The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Dr. Richard Haier： The Neuroscience of Intelligence

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00:00:51.040 Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

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00:01:12.020 Dr. Richard Heyer studies the neurobasis of human intelligence and cognition.

00:01:37.080 He works with neuroimaging technologies to study individual differences in mental ability.

00:01:42.260 He received his PhD in psychology from the Johns Hopkins University in 1975

00:01:46.680 and has since held appointments in the intramural research program at the National Institute of Mental Health

00:01:52.620 and the Medical School at Brown University and the University of California at Irvine.

00:01:58.340 Irvine, he has served on the editorial board of three journals, Neuro Image, Intelligence, and Psychiatry Research.

00:02:05.420 He also served as guest editor for a special issue on brain imaging research for the journal Intelligence.

00:02:10.660 He provides neuroscience consultation to university research groups, corporations, foundations, and educational and legal professionals.

00:02:18.660 He's a popular lecturer and has appeared in numerous media outlets.

00:02:22.180 In 2012, his research was featured on NOVA Science Now and he received the Distinguished Contributor Award for the International Society for Intelligence Research.

00:02:32.180 In 2013, the teaching company invited Richard to create an 18-lecture course called The Intelligent Brain.

00:02:40.520 So welcome to Dr. Richard Heyer today and we're going to talk about the most controversy of all topics, I would say, in social science, strangely enough.

00:02:50.740 Intelligence.

00:02:51.260 So maybe we could start with a little bit of historical information.

00:02:56.920 I would like to know how you got interested in IQ research or intelligence research, let's say.

00:03:03.100 And so let's start with that and then we can start diving into the nitty-gritty.

00:03:07.840 Well, really, it started in graduate school at Hopkins when I really became most interested in personality research.

00:03:18.940 And I started out 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 starting a study of mathematically precocious youth.

00:03:38.460 And I was one of the proctors at the very first talent search for mathematically precocious kids.

00:03:46.760 And I wrote my first couple of books as book chapters in books that Stanley was editing about this project.

00:03:55.100 And I saw these kids, age 10, 11, 12, who were scoring higher on SAT math than Hopkins freshmen.

00:04:07.220 And the question was, you know, how does this happen?

00:04:09.560 Where does this come from?

00:04:10.620 So that was kind of my earliest interest.

00:04:13.540 And in graduate school, although I really completed my dissertation on personality,

00:04:20.860 I took my first job at the National Institute of Mental Health in the intramural research program in the Laboratory of Psychology and Psychopathology,

00:04:33.520 which at the time, the lab director was David Rosenthal, who had just finished the Denmark Adoption Studies of Schizophrenia.

00:04:43.980 Right, right.

00:04:44.920 And here is where I learned about genetics.

00:04:48.440 My office was next door to a fellow named Monty Buxbaum, who was doing bulk potential research.

00:04:54.860 Yeah.

00:04:55.020 And I was very interested in that.

00:04:57.000 And so my early interest in individual differences slowly morphed into an interest in individual differences in intelligence.

00:05:09.800 And at NIMH, they were just going through a transition from kind of a psychoanalytic orientation to a neuroscience orientation.

00:05:22.440 And I was kind of caught up in that.

00:05:25.100 And so that's the origin of my interest in the brain and in technologies to make brain measurements and relate that to individual differences.

00:05:36.740 Okay, great.

00:05:37.440 Okay, now you just wrote a book, too, in the Neuroscience of Intelligence, Cambridge University Press.

00:05:42.860 And so when did that come out?

00:05:44.540 That came out really just about six months ago.

00:05:48.380 So it came out, I think, in December of 2016.

00:05:53.040 But they tell me for publishing reasons they call it a 2017 publication.

00:05:59.840 I see.

00:06:00.300 Well, part of the reason I was so excited to talk to you is that I've done a very large amount of research,

00:06:07.080 especially not so much practical lab research, but investigation into the structure of intelligence and into its measurement.

00:06:13.080 We designed back in 1993 with a student of mine, Daniel Higgins.

00:06:17.120 We designed, I think, what was probably the first online battery purporting to measure the cognitive abilities associated with dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, right?

00:06:27.120 So hypothetically the highest order cognitive functions in the brain.

00:06:30.560 And we found much to our chagrin, I would say, and this was a very painful discovery,

00:06:35.400 that a lot of what we had been thinking about as potentially separable neuropsychological functions were pretty easily collapsible into good old general intelligence,

00:06:48.340 you know, that killer central factor that seems to unite cognitive abilities.

00:06:51.860 And so it was quite a shock, especially because the neuropsychologists of the time, and they still do this,

00:06:58.080 aren't as assiduous investigators of the psychometric intelligence literature as they should be,

00:07:06.620 and tend to underestimate the central power of that initial factor.

00:07:10.640 So anyways, I'm really interested in intelligence research, partly from a practical perspective, too,

00:07:15.740 because the industrial organizational psychology literature is crystal clear.

00:07:19.800 For complex jobs, the best predictor of long-term success is intelligence.

00:07:24.220 And it's a predictor that's probably, say, imagine you give it an R of 0.4 to 0.5, which is pretty decent.

00:07:32.400 So let's say 25% of the variance.

00:07:34.320 The next best predictor is conscientiousness, and it's pushing its limit at mopping up 10% of the variability in long-term performance.

00:07:42.100 So IQ, it's a killer, man.

00:07:44.440 And I make sure my students assess intelligence with everything they do,

00:07:48.860 and it always ends up being a major predictor of things that you wouldn't even expect,

00:07:52.860 like disgust sensitivity, for example.

00:07:55.020 So your disgust sensitivity is higher if you have a lower IQ.

00:07:59.060 Yeah.

00:08:00.400 The G factor is powerful.

00:08:02.720 You just said something, though, that I want to just make a distinction about.

00:08:06.460 You were talking about the G factor, and then you kind of called it IQ.

00:08:12.540 This is very common in everyday language, to talk about intelligence, IQ, and what we call the G factor as one thing,

00:08:21.880 and it really isn't.

00:08:22.820 So an IQ score is a good estimate of the G factor.

00:08:27.200 Right.

00:08:27.740 It also includes other aspects of intelligence.

00:08:30.780 And intelligence itself, although it's a broad term, is only part of the universe of mental abilities.

00:08:41.080 So if you're very good at, say, calculating on what day January 5th was in the year 1520,

00:08:49.640 that's a mental ability that some people have.

00:08:52.520 It doesn't mean you're smart.

00:08:54.540 Right, yes.

00:08:55.080 You see that with autistic savants often, that they're not often, but sufficiently often.

00:09:00.860 They have these amazing calculation abilities, for example,

00:09:04.160 that don't seem to be manifest in a spectacularly high overall intelligence.

00:09:09.820 So what do you want to tell us about?

00:09:11.860 Do you want to start with the book and walk us through it?

00:09:15.280 Well, you know, that's interesting,

00:09:18.020 because the book is kind of a culmination of things I've learned,

00:09:24.900 mostly from my neuroimaging work on intelligence.

00:09:29.380 And it kind of came as a surprise.

00:09:31.940 It's the first book I've ever written.

00:09:33.500 I'm now retired, actually, from academia.

00:09:36.400 Never wrote a book while I was in academia.

00:09:38.440 I was writing, you know, journal papers.

00:09:40.620 But Cambridge University Press called,

00:09:43.880 and they have this series of fundamentals of neuroscience.

00:09:48.900 And they wanted to include intelligence.

00:09:52.560 And I regarded that as a major step,

00:09:55.980 because intelligence research really has been relegated almost to the peripheral of mainstream psychology.

00:10:04.660 Yeah.

00:10:05.780 Yeah, politically suspect, to say the least.

00:10:08.240 Yeah, and, you know, the switch happened overnight

00:10:12.640 from being in the mainstream to being really peripheral in about 1969.

00:10:20.600 Before 1969, almost everyone who was interested in education

00:10:27.180 was concerned about the achievement gaps.

00:10:31.980 Right.

00:10:32.100 And they felt universally that once you equalized educational opportunities,

00:10:40.920 those achievement gaps would disappear pretty fast.

00:10:43.920 Yeah, that was the Head Start, the Head Start point.

00:10:46.860 Yeah, even before Head Start.

00:10:49.200 Head Start, it came to Head Start.

00:10:52.500 But even before Head Start, there were all these demonstration projects.

00:10:56.080 There was the miracle in Milwaukee.

00:10:58.040 And there were all these things that showed that if you really intervened in early childhood education,

00:11:04.640 which at that time was called compensatory education.

00:11:09.700 The early childhood education term came much later.

00:11:14.400 But this idea of compensatory education really took off.

00:11:18.160 And then in 1969, the Harvard Educational Review asked one of the foremost educational psychologists,

00:11:26.420 Arthur Jensen, to write a review of the progress.

00:11:30.380 And this article in 1969 has become infamous.

00:11:34.260 The opening sentence was essentially,

00:11:36.400 we've tried compensatory education and it has failed.

00:11:40.520 Yeah.

00:11:40.760 And then he had 100 pages of detailed statistical analysis of why there were no,

00:11:47.120 you couldn't demonstrate an increase in IQ score.

00:11:50.020 Yeah.

00:11:50.500 In any of these programs.

00:11:51.960 Now, Head Start had just begun, so Head Start wasn't included.

00:11:56.400 Yeah, but I reviewed the literature on Head Start too extensively.

00:12:00.020 And basically what happened was that,

00:12:02.080 so that was, for those of the viewers who don't know,

00:12:04.660 Head Start was a nationwide attempt to add additional education to the lives of disadvantaged kids,

00:12:13.440 especially, you know, at the preschool level.

00:12:16.400 And basically what happened was that they actually did show improvements in academic achievement initially.

00:12:23.940 So in grade one and grade two, they were performing above their peers.

00:12:27.020 But then the difference in improvement, the difference in performance started to decrease.

00:12:31.780 And then by about the grade five or grade six, the differences had disappeared completely.

