Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Richard Haier on the Neuroscience of Intelligence, Correlates of IQ, and the G-Factor

Episode Date: October 9, 2020

Patreon for conversations on Theories of Everything, Consciousness, Free Will, and God: https://patreon.com/curtjaimungal Help support conversations like this via PayPal: https://bit.ly/2EOR0M4 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/better-left-unsaid-with-curt-jaimungal/id1521758802 Pandora: https://pdora.co/33b9lfP Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e Google Podcasts: https://play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#/ps/Id3k7k7mfzahfx2fjqmw3vufb44RICHARD HAIER'S LINKS WEBSITE: http://richardhaier.com BOOK: https://www.amazon.com/Neuroscience-I... TWITTER: @rjhaier (https://twitter.com/rjhaierTIMESTAMPS 0:00:00 Thoughts on his book "The Neuroscience of Intelligence" 0:02:50 The Bell Curve's controversy 0:06:26 The "brain efficiency" hypothesis 0:16:06 The stigma associated with intelligence research, and race & IQ 0:21:31 No relationship between IQ and morality 0:22:27 IQ vs. the g-factor vs. intelligence 0:23:46 Using chronometry to develop a ratio scale 0:26:38 Low IQ (below 85) is a societal problem 0:29:04 Intelligence is genetic, but that's hopeful since it means we can design interventions around it 0:31:18 Do "brain training games" help with IQ? What about piracetam / nootropics? 0:31:55 Dual n back? 0:33:17 TDCS, PEMF (eg. NeoRythym), and other EM-stimulation devices 0:36:01 Particular brain regions associated with intelligence (Parietofrontal integration theory) 0:46:50 The correlates of IQ on life outcomes 0:47:47 Psychometric tests of character / morality 0:49:16 RAPM test (pause and see what you guess) 0:53:24 Path length's between regions and why they matter 0:57:36 The famous Finn et al 2015 study, and groundbreaking studies that have been published since 1:04:12 IQ genes aren't deterministic but probabilistic 1:05:14 Do children have the average IQ of their parents? 1:06:46 Can brain damage increase IQ? (acquired savantism demonstrates abilities but what about IQ?) 1:08:34 Relationship between openness and intelligence 1:09:40 Relationship between LSD trips and intelligence 1:11:01 Relationship between IQ and happiness 1:11:53 Is the Flynn effect real? What are the limitations? 1:15:26 What decreases one's IQ? (cautionary tales) 1:16:59 IQ's relationship to consciousness 1:22:00 Mindfulness meditation and IQ 1:23:27 Joscha Bach's idea of intelligence (Haier's perspective) 1:24:26 Eric Weinstein's ideas on intelligence (Haier's perspective) 1:27:16 Elon Musk's Neurolink 1:27:57 Artificial intelligence and IQ tests for computers 1:31:14 Finding the g-factor in animals 1:32:55 What separates humans from the rest of the animals?* * *Subscribe if you want more conversations on Theories of Everything, Consciousness, Free Will, God, and the mathematics / physics of each.* * *I'm producing an imminent documentary Better Left Unsaid http://betterleftunsaidfilm.com on the topic of "when does the left go too far?" Visit that site if you'd like to contribute to getting the film distributed (in 2020) and seeing more conversations like this.

Alright, hello to all listeners, Kurt here. That silence is missed sales. Now, why? It's because you haven't met Shopify, at least until now. Now that's success. As sweet as a solved equation. Join me in trading that silence for success with Shopify. It's like some unified field theory of business.

Whether you're a bedroom inventor or a global game changer, Shopify smooths your path. From a garage-based hobby to a bustling e-store, Shopify navigates all sales channels for you. With Shopify powering 10% of all US e-commerce and fueling your ventures in over 170 countries, your business has global potential. And their stellar support is as dependable as a law of physics. So don't wait. Launch your business with Shopify. I'm here with Professor Richard Heyer, who has studied the neuroscience of intelligence for 40 years or so. Is that correct? 40 years or more. It's not quite clear to me, but a long time. Right. So what are you working on these days? Well, I just a couple of months ago finished the manuscript for a new textbook called The Science of Human Intelligence.

