He works with Neuroimaging Technologies to study individual differences and mental ability.

He received his PhD in psychology from the Johns Hopkins University in 1975 and has since held appointments in the intramural research program at the National Institute of Mental Health and the Medical School at Brown University and the University of California have Irvine.

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Has served on the editorial board of three journals.

Narrow Image Intelligence and Psychiatry Research.

He also served his guest editor for a special issue on brain imaging research for the Journal Intelligence.

He provides neuroscience consultation to university research groups, corporations, foundations and educational and legal professionals.

He's a popular lecturer and has appeared on numerous media outlets.

In 2012 his research was featured on Nova Science Now, and he received the Distinguished Contributor Award for the International Society for Intelligence Research.

In 2013 the teaching company invited Richard to create an 18 electric course called the Intelligent Brain.

So welcome to Dr Richard higher today and we're going to talk about the most controversy of all topics, I would say in social science strangely enough, intelligence.

So maybe we could start with a little bit of off historical information on I would like to know how you got interested Nike researcher in intelligence research.

Let's say and and so let's start with that.

And then we can start saving diving into the nitty gritty Well, really.

It started in graduate school at Hopkins when I really became most interested in personality research, and I started out that I was studying individual differences in personality.

But just by happenstance.

The year I started graduate school in 1971 was the year one of the professors there.

Julian Stanley was a study of mathematically precocious youth, and I was one of the proctors at the very first talent search for mathematically precocious kids.

And I want my first couple of papers as book chapters in books that Stanley was anything about this project, and I saw these thes kids age 10 11 12 who were scoring hider on S a T math than Hopkins freshen.

And the question was, How does this happen?

Where does this come from?

So now it's kind of my earliest interest and in graduate school, although I really completed my dissertation on personality.

Uh, I took my first job at the National Institute of Little Health in literal research program in the laboratory of psychology and psycho pathology, which at the time, the lab director was David Rosenthal, who had just finished the Denmark adoption studies.

That schizophrenia, right?

Right.

And here is where I learned about genetics.

My office was next door to ah Fallon, a Monte box pon who was doing whole potential search.

Very interested in that.

And so my my early interested in in the individual differences slowly morphed into uninterested in individual differences in intelligence and at n i am H they were just going through a transition from kind of a psychoanalytic, uh, orientation to a neuroscience orientation.

And I was kind of caught up in that.

And so that's the origin of my interest in the brain in technologies to make brain measurements and relate that the individual differences.

Okay, right.

Okay.

Now you just wrote a book too, And the neuroscience of intelligence.

Kanto University Press.

And so when did that come out?

That came out?

Um, really, just about six months ago.

So it came out, I think, in December of 2016.

But they tell me for publishing reasons they call it a 2017 publication.

And see, while I'm part of the reason I was so excited to talk to you is that I've done a very large amount of research, especially not so much practical lab research but investigation into the structure of intelligence and into its measurement.

We designed back in 93 with a student of mine, Daniel Higgins.

We designed think what was probably the first online battery purporting to measure the cognitive abilities associated with dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex?

Right.

So hypothetically, the highest order cognitive functions in the brain and we found much to our chagrin, I would say, And this was a very painful discovery that, ah, lot of what we have been thinking about it is potentially separable, neuro psychological functions.

We're pretty easily Kel obstacle in collapsible into good old general intelligence.

You know, that killer central factor that seems to have night cognitive abilities.

So it was quite a shock, especially because the neuro psychologists of the time and they still do this are are as assiduous in investigators of the A psychometric intelligence literature is they should be intent.

Underestimate the central power of that.

That initial factor.

So, anyways, I'm really interested into intelligence research Party from a practical perspective, too, because the industrial organizational psychology literature is crystal clear for complex jobs.

The best predictor of long term success is intelligence, and it's a predictor that's probably say, imagine you given in our of point for 2.5, which is pretty decent.

So, let's say 25% of the variance the next best predictors conscientiousness.

