Harry Potter and the Unfit Brain
Okay, I’m not trying to add another title to J.K. Rowling’s astoundingly successful series. I just want to use the main characters to make a point. Still, if you don’t want any kind of clue as to how the last Harry Potter book ends, then don’t read this article.
Why did Harry always seem to get the best of his evil arch nemesis, Lord Voldemort? I suggest that Harry had a fitter brain.
In my last couple of posts, I started to introduce a concept around variety in Brain Fitness, which I’m calling EPIQ performance – standing for Emotional, Physical and Intellectual intelligences (or Quotients). I say that the Dark Lord Voldemort excelled in one of these but wasn’t very well balanced. Whereas Harry wasn’t a star in any of them but had a good balance of intelligences – and in the end, that’s what mattered more.
Voldemort was incredibly smart, he probably had an IQ score through the roof. He was a great student and figured out all kinds of stuff that others before him did not succeed in doing. This helped him rise to power. But it wasn’t enough to keep him there.
He was fairly stupid when it came to emotional and physical intelligence. Emotionally, he didn’t connect very well with others and he had a bit of a hard time controlling his temper. He had a tendency to strike down anyone that didn’t see things quite his way. I’d say this ranks him pretty low on the EQ front.
Physically – well, he did split his soul into 8 pieces (7 of them were deliberate). Not really the ideal health plan. He didn’t look that good – Bad skin and teeth. It didn’t appear that his metabolism was functioning optimally. I bet his internal organs didn’t look that good either, since he spent about fifteen years nearly dead. So I give him a low score on the PQ side as well.
On the other hand, Harry was a modest student – not the best, not the worst. He probably had a reasonable IQ. But he had a much greater EQ and PQ than his counterpart. Although the books never really talked much about physical health or nutrition, he was athletic (a great Quidditch seeker), seemed to get a lot of exercise running around escaping from near death situations, had a lot of friends, and really connected with the people around him. So I’d say his scores on those fronts would be fairly high.
People wanted to help Harry because they liked him, not because they were afraid of him (there’s probably a managerial lesson in there somewhere). Harry was able to understand things that Voldemort could not. He was able to pull together his moderate strengths across a variety of areas, where Voldemort really only excelled at one thing. In the end, that mean’t victory for Harry and defeat for the Dark Lord. Harry’s brain was fit and Voldemort’s was not.
It all comes back to variety. Brain Fitness is about developing your skills on several fronts through a variety of approaches – EPIQ performance.
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