00:12:36.320 So there was no evidence whatsoever of that,

00:12:38.680 either of a stable one-time long-term gain in cognitive ability,

00:12:44.260 or what people were really hoping was that if you intervened early enough,

00:12:47.700 you'd get something that would sort of, would turn into a positive feedback loop.

00:12:51.860 And the gains would actually advance across time.

00:12:54.940 And what ended up happening with the Head Start research, basically,

00:12:58.060 was the conclusion that it produced no cognitive improvements whatsoever,

00:13:01.900 although more kids who went through Head Start graduated from high school.

00:13:06.900 Fewer of them were delinquent.

00:13:08.240 More of them, fewer of them became pregnant in the teenage years,

00:13:11.800 and more of them went to colleges.

00:13:13.460 But that seemed to be because they were better socialized,

00:13:16.120 not because they were, in any way, had been made smarter.

00:13:18.720 So that was a really tremendous disappointment,

00:13:21.740 because it was a bipartisan attempt to come to grips with the fundamental issues

00:13:26.440 that sort of bedeviled structural poverty in the United States.

00:13:29.740 No one was happy about that outcome, I can tell you.

00:13:32.280 Well, not only that, but when Jensen published his article,

00:13:35.920 he also said that since IQ increases seem not to be coming

00:13:44.600 from these intense environmental interventions,

00:13:48.940 we should consider the possibility that these differences have a genetic component.

00:13:55.360 And that really began the incendiary descent of intelligence research to the periphery.

00:14:03.360 The reaction against that was universal,

00:14:06.980 because it implied a genetic inferiority if you didn't have genes for IQ.

00:14:12.220 And it's also something that's universally hated on both sides of the political spectrum,

00:14:17.340 because on the liberal end, you know, the idea fundamentally is that everybody's the same,

00:14:23.280 and that if you distribute educational resources properly, then everyone can succeed.

00:14:28.740 And so that didn't work out so well for the liberals.

00:14:30.740 And then on the conservative side, the idea is,

00:14:33.080 well, if you could just get off your lazy asses and get a job,

00:14:36.140 there is a job for you out there.

00:14:37.680 And the truth of the matter is, you know, you can tell me what you think about this,

00:14:42.080 but this was a statistic that just absolutely shocked and staggered me

00:14:45.300 when I went through the intelligence literature.

00:14:47.540 So, you know, it is illegal in the United States to induct anybody

00:14:51.420 who has an IQ of less than 83.

00:14:54.100 And the reason for that is, you know,

00:14:55.680 that the American armed forces have been conducting intelligence research

00:14:59.200 for like more than 100 years.

00:15:00.740 And that was partly because they needed a way of sorting people rapidly

00:15:04.040 during times of military expansion during wartime.

00:15:07.300 But it was also because IQ tests,

00:15:10.000 and especially in the early part of the 20th century,

00:15:12.020 were used to identify, let's say, the deserving poor

00:15:15.020 who could really benefit from additional educational attainment and advancement.

00:15:19.340 And the military was hoping to identify people from lower class strata

00:15:24.340 that could be streamed into, say, officer training programs and so forth,

00:15:29.300 or even skills training programs to move people from the underclass

00:15:34.820 into at least the working class and maybe above.

00:15:37.220 So they had a bloody stake in this, man.

00:15:39.500 They wanted to find people.

00:15:41.480 They wanted to sort them properly,

00:15:42.680 and they wanted to do social good when they weren't just trying to win a war,

00:15:46.580 let's say, which often also is a social good.

00:15:49.780 But what happened was that by,

00:15:51.380 I don't remember when this legislation was introduced,

00:15:53.560 but it was in the later part of the 20th century.

00:15:55.820 But their basic finding was that by, say, the 1980s,

00:16:00.400 they had determined that if you had an IQ of less than 83,

00:16:03.620 there was not a damn thing that the Army could do,

00:16:06.480 the Armed Forces could do,

00:16:07.720 to transform you into someone

00:16:09.780 who could do something that was more productive than non-productive.

00:16:14.840 And the terrible thing about that is that it's about 10% of the population.

00:16:18.460 And so you look at a statistic like that,

00:16:21.640 and you think, oh, my God, you've got this enterprise,

00:16:27.060 this massive enterprise that's chronically hungry for people.

00:16:30.360 It's right.

00:16:30.560 It's always, they're always looking for people.

00:16:32.580 They're really oriented towards taking people from the underclass

00:16:35.760 and lower working class and pushing them up the societal strata.

00:16:39.260 And during wartime, they're actually desperate to bring in recruits, period.

00:16:42.960 And their conclusion is that 10% of the population can't be trained

00:16:47.500 to do anything sufficiently useful to make them militarily operable.

00:16:53.500 It's just, I just read that.

00:16:55.140 My jaw just dropped.

00:16:56.260 It's like...

00:16:56.800 Well, yeah.

00:16:57.740 You know, in the United States, we have about 330 million people.

00:17:01.360 And because of the distribution, the relatively normal distribution of IQ scores,

00:17:08.620 about 16% have IQs of 85 or less.

00:17:13.300 Right, right.

00:17:14.220 Which means they're not going to graduate school.

00:17:17.480 No, it means that from what I've read practically,

00:17:20.140 it means the Wonderland company has actually done a really...

00:17:22.900 They have a nice IQ test from the commercial perspective.

00:17:25.320 You know, it's actually psychometrically valid.

00:17:26.980 And they've linked IQ levels to job, specifically to job categories, you know.

00:17:33.700 Yes, I know.

00:17:35.400 And what I was going to say is they're not only not going to graduate school,

00:17:39.140 they're not going to find a stable job that pays a livable wage.

00:17:47.000 Yeah.

00:17:47.700 Especially even given that so many of the service jobs now require a fair high degree

00:17:51.940 of computational savvy or the ability...

00:17:54.760 No, not computational, but ability to interact with complex computational technology.

00:18:00.040 Even the typical till at a checkout market or the till at a McDonald's,

00:18:05.620 because McDonald's is actually very complicated,

00:18:07.960 is often far beyond the ability of people who are on the low end of the intelligence distribution.

00:18:12.580 And they claimed, I think it was Wunderlich, although it might have been Hunt.

00:18:19.000 What's his name?

00:18:19.800 He's an IQ researcher.

00:18:21.860 Is it Earl Hunt, I think, possibly?

00:18:23.960 Earl Hunt.

00:18:25.080 He claimed that if you have an IQ of below 90,

00:18:29.780 that it's difficult for you to read well enough to translate what you're reading into action.

00:18:36.340 So you can't actually read instructions and follow them.

00:18:39.140 You don't have that level of literacy.

00:18:41.000 That's correct.

00:18:41.660 So I was going to say that in the United States,

00:18:46.400 this bottom 16% translates into 51 million people,

00:18:52.940 including 13 million children who are in school.

00:18:57.380 Right.

00:18:57.880 This is a very difficult problem.

00:19:00.080 Now, I knew Earl Hunt.

00:19:01.160 He passed away last year.

00:19:02.740 I knew him pretty well.

00:19:03.560 He also would say that there is this cognitive segregation in society.

00:19:12.540 This is a point that Charles Murray makes.

00:19:14.440 Yeah.

00:19:14.740 Well, and Earl would often ask, you know, when's the last time you had someone over for dinner who wasn't a college graduate?

00:19:22.880 Yeah.

00:19:23.740 Well, that was something that Murray and Herrnstein wrote about in their book, The Bell Curve, which really struck me,

00:19:28.540 because I read that book twice, unlike most of the people who criticized it.

00:19:31.760 And, you know, one of the things that they pointed out in there was, look, the typical educated person thinks that someone isn't very bright if they have an IQ of 115.

00:19:44.860 So we're talking about graduate level and PhD level research institutions, right?

00:19:50.800 Because 115, there's as many people at 115 above as there are at 85 and below.

00:19:57.460 And so it's a minority of the population.

00:19:59.140 And that's the top 15%.

00:20:00.980 And, you know, that's the duller undergraduate.

00:20:05.540 Right.

00:20:05.800 So we just, people have, see, I'm a clinical psychologist, and I've dealt with people who had ranges in the low 80s

00:20:11.940 and tried to find them jobs and tried to train them.

00:20:14.360 And I have some real knowledge about the stunning gap between people at the low end of the IQ distribution and the high end.

00:20:21.460 And it's no bloody wonder people hate IQ research and intelligence research,

00:20:25.500 because it reveals a set of seriously dismal facts about the incredible range of ability among human beings.

00:20:35.020 Well, yes, this is true.

00:20:38.560 And moreover, I would add to this, that people in universities, professors and a couple of graduate students,

00:20:47.460 have a hard time understanding what the, what everyday life is like if you have an IQ of 80 or 85.

00:20:56.560 And you're making your way, you're living independently, you're making your way in the world.

00:21:03.080 But it is a challenge.

00:21:05.420 It is a, I mean, just, just barely begins to describe it.

00:21:11.680 I had a, I had a client who, he probably had an IQ of under 80, the nonverbal portion of it anyways.

00:21:18.120 And he was indistinguishable in physical appearance from, from, let's say, I hate to use the frame normal person,

00:21:25.720 but there's nothing marked, that marked him out about particularly intellectually impaired, you know.

00:21:30.440 And, uh, I tried at one point, this is, this, this was so, so telling to me.

00:21:37.320 I got him a, uh, a volunteer job, which, by the way, is very difficult.

00:21:41.720 It's harder to get a volunteer job than a real job, because you have to do police screening and all sorts of things.

00:21:46.200 And the selection process is just as extreme.

00:21:48.160 But I eventually ended up getting him a job at a bike store, bike slash bookstore.

00:21:53.760 And, but that place couldn't hold him once the subsidy program had expired.

00:21:58.340 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.

00:22:07.520 Well, that sounds easy, except that he also had a bit of a motor tremor.

00:22:12.120 And, you know, it took me about 30 hours to train him to fold up a piece of paper with sufficient precision,

00:22:19.700 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.

00:22:27.180 And, you know, there was high performance demands on him, too.

00:22:30.120 He had to whip through those letters pretty quickly.

