Placeholder Image

Subtitles section Play video

  • Dr Richard Higher Studies the neural basis of human intelligence and cognition.

  • 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.

  • Hey!

  • 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?

  • This is a very difficult problem now.

  • I knew World 100 passed away when you knew him pretty well.

  • He also it would say that there is this, ah, cognitive segregation in society.

  • This is a point that Charles Murray makes.

  • Yes.

  • Well, And you know what?

  • I often ask, When's the last time you had someone over for dinner who wasn't a college grad?

  • Well, that was something that Murray and Herrnstein wrote about in their book Bell Curve, which really struck because I read that book twice.

  • Unlike most of the people criticized it and, you know, one of the things that they pointed out in there it was.

  • Look, the typically the typical educated person thinks that someone isn't very bright if they have an I.

  • Q.

  • Of 115 so graduate graduate level with PhD level research institutions, right?

  • Because 115 there's There's many people at 115 above, as there are at 85 below.

  • And so it's a minority of the population, and that's the talk.

  • 15%.

  • And you know, that's That's the dollar undergraduate, right?

  • So just people have See, I'm a clinical psychologist and I've dealt with people had I ranges in the low eighties and tried to find them drugs and tried to train them.

  • And I have some real knowledge about the stunning gap between people at the low end of the ikey distribution in the high end.

  • And it's it's no bloody wonder people hate Ike research and intelligence research because it reveals a set of seriously dismal facts of the incredible range of ability among human beings.

  • Yes, thistles.

  • True, and moreover, I would add to this that people in universities, the fasteners and cutting graduate students, uh, have a hard time understanding what the what everyday life is like.

  • If you have an I Q of 85 and you're making your way, you're living independently.

  • You're making your way in the world.

  • But it is a challenge.

  • Is a right?

  • I mean, just tell, just barely begins to describe it.

  • I had a I had a client who he probably had nine q of under 80 the non verbal portion of it anyways.

  • And hey was indistinguishable in physical appearance from from Let's say, I hate to used the frame normal person, but there's nothing Mark that marked him out about particularly intellectually impaired, you know.

  • And, uh, I tried at one point.

  • I think this is This is this was so, so telling to me.

  • I got him on into a volunteer job, which, by the way, is very difficult.

  • It's harder to get a volunteer job than a real job because you have to do police screening in all sorts of things, and the selection process is just his extreme.

  • But I eventually ended up giving him a job in a bike store, bike slash bookstore, and at that place couldn't hold him once the substitute program had expired.

  • And then I got him a job at a charity, and his job was to fold letters into three so that they could be put into envelopes.

  • Well, that sounds easy.

  • Accepted.

  • He also had a bit of a motor tremor, and, you know, it took me about 30 hours to train him to fold up a piece of paper with sufficient precision so that it could be put in an envelope rapidly so that the envelope wasn't so mangled that it would get stuck in the automatic sorting machine.

  • And another is high performance demands on him, too.

  • He had to whip through those letters pretty quickly, and then sometimes the letters would have a photograph appended to them that was stapled on, and they weren't always stapled on in the same place.

  • So then he had to calculate how to fold the paper over the photograph without bending the photograph in precise third so that would still fit in the envelope.

  • And then he had to separate the French letters from the English letters and associate them with the proper envelopes and, like that level of complexity, just did him in.

  • So let me say two things about this one is, I hope, common sense and the other is pretty provocative.

  • The common sense it is we have to be very careful when we have these discussions not to devalue the human dignity of people who aren't in the upper end of the distribution.

  • And if there's one criticism that I think is fair, sometimes in these conversations it sounds like we're devaluing people at the lower end of the distribution.

  • We have to be very careful that we don't do that.

  • Ah, human life has dignity and I Q was not the most important thing that defines human guests and beans.

  • You even thought associated with wisdom.

  • It's not necessarily associated with truth or with courage or with many virtues that are possible home, right?