And it's pushing its limit at mopping up 10% of the variability in long term performance.

So, like you, it's a killer man, and it we I make sure my students assess intelligence with everything they do, and it always ends up being a major predictor of things that you wouldn't even expect.

Disgust, sensitivity for examples over your disgust sensitivity is higher if you have a lower I.

Q.

Yeah, the G factor is powerful.

You just said something that I want to just make a distinction about.

You're talking about the G factor, and then you kind of call that I Q.

This is very common in everyday language to talk about intelligence I Q and what we call the Julie Factor as one thing.

And it really isn't so when I Q score is a good estimate of the G factor, right?

Also includes other aspects of intelligence and intelligence is itself a little is a blogger Trot, um, is only a part off the universe of mental abilities.

So if you're very good at, say, calculating on what day January 5th was in the year 15 20.

That's a mental ability that some people have doesn't mean you're smart, right?

Yes.

You see that with autistic savants.

Often they're often, but sufficiently often they have these amazing calculus flight calculation abilities, for example, that don't seem to be manifest in a spectacular Lehigh overall intelligence.

So what do you What do you want to tell us about?

You want to start with the book and and walk us through it?

Well, you know, if that Z that's interesting, because the book is kind of a culmination of things.

I've warmed mostly from my neuroimaging work on intelligence, and it kind of came as a surprise.

Is the first book I've ever written that we're tired, actually from academia, never wrote a book while I was in academia was writing you journal papers, but Cambridge University Press called, and they have this Siri's of fundamentals of neuroscience, and they wanted to include intelligence.

And I regarded that as a major step because intelligence research has been relegated almost to, ah, the peripheral of mainstream psychology.

Yeah, he left politically Suspect to say the least.

Yeah.

And, you know, the switch happened overnight from May.

Being in the mainstream to being really peripheral in about 1960 million before 1969.

Almost everyone who is interested in education.

I was concerned about the achievement gaps.

Right?

And they felt universally that once you equalized educational opportunities, those achievement gaps would disappear.

Graphics?

Yeah, that was the head start.

Head start putting.

Yeah, even before head start head start, it came to a head start, But even before head stuck there, all these demonstration projects it was the miracle in Milwaukee.

And they're all these things that showed that if you really intervened in early childhood education Yep.

Which at that time was called compensatory education.

The early childhood education term king.

Much later.

But this idea of compensatory education really took off And then, in 1969 the Harvard Education will review asked one of the foremost educational psychologist, Arthur Jensen, to write a review of the Progress.

And this article, in 1969 has become infamous.

The opening sentence was essentially we tried compensatory education, and it has failed.

Yep.

And then he had 100 pages and detailed statistical analysis of why there were no you couldn't demonstrate an increase in on cue score any of these programs.

Now Head Start had had just begun.

So Head Start wasn't included.

Yeah, but you know, I reviewed the literature on hips, start to extensively, and basically what happened was that the So that was for those of the viewers who don't know Head Start was, ah, our nationwide attempt to to add additional education to the lives of dis disadvantaged kids especially, you know, at the pre school level.

And basically what happens.

What was that?

They actually did show improvements in academic achievement initially.

So in great one in Grade two, they were performing above their peers.

But then the difference in improvement, the difference in performance, started to decrease and then by boat.

The grade grade five agreed.

Six.

The differences have disappeared completely, so there was no evidence whatsoever of that of that either of a stable, one time long term gain in cognitive ability, or what people were really hoping was that if you intervene early enough, you get something that would sort of hut would turn into a positive feedback loop, and the gains would actually advance across time.

And what ended up happening with the Head Start research basically, was the conclusion that it produced no cognitive improvements whatsoever.

Although more kids who went through Head Start, um, graduated from high school, fewer than were delinquent, more of them fear that became pregnant, teenage in the teenage years and more of them went to colleges.

But that seemed to be because they were better socialized, not because they were in any way had been made smarter.

