating an old one.
As we age, we lose our fluid intelligence, our brain gets slower and our synaptic connections get pruned pretty heavily. Meanwhile, crystallized intelligence continues to grow, which is part of why aging makes it so hard to live in a rapidly changing society.
The way that I conceptualize my crystallized intelligence is through the idea of “mental frames”. A common frame-relation is déformation professionnelle, or workplace deformation, a case where the mind and body are distorted by one’s profession. This can be as simple as an automatic smile on a hostess or as invasive as cancer and an instinctive fear of the smell of almonds in a chemical worker.
For most of us, this will just be a series of odd preferences developed from our experience in our work. The programmer might think in terms of complexity during planning, the biologist of the feedback system of the holiday party, the physicist of the flux of guests, or the farmer of crop rotations for when to plan the next one. Each of these is a valid and occasionally very useful way to think about life.
The task of any novice to a frame is to build it clearly, noting all the sharp edges, the inconsistencies, and where the light will scatter into just the right answer. The task of building requires fluid intelligence, constantly updating, analyzing, rebuilding, until the new frame is complete.
The task of an expert is to know when the frame should be used; the frame of an astrophysicist may be of extreme detriment to the task of comforting a sad child. To ameliorate this the expert, who does not wish to step out of their current frame, may do one of two things: layer a new frame or combine frames together. The choice often comes from one’s desire to be a specialist or a generalist.
The specialist will want to keep the consistency of their frames, so they primarily function via frame stacking. Generally, there will be their chosen specialty frame and one or two other relevant frames. In this way, they will be an astrophysicist who comforts people and knows how to work with kids. So if you put them in a classroom, they will teach kids with the planets and spelling with stars. To the specialist all things are nails, their privileged frame is simply the most marvelous hammer their body is well adapted to handle. A specialist uses fluid intelligence to figure out how their chosen frame relates to everything else, and crystal intelligence to hold their frame involatile.
A generalist will want to connect the subject to all their frames, so there will be a constant drive to combine frames together. Analogies and concepts from a variety of directions will be applied to the subject in an effort to figure out which frames fit and which ones do not. The generalist is sensitive to the edges of their frames and their composability. So when placed in a classroom, they might see analogies to anatomy, star formation, and sociology that they combine into a new “teacher” frame. To a generalist the world is full of handles and hammer heads, and their job is to figure out which combination will solve their problem. A generalist uses fluid intelligence to figure out how frames meld together into a mosaic, and crystal intelligence to recall the shape of all the pieces.
Both strategies are valid, both methods important to becoming a fully fledged human. Some frames are better suited for either treatment, with extremely specific fields either requiring one to budget all their fluid intelligence for clarifying what they are looking at (category theory) or connecting all these disparate things together (systems biology). Put another way, the specialist frames are frames that update other frames while generalist frames are updated by other frames. Opinion: When working with professors, there is a curious syndrome diagnosed by graduate students called “professor brain”. This is an extreme case of déformation professionnelle, where the professor is only able to see through the frame of their work. The task of a grad student then becomes translating new concepts into a frame the professor can parse. When the professor parses, the rest of their system kicks in and startling insights often fall out.
Frame construction
Now, regardless of whether the frame in question is to be used in a general or specialized way, we need to figure out exactly how a frame should be constructed. There are many possible ways to construct a frame, and here I will outline one particular process that was useful during my journey.
Constructing frames is a natural part of life, often happening unconsciously and constantly. We construct the frame of “child” through the patterns we lived culturally, linguistically, and interpersonally. There are entire branches of psychology dedicated to repairing, modifying, and removing these frames, which are beyond the scope of this document.
The first step for constructing a frame is finding the role of that frame. The role can be anything from a teacher, a speaker, a scientist, a chemist, or a Midwestern grass dancer. A simple example is constructing a “cook” frame, where you find the role of cook for you involves making meals for yourself after work. For others, it might be big meals for family, but by defining your scope you can begin to fill in what parts are actually relevant to your life. Defining the scope of the role gives you the edges of where it should exist and what experiences contribute to it. When constructing a specialist frame, one does not want to have unrelated ideas and experiences bleeding into it. Opinion: I think we should start most frames in a specialist manner, keeping frame building to what is directly relevant. After defining this, the generalist thinking can come in and slot the framing into a larger whole; if done too early, we can warp our perception of a thing into our perspective instead.
