Top Ways to Discover Latent Intelligence in Yourself

Most people assume they know what they’re good at by the time they’re adults.

But in reality, a huge part of what they’re capable of never showed up because their environment never needed it. The potential capabilities are still hidden somewhere inside them, just in a raw form. 

This is what experts call latent intelligence. It is a vast reserve of unactivated potential that all of us have. 

You showed signs of these hidden capabilities when you were younger, but for one reason or another, they got ignored, or you had to suppress them.

That intelligence is still waiting for the right conditions to surface. 

In this article, you’ll learn how to create those conditions and bring out latent intelligence from the dormant state.

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Key Takeaways

• Latent intelligence refers to dormant cognitive abilities that haven’t found the right conditions to surface, yet.

• Performing certain actions daily, like deliberate reflection and trying uncomfortable tasks help bring latent intelligence to the surface.

• You should use cognitive assessment tools to boost growth in this journey

• Habits, not just activities, are needed for the continuous discovery of your hidden strengths

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What Is Latent Intelligence?

Latent intelligence is a vast reserve of knowledge and abilities we all have hidden somewhere inside us. Our environment and experiences have not yet provided the right conditions for them to show up.

That’s why they remain dormant. But they’re always there waiting to be discovered. 

You could say your head has a massive library, and you’ve only ever used books from one section of it. Your environment and experiences just never asked for, or valued, the rest of the books. 

There’s a reason why I keep mentioning the environment as the cause of why latent intelligence doesn’t get found.

It’s our environment that rewards us for very specific things and shows disregard for others. For instance, we are rewarded for speed and certainty, so those things are what we get really good at. 

But what about depth or ambiguity or exploration? Shouldn’t these be valued, too? Don’t they have the potential to produce valuable outcomes, too, albeit in the long run?

But instead, our environment usually ignores these traits, so most of us never get to know we have them in us, let alone nurture them. 

Some people get lucky because their environment changes, and they suddenly discover their untapped potential.

We see this all the time around us. You must know people (or could be that person yourself) who used to struggle in school but started a startup and aced it. 

However, very few people get to experience their latent intelligence waking up by itself. Others have to dig it up through activities. Yes, activities. You can do them, too. Let’s discuss a few. 

Activities That Unlock Latent Abilities Daily

Your latent abilities are counting on you to send them the correct activation signal.

You can try to send that signal by performing the following activities daily:

Deliberate Micro-Reflection for 5 Minutes

Reflection doesn’t mean meditating like a monk here. 

At the end of your day, you have to simply ask yourself two questions:

1. What went well today? 
2. Why did it go well? 

Then contemplate the answers to these questions deeply. This activity is needed because we tend to treat our wins like accidents. We never stop to pinpoint the exact reason that made that thing work. 

Contemplation can reveal that you’re better at certain things than you thought.

And when this act of noticing becomes a habit, you start to see patterns in everything and trace them back to hidden abilities in yourself.

Explain Something Out Loud (Even to No One)

Did you learn something recently? Could be a real-life experience or even just a YouTube video. 

Explain whatever you learned to someone as if they know nothing about it. Or if no one’s available, talk to your wall (or mirror). You can also record a voice memo.

I know you’ll feel silly talking to yourself at first. But it is necessary, so don’t hesitate.

What matters is forcing yourself to do it. You’ll either realize you don’t understand that new thing as well as you thought. Or you’ll realize you understand it really well. 

And no, merely thinking about it won’t count. Your brain tends to forget things when they’re all internal. So force yourself to speak.

Do Something Slightly Uncomfortable Daily

Most of us live in a very narrow loop. We do the same things on repeat and then wonder why we aren’t growing. 

One way to escape this loop is to add a little friction to life. Do unfamiliar things to feel slight discomfort. Discomfort will bring you to the edges of your current abilities and introduce you to newer ones.

What could those uncomfortable things be? Nothing terrifying or life-changing like quitting your job. 

You may consider the following ideas:

• Speak up in a meeting when you’d normally stay quiet. 
• Try a new route to work. 
• Chat up a stranger or your crush.
• Order something off a menu you never thought of eating before.

Reframe One Annoyance

When something frustrates us, it’s because our brain is noticing a mismatch between how things are and how they could be.

Next time this happens, instead of just feeling annoyed and moving on, try to dwell in the moment and see what that annoyance is trying to teach you.

There won’t always be something to learn from this, but you’ll definitely see patterns if they exist. 

For instance, if someone talks in hints instead of clearly stating things, and you find this annoying, you could be good at communication. Or if there’s someone who hates being bossed around, they might be a natural at autonomy.

It only takes you to ask the right questions in annoying situations instead of the usual “why is this happening to me?”

Using Technology To Reveal Hidden Strengths

For the longest time, you’d go through life with talents and abilities that never got spotted because the system was using multiple-choice tests to surface them.

But technology is changing that. Not in some dystopian Black Mirror way. But through the following kinds of tools:

Cognitive Assessment Apps

These apps help surface your hidden cognitive strengths you didn’t know you had.

You are tested on things like pattern recognition, working memory, attention span, reaction time, problem-solving under pressure, and more.

Most apps measure these things through gamified tests and interactive tasks. 

For instance, the Peak app offers research-based games that measure your specific cognitive abilities.

The app maintains a chart of different cognitive abilities of your brain, which updates as your performance improves. Cambridge Brain Sciences and Lumosity are also two major apps in this category.