So that was a really tremendous disappointment because it was a bipartisan attempt to come to grips with the fundamental issues that sort of be deviled structural poverty in the United States.

No one was happy about that outcome.

I could tell you the model that.

But when Jensen published his article, he also said that since I Q.

Increases seem not to be coming from music.

Intense environmental interventions.

We should consider the possibility that piece differences have a dramatic component and that really began incendiary descent of intelligence search to the periphery.

Reaction against that was universal because it implied into the inferiority.

If you're doing that, seems right.

You It's also something that's universally hated, but on both sides of the political spectrum, because on the liberal end, you know, the idea of fundamentally is is that everybody's the same and that if you if you distribute education, resources, property that everyone can succeed.

And so that didn't work out so well, liberals and then on the conservative side, the idea is, Well, if you could just get off your lazy ass is and get a job, there is a job for you out there, And the truth of the matter is, you know you can tell me what you think about this, but this is a statistic that just absolutely shocked and staggered me when I went through the intelligence literature.

So you know, it is illegal in the United States to induct anybody who has Nike of lace and 83 and The reason for that is you know that the American Armed forces have bean conducting intelligence research for, like, more than 100 years, and that was partly because they needed a way of sorting people rapidly during times of military expansion during more time.

But it was also because I Q tests, and especially in the early part of the 20th century, were used to identify, let's say, the deserving poor who could really benefit from additional educational attainment and advancement in the union.

And the military was hoping to identify people from nor class strata that could be streamed into, say, officer training programs, and so four or even skills training programs to to move people from the underclass into at least the working class and maybe above so that a bloody stake in this man, they wanted to find people.

They wanted to sort them properly, and they wanted to do social good when they weren't just trying to win a war.

Let's say which often also is a social good, but what happened was that by I don't remember when this legislation was introduced, but it wasn't.

It was in the later part of the 20th century.

But their basic finding was that, by say, the 19 eighties, they had determined that if you had an I Q of less than 83 there was not a damn thing that the that the Army could do the armed forces could do to transform you into someone who could do something that was more productive than non productive and the tear.

A terrible thing about that is that it's about 10% of the population.

And so you look a statistic like that and you think, Oh my God, you've got this This this is enterprise, this massive enterprise that's chronically hungry for people, Trade's always they're always looking for people.

They're really oriented towards taking people from the underclass and lower working class and pushing them up the societal strata.

And during wartime.

They're actually desperate to bring in recruits, period, and their conclusion is that 10% of the population can't be trained to do anything, anything sufficiently useful to make them militarily operable.

It's just I just read that my judges dropped.

It's like, yeah, you know, in the United States, we have about 330 million people and because of the distribution relatively normal distribution of I Q scores, about 16% have IQ's of 85 or wet, right?

Right Jews.

They're not going to graduate school.

No, it means that from from what I've read, practically, it means the Wonderlic company has actually done a Really, they have a nice I Q tests from the commercial perspective.

You know, it's actually Psychometric Lee valid, and they've late I Q levels Thio job specifically to job categories, you know, I know not and that a lot of concerns.

They're not only not going to graduate school, they're not gonna find a a stable job that pays a livable wage.

Yep, especially even given that so many of the service jobs now require fair, high degree of computational savvy Arleta built no, I'm not computation but ability to interact with complex computational technology.

That's the typical till Lata at a checkout market, or or the till at a McDonald's.

Because McDonald's is actually very complicated is often far beyond the ability of people who are on the low end of the intelligence distribution, And they claimed I think it was Wonderlic, although it might know it might have bean, it might have bean hunt.

What's his name?

They say, Uh, researcher.

Is that Earl Hunt?

I think possibly.

But he claimed that if you have an I Q of below 90 that it's it's difficult.

It's diff difficult for you to read well enough to translate what you're reading into action so you can't actually read instructions and follow them.

You don't have that level of literacy that's corrupt s So I I was gonna say that in the United States, this bottom 16% translates into 51 million people, right?

Including 13 million Children who are in school, right?