00:22:32.140 And then sometimes the letters would have a photograph appended to them that was stapled on.

00:22:39.160 And they weren't always stapled on in the same place.

00:22:41.700 So then he had to calculate how to fold the paper over the photograph without bending the photograph in precise thirds so that it would still fit in the envelope.

00:22:50.320 And then he had to separate the French letters from the English letters and associate them with the proper envelopes.

00:22:57.560 And, like, that level of complexity just did him in.

00:23:00.840 Let me say two things about this.

00:23:04.140 One is, I hope, common sense, and the other is pretty provocative.

00:23:08.200 The common sense thing 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.

00:23:21.500 And if there's one criticism that I think is fair is sometimes in these conversations it sounds like we're devaluing people at, you know, the lower end of the distribution.

00:23:33.380 And we have to be very careful that we don't do that.

00:23:36.460 Human life has dignity, and IQ is not the most important thing that defines human beings.

00:23:44.740 Yes, it's not associated with wisdom.

00:23:46.740 It's not necessarily associated with truth or with courage or with many virtues that are...

00:23:52.060 Or being likable.

00:23:53.760 Right.

00:23:54.220 It's not related at all with being likable.

00:23:56.820 Or honest.

00:23:58.080 Yes, that's right.

00:23:58.880 Well, we know the psychometric relationship between intelligence and conscientiousness is zero.

00:24:05.580 Right.

00:24:06.000 So I think we have to make that point.

00:24:08.160 Yes, I agree.

00:24:09.520 I agree.

00:24:10.160 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.

00:24:21.440 Right.

00:24:21.680 Jobs are just disappearing.

00:24:23.780 Yes, absolutely.

00:24:24.620 And now let's ask the question, is there anything that could be done about that?

00:24:30.600 Well, Western society has tried very hard with a number of environmentally-based interventions, early childhood education.

00:24:42.320 By the way, you said the literature in organizational psychology is very clear.

00:24:49.820 The literature is equally clear in educational psychology.

00:24:53.500 Oh, yeah.

00:24:54.300 Well, the relationship between IQ and learning is even more powerful than the relationship between IQ and job performance.

00:25:00.240 That's right, which is kind of common sense or it matches our common sense.

00:25:04.040 But, you know, if you put a bunch of variables into a regression equation to predict academic achievement and you have all these school quality variables and teacher quality variables and cognitive 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 variance.

00:25:29.400 Yeah, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, it's terrible, it's terrible, well, you know, and I talked to the guy who ran admissions at Harvard, I taught at Harvard for a while, his name was Dean Whitlaw and he is a really smart guy, I really liked Dean 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.

00:25:51.140 And he had run an interesting series of analysis that I don't believe he ever published and one of them was, well, let's say you segregate the Harvard population into the relatively low IQ kids, so maybe they only have an IQ of 130, you know, and the relatively high IQ kids who are pushing up towards to 160.

00:26:09.540 So you got two competing hypotheses there, one would be that the lower IQ kids come to Harvard, this remarkable environment and they thrive because of the high educational quality so well that they close the gap between them and the 160 kids and that's just completely wrong.

00:26:31.540 What happens is you put both those groups there, both very, very highly selected but some, you know, in this sort of superman rage intellectually, what happens is the gap just gets bigger and bigger as they progress through university.

00:26:46.540 And it's a dreaded example of that Matthew principle that the economists talk about which is, you know, to those who have, more will be given and from those who have nothing, everything will be taken.

00:26:58.540 It's very, very, very, it's no wonder people dislike this research.

00:27:02.620 It's so, it's so anti-egalitarian in its essential, in its essential structure.

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00:29:55.680 Well, I wanted to make a second point that I said would be provocative.

00:29:59.400 If you want to do something about this, you know, we tried a bunch of interventions, earnest, well-funded, long-term interventions don't seem to work, but neuroscience has been excluded from discussions about what to do about this.

00:30:17.820 And I believe that neuroscience, the progress in neuroscience research has the potential to really dramatically increase the G-factor.

00:30:31.060 Well, that's an optimistic statement, so I'm sure we're looking forward to some support for that one.

00:30:36.200 It's optimistic and controversial.

00:30:38.520 And, you know, just as a thought experiment, and I can tell you why I believe this is possible.

00:30:46.140 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.

00:30:56.680 That means, you know, if genes are involved, genes work through biology, even if environment interacts with that.

00:31:03.160 But, basically, you have a neurobiological system.

00:31:07.240 It's complex, but as you begin to understand it, you can tweak it.

00:31:12.300 This is what all medicine is doing now.

00:31:14.680 They're trying to understand the neurobiology slash genetic basis of our health and our diseases.

00:31:22.720 Why?

00:31:23.520 So they can fix it.

00:31:25.620 So they can, you know, when you go to the doctor, you're going because your biology is broken, and you want your biology fixed.

00:31:33.160 Well, let's think about the brain.

00:31:36.120 Now, no one conceptualizes low IQ as a disease, and it's a little dangerous.

00:31:42.520 But to the extent to which low IQ has a genetic input or a genetic influence,

00:31:49.820 that's the extent to which you might be able to find out how that works, what that system is,

00:31:56.340 and then figure out how to tweak that system to increase IQ.

00:32:02.620 It's not science fiction.

00:32:05.040 I mean, that's a plausible sequence of events.

00:32:09.080 What the problem is, it's a very complex sequence of events.

00:32:13.980 But I also think it's a finite set of problems, not an infinite set of problems.

00:32:19.140 So, you know, if physicists can figure out what happened during the first nanoseconds of the Big Bang,

00:32:27.940 we can certainly figure out what the neurobiology of intellect is and how to tweak it.

00:32:36.100 So I think that's possible.

00:32:37.880 So now let's do a thought experiment, and let's imagine there's an IQ pill.

00:32:45.360 And I mean that metaphorically, not literally a pill you could take, like having fluoridated water

00:32:53.800 just kind of raises the dental health of everybody.

00:32:57.520 It would be nice if we had that for IQ.

00:32:59.220 But just imagine what it would be like if we shifted the distribution of IQ 15 points into the high end

00:33:08.240 so that now the average IQ, and I understand how IQ is computed and norming and everything,

00:33:15.840 but the point is that no one would have an IQ less than 100.

00:33:20.100 Right.

00:33:20.840 What would the world be like if everyone could reason sufficiently to get a reasonable job?

00:33:30.120 Yeah, well, that's a good question.

00:33:31.760 I mean, the, what would you call the perverse part of me?

00:33:38.960 It's funny.

00:33:39.420 I was just talking to one of my graduate students.

00:33:42.160 We've been looking at the determinants of male attractiveness by the personality of female viewers.

00:33:50.060 Okay.

00:33:50.820 Okay.

00:33:51.440 And so what we found is that there are some personality effects.

00:33:54.920 So extroverted, enthusiastic women tend to rate men, generally speaking, as more attractive than introverted and less enthusiastic women.

00:34:03.440 And so there are some just straight personality effects, but the biggest effect by far we found was the proclivity of women in general to rate men as less attractive as the women's IQ increased.

00:34:17.060 And so the other thing that we don't know is what price we pay for, for accelerated IQ from a, from a broader perspective, you know,

00:34:26.140 because I know that there is some evidence and you can tell me what you think about this, because I know that there's reasonable evidence that the average IQ of the Ashkenazi Jewish population is about 15 points higher than the standard population,

00:34:39.940 which kind of makes it a thought experiment that's, or an experiment, real life experiment that's equivalent to the one that you laid out.

00:34:46.240 But Ashkenazi Jews also tend to suffer from a host of neurological diseases that seem to be associated with increased neuroplasticity.

00:34:53.680 And so to me, it's often, it's often hard to gain on one front without losing on another.

00:34:59.440 You know, I mean, that's the evolutionary conundrum, obviously, but.

00:35:03.020 We call that the social justice theory.

00:35:05.580 Yeah, right.

00:35:06.100 It's not one thing you have to be bad on everything else to kind of balance it out.

00:35:10.340 Yeah, well, generally speaking, you do pay a price for your, for your exceptionalism, you know.

00:35:14.960 I don't think that's true because, you know, the, the Julian Stanley studies of the mathematically precocious kids essentially found not only were they smart,

00:35:24.760 but they were more mature than their age peers.

00:35:27.580 Yeah.

00:35:27.780 They were better looking, they were taller, they were physically more fit.

00:35:31.340 I mean, it was kind of the anti-social.

00:35:32.960 Yeah, no, no, I, no, that's true.

00:35:34.780 Well, I mean, it's just, that also might be true because one of the things that, that, that can interfere with IQ is poor health and, and poor nutritional quality and all of that.

00:35:45.420 I mean, it doesn't look like it's that easy to increase IQ, but it looks like it's pretty easy to decrease it.

00:35:50.140 Yeah, you know, I think that those, those things have to be pretty extreme to have an effect and those effects may not be permanent actually.

00:36:01.900 There's some studies of deprivation of people who suffered, suffered deprivation during the Second World War that suggest that those, really severe deprivations didn't have lasting effects on them.

00:36:16.620 Well, you know, well, people are pretty tough, so I'm inclined to agree with that.

00:36:21.160 So, so have you seen any animal experiment, experimental work that you regard as compelling that shows something like the transformation of, of animal cognition into a, into something that's, that's, that's, that's higher order that, that you regard as compelling?

00:36:35.460 I'm not sure what you mean, but there's certainly animal work, uh, that shows you can extract a G factor from cognitive tests given to various animals.

00:36:45.460 Right, so, so what I was wondering is, has there been any evidence that you regard as credible showing that that could be, that that, say, so-called animal G factor extracted in the same, we should tell our readers too, the way you extract the G factor, I'm, I'm going to say it very, very rapidly, is,

00:37:01.340 imagine you take a, um, a randomly set, a randomly selected set of 200 questions that require abstraction of one form or another to solve,

00:37:13.680 and then you give those 200 questions to 100 people, and you sum the scores, and you rank order them, you get something that's roughly equivalent there to a G factor, it's roughly that.

