【英语原文】6.2

Q:Will I become less intelligent if I socialise with unintelligent people?

Denis Mateir：

Yes, you will absorb their stupidity like a sponge. The same goes for brilliance, brilliance can’t be learned, sure you can learn someone the technical aspects of every field, be it art, music, mathematics, psychotherapy, and so on. But you can never learn how to be brilliant in that.

The best way on how to be brilliant is to be around brilliant people, and their brilliance will shine and be absorbed by you like a sponge. That’s why having a mentor is very important.

Let’s say you are a very smart person, and you hang around with the stupid people. The way I see it is like smoking, sure cigarettes are unhealthy and can even kill you.But one cigarette won’t do any real harm, so keep smoking and smoking until it’s to late, and your health has dropped a tremendous amount. How could you not have noticed that? It’s because your health has dropped every time by 0,1%.

That’s how I see hanging around with stupid people, like smoking cigarettes, you don’t really notice what these people will do to you, but before it’s too late your brilliance has been sucked away by their stupidity, and how Einsteins likes to point it out, ‘’human stupidity is infinite’’, so human stupidity sucks in everything because it is like a black hole.

Of course unless your light shines with the brilliance of a thousand suns. You might be the one shining a stairway to heaven for them.

This mechanism works exactly in the same way, when you watch a movie. The reason you can enjoy a good movie is because you use mirror-neurons which is a type of brain function, which allows you to feel what another person is feeling. So this has even a scientific basis.

‘’Tell me who your friends are, and I will tell you, who you are’’ 
— Turkish Sultan

Cheers,

Edit
P.s. don’t be dense I was talking about behavior. Google the conformity bias. And epigenetics has pointed out that behavior can influence DNA. Maybe raising your intelligence is very hard, but from what I know it’s pretty darn easy to lower it through various variables. Also stop seeing everything as black and white, the world simply doesn’t work like that, nothing is permanent, everything is in flux.
For example if I have an IQ of 140, and I don’t sleep for 1 night, then it would mean my potential of that IQ would decrease significantly to maybe 130. Use it or lose it.