And so it was the my latest review of the research literature. So actually, this is the third book. I have only I wrote the first book after I retired. That wasitive Neuroscience. It's a Cambridge handbook. And that is due to come out sometime early in 2021. And the textbook, The Science of Human Intelligence, with my colleague and friend Roberto Colum, that is due out sometime in 2021 also. And those are textbooks, those are for university students? Yes. The handbook of intelligence and cognitive neuroscience is for more advanced students. And the science of human intelligence will be an introductory textbook.

And the neuroscience of intelligence, which is out now for a couple of years, that was intended as an introductory text for students, but also I wrote it for the public as well. And it's had a very nice public response, actually. Right. Now this book, which I'm going to put a link in the description, I recommend for the people who watch, if you're interested in intelligence at all, especially if you have no idea, this is a superlative book I read cover to cover. And I don't say that often. Just a bit of a background on me. I'm a math, my backgrounds in math, mathematical physics in university.

And I pretty much stayed narrowly in that field, even narrow in that field to the theoretical side. So I know virtually nothing outside that. And this takes someone like me who knows a smidgen or modicum about neuroscience and intelligence to getting a surveillance of the entire field. It's almost like the bell curve of 2015, except minus the controversy. Well, it's interesting you should say that. Charles Murray, one of the authors of the bell curve, is a friend of mine,

is a friend of mine and he endorsed the book and the controversy about the bell curve is largely misplaced, shall we say. A lot of people who never read the book think they know what's in it and react to what they think they know what's in it. But in fact, when you actually read the book and see what's in it, it's nothing like it's been portrayed right this is another whole side issue we can spend an hour talking about that yeah okay forget about that the book also has humor injected in it and i haven't heard that mentioned in any of the reviews and i found myself chuckling aloud which is again rare for me i this is fantastic that you appreciate that because either some people didn't notice the humor or i just couldn't quite figure out if i was really trying to be funny and there's even you can you can see yourself thinking aloud in the book so for example there's one section where you

say i'm paraphrasing something like there is no hope. And then the next section, next sentence is actually, wait, there is a study just came out, so on and so on. Okay. Just so you know, one of my favorite parts was at the end where you admit your own bias and you admit it in the front to your bias towards the genetic influence towards intelligence. But it's not just based on your own proclivities or your own penchant. It's based on 40 years of research. And you say this, which I'm going to read. It's one of the last lines. It says,

I challenge you to think critically about the studies I've presented throughout this book as representative of neuroscience progress and about what I think they mean. My challenge to you is to find the weak links and loopholes in my presentation. And when I do, then you design a new research study and fix them or falsify them. Now that to me says that you're a true scientist. You're saying, hey, here are my theories. I think they're largely correct, but maybe they're not. Please go show me where they're false and do the studies. the studies? Well, you know, to be honest, it's not even that I think they're mostly correct. I don't know if they're correct. The theories came from the empirical observations, and it represents our best guess of what might be true, but they're formulated in a way that creates testable hypotheses. And so over the years, a lot of other people interested in intelligence have found those theories of interest, and they've tested many of the hypotheses. One of the things I note up front in the book is what I call my three laws. Number one, no story about the brain is simple.

Number two, no one study is definitive. And number three, almost most importantly, it takes many years to sort out inconsistent and conflicting data from different studies to establish a weight of evidence on any particular question. And we are now at this stage where some of the things I proposed as much more than 20 years ago have been tested. There are inconsistent results. There are contradictory results, but an emerging weight of evidence is apparent to people in the field. And sometimes it supports the original formulation. Sometimes it doesn't. I was at a meeting a couple of years ago where a terrific researcher, Professor Bastin from Germany,

gave a talk on the brain efficiency hypothesis. Right. And she reviewed all the evidence as she saw it. What year was this? This was, geez, about three years ago, I think. It was a meeting in Edinburgh. And she concluded that the evidence for the brain efficiency hypothesis at best wasn't so strong.

She was very diplomatic. And so, you know, I was in the audience. I raised my hand and I said, you might be wondering what it feels like to be sitting in the audience, hearing one of your key theories being discussed and with not too much enthusiasm. And so she started to laugh and I said, I'll tell you what it feels like. It feels fantastic. It was a hypothesis. It doesn't matter whether I thought it was correct or not.