  • So right it always being likable, you know, our honest Yes, that time, many about now the psychometric lost a psychometric relationship between intelligence and conscientiousness.

  • Zero, right, Right, So, like that we have to make that point.

  • Yes, I think I agree.

  • I agree.

  • I'm trying to make the point about how difficult it is for people who are on the low end of the cognitive spectrum to survive in an increasingly complex, cognitively sophisticated environment.

  • But jobs are just disappearing.

  • Yes, absolutely.

  • And now let's ask the question.

  • Is there anything that could be done about that?

  • Well, Western society has tried very hard with a number of environmental, environmentally based interventions.

  • Early childhood education, by the way that the you said the literature and organizational psychology is there in clear.

  • The literature is equally clear in educational psychology.

  • Oh, yeah, well, the relationship between you and learning more powerful than the relationship between Ike, your job performance, that that's right, which is kind of common sense or matches, are common sense.

  • But, you know, if you put a bunch of variables into a regression equation to predict academic achievement, and we have all these school quality variables and teacher quality variables and cotton, the variables of the students and what you find is the teacher variables and the quality of the school variables together barely account for 10% of the vic.

  • Yeah, no, I know it's terrible.

  • It's terrible, you know, And I talked to the guy who ran admissions at Harvard.

  • I taught at Harvard for while his name was Dean Whipple on He is a really smart guy.

  • I really like the and you know he was.

  • Let's say he was on the right side of the human race and he was really trying to figure out how to run the admissions policy at Harvard so that it did the best for everyone concerned.

  • And he had run an interesting series of analysis that I don't believe he ever published.

  • One of them was, Well, let's say you segregate the Harvard population into the relatively low I Q.

  • Kids.

  • So maybe they only have an I Q.

  • Of 130 you know, and the relatively high I Q.

  • Kids who are pushing up towards to 160.

  • So you are two competing hypotheses there.

  • One would be that the lower I Q.

  • Kids come to Harvard, this remarkable environment and they may and they they thrived because of the high educational quality so well that they closed the gap between them and the 1 60 kids.

  • And that's just people completely wrong.

  • What happens is you put both those groups.

  • They're both very, very highly selected.

  • But some, you know, in this in a sort of Superman rage, intellectually, what happens is the gap just gets bigger and bigger as they progressed through university.

  • And it's a dreaded example of that Matthew principle that the economists talk about, which is no to those who have more will be given and from those who have nothing.

  • Everything will be taken.

  • It's very, very.

  • It's no wonder people just like this research is so it's so anti egalitarian in it in its essential and it's essential structure.

  • Well, I wanted to make a second point that I said would be provocative if you want to do something about this.

  • And, you know, we tried a bunch of interventions.

  • Ernest.

  • Well funded, long term interventions don't seem to work, but no science has been excluded from discussions about what to do about this, and I move that neural science.

  • The progress in neuroscience research has the potential to really dramatically increase the G factor.

  • Well, that's an optimistic statement.

  • So I'm sure looking forward to some support for that one.

  • It's optimistic and devotional, and you know, just this a thought experiment and I can tell you why I believe this is is possible.

  • Well, first, before I tell you the thought experiment, the reason I'm optimistic is that it is because of the high heritability of the G factor.

  • That means, you know, June's are involved.

  • Joon's work through biology, even if environment interacts with that.

  • But basically you have a no biological system.

  • It's complex, but as you begin to understand it, you can tweak it.

  • This is what all medicine was doing.

  • Now they're trying to understand the moral biology's last genetic basis of our health and our diseases.

  • Why, so they can fix it so that you get when you go to the doctor, you're going because your biology is broken and you want your biology fixed?

  • Well, let's think about the brain.

  • No one conceptualize is low.

  • I Q is a disease, and it's a little dangerous.

  • But to the extent to which, like you, has a genetic input or genetic influence, that's the extent of what you might be.

  • Ableto find out how that works, how that's what that system is, and then figure out how to tweak that system to increase I.

  • Q.

