[mtlb]

I think that generally people are interested in being as intelligent as possible. The institutes of school and university, the study of pedagogy and science in general are all dedicated to this.

The reason why people generally don’t strive to have supernormal abilities such as super memory is because these are not strictly needed. Instead of memorizing everything we can write it all down.

Some abilities are much more useful, but we don’t know what makes them appear. Neuroscience and psychology are studying the underlying mechanisms for those. These topics are just very hard to understand, and would be much harder to reliably implement in practice. For example, we understand a lot more about how muscles work than how brains work, yet most we can do to affect our strength reliably is better nutrition and exercise programs. And until we find a way to make everyone run ultra-fast without impeding other positive qualities, a bicycle would be preferred to running very fast.

If the improvement in human intelligence could only be done mechanically (i.e. by making the brain work faster or store more stuff more precisely), the sciences about human mind would be the only sciences that improve human intelligence. However, all sciences work on this. A person who studied Newtonian mechanics would be "superintelligent" in reasoning about motion of rigid bodies compared to people who don’t know about it. Being able to masterfully solve hard equations is not be as useful to humanity as a whole as devising formulas to make solving these equations easier for everyone, and computing machines to let them be solved automatically.