The reason why it sounds counterintuitive is that neurology has the brain upside down. It teaches us that formal thinking occurs in the neocortex, and we need all that huge brain mass for that.
But in fact it works like an autoencoder, and it reduces sensory inputs into a much smaller latent space, or something very similar to that. This does result in holistic and abstract thinking, but formal analytical thinking doesn't require abstraction to do the math or to follow a method without comprehension. It's a concrete approach that avoids the need for abstraction.
The cerebellum is the statistical machine that gets measured by IQ and other tests.
To further support that, you don't see any particularly elegant motions from non mammal animals. In fact everything else looks quite clumsy, and even birds need to figure out flying by trial and error.
But in fact it works like an autoencoder, and it reduces sensory inputs into a much smaller latent space, or something very similar to that. This does result in holistic and abstract thinking, but formal analytical thinking doesn't require abstraction to do the math or to follow a method without comprehension. It's a concrete approach that avoids the need for abstraction.
The cerebellum is the statistical machine that gets measured by IQ and other tests.
To further support that, you don't see any particularly elegant motions from non mammal animals. In fact everything else looks quite clumsy, and even birds need to figure out flying by trial and error.