It's an empirical question. And all the research that has come out since, we've discovered all kinds of interesting things that we didn't know before from that research. So it's not whether it's right or wrong. All hypotheses are meant to be tested. And then you formulate new hypotheses and new theories based on the new kinds of data. And what's interesting to me about this field is when I

started doing brain imaging studies of intelligence in the late 1980s, I was one of the few psychologists who had any access to brain imaging technology. At that time, it was positron emission tomography. This was 12 years before fMRI became available to most places. And we were making everything up. There was no canned software to analyze the images. There was no database of images we could access. Not only did we have to pay for every scan we got, with PET it was $2,500 per scan. We had to buy the scanner more than a million dollars. How much was that? More than a million.

How much was that? More than a million. And because PET used short-lived radioisotopes, we had to buy a cyclodron. We had to buy our own cyclodron. So I spent many, many years fundraising for the capital equipment we needed to get a few scans. And at that time, if we could do a sample size of eight people, these were the first eight people ever scanned in an intelligence test. And everything we saw was fantastically interesting. No one had ever seen brain function in this way before. And so when in our very first study, when we found inverse correlations between glucose metabolic

rate in the brain, which is what PET assessed, and scores on a nonverbal abstract reasoning test of intelligence, that was amazing. It was very surprising. It's not what we expected. And it was thrilling, actually, even though the sample size was eight now you can access public databases of brain images and get a thousand people and it doesn't cost you anything for the for the public for the audience for the people listening do you mind outlining what is the brain efficiency hypothesis also also please let people know the advantages and disadvantages to PET versus MRI. I'm not sure. Remember, I'm going off of this book, so I know what it was in the 1980s and the 1990s.

But I don't know if those have been fixed, if there's any new technologies, any new innovations. Yes, I lost the thread of the point I wanted to make. I'll answer your question. I lost the thread of the point I wanted to make. I'll answer your question. But the point I wanted to make is that, you know, the 1980s, 35 years ago, this is a whole generation. Some of the people I listened to when I go to talks now literally were not born when

I was doing this. And I could not imagine then the kinds of technology that's being brought to bear on the brain efficiency hypothesis. And I think people in the field, the young people in the field, need to think about what the field is going to be like 35 years from now. I won't be here, but it's going to be fantastic, even though what they're doing today is fantastic. And they need to start thinking about what's coming, or the technology that's coming, and the kinds of questions they're going to ask. So in 1988, positron emission tomography was brand new. It was available in only a handful of universities. And that's why I came to the University of California at Irvine, because I had an opportunity

to work with people who acquired a PET scan machine here. And PET works by injecting a radioactive tracer into a person while they're doing a cognitive task. And the tracer labels those parts of the brain that were taking up the most glucose, that were using the most energy. And then you can make a picture of the places in the brain that took up the most of the radioactive tracer, because the parts of the brain that are working the hardest would take up the most glucose and give off the most radioactivity to make the picture from. And the very first study we did, we were interested in what parts of the brain were most active while people were literally

solving intelligence test items. They were nonverbal abstract reasoning problems. And we found some areas of the brain compared to some control conditions were more active while people solve the problems. But the surprising thing was when you correlated the amount of glucose activity in those parts of the brain that were more active to the scores people got on the intelligence test, the correlations were inverse. That is, the people whose brains were working the hardest had the lowest scores. Hence the brain efficiency hypothesis that it's not how hard your brain was working that made you score high on the test.

It was how efficiently your brain was working. That's how we explain the inverse correlations in 1988. how we explain the inverse correlations in 1988. And that was the origin of a lot of subsequent research on the direction of correlations between brain activity measured by PET, measured by functional MRI, and scores on intelligence tests. Between 1988 and the year 2000, not much happened in brain imaging studies of intelligence. PET was a very complicated and expensive technology. It was not available in many places. But around the year 2000, functional MRI became available. Although MRI machines have been around for a while, getting functional information in terms of blood flow out of an MRI scanner started to become available around 2000. a remarkable thing happened. A bunch of cognitive psychologists who were really not so much interested in brain location, but they were interested in how the brain processes information, irrespective of the brain areas involved. fMRI was readily available at many institutions in

the medical schools. So a lot of cognitive psychologists started getting access to fMRI. And they started doing fMRI studies of cognition. And some of that included tests of intelligence. So it's kind of a watershed moment in cognitive psychology where people who traditionally were uninterested in individual differences became individual difference researchers. And now we have a lot of the most sophisticated brain imaging studies of intelligence being done by sophisticated brain imaging people who never really came up through the ranks of intelligence research. So the whole field is, is very exciting.