00:37:26.280 So, just, I would say it a little bit differently, just, okay, so everyone's on the same page, if you think of all the different mental abilities, and you devise a test for each one of them,

00:37:39.200 and you gave this test to a, a lot of people across the, the range of ability, what you'll find is the scores on all those tests are positively correlated with each other,

00:37:50.620 suggesting that all tests of mental ability have something in common.

00:37:55.080 Right, right, sure, that's a great way of putting it.

00:37:56.660 Common is this G factor, this general ability to reason, and some individual tests have more G loading than other individual tests.

00:38:07.220 Right.

00:38:07.920 So, and tests of abstract reasoning tend to be highly G loaded.

00:38:13.660 Right.

00:38:13.820 If I said to you, repeat the following numbers back to me, three, seven, two, one, six, five, that's not a very highly G loaded mental ability to be able to do that.

00:38:28.600 But if I gave you a string like that, and said, repeat them to me backwards, that becomes a G loaded ability, because you do a transformation.

00:38:38.360 Yes, well, the other thing to say about that, too, is that the positive relationship between those multiple assessments that you described is actually quite high.

00:38:47.640 Right.

00:38:47.980 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 ability in each of those domains.

00:39:00.140 Right.

00:39:00.240 So it's kind of like a, G is kind of like a black hole for intelligence research, and everything keeps falling into it.

00:39:05.980 So that's an interesting way to put it, because now we have these genome-wide association studies that are finding these bits of DNA that are related to a latent factor of intelligence, which is the G factor, or to what they call educational attainment variables.

00:39:28.360 Educational attainment is so highly correlated with IQ that it's essentially the same thing.

00:39:34.100 So we're really moving, when I was in graduate school, the question was, is there a genetic component to intelligence or not, to this kind of DNA analysis, trying to find bits of DNA that are going to be related to what we call intelligence, or IQ testing, or the G factor.

00:39:58.260 And they seem to exist, and they seem to exist, there seems to be hundreds of them, in each a tiny effect, which will make the ultimate story extremely complicated.

00:40:10.540 But as I said before, I think it's a finite set of problems.

00:40:14.220 Right, right.

00:40:14.820 And at the end of that sequence of solving those problems, I think there's a good chance we'll know how to increase IQ.

00:40:23.140 And I think it's a good thing to be able to do that.

00:40:27.300 You know, I've said publicly that more intelligence is better than less.

00:40:32.720 Sometimes I get criticized because that implies that people with less intelligence aren't as worthwhile.

00:40:39.500 That's why I want to be very careful that I don't believe that.

00:40:43.180 Yes, to have harder lives is more the accurate way of thinking about it.

00:40:47.500 Harder lives and a narrower range of possibilities and opportunities.

00:40:50.800 That's right.

00:40:51.960 And in my view, my political bias is, therefore, governments have a moral responsibility to help those people.

00:41:00.960 And a lot of government programs aren't going to do it because job training requires a certain level of G.

00:41:11.240 Oh, yeah.

00:41:11.700 My low IQ clients, they used to go to the government agencies that were designed to help people find employment.

00:41:17.760 And, you know, the typical response was, well, just go home and type up your CV and distribute it.

00:41:23.360 It's like, you just go, like, I can't use a computer.

00:41:27.720 I can't type.

00:41:28.720 I don't know what a CV is.

00:41:30.620 It's like it's a non-starter in all three counts.

00:41:33.200 That's right.

00:41:33.460 That's right.

00:41:34.020 So in the United States, there are 51 million people with IQs under 85, and there are about 43 million people living in poverty.

00:41:43.160 Do you think those Venn diagrams intersect?

00:41:46.360 Yeah.

00:41:46.520 Well, we should also be clear about this because it is so politically suspect is that it's not like it's self-evident that people who have less cognitive capability are likely to end up poor because there are serious, complex problems in life that beset them that they have a difficult time dealing with, and they can't learn as quickly.

00:42:14.260 And so the relationship between poverty and intelligence is self-evident if you're willing to think it through for any length of time.

00:42:22.620 It 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 poor is stupid, to be blunt.

00:42:34.160 But what it does mean is that if you're intelligent, you're much more likely to become financially successful.

00:42:38.640 And I think it was the Herrnstein – Herrnstein and Murray, I think, did the calculations back in the bell curve that indicated that if you imagine that you could – you were a fairy godmother, and you have your newborn grandchild in front of you, and you can grant them three standard deviations above the mean in terms of wealth at birth,

00:43:00.600 or you can grant them three standard deviations above the mean in terms of IQ at birth, and then you wanted to determine which would work better for them by the time they were 40.

00:43:10.660 And the answer to that was quite clear, is that IQ trumps wealth in terms of ability to predict a positive future.

00:43:18.760 Yes.

00:43:19.020 Yeah, and that's why I'm so interested in the concept of increasing IQ or increasing the G factor, not just the IQ score, but really what under this reasoning ability.

00:43:33.100 So, you know, some people have tried to teach college students critical thinking.

00:43:37.220 Yeah.

00:43:37.880 I think that's a good thing.

00:43:39.460 It is.

00:43:40.440 If you're smart and you can think critically, so much the better.

00:43:44.120 Exactly, you know.

00:43:45.300 And, you know, it may sound to your listeners – I just want to take a moment out here.

00:43:48.900 It may sound to your listeners like, here are these two guys pontificating about what it's like to be smart, what it's like to be not so smart.

00:43:56.160 I mean, the point of this, the point of neuroscience research on intelligence, and what I hope to achieve by writing the book,

00:44:04.480 was to show that the genetic aspects are not deterministic.

00:44:10.180 It's the opposite.

00:44:12.300 It's our probabilistic.

00:44:13.940 So, the extent to which something like intelligence is genetic, in my view, is the extent to which we'll learn how to change it for the better.

00:44:23.280 Right.

00:44:23.600 Well, that's definitely – yeah, because people do tend to think about biological factors as deterministic, and that's a mistake because they can be shifted.

00:44:31.160 So, with regards to the animal study, so, you know, you pointed out that you can come up with an IQ-like estimate for, say, a rat.

00:44:38.720 And have you seen anything that indicates – I don't care how it's done, through training or neurochemically or by promoting brain function in different ways, however you might do it –

00:44:52.080 that's actually indicated to you that there is a way of biologically enhancing the general cognitive ability, even of an animal?

00:44:59.460 Has anything come out credible?

00:45:02.320 Just by breeding mice who run a maze faster than other mice together, you get mice that seem to be able to learn how to run a maze faster.

00:45:13.380 But that's work from the 1980s.

00:45:15.540 Right.

00:45:15.980 I review this in the book.

00:45:17.680 There are some interesting technologies that have been developed where you can turn parts of a rat brain on and off at will and see what happens.

00:45:33.100 This has not yet been applied, as far as I know, to learning.

00:45:37.080 But, interestingly, there are human studies underway with things like transcranial magnetic stimulation and electrical ways to – low-voltage ways to stimulate parts of the brain.

00:45:56.660 And there are some interesting experiments now being done with humans to see if you can improve learning or reasoning ability.

00:46:04.420 Yeah.

00:46:04.780 As a matter of fact, you know, I edit this journal called Intelligence, which is kind of a prime spot for intelligence researchers to publish on all aspects of intelligence.

00:46:16.180 And we're just starting to put together a special issue on human experiments to increase reasoning ability using these techniques of stimulating the brain.

00:46:27.160 Are any of you – you've seen some positive things with regards to low-level electrical stimulation?

00:46:32.180 Because that's also being used – you know, it's more anecdotal, but there's a bit of research being used to treat depression, for example.

00:46:39.640 That's right.

00:46:40.060 And I do cover in the book the studies that were published up until the time I wrote the book and cautioned people that they hadn't been replicated yet.

00:46:50.600 Right, right, right.

00:46:51.860 But we're on the way.

00:46:53.460 I mean, this is an evolving area that's going to be very exciting.

00:46:57.780 I mean, if students are listening to this podcast and they're thinking about neuroscience or psychology,

00:47:04.280 this kind of experiment is really a new phase of intelligence research where you can do experiments on human beings that are completely ethical and relatively non-intrusive.

00:47:19.280 And this is really going to change everything now because it will shift intelligence research from basically psychometric correlations past what neuroimaging has done,

00:47:35.680 which really moved it away from just psychometrics.

00:47:39.180 And then, you know, correlating psychometric scores with measurable aspects of the brain like glucose metabolic function or the amount of gray matter or white matter or the number of white matter fibers.

00:47:52.840 I mean, there are all these fabulous connections.

00:47:54.800 Right, right.

00:47:55.460 That was a new phase.

00:47:57.060 I got in early on that phase.

00:47:59.160 But that phase is now moving into this new phase of actually stimulating the brain to improve learning and memory and reasoning and all the while doing it with neuroimaging to see what happens and adding DNA to it.

00:48:20.620 I mean, come on now.

00:48:22.220 This is a great time to be entering the research in this area.

00:48:26.820 Right, right.

00:48:27.320 Well, there's some optimism on the horizon.

00:48:29.240 I mean, I looked for a while because I've been very interested in improving human performance, measuring it and improving it.

00:48:37.640 And so I looked and doing that also in conjunction with businesses because I'd like things to have a practical end.

00:48:44.340 And, you know, I looked to find out what the research indicated with regards to improvement of intelligence.

00:48:49.940 And mostly what I found was not so much improvement as conservation is that if you exercise both aerobically and with weightlifting, that that can help you maintain your fluid intelligence across for longer across your lifespan.

00:49:06.020 Because it tends to decline rather precipitously as you age, which is one of the more dismal things that you also discover with IQ research.

00:49:13.340 And it starts to decline when you're in your early 20s.

00:49:15.800 And it's kind of linear downhill all the way along.

00:49:18.940 But exercise really helps.

00:49:20.420 But it's preservation, which is pretty important at my age.

00:49:26.460 Yeah, preservation is a big deal, man, but enhancement would be good.