  • It's not science fiction.

  • I mean, that's that's a plausible sequence of events.

  • What the problem is, it's a very complex sequence assurance, but I also think it's a finite set of problems, not an infinite set of problems.

  • You know, if this is if physicists can figure out what happened during the first nanoseconds of the Big Bang, we can certainly figure out what the neurobiology off intellect it is and how to tweak it.

  • So I think that's possible.

  • So now let's let's do a thought experiment and let's imagine there's an I Q pill and I mean that metaphorically, not literally appealing.

  • You could take like, pretty floor, but, like heading floor dated water just kind of raises the dental health of everybody.

  • Be nice if we had that for, like you.

  • But just imagine what it would be like if we shifted the distribution of I Cube 15 points into the high end so that now the average I Q.

  • And I understand how like he was computed and morning and everything.

  • But the point is that no one would have an I Q.

  • Less than 100 right?

  • What would the world be like if everyone could reason sufficiently to get a reasonable job?

  • Yeah, well, that's it's a good question.

  • The, uh what would you call the perverse part of me has.

  • Funny.

  • I was just talking to one of my graduate students.

  • We'd be looking out the determine its of male attractiveness by the personality of female viewers.

  • Okay, okay.

  • And so what we found is that there are some personality effects so extroverted, enthusiastic women tend to rate men generally speaking as more attractive than introverted, introverted, less enthusiastic women.

  • And and so there are some just straight personality effects.

  • But the biggest effect by far we found, was the proclivity of of women in general to rape men as less attractive as the women's I Q increased.

  • And so the other thing that we don't know is what price we pay for for accelerated I Q from A from a broader perspective, you know, because I know that there was some evidence and you tell me what you think about this because I know that there's reasonable evidence that the average I q of the Ashkenazi Jewish population is about 15 points higher than the the standard population, which is kind of makes it a thought experiment that experiment real life experiment.

  • It's equivalent to the one that you laid out but asking nosy Jews also tend to suffer from a host of neurological diseases that seem to be associated with increased neural plasticity.

  • And so, to me, it's often it's often hard to gain on one front without losing on another.

  • You know, I mean, that's the evolutionary conundrum, obviously, but we call that the social justice.

  • Terry, if you're right about one thing, you have to be bad and everything else that kind of balance it out.

  • Yeah, well, generally speaking, you do pay a price for your for your exceptionalism.

  • You know, I don't want that's true because you know the Julian Stanley studies of the math nappy, precocious kids essentially found.

  • Not only were they smart, but they were more mature than their age peers.

  • Better looking.

  • They were taller.

  • They were physically fit.

  • I mean, it was kind of the anti so yeah, No, I know that's true.

  • Well, I mean, it's just that also might be true, because one of the things that that can interfere with I Q.

  • Is poor health and poor nutritional quality and all of that.

  • I mean, it doesn't look like it's that easy to increase I Q.

  • But looks like it's pretty easy to decrease it.

  • Yeah.

  • You know, I think that those those things have to be pretty extreme.

  • Yeah, they haven't effect, and those effects may not be permanent.

  • Actually, there's some studies of deprivation of people who suffer suffered deprivation during the Second World War.

  • That suggests that those really severe deprivations didn't have lasting effects on Well, you know well, people are tough, so I'm inclined to agree with that.

  • So So, have you seen any animal experiment?

  • Experimental work that you regard is compelling.

  • That shows something like the transformation of of animal cognition into a into something that it's It's higher order that you regard is compelling.

  • Not sure what you mean, but they're certainly animal work that shows you can extract a G factor from cognitive tests given to various animals.

  • Right?

  • So So what I was wondering is, has bean.

  • Any evidence that you regard is credible showing that that could be that that sake so called animal G factor extracted in the same.

  • We should tell our readers do the way you extract the G factor.

  • I'm going to say it very, very rapidly.

  • I imagine you'd take a a randomly set, randomly selected set of 200 questions that require abstraction of one form or another to Seoul.

