Reinterpreting Stupidity

One of the common patterns in humans is calling people who don't perceive what is obvious to us as being "stupid". That seems to end the causal chain of thinking and no more energy needs to be expended in trying to understand what is going on. One is simply left with some degree of frustration at that "stupidity". This was one of my common modes of thinking till a fateful moment that started a shift in interpretation. That fateful moment was riding in the car with my wife and listening to The Moody Blues. On a whim, she asked my how many voices I heard in the song. I said what do you mean? There is one voice. She said no, there are 4 voices. Try as I might, I could not hear 4 voices, just one.

So, I could call myself stupid for not hearing what was obviously there and for all "smart" people to hear. This epithet being a bit unsavory to apply to oneself, I had to rethink my mental models of what stupid meant. With this motivation in hand, it became "obvious" that these auditory distinctions that I was not perceiving pointed to a larger meta pattern. Our various neurologies have different capabilities as to the distinctions that they can perceive. For example:

• We have different visual capacities. Some of us who are not visually oriented don't see details and relationships among things in the visual field that are obvious to others.
• We have different time and causal strategies. Some people are very good at distinguishing the effects of an action / decision. For others that causal chain is simply absent in their perceptual field. They can't see the implications of their own or others actions down stream in time.
• We have different taste distinctions. If someone can't appreciate the fine tastes of a particular food or beverage, they may be considered "less than" by those with finer gustatory distinctions.

One can see from these different distinctive capabilities, that one may inappropriately label another as less than, stupid, or other pejorative adjective. However their neurological structure simply may not have the capability one is expecting of them. Take the example of a baby. One does not expect a young child to drive a car. It is not because the child is stupid. He / she just doesn't have the fine motor distinctions and integration to do that. Is that child / baby stupid?