00:49:30.800 But, you know, this thing about an IQ pill coming up with a way, you know, to manipulate the neurobiology of your brain regarding intellect, if there's a breakthrough in this, it will come either from Alzheimer's research or from normal aging research.

00:49:52.060 Trying to prevent the slow decline of your mental faculties as you age, especially fluid intelligence, or trying to reverse the ravages of Alzheimer's disease.

00:50:05.240 These are neurochemical problems.

00:50:08.100 Right.

00:50:08.860 You know?

00:50:09.600 Yes, well, an IQ seems to be quite tightly linked to.

00:50:13.020 Well, this is another thing we could talk about.

00:50:14.480 So, I know that there are certain biological markers that IQ is loosely associated with.

00:50:23.720 So, you know, it predicts in a fragmentary matter.

00:50:28.040 So, I know that even something as simple as simple reaction time, how fast you can push a button when a light comes on, is correlated with IQ, with fluid intelligence at about 0.2.

00:50:38.200 And having a bigger head is slightly correlated, especially when you correct for body size.

00:50:43.600 And so is brain mass.

00:50:44.940 And so is thickness of the myelin sheaths on individual neurons.

00:50:49.840 And so, there's these micro markers of, you might think about them as neurological integrity that seem to predict IQ.

00:50:57.140 But you've been doing neuroimaging, and I'm not as up on that.

00:51:00.000 I haven't looked at that for a couple of years.

00:51:01.560 So, what have the neuroimagers found about brain structure and function in relationship to intelligence that you think is compelling and interesting?

00:51:10.800 I'm 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.

00:51:23.240 Because there was this very interesting study published by a group at Yale that used a fairly sophisticated way to look at white matter connections.

00:51:35.920 It's functional, structural, structural, white matter connections, and functional connections in the brain.

00:51:44.480 And determining how one brain area is functionally or structurally related to all other brain areas.

00:51:54.680 And you can put up a map of a person's brain that shows from brain imaging, from MRI technology, how their brain is interconnected.

00:52:09.720 And this paper said these interconnections are so reliable within a person that they're like fingerprints.

00:52:18.080 And not only that, but the fingerprints can predict IQ.

00:52:25.760 And so, was it density of connections, density of interconnections, or something like that?

00:52:30.120 Or was there something more specific going on?

00:52:32.900 It can be the density of connections structurally, how much white matter connects this area to that area.

00:52:40.560 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.

00:52:48.340 They're called hubs.

00:52:50.520 And there are nodes that have lesser connections.

00:52:55.100 And so, it makes kind of, it certainly makes sense that being able to make measurements of brain connectivity would be related to things like intelligence.

00:53:05.380 Do you know, or do you remember what some of the major hubs were?

00:53:09.040 Like, are they identifiable as, also as neuroanatomical areas with specific functions?

00:53:14.380 Yes.

00:53:14.400 Well, they're definitely neuroanatomical areas.

00:53:20.120 And they're what you might expect.

00:53:24.640 But they, what was exciting to me is they mapped on to a model of brain intelligence relationships that I had developed with my colleague, Rex Jung, and published in 2007.

00:53:41.120 And it's called the Parietal Frontal Integration Theory, or PFIT, of intelligence.

00:53:48.360 And the idea is that the connections between the parietal lobe, which is here, and the frontal area, are the key connections for intelligence.

00:54:00.460 Okay, so tell us, tell us why you derived that particular theory.

00:54:04.320 Because, you know, people have suggested, say, alternatively, that the seat of higher order intelligence is basically, let's say, the dorsal lateral prefront cortex, or something like that.

00:54:14.480 So, why specifically the connection patterns between frontal and parietal areas?

00:54:21.060 Well, 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.

00:54:32.280 And there were 37 such studies at the time, including some I had done as early as 1988, and others had done with much larger samples.

00:54:40.820 And we just kind of qualitatively analyzed the results to see what brain areas came up in common across these studies using different measures, different imaging techniques.

00:54:54.780 And we found that not all brain areas were equally distributed.

00:55:01.160 They tended to be concentrated in the front and the parietal lobe.

00:55:05.500 But also, we found areas in the occipital lobe and the temporal lobe that were also related to intelligence.

00:55:12.640 And so, we developed this model that we talked about how information would be processed and how information would flow around this set of, I think there were 18 areas all week.

00:55:24.860 And we hypothesized that people who scored high on intelligence tests would have some combination of these areas.

00:55:35.240 You didn't need all of them kind of working together.

00:55:37.960 But some people would have this combination.

00:55:40.460 Some people would have that combination.

00:55:42.080 And if you could make measurements about the way information was flowing around these areas with a technology like the magnetoencephalogram, which shows changes in the brain millisecond by millisecond, then you might be able to actually estimate IQ from brain images.

00:56:03.220 So, in 2007, people were trying to do this with multiple regression equations.

00:56:09.260 It never really replicated.

00:56:10.900 Independent replications didn't go very far.

00:56:13.180 Yeah, yeah.

00:56:14.060 Because the sample sizes were relatively small.

00:56:16.300 You had enormous individual differences.

00:56:18.460 Yeah.

00:56:19.000 But these newer techniques, these mathematical techniques of calculating brain connectivity, really seemed to have advanced this whole thing dramatically.

00:56:29.240 So, was there a map between the nodes that were identified in this more recent research and the areas that you guys had identified with your overarching analysis?

00:56:38.300 Yes.

00:56:38.920 To the way Rex Jung and I looked at the data, it seemed like there was considerable overlap.

00:56:46.400 And some of the authors who we did not know personally, when they wrote their papers, noted that their findings were consistent with our model.

00:56:56.100 Any hemispheric differences?

00:56:59.240 We have, yes.

00:57:01.080 There were more on the left than on the right, but there were also areas on the right as well.

00:57:07.880 And these areas tend to be areas that are also related to language and memory and attention.

00:57:18.280 So, the more fundamental cognitive processes of language and memory and attention seem to be the architecture on which intelligence is built.

00:57:31.540 Right.

00:57:31.800 Hey, do you, here's a question that I haven't been able to figure out because I've looked at the attention literature a lot.

00:57:37.340 And the more I look at the attention literature, the more I find it difficult to distinguish it from the intelligence literature.

00:57:43.580 I mean, attention and intelligence seem to be different things.

00:57:47.240 And we certainly use the words in common parlance as different.

00:57:50.160 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.

00:58:01.620 I haven't seen anybody manage that.

00:58:03.780 And so, do you, 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 IQ.

00:58:15.080 But, I mean, what's the relationship between attention and intelligence as far as you're concerned?

00:58:21.280 Those studies have been done where they take cognitive variables, the elemental cognitive tasks is what they call them.

00:58:29.020 The real basic things that cognitive psychologists like to study because they like to study reasoning.

00:58:35.200 Right.

00:58:35.340 You know, and they'll study learning and 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.

00:58:46.280 That's what cognitive psychologists study.

00:58:48.480 They study what's common to everybody.

00:58:50.540 But if you look at these elemental cognitive tasks, you can extract a G-factor of cognition, which is highly correlated with a psychometric G-factor.

00:59:00.680 Sure.

00:59:00.720 More than attention, memory, aspects of memory are more correlated to the G-factor.

00:59:11.160 Processing speed is correlated.

00:59:13.200 Right.

00:59:13.620 Sure.

00:59:14.220 And attention is also correlated.

00:59:16.880 So, you know, I kind of have this idea from being a parent, watching my kids grow up, that people differ in their baseline of attention when they're not specifically paying attention.

00:59:35.080 This might be called consciousness.

00:59:37.360 So, you know, you have two kids walking through a museum for an hour.

00:59:40.520 And you come out and you say to kid one, so what did you see?

00:59:43.820 And you get a whole long thing.

00:59:46.260 And you ask the other kid, well, what did you see there?

00:59:48.480 And you get a much less rich explanation.

00:59:53.240 Yeah.

00:59:53.840 Of what it is.

00:59:55.120 I've always thought about that as a difference in resolution of worlds.

00:59:59.600 Well, yeah, call it what you will.

01:00:01.240 But, you know, there are these differences.

01:00:03.460 And, you know, we've actually studied consciousness with brain imaging with my friend Mike Alkire, who's an anesthesiologist.

01:00:12.380 We did the first imaging studies where we brought normal volunteers in and Mike gave them anesthetic drugs to knock them out completely while they underwent brain imaging.

01:00:27.140 And we had different levels of anesthesia.

01:00:30.260 We were trying to see what part of the brain is the last part of the brain to turn off when you lose consciousness.

01:00:35.800 And did you find anything that you could make sense out of from that?

01:00:39.780 Because, of course, that's obviously an extraordinarily interesting question.

01:00:43.560 I mean, is it the collapse of these networks?

01:00:46.300 Well, Mike Alkire is the real expert on this.

01:00:48.700 He's published a whole series of papers.

01:00:50.520 And the mechanism of consciousness is still one of the great Nobel Prize winning.

01:00:56.480 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:00:57.100 Well, that's my interpretation of literature, too.

01:00:59.800 It's like it's such a mystery that it seems uncrackable in some sense.

01:01:06.560 Well, what was good about the imaging stuff here, you could study this experimentally.

01:01:11.200 Yeah.

01:01:11.400 You know, you could put people into different levels of consciousness and bring them out at will and see how the brain reacted.

01:01:21.440 So the thalamus seems to be important.

01:01:24.320 A lot of people are looking at thalamus connections.

01:01:27.420 And each anesthetic, there are categories of anesthetics.

01:01:31.960 And they have different mechanisms of action in the brain, yet they all produce the same consequence when you lose consciousness.

01:01:40.520 Right.

01:01:41.200 That's a very interesting thing, too.

01:01:44.000 I know with the thalamic, what is it, cortical thalamic loops.

01:01:49.060 I mean, there's a guy named, what's his name, Voldemeyer?

01:01:53.000 God, it's close to that.

01:01:54.380 I'm afraid I haven't got it right.

01:01:56.460 He suggests that one of the consequences of psychedelic drugs is to decrease the gating of the thalamic cortical circuitry.