  • And then you give those 200 questions 200 people and you some the scores, and you rank order them.

  • You get something that's roughly equivalent there to a G factor.

  • It's roughly that.

  • So just I would say it a little bit differently, just Cape forever.

  • It's on the same page if you think of all the different mental abilities and you devise a test for each one of them, and you gave this test with a lot of people across the range of ability, what you'll find is the scores on all those tests are positively correlated with each other, suggesting that all tests of mental ability have something in common.

  • Right?

  • Sure, that's a great cop.

  • Is this G factor this general ability to reason?

  • And some individual tests have more G loading than other individual tests, right?

  • So it's and tests of abstract reasoning tend to be highly g loaded.

  • If I said to you, repeat the following numbers back to me.

  • 372165 That's the not a very highly G loaded mental ability to be able to do that.

  • But if I gave you a string like that and said, Repeat him to me backwards, that becomes a gene loaded ability because transformation.

  • So well.

  • The other thing to say about that, too, is that the positive relationship between that was multiple assessments that you described is actually quite high, Right, Right.

  • That's the thing is that that general factor not only exists across domains of cognitive ability, but it tends to account for a substantial amount of the of the ability in each of those domains.

  • It's kind of like our groggy is kind of like a black hole for intelligence research, and everything keeps falling into it.

  • That's an interesting way to put it, because now we have these Juvenile wide association studies that are finding these bits of D N A that are related to a latent factor of intelligence, which is the G factor, or to what they call educational attainment variables where it hits.

  • The attainment is so highly correlated with I Cube, that's essentially the same thing.

  • So we're really moving well.

  • When I was in graduate school, the question was, Is there a genetic component to intelligence or not to this kind of d n a analysis trying to find bits of d n A.

  • That I'm going to be related to what we call intelligence or I q testing or for the G factor, and they seem to exist.

  • There seems to be hundreds of them.

  • A tiny effect, uh, which will make the ultimate story extremely complicated.

  • But as I said before, I think it's a finite set of problems, right, right at the end of that sequence of solving those problems, I think there's a good chance will know how to increase I Q.

  • And I think it's a good thing to be able to do that.

  • You know, I have said publicly that more intelligence is better than less.

  • Sometimes I get criticized because that implies that people with less intelligence aren't us both.

  • While that's why I want to be very careful that I don't believe that that martyr life's is more the accurate way of thinking about it.

  • And there lies in a narrow range of possibilities and opportunities.

  • That's right, and in my view, my political bias is therefore, governments have a moral responsibility to help those people and and, uh a lot of government programs are gonna do it because your job training requires a certain level G on like my low I Q clients.

  • They used to go to the government agencies that were designed to help people find employment.

  • And, you know, the typical response was, Well, just go home and type up your CV and distribute it.

  • It's like, Yeah, you just go like, can't use a computer a cat type.

  • I don't know what a CVI is.

  • It's like it's It's a non starter on all three counts.

  • That's right.

  • So in the United States, there are 51 million people with IQ's under 85 they're about 43 million people living in poverty.

  • Do you think those Venn diagrams intersect?

  • You are.

  • We should also be clear about this because it is so politically suspect is that it's not like it's it's it's.

  • It's self evident that people who have less cognitive capability are likely to end up poor because they're serious, complex problems in life that be set them.

  • That they have a difficult time dealing with and they can't learn is quickly.

  • And so the relationship between poverty and intelligence, self evident if you're willing to think it through for any length of time, doesn't mean that everybody who's rich, that is it doesn't mean that everyone who is rich is smart.

  • And it doesn't mean that everyone who is a whore is stupid, what to be blood.

  • But what it does mean is that if you're intelligent, you're much more likely to become financially successful.

  • And I think it was the Hornstein, her Einstein and Murray.

  • I think that the calculations back in the bell curve that indicated that if you imagine that you could you are a fairy godmother and and you have, ah, your newborn grandchild in front of you and you can grant them three standard deviations above the mean in terms of wealth at birth.