The second step for constructing a frame is gathering data on that frame. Often this means studying, mimicry, and thoughtful experimentation. Going to cooking classes and reading cookbooks will help develop your cook frame. Having experts that model behavior, teach key insights, and share little mental tricks gives life to a frame that might be too static or lacking insight. The meat of the frame is found here, and it involves ingesting and smoothing out the knowledge you are aggregating into a continuous behavioral whole. You found the edges of the role, so within that role you are attempting to find every way that one using this frame would interact. Stories and narratives are helpful here, providing rich contextual pieces to scaffold the frame even if it might be missing all the pieces to fill it in properly.
The third step for constructing a frame is learning how to use it. Some frames are made to be held up to the world at all times—many philosophers have taken to such grand projects—while others are only made for brief moments. Figuring out where and when a frame is relevant to your purposes is learned through fluid intelligence but encoded in crystal intelligence. While mimicry and the like often gives guidelines, the truth is primarily going to be gained from experience. Here we can use other frames as filters for information to help us extract the relevant data for our new frame. We might have a textbook on the history of chemistry, but I want to build a sociologist frame, so I use my knowledge of chemistry to disentangle the implications and how they slot into a sociological frame. This helps me see what the limits of my frame of chemistry AND sociology are, if I attend to this properly of course.
Taken together there is a neat recipe for creating a frame around a topic, a trade, a science, an author, a philosophy, or even a religion. By maintaining awareness of a frame as something that is being handled for a task it helps keep you from becoming mired in a particular way of thinking.
Some Useful Frames
The Amateur
The first frame I would urge someone to intentionally construct is the frame of the amateur. The amateur frame is a flexible one, capable of generating the apprentice, the student, the fool, and even the expert if given time and effort. This is because I class it as a meta-frame, a place to construct, integrate information, and build new frames from.
There are two major components to the amateur:
- Pedagogy (the study of learning)
- Enthusiasm and openness
The first is the most analytically tractable, and easiest to construct a recipe for. The data for this frame is stored in psychology texts, education papers, and countless YouTube videos. First, gather the data on how to learn. Studiously note down all the techniques and sources. Then experiment; try them on dummy subjects and record how well each technique does in an objective manner. Look specifically for ways to classify information you are being given and which techniques are best suited for helping you learn that type of information, such as PACER. Through this process you will develop a toolbox you can reach for whenever you wish to learn a new topic and a potent frame for learning new subject matter. Opinion: I have dysgraphia so writing by hand is hard. This handicaps it as a tool for communicating to others, however the increased encoding strength makes it a potent tool for learning information.
The second is harder to put into words, but it is no less important. The goal here is to find the things that inspire your curiosity and ignite your drive to learn. We can point to similar things, such as curiosity, and the frame of childlike wonder at the bigness of the world to help motivate people to seek new information. We can find inspiring stories and relationships that nurture these parts of the self, but these can be a fraught endeavor. Frequently, people turn to different forms of spirituality here, finding the framing of religion or higher beings a powerful method of cultivating these feelings internally. A book that helped me here was “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind”, which discusses in detail how to cultivate this enthusiastic openness and wonder at the world that is required for learning.
Opinion: If one is a student, in whatever sense, an exercise I found most helpful is the connection between classes. When asked to do a history paper, a chemistry project, and a human anatomy presentation, simply do them on the exact same thing you are already interested in. Looking at a single subject and picking it apart helps spread that interest into new subjects. With repeated practice you will find that all the things you are natively interested in can eventually connect to all other things. With practice the time it takes to connect your personal interests to a new one will decrease, and everything will seem to be another reflection of your passion.
Abstract Frames
Most of the frames I have brought up thus far are eminently practical, tools used for work or for reasoning. When considering the problems of declining fluid intelligence a lot of our focus will naturally fall there. That said, there are many frames that do not have to do with such practicalities that remain important.
A key distinction here would be the difference between an artisan’s frame and an artist’s frame. An artisan is a craftsperson whose job it is to make something functional and beautiful, something to serve a purpose and an aesthetic. While an artist is tasked with something more ephemeral, not beholden to practicalities but using them as mere tools for expressing something harder to pin down. Similar is the distinction between a journalist and a poet.
Within this thread, I would like to introduce something a bit personal: the cabinet. For me, the cabinet is a variety of frames, some might even call them qualia. Each one can range from “smooth stone” to “the moment where a summer’s full moon shines on a jasmine bush when I was a young child”. The former is more composable, the latter more visceral.
For context, if one touches a smooth stone vs. a rough one, they will believe different things about unrelated topics. So with this in mind, one can evoke the frame of a rigid object when you wish to remain unbending in a negotiation. What I did was use this to play—there are a lot of abstract frames of mind, and what I found is that evoking them was useful practice. Feeling the edges of how they combined, when they failed, and what made them harder or easier to maintain as I went through my day.