01:02:07.360 And that that's one of the mechanisms whereby that expanded, at least, sense of consciousness emerges as a consequence of experimentation with the psychedelic end of the pharmaceutical universe.

01:02:20.620 Yeah, I have a section in the book where I talk about consciousness and these studies and try to relate the concept that if you can turn consciousness off, you should be able to turn it on.

01:02:37.100 We know anesthesiologists do this at will.

01:02:40.220 Yep.

01:02:40.740 Even though they don't understand what they're doing.

01:02:42.900 Right, right.

01:02:43.520 You know, they can't tell you why it works.

01:02:49.460 But then can you use, if anesthetic drugs kind of dissociate the brain and creativity seems to be related to a dissociation of the frontal lobes,

01:03:04.520 can low doses, can low doses, very, very low doses of anesthetic drugs, cause just enough disinhibition to increase your creativity?

01:03:19.740 And?

01:03:21.300 I don't think this experiment has ever been done.

01:03:23.860 Well, I know.

01:03:24.240 You see something similar in that sometimes reported with people who develop frontotemporal dementia.

01:03:29.340 That's exactly right.

01:03:30.380 You know, is that as, and that's, that's, that's a very strange phenomenon where as your brain deteriorates,

01:03:35.820 your creativity increases because so much of brain function seems to be inhibitory.

01:03:40.780 That's right.

01:03:41.300 I don't know of a comparable disease that produces increases in intelligence.

01:03:47.080 Right.

01:03:47.460 No, no, I've never heard of that.

01:03:49.040 Oh, yeah.

01:03:49.640 The other thing that's been, so you can tell me what you think about this.

01:03:52.440 I mean, I was curious for a while about these companies like Lumosity because when we developed

01:03:59.080 our original prefrontal tasks, they weren't tests.

01:04:02.740 They were, they kind of had a game-like element, you know, and we kind of thought, well, maybe

01:04:07.160 if you had people practice doing them, they would obviously get better at the specific task

01:04:13.220 because that is what people do.

01:04:14.520 But then if you had people practice a whole bunch of them, maybe they would get better at

01:04:18.920 the whole, at the entirety of the tasks in a way that would generalize to other, to other

01:04:24.060 measures like, like the Raven's progressive matrices, which is a good measure of fluid

01:04:28.160 intelligence, but that never works.

01:04:30.840 And of course, the Lumosity people claim that they were able to produce enhancement in general

01:04:36.320 intelligence, but by all appearances, that's been, that's been a dismal failure as well.

01:04:41.660 It's, it's, it's very strange in some sense that that general factor doesn't seem to be something

01:04:48.080 that you can actually improve by practice, right?

01:04:51.720 Well, you know, what the hell, why, why I can't just, I just don't get that.

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01:07:18.060 Here's something you don't know about me, I'll bet.

01:07:24.300 But I am in the Guinness Book of Records, the Gamers Edition, because of my study, my brain

01:07:31.580 imaging study of Tetris.

01:07:33.920 Hmm.

01:07:34.540 And I did a brain imaging study of Tetris.

01:07:36.520 I think it was published in 1992.

01:07:38.920 I really wanted to do a study of warning.

01:07:41.080 I wanted to see what happened in the brain before and after you warned something.

01:07:45.080 And back in 1991, when I was doing this, nobody had personal computers.

01:07:51.080 Nobody had ever heard of Tetris.

01:07:53.320 Computer games were not what they are today.

01:07:57.340 Right.

01:07:57.780 And I went to the Egghead software store.

01:08:01.240 When they had software stores, it had just opened.

01:08:03.760 And I was talking to the guys there about, I needed something where I could study before

01:08:08.880 and after they learned something relatively simple.

01:08:12.340 Yep.

01:08:12.660 Yep.

01:08:12.940 Yep.

01:08:13.080 They showed me this game Tetris.

01:08:14.500 It had just come in.

01:08:15.320 They just had opened the box.

01:08:16.460 They put it up on the computer there.

01:08:18.200 And I thought, boy, this is really perfect.

01:08:20.140 It's simple to learn.

01:08:21.540 But there's an enormous learning curve.

01:08:23.480 And we brought in college students, a small number of college students.

01:08:28.420 And we showed them how to play Tetris.

01:08:31.940 They practiced for a few minutes.

01:08:33.920 We injected the radioactive glucose for positron emission tomography.

01:08:39.320 And we did PET scan studies of them that very first day they played Tetris for 32 minutes.

01:08:45.760 They then practiced every day.

01:08:47.440 They had to come to my office because nobody had a PC at home.

01:08:50.900 They came to my office five days a week for about four weeks.

01:08:54.460 They practiced until they got so good at Tetris, you know, the game was moving faster.

01:08:59.160 Yep.

01:08:59.960 Yeah, it's amazing how good people can get at that sort of thing.

01:09:02.680 Yeah, you couldn't even believe a human being could do this.

01:09:05.140 Yeah, I know.

01:09:05.560 I've watched people do that sort of thing.

01:09:07.400 It's just absolutely unbelievable how good they can get at it.

01:09:10.260 Right.

01:09:10.500 And when they got really good, we scanned them a second time.

01:09:13.160 Yep.

01:09:13.880 And we found that even though the game was faster and harder, when they had learned how to do it,

01:09:20.720 they used less glucose metabolic rate.

01:09:23.000 Okay, so now, was that also, okay, so I knew that research.

01:09:26.580 I read that research.

01:09:27.640 Now, that, what do you think about the, now, the problem is I can't remember where this research

01:09:33.480 came from because I also read at approximately the same time studies that appeared to claim,

01:09:39.260 and I think this was reviewed by L. Conan Goldberg in his book on, on hemispheric specialization

01:09:44.600 for routinization and novelty, respectively, that as you, when you first start to learn something

01:09:51.340 novel, and I think this was demonstrated, for example, in people who were listening, they

01:09:56.260 were Danish native speakers who were listening to Danish in reverse, and they used very large

01:10:01.260 portions of their brain when they were listening to Danish in reverse, but if they were listening

01:10:05.680 to Danish properly spoken, they used very small specified parts of the brain that were

01:10:10.500 located in the latter, or in the, in the back part of the, of the left hemisphere.

01:10:14.860 And, and there was another group of researchers who were demonstrating that as you learned,

01:10:19.240 the degree of activation decreased, and it shifted from the right to the left, and it shifted

01:10:24.840 from the front to the back, and it got smaller and smaller.

01:10:27.420 And is that associated with that decreased glucose utilization?

01:10:30.640 Is that the same phenomenon?

01:10:33.100 I, I think it is.

01:10:34.100 I think we were the first to, to, to show it.

01:10:36.140 Yeah.

01:10:36.460 And we had done one, one imaging study before this Tetris study, where we just correlated,

01:10:41.720 uh, glucose metabolic rate with scores on a test of abstract reasoning, a high G-loaded

01:10:49.380 test.

01:10:49.660 Yeah.

01:10:50.120 They had taken the test during the imaging, so we got to see what brain areas were involved,

01:10:56.320 and we did find some brain areas, but the really interesting, surprising thing was,

01:11:00.640 the correlation between the scores and glucose metabolic rate was always negative.

01:11:06.040 Yeah.

01:11:06.100 The better they did on the test, the lower their glucose metabolic rate, and that was

01:11:10.400 the first inkling we had about this idea of brain efficiency.

01:11:13.980 Right.

01:11:14.400 Right, right, right.

01:11:14.820 Subsequently, that, there's been a lot of research on that, uh, and it turns out to be

01:11:19.120 a complicated thing, because nothing about the brain is simple.

01:11:22.240 Right.

01:11:22.840 But, uh...

01:11:23.340 But it does seem to make perfect sense that expert skill is associated with doing more with

01:11:28.200 less.

01:11:28.620 It makes sense now, but I tell you, nobody predicted it.

01:11:32.940 No, no, I, look, I understand.

01:11:34.700 I, that's, that, that research, that research stood out for me in a very, in a very, uh,

01:11:39.200 you know, in a, in a very striking manner.

01:11:41.100 But it also gets at this thing about, that you raised about practicing on different kinds

01:11:47.660 of tests, because one of the attractive things about Tetris is it's visual-spatial, it's planning

01:11:53.660 ahead, you know, it's attention.

01:11:57.480 There are a lot of elemental cognitive tasks necessary, you know, it's fine motor control,

01:12:03.780 really necessary to, to do well on Tetris and to learn it really well.

01:12:08.640 And so the Tetris company found my research some years later and asked if I'd be willing

01:12:16.820 to try to replicate it with more modern imaging, which, of course, I was willing to do.

01:12:21.900 And so they, they funded this.

01:12:23.660 And, uh, we found, now instead of PET scanning, we use functional MRI and structural MRI, both.

01:12:31.860 And we did find, like we found with the, the PET scanning, there were areas where after, uh,

01:12:37.880 teenage girls with very limited gaming experience learned Tetris, uh, their, uh, brain activity

01:12:45.800 decreased.

01:12:46.660 But we also found from, uh, the structural MRI that there were increases in gray matter.

01:12:58.060 And the really interesting thing is the areas where there were increases in gray matter did

01:13:03.840 not overlap at all with the areas that functionally decreased.

01:13:09.340 It would have been a terrific story.

01:13:11.460 Wow.

01:13:12.040 That's strange.

01:13:13.080 Yeah, well, things are always more complicated than you hope them to be.

01:13:15.700 Not only that, but I can tell you that every time I did a brain imaging study, we always

01:13:23.040 found the exact opposite of what we expected.

01:13:27.060 Not just complicated.

01:13:28.060 That sounds, that sounds to me like, you know, you might actually be, uh, be, uh, be operating

01:13:32.620 as a real scientist.

01:13:34.520 Well, I mean, things are so damn complicated that it's really difficult to guess right to

01:13:38.460 begin with.

01:13:40.280 Well, it led to one of my three laws that I based the book on.

01:13:43.940 Law number one is no story about the brain is simple.

01:13:47.740 Law number two is no one study is definitive.

