Earlier today, I responded to Julia Galef’s post about cognitive laziness. My upcoming book, Discontinuities: Love, Art, Mind will explore other themes related this: sapiosexuality in general and sapiosexual intelligence in particular.

Sapiosexual intelligence involves an attraction towards (potential) mates who are not only very smart, but are cognitively motivated. For a sapiosexual, what would be the point of dating (or marrying) someone who is smart but who doesn’t use her brain (in the right way)? To be sapiosexually attracted to such a person is a sapiosexual illusion. True (or competent) sapiosexuals, as so defined, find people who are cognitively interested interesting. I blogged about this in Lovers, Intellectual Loneliness, and an Enigma, which was a response to film, The Imitation Game.

This aspect of sapiosexuality, or sapiosexual intelligence, is learned. It can be learned from hard experience of dating (or marrying) smart people who keep their brains in park, or who only apply their brains to practical matters. Sapiosexual intelligence requires a theory of cognitive motivation, including concepts like fluid expertise, fluid intelligence, effectance and meta-effectiveness. More generally, it calls for a theory of the blending of, and interactions between, cognition, motivation, affect, executive functions, and ancillary information processing functions.

Of course, “it’s complicated”, but it’s also quite interesting, no?