Axiom Of Natural Limitations On Aptitude

Often people are in bewilderment after interacting with individuals with extraordinary aptitude or mathematical ability. After reading their stories or watching their interviews on TV, they find themselves questioning whether they would ever become so “great”. Such incidents sometimes lead to encouragement and at other times, sadly, to depression. With this starts a cycle of sincere efforts and results, filled with expectations to match that extraordinary story. But seldom are these expectations realized. Ultimately, either these culminate in surrender or depression or both. But there is a serious fallacy in the argument that persistent and sincere efforts yield matchless results. Rarely do people realize that a factor, of which they are completely unaware of, has a critical bearing upon their aptitude.

Let us do a case study to understand how this “spectral factor” betrays a considerable fraction of efforts and maneuvers the results.

There is a lot of hoopla about top AIRs in highly competitive examinations like IITJEE and CAT. These examinations basically test our aptitude to work with numbers, formulas, theorems and basic mathematical operations. Not just that, they also set a time-limit disproportionately lesser than what the best of all candidates would take. Now this creates an oppressive exigency of solving some of the trickiest problems. Candidates with this “spectral factor” score unbelievably high and others are disappointed to see their average or poor scores. The latter impute the “not-extraordinary” scores to their coaching, bad luck, distraction during the exam or their unsatisfactory efforts. But trying to score extraordinarily in such exams or to match the performance of candidates scoring unbelievably high is, more or less, challenging the order of nature. The biological setup of the brain has a critical bearing upon an individual’s problem solving ability under extreme temporal pressure. How the biological elements, which work at the lowest level of human problem processing ability, stack up, determines the limits of what an individual can perform based on aptitude.

Thus there is not a great deal about individuals persistently scoring very high marks or getting top ranks in competitive exams or easily making it to IITs and IIMs and Ivy Leagues. They might be very hard working, but even if they prepare moderately, they are bound to score big shots. Behind the scenes is a biological setup that favors quick problem solving ability, even in draconian, time-bound situation.

But this should not make others feel that the genuine efforts they are putting in are futile. As with other laws of nature, exceptions exist, whether we know or not. Space will always develop for the very antithesis of natural orders.