  • Or you could grant them three standard deviations above the mean in terms of I Q.

  • At birth.

  • And then you wanted to determine which would work better for them by the time they were 40.

  • And the answer to that was quite clear.

  • Is that I Q.

  • Trump's wealth trying if its ability to predict a positive future Yes, yeah, and that that's why I'm so interested in the concept of increasing cute or increasing the G factor, not just the I Q.

  • Score, but really, what under this reasoning ability?

  • So you know, some people tried to teach college students critical thinking.

  • Yeah, I think that's a good thing.

  • It is your comm part, and you can think critically.

  • So much the better.

  • Exactly, you know, and you know, it may sound to your whiskers.

  • I just want to take a moment out here.

  • It may sound to your listeners, like, you know, these two guys pontificating about what it's like to be small, what it's like to be not so smart.

  • I mean, the point of this, the point of no neuroscience research on intelligence and what I hope to achieve by writing the book was to show that that the genetic aspects are not deterministic.

  • It's the opposite.

  • Sheets are probabilistic.

  • So the extent to which something like intelligence is genetic, in my view, is the extent to which would learn how to change it for work for the better.

  • Well, that's different.

  • Yeah, because people do tend to think about biological factors is deterministic and that that's a mistake because they can be shifted.

  • So with regards to the animal studies.

  • So you know, you pointed out that you can you can come up with an I Q like estimate for, say, a rat.

  • And have you seen anything that indicates I don't care how it's done through training or or Nero chemically or or by By promoting brain function in different ways, however, you might do it.

  • That's actually indicated to you that there is a way of biologically enhancing the general cognitive ability even of an animal Has anything of some of credible Just by breeding myself run a maze faster than other mice together, you get myself simply be ableto learn how to run a maze faster.

  • But that's work from the 19 eighties, right?

  • I review this in the book.

  • There are some interesting technologies that have been developed where you can turn parts of a rat brain on and off and will and see what happens.

  • This has not yet been applied as faras I know toe learning, but interestingly, there are human studies underway with things like trans cranial magnetic stimulation and electrical wasted low voltage ways to stimulate parts of the brain.

  • And there are some interesting experiments now being done with humans to see if you can improve learning or reasoning ability.

  • Yes, matter of fact, I edit this journal called Intelligence, which is kind of a prime spot for intelligence researchers to publish on all aspects of intelligence.

  • And we're just starting to put together a special issue on human experiments that increase reasoning ability.

  • Using these these techniques of stimulating the brain are any of you seen.

  • You've seen some positive things for three guards to low level electrical stimulation because that's also being used.

  • You know, it's more.

  • It's more anecdotal, but there's a bit of research being used to treat depression.

  • For example.

  • That's right.

  • And I do cover him in the book, the studies that were published up until the time I wrote the book and caution people that they hadn't been replicated yet.

  • Right, right, right, we're on the way.

  • I mean, this is This is an evolving area that's going to be very exciting under that students are listening to this podcast, and we're thinking about neuroscience or psychology.

  • This kind of experiment is, is is really a new things of intelligence research where you can do experiments on human beings that are completely ethical on dhe, relatively non intrusive on this is going really gonna change everything because it'll shift intelligence research from basically psychometric correlations past what neuroimaging has done, which, which really moved it away from just cycle metrics and then correlated psychometric scores with measurable aspects of the brain, like glucose, metabolic function of the amount of gray matter or white matter or number off white matter fibers.

  • And with all these fabulous connections, right, move things I got in early on that phase.

  • But that face is now moving into this new phase off, actually stimulating the blame to improve learning and memory and reasoning and all the while doing it with neural imaging.

  • Right?

  • See what happens And adding Deanna to it.

  • I mean, come on, now, this is a great time.

  • Great entering the research in this area, right?

  • Right.

  • Well, there's some optimism on the rise.

  • I mean, I looked for a while because I'm very interested in improving human performance, measuring it and improving it.

