The Idiot Brain

by Dean Burnett

  The argument is that an unintelligent person actually cannot ‘perceive’ what it is to be considerably more intelligent. It’s basically like asking a colour-blind person to describe a red and green pattern.

  It may be that an ‘intelligent’ has a similar take on the world, but expressed in different ways. If an intelligent person thinks something was easy then they may assume everyone else finds it easy too. They assume their level of competence is the norm, so they assume their intelligence is the norm (and intelligent people tend to find themselves in jobs and social situations where they’re surrounded by other similar types, so they are likely to have a lot of evidence to support this).

  But if intelligent people are generally used to learning new things and acquiring new information, they’re more likely to be aware that they don’t know everything and how much there is to know about any given subject, which would undercut confidence when making claims and statements.

  For example, in science, you (ideally) have to be painstakingly thorough with your data and research before making any claims as to how something works. A consequence of surrounding yourself with similarly intelligent people means if you do make a mistake or a grandiose claim, they’re more likely to spot it and call you on it. A logical consequence of this would be a keen awareness of the things you don’t know or aren’t sure about, which is often a handicap in a debate or an argument.

  These occurrences are common enough to be familiar and problematic, but obviously aren’t absolute; not every intelligent person is racked with doubt, and not every less-intelligent person is a self-aggrandising buffoon. There are plenty of intellectuals who are so in love with the sound of their own voice that they genuinely charge people thousands to hear it, and there are ample less-intelligent people who freely admit their limited mental powers with grace and humility. It may also have a cultural aspect; the studies behind the Dunning–Kruger effect almost always focus on Western societies, but some East Asian cultures have shown very different patterns of behaviour, and one explanation put forward for this is these cultures adopt the (healthier) attitude that a lack of awareness is an opportunity for improvement, so the priorities and behaviours are very different.6

  Are there actual brain regions behind this kind of phenomenon? Is there a part of the brain responsible for working out: ‘Am I any good at this thing that I’m doing?’ Amazing as it may seem, there might well be. In 2009, Howard Rosen and his colleagues tested a group of about forty patients with neurodegenerative diseases and concluded that accuracy in self-appraisal correlated with the volume of tissue in the right ventromedial (lower part, towards the middle) region of the prefrontal cortex.7 The study argues that this area of the prefrontal cortex is needed for the emotional and physiological processing required when evaluating your own tendencies and abilities. This is relatively consistent with the accepted functioning of the prefrontal cortex, which is largely all to do with processing and manipulating complex information and working out the best possible opinion of it and response to it.

  It’s important to note that this study in and of itself is not conclusive; forty patients isn’t really enough to say that the data obtained from them is relevant to everyone ever. But research into this ability to assess your own intellectual performance accurately, known as a ‘metacognitive ability’ (thinking about thinking, if that makes sense), is considered to be quite important, as an inability to perform accurate self-appraisal is a well-known feature of dementia. This is particularly true of frontotemporal dementia, a variation of the disorder that attacks largely the frontal lobe, where the prefrontal cortex is. Patients with this condition often show an inability to assess their performance on a wide variety of tests accurately, which would suggest their ability to assess and evaluate their performance has been seriously compromised. This wide-ranging inability to judge one’s performance accurately isn’t seen in other types of dementia that damage different brain regions, suggesting an area of the frontal lobe is heavily involved in self-appraisal. So this adds up.

  Some propose that this is one reason why dementia patients can turn quite aggressive; they are unable to do things but cannot understand or recognise why, which must be nothing short of enraging.

  But even without a neurodegenerative disorder and while in possession of a fully functioning prefrontal cortex, this means only that you are capable of self-appraisal; there’s nothing to say your self-appraisal will be correct. Hence we end up with confident clowns and insecure intellectuals. And it’s apparently human nature that we pay more attention to the confident ones.

  Crosswords don’t actually keep your brain sharp

  (Why it’s very difficult to boost your brain power)

  There are many ways to appear more intelligent (using pompous terms such as ‘au courant’, carrying The Economist), but can you actually become more intelligent? Is it possible to ‘boost your brain power’?

  In the sense of the body, power usually means the ability to do something or act in a particular way, and ‘brain power’ is invariably linked to abilities that would come under the heading of intelligence. You could feasibly increase the amount of energy contained within your brain by using your head to complete a circuit connected to an industrial generator, but that’s not going to be something that benefits you, unless you’re especially keen to have your mind literally blown (to bits).

  You’ve probably seen ads for things that claim to offer substances, tools or techniques for boosting your brain power, usually for a price. It’s highly unlikely that any of these things will actually work in any significant way, because if they did they’d be far more popular, with everyone getting smarter and bigger-brained until we’re all crushed under the weight of our own skulls. But how does one genuinely increase brain power, boosting intelligence?