01:13:51.120 And law number three is it takes a long time to sort out all the various studies to see

01:13:56.360 what's consistent and what establishes a reliable rate of evidence.

01:14:00.220 Okay, so, so let, let me put you on a different track momentarily, and maybe this won't work,

01:14:05.160 but, but, but, you know, I'm always curious about, uh, let's say the practical implications

01:14:11.480 of scientific research, both at a, at a personal level, familial level, social level, all of

01:14:16.540 those things, you know.

01:14:17.380 So, I mean, one of the things that I'm planning to do in the near future is to launch a website

01:14:21.980 that will enable people to assess themselves with what we've developed a scale called the

01:14:26.360 big five aspect scale that breaks the big five down into 10 aspects, each of which, which

01:14:32.600 provides some additional high resolution and useful descriptions of personality.

01:14:37.300 So, you'll be able to go there and find out what your personality is like.

01:14:40.380 You'll be able to compare yourself to other people who you know to find out where your

01:14:44.360 similarities and differences are.

01:14:46.000 But one of the things we've been thinking about doing as well is putting up on the same

01:14:51.120 site a real IQ test, like nicely validated, probably focusing on fluid intelligence because

01:14:57.000 it's a little bit less linguistically complex to do so, but maybe measuring verbal intelligence

01:15:02.640 intelligence and then showing people the strata of occupations in which they're likely to

01:15:08.360 find maximal success.

01:15:10.600 Because, you know, from, for me, given that I know that people vary in their cognitive abilities

01:15:16.340 tremendously and that that's actually an important determinant of their life outcome, it seems

01:15:20.060 to me, so let's say someone tests out in an IQ of around 115.

01:15:25.300 And so you could say, look, you know, you're pretty damn smart.

01:15:27.940 You're, you're up above 85% of the general population.

01:15:30.840 You, you could, you could probably do a pretty damn good job as an undergraduate in university

01:15:35.800 if you were also disciplined, right?

01:15:37.860 If you were conscientious, you hit the books hard, you're going to, you're going to come

01:15:41.580 out in the top quartile of your class, assuming that you're not at a spectacularly successful,

01:15:46.600 uh, uh, spectacularly selective university.

01:15:49.440 But you're going to have a much more difficult time as a master's student and PhD level stuff

01:15:55.280 is going to be, you're going to be pushing your luck to, to really master that.

01:15:58.760 But, you know, you could be, here's a, here's a domain of, of, of, of, of, of, what would

01:16:05.780 you call it?

01:16:06.340 Industrial organizational activity where you could really be in the top 10 percentile.

01:16:11.240 You know, it's like, so if you have an IQ of 115, like you might make one bang up plumber

01:16:16.480 and you could have a spectacularly successful career as a plumber and maybe as a manager

01:16:21.220 of other plumbers and all of that.

01:16:23.040 And, you know, and I mean, I actually happen to be a real aficionado of the trade.

01:16:27.000 So I certainly don't think of that as something that's a, that's a low quality or low status

01:16:31.380 occupation in the least.

01:16:32.540 But we would, we would like to tell people, okay, here's, here's, here's a, here's an intellectual

01:16:41.340 domain that's probably too high for you to be successful without working insane hours

01:16:49.900 to, to, to, to close the gap.

01:16:52.060 Because you can do that with insane work up to some, some limited degree.

01:16:55.400 But it seems to me that the logical thing to do, at least in part, is to give people

01:16:59.940 a sense of what their advantages and limitations are and then say to them, okay, well, given

01:17:04.980 that, here's a place that you could go where you could be optimally successful.

01:17:10.800 And so, you know, that's kind of my take from a policy perspective, let's say.

01:17:14.600 But like, what have you thought about, you know, the massive diversity and intellectual

01:17:19.180 ability, I mean, what are the implications from a policy perspective as far as you're concerned?

01:17:23.620 Well, I think vocational guidance is clearly one.

01:17:26.560 I actually did some consulting and some research for a nonprofit group called the Johnson O'Connor

01:17:32.520 Foundation, which is vocational testing.

01:17:36.200 They're not that big on G, but they have their own battery of tests.

01:17:40.560 They bring someone in and do a full day of cognitive tests.

01:17:46.260 And from that, they give some advice about what kinds of professions match their cognitive

01:17:53.380 strengths and weaknesses.

01:17:55.300 And I actually did some brain imaging on their tests and it was, you know, very interesting

01:18:00.580 stuff.

01:18:02.660 Did you think they do, did you think, see, because it's hard to do the psychometrics properly

01:18:07.360 with regards to vocational guidance because we don't really know, we don't have a good

01:18:12.740 handle on how to classify jobs into their various subtypes.

01:18:16.360 John Holland has done some good work doing that, but there's so many jobs and it's hard

01:18:21.280 to figure out, well, what makes two jobs the same or similar, you know?

01:18:25.680 No, I was at Hopkins when Holland was there and some of my friends who were graduate students

01:18:30.080 worked for him.

01:18:31.580 And I learned all about that vocational testing.

01:18:34.260 It's very powerful.

01:18:35.160 And as you know, it's, that's more, his, his scales have kind of morphed into more personality

01:18:41.920 like dimensions.

01:18:43.740 Yeah.

01:18:43.960 Well, that, that's it.

01:18:44.840 You want that, well, that's exactly the nexus that we want to play out.

01:18:47.840 It's like, okay, because there is a reason, I know people have been mapping Holland's, Holland's

01:18:53.080 job categories onto the big five and with a fair bit of success, you know, and we're hoping

01:18:57.880 that the differentiation down to the, to 10 levels of personality will provide even more

01:19:02.480 precision, but, but with more general policy, let, okay, so fine.

01:19:07.080 So reasonable vocational counseling, that's a good idea.

01:19:11.240 When does it start?

01:19:12.920 Does it start in junior high?

01:19:14.600 Like, do you do what the Europeans do and start to track people into trades and, and,

01:19:18.660 and higher education at that kind of early age?

01:19:21.980 The Europeans seem to have had great success with that.

01:19:25.680 So it's certainly.

01:19:26.480 The Germans in particular.

01:19:27.620 Yeah.

01:19:27.940 So it's reasonable to look at, but the problem in the United States, there are so many

01:19:32.460 problems with the way we conceptualize education and the whole idea of tracking.

01:19:41.740 I don't know how it is in Canada, but in the United States, this idea of tracking has a

01:19:46.520 very negative balance to it.

01:19:48.400 You know, segregating the smart kids into one, one set of classes and the, the, the less smart

01:19:56.120 kids into others.

01:19:57.120 And then there's remedial education and there's been a tendency, a strong tendency in the United

01:20:03.500 States to feel that kids learn from each other.

01:20:07.180 So you don't want homogeneous groups based on learning ability.

01:20:10.900 You want, uh, yeah, it's so funny because it's so funny because the people say that with regards

01:20:17.280 to, to let's say academic achievement, but they play exactly the opposite stunt when it

01:20:22.580 comes to such things as, as childhood sports, you know?

01:20:26.260 So if you look at football, for example, it's like, well, Hey, let's segregate like ability.

01:20:30.560 It's like, you don't have the people who stumble around on the field, dropping the ball all the

01:20:34.440 time, playing with the top end quarterbacks and nobody thinks there's a problem with that.

01:20:38.500 They don't say, well, everyone learns from everyone else in that situation.

01:20:42.100 So to me, it, it speaks more of a refusal to admit to the stark reality that there are massive

01:20:48.980 cognitive differences between people and to try to actually start to address that with

01:20:52.960 some degree of seriousness.

01:20:54.100 And the seriousness should be something like, okay, well, let's look at the bottom 15% of

01:20:58.860 the population, cognitively speaking.

01:21:01.040 It's like, what the hell can we do for those people that's going to be useful?

01:21:05.640 And, you know, like the guy that I was telling you about, I was trying to think of some way

01:21:10.000 that he could find a respectable and productive and relatively stable position in society that

01:21:18.220 would be useful.

01:21:19.440 And I thought there was a couple of things he could do.

01:21:21.400 Like one of the things he could have done, I think he could have been encouraged, let's say,

01:21:26.180 to, to collect trash in the downtown areas.

01:21:30.680 Like he could have been assigned a city block and, and it could have been said to him, look,

01:21:35.760 your job is to keep this damn city block clean.

01:21:40.200 Here's a bag.

01:21:41.260 Here's a stick.

01:21:41.980 You get up in the morning, you go do this.

01:21:43.540 It's like makes everybody's life more pleasant.

01:21:46.100 It's a valuable contribution.

01:21:48.080 It's something you could do with a certain degree of pride.

01:21:50.540 And it, and there's a socially valuable end of it.

01:21:53.000 Now, what happens in Toronto is that people drive around these vacuum cleaner machines

01:21:58.340 on sidewalks and pick up the, the, the scrap paper and all of that.

01:22:02.760 That actually turns out to be a very cognitively demanding job because, well, you have to pay

01:22:07.880 careful attention.

01:22:08.660 You can't run over people.

01:22:09.840 You have to have decent social skills and, you know, it's complicated, but it might be nice

01:22:14.460 to see, but we, but we're not mature enough to have a discussion like this as a society.

01:22:18.880 We might want to say is like, okay, well, there's a group of people who aren't going

01:22:22.420 to be able to compete in the, in the cognitive workplace.

01:22:28.660 They're, they're not going to do it.

01:22:30.160 And there's actually lots of them.

01:22:31.800 And we're not going to say they're lazy and we're not going to say they're not looking

01:22:34.900 for work.

01:22:35.420 We're not going to say any of that.

01:22:36.320 We're going to say, look, we need to find occupations that have public utility that

01:22:43.760 aren't just make work projects that people of that level of,

01:22:48.260 abstract capacity could actually perform.

01:22:52.400 But I don't think we have the maturity to have that conversation.

01:22:56.120 We don't have the economics.

01:22:57.640 And so I would go even a little to the left of you.

01:23:00.240 And I would say there's nothing wrong with make work programs, you know, to, to, to allow

01:23:06.220 people, I mean, you have, you know, to, to work with dignity.