A lot of new ideas, a lot of new technology. And it's, this is not your grandfather's intelligence research. You know, that was all paper and pencil IQ test scores are IQ scores, meaningful at all. Aren't they just biased? Those controversies are long gone. Long gone in your field, but to the general public, it's still a touchy issue. In fact, you even mentioned that some researchers say we're measuring reasoning, and they don't mention intelligence because maybe the grant providers will be more likely to give funding to people who don't study intelligence because of the stigma attached to it. The stigma attached to intelligence came about almost overnight.

There was a time when educational psychologists tended to be experts in psychometrics and things like intelligence testing. experts in psychometrics and things like intelligence testing. As I actually explained in the book, the watershed moment was the publication of an article by an educational psychologist named Arthur Jensen, published an article in the Harvard Educational Review in 1969. He had been asked to review programs that were designed to help disadvantaged children close the gap on cognitive testing. It had been known for decades that many disadvantaged children... Head Start? This was before Head Start. Head Start started just about the time, but it was too new to be included in his evaluation. But there were demonstration projects that helped lead to Head Start.

And some of those demonstration projects were claiming gigantic increases in children's IQ after an intervention, after what they called compensatory education. And it was like remarkable. One of them was actually called the miracle in Milwaukee. Right. And Jensen was asked by the editors of the Harvard Educational Review to get the data, look into it, and just see what was going on, because these reports were so phenomenal and encouraging and supported what almost every psychologist at the time believed, that gaps in cognitive testing were due entirely to being disadvantaged. And that if you could compensate for the disadvantage, those gaps would go away. And that's why they called it compensatory education. And what Jensen found as he actually got data and looked into this, that from a statistical psychometric point of view, none of the claims held up, none of them. And it was very disappointing. But then he went further and said,

look, the fact that intelligence seems to be so resistant to efforts to improve it by making environmental education changes, this suggests that genetics plays a more powerful role in intelligence differences among people than we have considered before. And that was bad enough. But then he went further and applied that reasoning to the well-known historical average difference between black students and white students. So Jensen did that? Jensen did that all in this one article. It's over 100 pages

long, and it's technical. And he basically said, we should consider as a hypothesis that part of this average group difference might be due to genetics. He didn't conclude it. He didn't state it. He said, this is a hypothesis we should consider. He then went on to say, in part of the article that no one ever cites, that what this might mean is that education has to be tailored to individual students' strengths and weaknesses so that every student can benefit to maximize their education by concentrating on their strengths, essentially. I think I cite that concluding paragraph in the book you held up. Well, anyway, this created a firestorm because all people heard was compensatory

education doesn't work because intelligence is genetic. And so is the black and white differences due to genetics. And since genetics is deterministic and we can't do anything about it, it means that at least one group is genetically inferior. And you can imagine that this went over very poorly. Jensen was hounded for this. He couldn't speak at a meeting of the American Psychological Association. He couldn't give an address. I actually went as a student to hear him, and the room was cleared because of a bomb threat. And he had to basically have the university police escort him around the Berkeley campus. His mail was checked by the police. against this article and against the view that we should consider the hypothesis that genetics had something to do with average group differences. It's still a hot button issue today.

We need to make clear for the people listening that during the course of this conversation, when we're talking about intelligence, it may seem as if we're saying that because having more intelligence seems to be better overall, it increases your, we can talk about the benefits later, that if you have low intelligence, then you're lesser of a human or that you're worth less. No intelligence researcher that I know, and I know quite a number of them, has ever entertained that thought. There are people who clearly believe. Right. I'm just saying that there's the perception that when we talk about something like this,

that we're holding that belief unstated. Part of what intelligence researchers have to do is just say how silly that belief would be. So having low, and we haven't really talked about what intelligence is. Right. We have to define it. We have to delineate it between IQ, intelligence, and G-factor. Yeah. For the purposes of this conversation, intelligence is very narrowly defined as a general ability that underlies all other mental abilities. It's not one particular thing. It's a general ability. And it's not, the general ability itself is not the only aspect of intelligence, but it turns out to be the most predictive of academic success, job success,

and life success in general. That's why most intelligence researchers focus on it. And it's estimated by IQ tests. There's no definitive measure of intelligence like there is for temperature or distance. So as I explain in the book, 10 feet is exactly twice as long as five feet. Right, a ratio measurement. But an IQ of 140 is not twice as smart as an IQ of 70. It's a different metric.