  For this, it would be useful to know what differentiates the unintelligent brain from the intelligent one, and how do we turn the former into the latter? One potential factor is something that seems completely wrong: intelligent brains apparently use less power.

  This counterintuitive argument is something that arose from scanning studies directly observing and recording brain activity, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). This is a clever technique where people are placed in MRI scanners and their metabolic activity (where the tissues and cells in the body are ‘doing stuff’) is observed. Metabolic activity requires oxygen, supplied by the blood. An fMRI scanner can tell the difference between oxygenated blood and deoxygenated blood and when one becomes the other, which occurs at high levels in areas of the body that are metabolically active, like brain regions working hard at a task. Basically, fMRI can monitor brain activity and spot when one part of the brain is especially active. For example, if a subject is doing a memory task, the areas of the brain required for memory processing will be more active than usual, and this shows up on the scanner. Areas showing increased activity would be identifiable as memory-processing areas.

  It isn’t as simple as that because the brain is constantly active in many different ways, so finding the ‘more’ active bits requires much filtering and analysis. However, the bulk of modern research about identifying brain regions that have specific functions have utilised fMRI.

  So far, so good; you’d expect that a region responsible for a specific action would be more active when having to do that action, like a weightlifter’s bicep is using more energy when picking up a dumb-bell. But no. Bizarre findings from several studies, such as those from Larson and others in 1995,8 showed that in tasks designed to test fluid intelligence, activity was seen in the prefrontal cortex … except when the subject was very good at the task.

  To clarify, the region supposedly responsible for fluid intelligence apparently wasn’t used in people who had high levels of fluid intelligence. This didn’t make a lot of sense – like weighing people and finding that only lighter people show up on the scales. Further analysis found that more intelligent subjects did show activity in the prefrontal cortex
, but only when their tasks were challenging, as in difficult enough for them to have to put some effort into it. This lead to some interesting findings.

  Intelligence isn’t the work of one dedicated brain region but several, all interlinked. In intelligent people, it seems these links and connections are more efficient and organised, requiring less activity overall. Think of it in terms of cars: if you’ve got a car with an engine roaring like a pack of lions impersonating a hurricane, and a car making no noise whatsoever, the first one isn’t automatically going to be the better model. In this case, the noise and activity is because it’s trying to do something the more efficient model can do with minimal effort. There’s a growing consensus that it’s the extent and efficiency of the connections between the regions involved (prefrontal cortex, parietal lobe and so on) that has a big influence on someone’s intelligence; the better he or she can communicate and interact, the quicker the processing and the less effort is required to make decisions and calculations.

  This is backed up by studies showing that the integrity and density of white matter in a person’s brain is a reliable indicator of intelligence. White matter is the other, often overlooked, kind of tissue in the brain. Grey matter gets all the attention, but 50 per cent of the brain is white matter and it’s also very important. It probably gets less publicity because it doesn’t ‘do’ as much. Grey matter is where all the important activity is generated, white matter is made up of bundles and bands of the parts that send the activity to other locations (the axons, the long bit of a typical neuron). If grey matter were the factories, white matter would be the roads needed for delivery and resupply.

  The better the white-matter connections between two brain regions, the less energy and effort is required to coordinate them and the tasks they’re responsible for, and they’re harder to find with a scanner. It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack, only instead of a haystack it’s a massive pile of slightly bigger needles, and the whole thing is in a washing machine.

  Further scanning studies suggest that the thickness of the corpus callosum is also associated with levels of general intelligence. The corpus callosum is the ‘bridge’ between the left and right hemispheres. It’s a big tract of white matter, and the thicker it is the more connections there are between the two hemispheres, enhancing communication. If there’s a memory stored on one side that needs to be utilised by the prefrontal cortex on another, a thicker corpus callosum makes this easier and faster. The efficiency and effectiveness of how these regions are connected seems to have a big impact on how well someone can apply their intellect to tasks and problems. As a result of this, brains that are structurally quite different (the size of certain areas, how they’re arranged in the cortex, and so on) can display similar levels of intelligence, like two games consoles made by different companies that are similarly powerful.

  Now we know efficiency is more important than power. How does that help us go about making ourselves more intelligent? Education and learning is an obvious answer. Actively exposing yourself to more facts, information and concepts means every one you remember will actively increase your crystallised intelligence, and regularly applying your fluid intelligence to as many scenarios as possible will improve matters there. This isn’t a cop-out; learning new things and practising new skills can bring about structural changes in the brain. The brain is a plastic organ; it can and will physically adapt to the demands made of it. We met this in Chapter 2: neurons form new synapses when they have to encode a new memory, and this sort of process is found throughout the brain.

