Here’s what I mean: Is there some physical thing that makes a person’s brain more efficeint, effective, etc. than another’s?
I can hammer out three possibilites:
[list=1]
[li]The brain is, for lack of a better term, a “muscle.” Just like any other muscle, it will grow stronger if exercised. So, those of us that are more demonstratably intelligent than others simply had more practice thinking about tough stuff.[/li][li]There is some sort of physical matter (chemical, or whatever) in the brain that promotes efficiency. Those people born with more of it than others have brains that work better and are, thus, more intelligent. (You know, like those chlor-trimaton things that Anakin Skywalker has a lot of.)[/li][li]“Intelligence” has nothing to do with the brain as we understand it. There is no neccesary physical difference between the brain of Marilyn vos Savant and that of Marilyn Manson. “Intelligence” lies elsewhere; it is not a physical issue.[/li][/list=1]
Those are the possibilities as I imagined them (between this morning’s shower and now). I am sure some of you will propose others.
Caveat - I don’t mean for this to become a discussion of the meaning of the word “intelligence.” For the sake of this post, let’s use this definition, from http://www.m-w.com:
Of course, by this definition, everyone has intelligence. I also don’t want to start arguing about how to measure it; let’s assume that we simply mean the fact that, while some of us can easuly wrap our heads around new ideas and sort them out for ourselves, others have more trouble.
I believe that in studies of Alzheimer’s patients and other studies of aging, they’ve found that if you keep your brain active, that is, retain an interest in things, you’re more likely to retain all your marbles longer. Keep an “inquiring mind” is what they say. Learn something, anything, to speak French, to do woodcarving, to program computers, whatever.
But I don’t have a cite for that, it’s just a sound bite factoid that went drifting past at some point.
P.S. I like the image of tiny yellow pills zooming around the little twerp’s bloodstream. LOL!
But what kind of soap are you using? Is it Zest or Coast that makes you pop out of the shower, fermenting with ideas? Gee, and here all this time I thought that was just Madison Avenue claptrap.
Tsk tsk tsk! They’re called midi-chlorians. Lucas got the idea from mitochondria, which had recently been discovered to have evolved in a symbiotic relationship with their host cells.
As I understand it, your brain builds little neural “bridges” between cells when you learn something. The more bridges that were built when you were a baby, the quicker and easier you will learn new things as an adult. The environment that a person is raised in is also important in intelligence. A baby that is not properly stimulated and won’t be quite as sharp as a baby whose parents encouraged learning.
Play is also extremely important. Some researchers are now making a tentative link between children who didn’t play much and violent, anti-social behaviors as a teenager and adult. Play teaches children important social, reasoning and communication skills without which a person can’t be argued to be particularly intelligent. Play also teaches a person about their environment, what’s possible and impossible, what what behaviors are and aren’t socially acceptable.
An aside on Alzheimers: Wasn’t there a study published a few months back that said that smokers were less likely to develop Alzheimers?
Maybe we have all heard everything there is to hear about Nature and Nurture and intelligence, but it is hard to pass up when I have a 4 line link at my finger tips.
[HIJACK]How recently? I read a book about this that I thought was at least as old as me, but it might have been newer. Paperbacks start to look old very quickly and it was long enough ago that I don’t remember if I noticed the publication date. Very interesting concept though, to imagine that we’re basically toting a more efficient life form around, feeding it and helping it propagate. I hope my mitochondria are happy with me and let me go to Heaven when I’m no longer needed.[/HIJACK]
Nurture definitely applies. Children who are raised multilingual learn faster and score higher on generalised tests than unilingual kids. Sorry, no cite for that. I think the study was in Seattle.
In the early months of life, there is a massive proliferation of these “bridges” (called synapses). Over time, the synapses that are used are kept and the rest are lost. This synaptogenesis/synaptic pruning process occurs in different parts of the brain at different times. This is the principle behind the so called “critical periods” where development of cognitive functions is most sensitive to environmental factors. I can site some studies/articles for this if you’d like.
As my developmental neuroscience professor pointed out, lack of normal environmental conditions is much more detrimental than having extra stimulation is beneficial.
And from my medical ethics professor who explained nature/nurture this way: genetics only provides a dispostion for certain behaviors and abilities. The person with the genetics to be the smartest person in the world may have been born in some rundown, backwoods town in Georgia, but since the environment he was raised in was not capable of bringing out that intelligence, he never reached his genetic potential. That is one of the reasons Good Will Hunting was such a powerful movie. Will Hunting had the genetic capapbilities of a genius but he had to seek out the environment (MIT) to cultivate it.
Another study (sorry, no cite) released just recently has looked at the relationship between alcohol consumption, tobacco smoking, and mental decline with aging. It found that people who consumed small quantities of alcohol retained their mental faculties better than those who were teetotallers. Tobacco smokers fared worse and alcoholics were positively catastrophic.
The hypothesis put forward against smoking was based on the link between smoking and cardiovascular disease. The authors suggested that blood flow was reduced to the brain by the process of atheroma, thus depriving it of nutrient necessary to maintain the status quo.
Sounds great doesn’t it? Smoke to avoid Altzeimer’s and get your brain wasted by hardened, narrowed arteries instead.
My WAG as to why few smokers get Altzeimer’s? Because they get cardiovacular and respiratory diseases that kill them off before the dementia develops.
I am sure some of you will propose others.