  • And, uh so I looked and and doing that also in conjunction with businesses, because I like things to have a practical and, you know, I look to find out what the research indicated with regards to improvement of intelligence.

  • And mostly what I found was not so much improvement as conservation is that if you exercise both aerobically end and with weight lifting that that can help you maintain your fluid intelligence across for longer across your lifespan because it tends to decline rather precipitously as you age.

  • Which is one of the more dismal things that you also discover with Ike research and starts to decline when you're in your early twenties and it's kind of linear downhill all the way along.

  • But exercise really helps excellent, but its preservation, which is pretty important at my age.

  • Preservation is a big deal, man, but enhancement would be good.

  • But you know this thing about on I Q pill coming up with a way, you know, to manipulate your biological the neurobiology of your brain thio regarding intellect.

  • If there's a breakthrough in this, it will come either from Alice Chambers research or normal aging research, trying to prevented the slow decline of your mental faculties as your age, especially fluid intelligence, right?

  • Oh, are trying to reverse the ravages of Alzheimer's disease.

  • These are neural chemical problems, right?

  • Well, as we like you seems to be quite me tightly, tightly linked to Well, this is another thing we could talk about because so I know that there are certain biological markers that I Q is loosely associated with.

  • So, you know, it's fragment it predicts in a fragmentary matter.

  • So I know that even something as simple a simple reaction time, how fast you can push a button when light comes on is correlated with I Q.

  • With fluid intelligence and about 0.2.

  • And, um, having a bigger head is slightly correlated, especially when you correct from body size.

  • And so his brain mass and so is thickness of milon sheets on individual neurons.

  • And so though these is these micro markers of you might think about them as neurological integrity that seem to predict.

  • Q.

  • But you've been doing neuroimaging, and I know it is up on that.

  • I haven't looked at that for a couple of years.

  • So what have the neuro imagers found about brain structure and function in relationship to intelligence that you think is compelling and interesting?

  • Glad you asked this because as I was finishing the manuscript for the book literally.

  • The day after I turned it in, I had to ask for it back because there was this very interesting study published by a group at Yale that has used a fairly sophisticated lady toe look at white matter connections, functional structural White matter connections and functional connections in the brain, and determining how one brain area is functionally or structuring structurally related to all other brain areas.

  • And you can put up a map of a person's brain that shows from brain imaging from M I technology how their brain is interconnected, this paper said.

  • These interconnections are so reliable within a person that they're like fingerprints.

  • And not only that, but the fingerprints can predict i Q.

  • And so is the density of connections, density of interconnections or something like that.

  • It was there were some something more specific going on.

  • It could be the density of connections.

  • Structurally, how much white matter connects this area to that area, you know, and there are certain brain areas where you have a lot of white matter coming in and a lot of white matter going out to other parts of the brain.

  • They're called hubs and there are notes that have lesser connections.

  • And so it makes kind of It certainly makes sense that being able to make measurements of blame connectivity would be related to things like intelligence.

  • And would you remember what some of the major hubs were like?

  • Are they identifiable as also as neuro anatomical areas with specific countries?

  • Definitely.

  • Nor attempt No anatomical areas on dhe, though What you might expect, but they was exciting to me.

  • Is they mapped onto a, ah, model off brain intelligence relationships that I had developed with my colleague Rexy Young and published in 2007.

  • And it's called the Parietal Frontal Integration Dearie Therapy Fit of the Intelligence.

  • And the idea is that the connections between the parietal lobe, which is here, and the frontal area are the key connections for intelligence.

  • So tell us will tell us why you you drive that particular theory because, you know, people have suggested say, alternatively, that the seat of higher order intelligence is basically, let's say, the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex or something like that.

  • So why, specifically the connect the connection patterns between frontal and parietal areas?

  • While this article in 2007 was a review article where we took every single brain imaging study we could find that included a measure of intelligence.

