Imagine you have a computer at home
And this computer is linked to another two computers.

And let’s say you wanted to search for a file named ‘monkey’.
If you initiated a search, guess what you’d get?
You’d get what you searched for: Namely all the files named ‘monkey.’

So if you have no files named ‘monkey’, you’d get zero responses.
Now let’s suppose you tried to do the same thing when you were online.

Let’s just say you typed in the word ‘monkey’ on Google
You know what happens next, don’t you?
You get 186,000,000 responses.

That’s 18.6 million responses
But that’s not the cool part. The cool part, is that the responses are visual, and textual, and there are thousands of variations on the topics. Topics that range from what monkeys eat. To where they live. To how monkey are connected with spiritualism. If you can think of the word ‘monkey’, and think of another word that’s not even remotely connected to ‘monkey’, you’ll find it on Google.

Smarter people are not smarter.
They have a database in their brain.
A database consisting of millions of ideas, concepts, and learning beyond what the average Joe seems to have.

Because of that database…
A smart person can answer questions out of left-field.
A smart person can literally see things that others can’t see.
A smart person is able to take completely disconnected situations, memories and learning and merge them together to make sense instantly.

So will reading a million books make you smarter?
Yes it will.  A lot smarter than you are right now.
But just having a database is not enough.

Google has a database. But that’s not enough.
What makes Google smarter, is the ability to recognise the pattern of the keywords.
So that when you type in keywords, Google brings up a close match to what you’re supposedly looking  for.
And it also brings up several matches that you hadn’t considered.

Your brain works in a similar fashion
When you have a problem to solve, and you put that problem to your conscious brain, it does a brain-wide search. It brings up connected and disconnected memories, situations and learning.

Which means that that if you spend six years reading up on ‘monkeys’, your brain is more than likely to make hundreds of connections with ‘monkeys’ and something random—like ‘coffee.’

This random mix is what we refer to as um, creativity
Most people who appear smarter work in this manner
Someone asks them a question. Or put forward a challenge of sorts.
And their brain races wildly through their personal database.
Linking connected and random memories, situations and learning.
And it comes up with a superb answer.

And their audience is astounded at how smart they are.

But in the end it’s the database.
If their database can’t access data on ‘monkey’, then it accesses nothing.

And it makes them look very chimp-like, doesn’t it?

Note: The obvious graphic to put at the top of this post would be a real monkey. But because I can access the term ‘monkey’ in my brain, I can think of soft toys, or dunces, or bananas. Or a zillion other things. Spend some time thinking of the word ‘monkey.’ You’ll be amazed at how many associations you have with this single word.