01:23:10.020 So you have that option, but you also have this interesting experiment being proposed of

01:23:15.880 the minimum annual income.

01:23:17.840 Yeah.

01:23:18.480 Well, that one worries me because see, there's a couple of things about that one that concerns

01:23:22.320 me because, you know, so we're having a conversation here where we're taking differences in IQ seriously.

01:23:29.880 But the problem with the guaranteed annual income issue, I think one of the problems,

01:23:35.500 problems, and I'm not denying its potential utility.

01:23:38.440 It's something I think that would have to be experimentally determined, you know, and all

01:23:42.580 of that, and maybe it could replace a plethora of less efficient social welfare programs.

01:23:48.380 But, you know, it isn't obvious to me.

01:23:54.100 It's obvious to me that there's a substantial proportion of the population, and I would say

01:23:58.120 it's probably 5%, that would destroy themselves instantly if you gave them a guaranteed annual

01:24:04.640 income.

01:24:05.460 And they would do it because they're very low in conscientiousness, for example, and very

01:24:10.020 impulsive.

01:24:10.760 And like, I've worked with many guys, often ex-cocaine addicts, who were often not all that

01:24:16.560 high on the end of the cognitive distribution, but very, very low in conscientiousness, high in

01:24:20.880 impulsivity.

01:24:21.780 And those guys were absolutely fine as long as they were flat broke.

01:24:25.100 But man, I tell you, as soon as they had money, they were done.

01:24:29.580 It was like three days in the bar, cocaine binge, face down in a ditch, and then they were

01:24:34.560 fine until they got money again.

01:24:36.460 And so, I don't, the problem with the guaranteed annual income solution is that, you know, man

01:24:44.200 does not live by bread alone, let's say.

01:24:46.400 And if you have money and you have things to do, then you have a life.

01:24:51.900 But if you just have money, you don't have a life.

01:24:55.100 Well, you know, I look at, you know, I have a very narrow lens on this.

01:25:00.720 What do I know about the big social policies?

01:25:03.240 And, you know, I don't know anything about that more than anybody else.

01:25:06.360 I have opinions like everybody.

01:25:08.180 But my narrow lens is through intelligence.

01:25:13.020 Yep.

01:25:13.380 I think more is better than less.

01:25:15.820 Yeah.

01:25:16.000 More doesn't make you a better person.

01:25:18.480 Doesn't make you honest.

01:25:19.740 Doesn't make you likable.

01:25:20.920 Doesn't make you conscientious.

01:25:22.060 Doesn't solve the problems of the world.

01:25:24.820 But if we can do something to increase intelligence generally, I think that would go in some measure

01:25:34.120 toward alleviating a lot of these very complex problems.

01:25:40.560 So, imagine the homelessness problem.

01:25:42.820 Some proportion of chronically homeless people have schizophrenia.

01:25:47.680 Yeah.

01:25:48.440 Schizophrenia is a genetic disorder.

01:25:52.320 Nobody knows what the genes are or how they work.

01:25:55.960 But it's pretty clear there's a genetic component.

01:25:58.360 If you can find the genes, figure out what they do, and come up with real good treatments,

01:26:06.080 if not cures, for schizophrenia and possibly preventions for schizophrenia, that indirectly

01:26:12.640 is going to help alleviate the homeless problem.

01:26:15.120 Right.

01:26:15.680 So, I don't know what to do about the homeless.

01:26:17.920 But if you can figure out what to do about schizophrenia, that's going to have some impact on that.

01:26:24.320 Yes.

01:26:24.860 It's basically, yeah.

01:26:25.900 Well, you know, your claim, to some degree, is that these more complex social problems

01:26:30.500 should be decomposed into isolatable micro-problems and that specific solutions should be sought

01:26:35.800 for them.

01:26:36.260 And that certainly strikes me as an appropriate approach.

01:26:39.520 Because everybody is different.

01:26:41.000 Not everyone's poor for the same reason.

01:26:43.300 No.

01:26:43.660 No.

01:26:43.940 Well, that's for sure.

01:26:44.820 That's for sure.

01:26:45.260 Not everyone's poor for the same reason by any stretch of the imagination.

01:26:50.280 That's right.

01:26:51.020 Poverty doesn't have one cause.

01:26:53.200 No.

01:26:54.100 No, it would be.

01:26:55.020 And it's not merely caused by lack of money, either, because that would be a much easier

01:27:00.240 problem to solve.

01:27:01.340 Unfortunately, it's not so simple.

01:27:03.500 So, the one thing that we're probably getting toward the end, the one thing I would like

01:27:06.620 to leave your listeners with is really optimism.

01:27:10.260 These are not dismal problems in perpetuity.

01:27:13.740 Because the genetic approach, I think, and I'm kind of out, you know, I'm kind of out there

01:27:20.540 on this, this is not a mainstream view.

01:27:22.500 But I think the more something is genetic, the more likely it is we can change it for

01:27:26.640 the good.

01:27:27.980 And that's why we should study the genetics of intelligence.

01:27:32.040 That's why I hope genes have more to do with it than environment.

01:27:37.360 Not, you know, not because I want to do something nefarious with genes.

01:27:41.660 And I understand the history of this very well.

01:27:44.900 Yes, yes, yes.

01:27:45.620 But it's because I think in neuroscience, there's optimism.

01:27:50.600 And to guard against the negative aspects, the potential negative aspects of this, the

01:27:56.280 only solution is to have public conversation about this.

01:27:59.420 And to get people to understand IQ, intelligence, G factor, these are not all the same things.

01:28:06.020 They have different relationships to the data, to the genetic data particularly.

01:28:10.740 So we have to understand these things.

01:28:13.420 And once we have some sense of this and not hate people who believe that there's a genetic

01:28:19.800 component as a priori racist or malevolent people, I think we can come to a common understanding

01:28:30.000 about how genes and environment interact and figure out how all that works and begin to

01:28:36.060 think how in the year 2050 or 2060 we're going to have to resolve some of these issues to

01:28:47.680 practical benefit.

01:28:49.840 Well, that is a good place to leave it, I think.

01:28:51.620 And we've had a very productive discussion.

01:28:53.180 So I think that's probably a nice place to bring everything to a close.

01:28:58.420 I've been speaking with Dr. Richard Heyer, who studies the neural basis of human intelligence

01:29:03.320 and cognition and who has recently released a new book called The Neuroscience of Intelligence,

01:29:10.020 published by Cambridge University Press.

01:29:11.760 It's an academic book, but for people who are interested in a serious discussion of the

01:29:17.060 relationship between biology and intelligence, then it's a good go-to tome.

01:29:21.880 And it's an extraordinarily important topic given the undeniable primacy of intelligence

01:29:29.060 as the fundamental predictor of, let's say, success in many, many domains across the human

01:29:35.620 lifespan.

01:29:36.040 So thank you very much for spending an hour or so with us today, and with any luck, maybe

01:29:43.660 we'll talk to you again in the future.

01:29:45.040 I'd like to talk to you perhaps about consciousness at some point.

01:29:47.540 That might be entertaining.

01:29:49.240 Well, listen, I've really enjoyed it.

01:29:51.440 I appreciate the chance of having more than three sentences, you know, three sentences, you

01:29:59.080 know, related to your listeners.

01:30:02.600 I just want to say one thing about the book.

01:30:04.420 It is written for the lay public as well.

01:30:07.300 Oh, okay.

01:30:07.840 Well, that's a good thing to know.

01:30:09.380 Cambridge wouldn't let me call it the neuroscience of intelligence, colon, what every parent and

01:30:14.680 student needs to know about neuroscience, because they wanted to market it as a strictly academic

01:30:21.780 book.

01:30:22.240 But it's getting quite a bit of attention just among non-academic readers.

01:30:26.340 Okay, well, excellent.

01:30:27.100 Well, I'll make sure that I mention that in the description, which I will post a link

01:30:32.680 to the book probably on Amazon.

01:30:35.120 That's usually the most straightforward thing.

01:30:36.920 And also point out that it is, in fact, written for people who aren't only specialists

01:30:41.320 in the area.

01:30:42.700 So that was good.

01:30:44.400 Thanks.

01:30:45.240 Yep.

01:30:46.040 Thanks a lot.

01:30:47.140 Hey, listen, thank you very much.

01:30:48.480 I appreciate it.

01:30:49.200 No problem.

01:30:50.000 It's a pleasure talking with you, too.

01:30:51.800 Good to meet you.

01:30:52.920 Okay.

01:30:53.420 Bye-bye.

01:30:54.000 Bye.

01:30:54.240 Bye.

01:31:23.780 Bye-bye.

01:31:24.320 Bye-bye.

01:31:24.580 Bye-bye.

01:31:24.740 Bye-bye.

01:31:25.320 Bye-bye.

01:31:25.880 Bye-bye.

01:31:26.620 Bye- joins me.

01:31:26.640 Bye-bye.

01:31:26.680 Bye-bye.

01:31:27.460 Bye-bye.

01:31:27.680 Bye-bye.

01:31:29.200 Bye-bye.

01:31:29.440 Bye-bye.

01:31:29.740 Bye-bye.

01:31:30.760 Bye.

01:31:31.520 Bye-bye.

01:31:32.300 Bye-bye.

01:31:32.720 Bye-bye.

01:31:33.620 Bye-bye.

01:31:33.720 Bye-bye.

01:31:34.620 Bye-bye.

01:31:35.600 Bye-bye.

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01:31:36.680 Bye-bye.

01:31:38.580 Bye-bye.

01:31:40.280 Bye-bye.

01:31:41.380 Bye-bye.

01:31:42.200 Bye-bye.

01:31:42.800 Bye-bye.

01:31:43.100 Bye-bye.

01:31:43.780 Bye-bye.

01:31:45.900 Bye-bye.

01:31:47.020 Bye-bye.

01:31:49.700 Bye-bye.

01:31:51.760 Bye-bye.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - June 04, 2018

Dr. Richard Haier： The Neuroscience of Intelligence

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