  • And there were 37 such studies at the time, including some I had done his earliest 1980 rate and others had done with much larger samples.

  • And we just gotta qualitatively analyze the results to see what brain areas came up in common across these studies using different measures, different imaging techniques.

  • And we found that there was not a that not all brain areas were equally distributed.

  • That telephone booth concentrated in the front and the parietal lobe.

  • But also we found areas in the acceptable Logan, the temporal that were also related to intelligence.

  • And so we developed this model that we talked about how information would be processed and how information would flow around this set of fighting.

  • There were 18 areas on him.

  • Hi pots scored high on intelligence tests would have some combination of these areas.

  • You didn't need all of them kind of working together, But some people would have this combination.

  • Some people would have that combination, and if you could make measurements of about the way information was flowing around these areas with technology like the Big Needle in South telegram that shows changes in the brain mill with second by milliseconds, you might be able to, uh, actually estimate I cute from brain in 2007.

  • People were trying to do this with multiple regression equations that never really replicated independent replications to go very far, as the sample sizes were relative.

  • Smalling have more on this individual differences.

  • But these newer techniques these mathematical techniques of calculating brain connectivity, really seemed to have advanced this home from dramatic.

  • Was there a map between the notes that were identified in this for recent research in the areas that you guys had identified with your overarching analysis?

  • Yes, to the way Rex Young and I looked at the data, it seemed like there was considerable overlap.

  • And some of the author, so we did not know personally when they wrote their papers noted that their findings were consistent with our model that he has any hemispheric differences.

  • Well, yes, there were.

  • There were more on the left and on the right, but there were also areas on the right, a cz well, and these areas tend to be areas that are also related to, uh, language and memory and a touch.

  • So the more fundamental cognitive processes of language and memory and attention seemed to be the architecture on which intelligence is drill.

  • Hey, do you?

  • Here's a question that I haven't been able to figure out cause I've looked the attention, literature lot.

  • And the more I look at the attention literature, the more I find it difficult to distinguish it from the intelligence.

  • Literature mean attention and intelligence seemed to be different things, and we certainly used the words in common parlance as different.

  • But I haven't really been able to like imagine you wanted to establish a battery of attention related tests that were independent of G loaded cognitive abilities.

  • I haven't seen anybody managed that, and so do Do you?

  • What do you think?

  • The difference is between the capacity to pay attention, which also seems to be associated with conscientiousness, by the way, which isn't associated with I.

  • Q.

  • But I mean, what's the relationship between intent, attention and intelligence?

  • As far as you're concerned, those studies have been done where they take cognitive variables.

  • The elemental cognitive tasks is what they call him the real basic things that cognitive psychologists like.

  • The study they like the study be sitting great and the study warning in memory.

  • But they don't want to address why some people learn faster than other people, or why some people can remember more than other people.

  • That's a cognitive psychologist study.

  • They study what's comin to everybody.

  • But if you look at these elemental constants of tasks, you can extracted a Jew factor of cognition, which is hi fi correlated with a psychometric.

  • G factors should abilities more than attention Memory aspects of memory are more correlated to the G factor.

  • Processing speed is correlated, right?

  • Sure, and attention is also correlated.

  • So, you know, I kind of have this idea from being a parent, watching my kids grow up, that people differ in their baseline off attention when they're not specifically paying attention.

  • This might be called consciousness.

  • So you have two kids walking through a museum for an hour and you come out and you say the kid one.

  • So what did you see?

  • And you got a whole long thing.

  • And yes, the other cable, what did you see there?

  • And you get a much less rich explanation.

  • Yeah, off.

  • What it I've always thought about that is a difference in resolution of worlds.

  • Well, you call what you will, but you know, there are these differences and, you know, we have set.

  • We've actually studied consciousness with Brian and Jeanne with my friend Mike Al Qaed

Dr Richard Higher Studies the neural basis of human intelligence and cognition.

Subtitles and vocabulary

Click the word to look it up Click the word to find further inforamtion about it