Stephen Gislason MD
The challenge is to become intelligent
about intelligence. Humans have a great interest and ability to create
nonsense. You could argue that many of the features of intelligence are
deployed in the cause of nonsense but nonsense is not intelligent.
Intelligence is really about survival in a
threatening world. Humans survive because of the genius abilities such as
vision, hearing, skilled movement and speech; abilities that are built into
their brain, innate gifts from nature. Humans do not learn how to see or how to
hear what is going on out there, but they do have to learn what it means to
them today. This is an interactive process. Speech is a form of sound
interaction.
Although modern humans tend to emphasize
individual thought and expression, most “thinking” is talking in groups. The
value of speech is to connect individuals in “thinking” groups. Books and other
publications link large numbers of humans in common patterns of
language-dependent thinking.
The newest human abilities are more dependent
on learning and are the least reliable. Reasoning, planning and learning to
tolerate other humans in a friendly constructive manner require the most
sustained practice. The term, “nice,’ refers to these characteristics and therefore nice people require
sustained learning to remain reasonable, to tolerate others and to behave in a
friendly, constructive manner. To become nice and to remain rational and
skilled, a human must belong to and work within a supportive group that shares
these characteristics. Human groups often have the opposite effect, supporting
intolerant and irrational thinking and bad behavior.
In the recent past new knowledge and
abilities have proliferated in every human population with only a few humans
doing well at cultivating the new abilities. In higher education and other life
contests, general ability has been traditionally desirable. The
"well-rounded" individual was a generalist, good at everything but
perhaps not outstanding in one skill.
The key to human survival is group
cooperation and individual
specialization. The group tends to smooth out the negative effects of
individual limitations and irrationality. In an affluent urban society, a small
subpopulation cause most of the trouble and consume most of the social and
medical resources available. Often the understanding and solution of “social
problems” involves the interaction of elite and educated group with a sick,
aberrant, dysfunctional group. Their interaction involves a persistent, inevitable
misunderstanding arising from incongruent needs, values, information and
capabilities. Human societies involve increasing specialization of individuals who are skillful at performing
single tasks. The income of an individual often depends on this specialization
and does not depend on a general or comprehensive understanding of how their
society works and his or her place in it.
A similar description applies to
individuals in many animal groups, beginning with the social insects. Humans
and ants have much in common; the most compelling similarity is that
individuals achieve viability on the planet, not by solitary activities, but by
participating in a meta-order that involves the entire group.
Most humans live
at a minimum level of overall comprehension and, even if they become more or
less civilized, they will tend to regress to old and innate patterns of
intolerance, hostility, aggression and conflict if the supportive
infrastructure is inadequate to sustain external controls over competitive and
hostile behaviors. It is to argue that many to most humans can remain
misinformed and unreasonable as long a small number of more intelligent and
skillful humans build and maintain infrastructures that support the others.
Neuroscience views minds as manifestations
of the living processes found in brains. Brain science does not "explain" mind, or
consciousness, but does give us strategies for understanding the properties of
mind. Neuroscientists have made rapid progress in the past few decades and some
of them are asking the same sorts of questions that only philosophers used to
ask. The difference is that neuroscientists are sometimes able to ask more
specific questions that may lead to more insight into the basic principles of
the human experience. Neuroscientists are motivated and equipped to find real
and practical answers to philosophical questions, leaving philosophers behind
in an anachronistic philological niche, repeating discussions of what
philosophers said hundreds to thousands of years ago. This is not to argue that all neuroscientists
are philosophers or that all neuroscientists understand the human mind, since
many are focused on highly specialized tasks that reveal little or nothing
about how the whole system works.
Humans are born with a somewhat defined
intelligence potential. The spread of IQ scores in any population represents a
combination of genetic determinants that cannot be changed and environmental
determinant that operate in a sequential manner and can be changed.
Environmental determinants can be separated
into two groups:
- determinants that are sequence critical and
- determinants that operate all the time.
Key nutrients must be supplied as the brain
forms in utero on a daily basis. Deficiency may cause irreversible damage. If
the same nutrients are deficient in an older child or an adult temporary and
relatively milder functional impairment occurs that can be reversed by
correcting the nutrient deficiency. The most common cause, in third world
terms, of low intelligence is iodine deficiency during pregnancy and
infancy. Iodine deficiency has profound
implications in terms of economics, politics, human rights and dignity. Low
intelligence populations will not do as well as smarter populations and will
not be capable of fully participating in a technological 21st century. In
affluent populations children may still be malnourished and suffer from
neglected problems such food excess, nutrient disproportion and food allergy. We can equate normal intelligence with normal
brain function. Not all brains are created equally and some brains are not
constructed properly or are damaged before and during birth. The world offers
abundant opportunities to interfere with normal brain function. The
overwhelming task is to avoid foods, drugs, and environmental chemicals that
make people less smart and even demented. Alcohol intoxication for example is a
temporary dementia that becomes permanent if it is repeated too often. Brain
injury adds to the negative effects of using alcohol and other psychoactive
chemicals.
Leda Cosmides and John Tooby suggest:[i]
“The brain is a naturally
constructed computational system whose function is to solve adaptive
information-processing problems (such as face recognition, threat
interpretation, language acquisition, or navigation). Over evolutionary time,
its circuits were cumulatively added because they "reasoned" or
"processed information" in a way that enhanced survival....our minds
consist of a large number of circuits that are specialized. For example, we
have some neural circuits whose design is specialized for vision. All they do
is allow you to see. Other neural circuits are specialized for hearing -- they
detect changes in air pressure, and extract information from it. Still other
neural circuits are specialized for sexual attraction -- i.e., they govern what
you find sexually arousing, what you regard as beautiful, who you'd like to
date, and so on.… you can view the brain as a collection of dedicated
mini-computers -- a collection of modules… whose operations are functionally
integrated to produce behavior...So it is with your conscious experience. The
only things you become aware of are a few high level conclusions passed on by
thousands of specialized mechanisms: some that are gathering sensory
information from the world, others that are analyzing and evaluating that information, checking for inconsistencies,
filling in the blanks, figuring out what it all means.“
Smart people learn faster and learn more than not so smart
people. Smart people also are more curious, seek more diverse experiences and
absorb more information. Intelligence is manifest in the ability to acquire
complicated skills and excel in performance by practice and progressive
improvement. Competent people are smart people who have the discipline to
practice and improve their performance.
There is a relationship between being nice
person and being a competent person. In demanding, professional environments
the nicest people tend to be the smartest and most competent. There are
exceptions.
Read Neuroscience by Stephen Gislason andIntelligence and Learning
[i] Leda Cosmides & John Tooby Primer of Evolutionary Psychology:
Center for Evolutionary Psychology University of California, Santa Barbara