I encourage a reader to attempt this exercise of building a cabinet in their mind, trying on all the different frames, and combining them. This helps develop a sense for how your mind interacts with these things and gives something akin to a spice rack to adjust the flavor of a new frame you are cooking.
The Curation of Frames
I view many frames as naturally overlapping, the mosaic closer to a spectrum. During the cabinet exercise, this may become apparent to you as well. As a result, my goal when trying to appropriately spend the coin of my fluid intelligence has been on the task of spanning the space of interesting frames. This section will be fully predicated on my interests and aesthetics, so be aware that what I choose might not be right for your case.
Primarily I find there to be three parts to a frame:
- Academic
- Practical
- Spiritual
So for any frame, think about how much of each part is present and why. The amateur has an academic need to learn many ways of learning, a practical requirement to test and refine them, and a spiritual shaping to ensure a constant desire to learn. By focusing on different aspects, new frames can be derived - with an apprentice having a heavier emphasis on following a master, or a savant focused on personal exploration.
With these two pieces in mind, my focus as I grew was on the task of ensuring I have a broad number of frames spanning the space of my interests and flexible frames that let me make new ones easily. For when I age, it will grow harder and harder for me to combine these things the way I did as a child.
My first regret: spending so long to develop my amateur frame. I had other concerns and so it might have only been natural. Still, I wish I had developed this frame earlier so I could have had an easier time with subject matter I found boring. When I started developing this frame in my first year of university, it took several more for it to fully blossom. Supported by a natural interest in biophysics there were many opportunities to learn how little I knew.
From there, I spent much of my studies simulating the things I was learning through different frames. A casual touch of a tree pulling out a botany frame that peels back the layers, naming each and tracing the flow of nutrients and water to the specific carbon fixation pathway. The movement of air and the shifting of temperature unspooling the frame of differential equations and higher-dimensional representations of space. In the amateur frame every detail became a source of grand inspiration, each defect in a leaf a question of existence. A strange detail here, but I would recommend “It’s Such a Beautiful Day” if you wish to develop an appreciation for details. It helped me inoculate into my amateur frame the sensation of being 8 and watching the motes of dust drift in a sunbeam for hours.
My second regret: over-indexing on processes over more general frames. Learning a process to memorize things is useful; learning a process to ensure the dishes get done is necessary. Attempting to set up a life of interlinking processes is brittle. There were a couple of times where I “broke” my ability to learn because some part of my process became unavailable and the rest fell apart in turn. The strongest antidote, in these cases, was framing myself as something that learns and merely used those processes for a time.
Framing yourself as a thing can be a double-edged sword. For most of this text, I discussed frames as tools. In reality, they often become fused to our identities, masks that speak for us instead of the other way around. Using processes as proxies involved identifying with a specific process instead of a general frame. So, when selecting a frame to identify with, I needed to deconstruct a lot of ad-hoc pieces that were not composable or generalizable. Some of them made me feel safe even as they constricted my development, but that is the work of a proper psychologist to talk you through.
My third regret: ignoring what I already was. I had used stories for years to drive my existence, but I was not really integrating this. Lacking awareness made it longer than might be expected to appropriately identify many of the frames I was already using. Spend the time to look at your current frames; you are not a fresh child with no knowledge or beliefs. When you pick new frames, when you build ones, there will already be rose-tinted glasses blocking your view. Learn how to work with them, how to mold them, and if need be to remove them.
In the sense of what I wanted, I was blessed early in life and knew the direction to go; like a monarch butterfly knows where to migrate. From this, I derived many of my other desires and frames, such as physicist, biologist, philosopher, chemist, reader, and fool. Your mind dictates what pieces of these will fit together, which will not, and which will be of actual purpose in your life.
Learning the name of every layer of rock under the earth is not something that drives me, but I made sure that my frames have aligned so that should it become important, I can derive a new frame capable of supporting it.
A small survey of some frames of thought that I have cultivated:
- Experimentalist
- Theoretician
- Instrumentalist
- Biologist
- Ecologist
- Molecular
- Cellular
- Bacterial
- Botanist
- Zoologist
- Systems
- Physiologist
- Geneticist
- Physicist
- Spectroscopist
- Thermodynamicist
- Soft-matter
- Rheologist
- Fluid
- Chemist
- Analytical
- Organic
- Biological
- Physical
- Materials
- Statistician
- Mathematician
- Set theory
- Differential
- Numerical
- Biophysicist
- Baker
- Artist
- Writer
- Reader
- Student
- Child
- Caretaker
- Philosopher
- Victim
- Aggressor
- Penitent
- Manipulator
- Lover
- Dreamer
- Doodler
- Protector