How Intelligent are We?

 

 My engineer brother-in-law tells me his mountain tortoise brain is far more intelligent than my baboon’s brain because his slow and steady brain can climb up a mountain, whereas my baboon’s brain can only climb up a tree. Let’s see how intelligent our brains work.

Intelligence refers to the ability to learn about, learn from, understand, and interact with one’s environment. It embraces many different types of skills such as physical dexterity, verbal fluency, concrete and abstract reasoning, sensory discrimination, emotional sensitivity, numeracy, and also the ability to function well in society.

It does not mean to be an engineer, a doctor, a scientist, a lawyer, a businessman, or an entrepreneur or any other profession makes us more intelligent than others although I am unsure about politicians.

Let’s have a look at how our brain works. The frontal lobes of the brain we believe are the seat of intelligence not only in human animals but also in other mammalian brains.  I believe animals like baboons, chimpanzees, monkeys, dogs, dolphins…etc.  can be trained to be very intelligent like humans through education.

Unfortunately, any injury or damage to this frontal area of the brain may affect our ability to concentrate and make sound judgement among others. On the bright side, frontal lobe damage may not necessarily affect a person’s intelligence or intelligence quotient (IQ).  He or she can still get a PhD even with frontal lobe damage even though ironically those with a PhD degree is jealousy called “Permanent Head Damage” by others without a PhD or any frontal lobe damage. What can we do?

IQ is measured by evaluating spatial, verbal, and mathematical ability. Mathematics happens to be one of my pet subjects not because I am more intelligent, but because mathematics is like a game of chess where interestingly you need to think hard which the next move would be to take to confront the equation unlike a game of “snake and ladder” where we depend on statistical chance. I believe taking an old textbook in mathematics and trying to solve all those problems all over again when we were young in school may keep us from developing Alzheimer’s disease at old age. The ability to think intelligently involves other parts of the brain too.

Studies have shown that intelligence relies on a neural “super expressway” that links the frontal lobes that are involved in planning and organizing decisions together with the parietal lobes that integrate sensory information. The speed at which the frontal lobe receives information and data through this neural expressway affects our intelligence even for jungle baboons, monkeys and chimpanzees to quickly climb up a tree when threatened by a mauling tiger below and gives out loud distress calls to warn other animals. Coincidentally, I would do the same. What else could I do if I was a human baboon without a gun?

Fortunately, our frontal lobe ability is enhanced by our education. But unfortunately having a high IQ also has a disadvantage. A study among members of MENSA, a club meant for people with very high intelligence, found a number of them having mental problems. Neuroscientists are unable to know the clear reasons for this phenomenon. We would like to ask if the reason for this was because highly intelligent people are often very creative, which of course is linked to abstract thoughts rather than practical solutions? Wrestling with fantastic theoretical ideas rather than being practical induces stress to the brain that may have caused “mental problems” to himself and to others who needed to deal with these highly intelligent people. Studies have shown that highly intelligent people cause problems to others due to their hyper brain activity and others who could not catch up. This itself manifests as mental instability.

We believe intelligence is largely the ability to make decisions which involves balancing the pros and cons. Our intelligent thinking brain depends on our ability to calculate the pros and cons to achieve a gold standard as a final reward to whatever we have decided. Our brain's next step is to calculate “decision valves”, meaning the net outcome, and or the reward expected minus the cost of that decision.

Irrevocably, our brain makes a prediction how likely that decision will deliver the reward envisioned which we compare with the actual reward or outcome with plus or minus “prediction error”. The more complex the problem, the more the frontal area of our thinking brain comes into action.

Number sense, the brain seemed to be wired. Babies as young as six months can spot the difference between one and two. One study where the babies’ brain electric activities were wired while playing with soft toys. What the researchers found was when the toys were momentarily screened and one was removed, then the screen was removed the babies brain registered an error by activating the same circuit known to mark error detection in adults, suggesting that even young babies are intelligent enough to recognize errors, discrepancies and inconsistencies.

But I am unsure if the brain of a jungle baboon can detect the same? Perhaps only the brain of an engineer can?

My nephew, Dr Ong We Yii is a Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Singapore. He would be able to tell us much more about our brains whether we are stupid, intelligent or it was just our serendipity (not stupidity) - meaning good luck in making unexpected and fortunate discoveries not with our brain but through accidents based on the statistical laws of chance or probability – a mathematical procedure we used very seriously when we conduct a biological or medical research. I shall write more about our brain later. Give my slow brain a rest. 

Meantime, over to Wei Yii Ong for more about our brain.

Jb