AI Feedback Tools

External feedback informs you about your abilities and motivates you to improve them like nothing else. 

For example, there’s a tool called Yoodli that analyzes your speaking patterns during presentations or meetings. 

You can set up conversation roleplays and get feedback based on how you performed in them. It can catch filler words, pacing issues, how much you’re talking versus listening, and a lot more.

Skill-tracking Dashboards 

These tools force you to be intentional about progress by tracking your activities in one place. 

You might already know about Notion and Airtable. These platforms let you build custom dashboards to track literally anything. It could be a skill, a project, a course, finances, reading lists, deadlines, and much more.

You should also consider LinkedIn Learning or Coursera. You complete courses there, and based on the results, the platform shows you interests you gravitate toward. 

AI tools have brought a lot of ease to our day-to-day lives. But at the same time, AI is found to be killing cognitive skills at a fast pace.

Writing skills are one of the worst hit due to this. All of this is very bad news for students.

So if you frequently use AI for writing, it’s important you also exercise your brain by rewriting the AI output in your own, human voice.

Undetectable AI offers an AI detection tool, which shows the AI score of your text. You can practice with it and keep your writing skills alive.

Habits That Encourage Continuous Discovery

You cannot discover latent intelligence with just one-time activities. You need to develop habits to guarantee discovery.

You can start with these habits:

Daily learning routines

A habit that you can inculcate in almost any of your daily learning routines is the habit of being curious. 

For instance, if you’re reading an article, don’t just nod along to whatever it says. When we consume information passively, most of the things don’t stick because we don’t engage our critical thinking while we read.

So, next time you consume any information, ask curiosity-driven questions in your mind. “What if this worked differently?” or “Where else does this apply?”

Somewhere in between that process, you’ll discover things you didn’t know about yourself or the world at large.

Experimenting with challenges

We have been over this when we talked about exposing ourselves to slight discomfort. 

When you’re doing the same things over and over, you can’t discover new abilities.

But when you push yourself into challenges, your brain has to pull tricks from parts of itself it doesn’t normally use.

So what can those challenges be? Nothing too easy or too hard. Look for challenges slightly beyond your current edge.

And remember, don’t be afraid of failure. If you try something and it doesn’t work, don’t call that a failure. Do that again, and your brain might just discover new pathways to make it work. If it still doesn’t work, you’ve still discovered something about yourself.

Networking with diverse thinkers

Our brains hold vast swathes of knowledge that we don’t know how to articulate into words. 

The only way to try to bring that out is by engaging in stimulating discussions with people who think differently from you.

When you have to explain your perspective to someone from a different background, you force yourself to translate what’s in your mind. 

In between those discussions, you begin to see your own thinking pattern as well as how someone else’s brain organizes the same information differently.

And a good thing about diverse thinkers is that they ask challenging questions you didn’t think to ask yourself. This exposes you to different ways of seeing the world, and especially seeing within. 

Measuring And Reflecting On Your Growth

Traditionally, we measured cognitive abilities through metrics like IQ tests. 

But they just measure what you can do right now under specific conditions. They don’t measure your dormant potential. 

A better way to track if you’re tapping this hidden potential is by reviewing both your wins and losses. On both occasions, ask what skill or mindset you have or lack that made such an outcome possible.

Another way to track growth is looking back at your so-called flaws and seeing what they’ve morphed into over time. People used to criticize you for being argumentative.

But that was just your ability to think critically about things that you didn’t know how to channelize properly. So look within, and you’ll discover many raw talents from the past that you should revive. 

You can also track your hidden potential by looking at how much of your knowledge has become tacit.

We make decisions based on what we sense is right in a situation. But our intuition is often based on thousands of micro-experiences our brain has cataloged. 

Applying Latent Intelligence In Real Life

If you apply our tips and manage to get visibility into your latent intelligence, it’s time to apply it so it doesn’t stay dormant anymore.

For that, you need to bring some major changes to your life. But do that slowly so you aren’t exhausted. 

The first major change should be your environment. You have to create or find environments that allow you to use your latent abilities. Those environments ask for a diverse skillset from you.

They aren’t like your previous environments, where only a narrow skill set essential for basic survival was rewarded. 

These new settings encourage you to ask good questions. They value your curiosity instead of shutting you down.

Another major change has to come from within. You have to settle your mind. Because when your inner state is managed, you are able to see possibilities you don’t see when you’re in survival mode and stressed.

So declutter your mind and let your new environment grow your latent abilities. 

If we talk about writing, that new environment for you can be tools that nurture your writing skills.

For instance, if you were only using an AI writing tool and simply copy pasting its output in your assignments, add an AI Humanizer tool to the loop.

You’ll learn what a typical AI writing style is and how the AI humanizer makes it sound human. Basically, you’ll learn how to rewrite AI-content in a human voice, which is a very useful skill already and only going to increase in value in the future.

Give our AI Detector and Humanizer a try in the widget below!

Final Thoughts

All of us have latent intelligence, so the hard part won’t be finding it. 

The real difficulty will be creating or finding the space for it to surface and grow.

If you’re serious about this, you can take the help of tools that are already out there to help you in some capacity.

Undetectable AI can take care of the writing side of things. It can help make sure you don’t lose your much-needed writing skills in this era of AI. 

Check out Undetectable AI and see what latent abilities you can work on with it.