  For example, the motor cortex, in the parietal lobe, is responsible for planning and control of voluntary movements. Different parts of the motor cortex control different parts of the body, and how much of the motor cortex is dedicated to a body part depends on how much control it needs. Not much of the motor cortex is dedicated to the torso, because you can’t do much with it. It’s important for breathing and giving your arms somewhere to connect to, but movement-wise we can turn it or bend it slightly, and that’s about it. But much of the motor cortex is dedicated to the face and hands, which require a lot of fine control. And that’s just for a typical person; studies have revealed that classically trained musicians such as violinists or pianists often have relatively huge areas of the motor cortex dedicated to fine control of the hands and fingers.9 These people spend all their lives performing increasingly complex and intricate movements with their hands (usually at high speeds), so the brain has adapted to support this behaviour.

  Similarly, the hippocampus is needed for spatial memory (memory for places and navigation) as well as episodic memory. This makes sense, given that it is responsible for processing memory for complex combinations of perceptions, which is necessary for navigating your environment. Studies by Professor Eleanor Maguire and her colleagues showed that London taxi drivers with the ‘Knowledge’ (the required intricate awareness of London’s incredibly vast and complicated road network) had an enlarged posterior hippocampus – the navigation part – when compared to non-taxi drivers.10 These studies were conducted mostly in the days before satnavs and GPS though, so there’s no telling how they’d pan out now.

  There is even some evidence (although much of it from studies using mice, and how smart can they be?) to suggest that learning new skills and abilities does lead to the white matter involved being enhanced, by increasing the properties of the myelin (the dedicated coating provided by support cells that regulates signal transmission speed and efficiency) around the nerves. So, technically, there are ways to boost your brain power.

  That’s the good news. Here’s the bad.

  All of the things mentioned above take much time and effort, and even then the gains can be fairly limited. The brain is complex and responsible for a ridiculous number of functions. As a result, it’s easy to increase ability in one region without affecting others. Musicians may have exemplary knowledge of how to read music, listen to cues, dissect sounds and so on, but this doesn’t mean they’ll be equally good at maths or languages. Enhancing levels of general, fluid intelligence is difficult; it being produced by a range of brain regions and links means it’s an especially difficult thing to ‘increase’ with restricted tasks or methods.

  While the brain remains relatively plastic throughout life, much of its arrangement and structure is effectively ‘set’. The long white-matter tracts and pathways will have been laid down earlier in life, when development was still under way. By the time we hit our mid-twenties, our brains are essentially fully developed, and it’s fine-tuning from thereon in. This is the current consensus anyway. As such, the general view is that fluid intelligence is ‘fixed’ in adults, and depends largely on genetic and developmental factors during our upbringing (including our parents’ attitudes, our social background and education).

  This is a pessimistic conclusion for most people, especially those who want a quick fix, an easy answer, a short-cut to enhanced mental abilities. The science of the brain doesn’t allow for such things. Sadly but inevitably, there are many people out there who offer them anyway.

  Countless companies now sell ‘brain-training’ games and exercises, which claim to be able to boost intelligence. These are invariably puzzles and challenges of varying difficulty, and it’s true that if you play them often enough you will get increasingly better at them. But only them. There is, at present, no accepted evidence that any of these products cause an increase in general intelligence; they just cause you to become good at a specific game, and the brain is easily complex enough not to have to enhance everything else to allow this to happen.

  Some people, particularly students, have started taking pharmaceuticals such as Ritalin and Adderall, intended to treat conditions like ADHD, when studying for exams, in order to boost concentration and focus. While they might achieve this briefly and in very limited ways, the long-term consequences of taking powerful brain-altering drugs when you don’t have the underlying issue they’re meant to treat are potentially very
worrying. Plus, they can backfire: unnaturally ramping up your focus and concentration with drugs can prove exhausting and depleting to your reserves, meaning you burn out much faster and (for example) sleep through the exam you’re studying for.

  Drugs meant to improve or enhance mental function are classed as Nootropics, aka ‘smart drugs’. Most of these are relatively new and affect only specific processes such as memory or attention, so their long-term effects on general intelligence are currently anyone’s guess. The more powerful ones are restricted largely to use in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, where the brain is genuinely degrading at an alarming rate.

  There is also a wide variety of foods (for instance, fish oils) that are supposed to increase general intelligence, too, but this is also dubious. They may facilitate one aspect of the brain in one minor way, but this isn’t enough for a permanent and widespread boost of intelligence.

  There are even technological methods being touted these days, particularly with a technique known as transcranial direct-current stimulation (tCDS). A review by Djamila Bennabi and her colleagues in 2014 found that tCDS (where a low-level current is passed through targeted brain regions) does seemingly enhance abilities such as memory and language in both healthy and mentally ill subjects, and seems to have few to no side-effects thus far. Other reviews and studies have yet to establish a viable effect of the method though. Clearly, there’s a lot of work to be done before this sort of thing becomes widely available therapeutically.11