There is no metric in intelligence research comparable to weight or distance. Is there a way to develop the ratio scale with chronometry? That is assessing reaction time? We're getting ahead of the story, but people have dreamed about that. So far, it hasn't come to fruition. Reaction time is a possibility because 500 milliseconds is twice as slow as 250 milliseconds. And reaction time to brain events has been used, but so far, and it is correlated with IQ scores and other measures of intelligence, but so far it hasn't really broken through as an independent or alternative measure of general intelligence. But even with the limitations we have of estimating general intelligence, researchers have still learned a lot about what intelligence is and where it comes from. If you score low on an IQ test because you don't have this generalized ability, it means absolutely nothing about your quality. It means nothing about the quality of

what kind of person you are. You can be a kind person, you can be a loyal person, you can be a likable person, you can be a friendly person, and on the opposite end you can have a high IQ and be none of those things. So I think part of the problem is that many people who are interested in IQ or discuss it don't have personal experience with people at the lower end. Unless you have a relative or you grew up with somebody with an IQ of around 80 or less, you have no idea what life is like for them and how difficult it is. Somebody once defined everyday life as an IQ test, just navigating the trials and tribulations of everyday life.

Probably most of the people you know are at the higher end of the spectrum. And if your average IQ, most of the people you know are, you know, plus or minus. And you don't really know what it's like to have an IQ of 80 or even 85. People with IQs of 85 and less are at the lower 16th percentile. So if you think about IQ as a percentile, if you have an IQ of 130, you're in about the top 2% of people. you're in about the top 2% people. If you have an IQ of 85 or less, you're in the bottom 16th percentile.

And people in that range, with some exceptions, find it very difficult to have the kind of employment that pays enough to be self-sufficient. They're chronically underemployed. Okay, is this a problem? Well, the 16th percentile in the United States with 320 million some odd people, this means over 50 million people in the United States have IQs of 85 or less. This is a problem. It's not a problem because they're bad people. It's not a problem because they're lazy people. It's not a problem for any negative reason about them through no fault of their own.

They have mental abilities that limit their participation in modern society. So how can you help this? Well, there are two ways. You can provide safety nets. I think this is partly the reason I've come around to the universal basic income idea. There are some people who really need this and through no fault of their own just can't earn enough to be self-efficient. But the other way to approach it is to say, well, what can we do to raise IQ?

What can we do to increase people's general ability? Is there anything? Compensatory education doesn't work. It's been tried. You know, Jensen said it didn't work based on what he did in 1969. Here we are 50 years later. There have been all kinds of compensatory education programs, including Head Start and others. And they do some positive things.

You get positive outcomes from them. They're worth doing. But one of the positive outcomes is not increasing their IQ, the IQ of students. And we don't call it compensatory education anymore. We call it early childhood education, completely changing in name, education, completely changing in name, partly as a recognition that it failed to increase IQ. Is there anything we can do to increase IQ? In my view, when I go through this chapter and verse in the book, so far nothing has worked. Many claims about memory training, computer games. In my view, the way to increase IQ will come from an understanding of the neuroscience and genetics of intelligence. And ironically, the more differences among people in intelligence are genetic.

That means there's an underlying biochemistry, are genetic. That means there's an underlying biochemistry, which is ironic because in the 21st century, we are learning how to manipulate that kind of bio, that kind of neurochemistry. And that tells me that it's going to be possible once we have a better understanding of the neuroscience of intelligence, to use neuroscience methods to develop interventions, possibly medications or drugs, that would increase IQ. That's the ironic part. People think that if intelligence is genetic, it's immutable, can't change. That's the wrong way to look at genetics. Genetics is probabilistic, not necessarily deterministic. And if you can manipulate those probabilities by manipulating somewhere in the cascade of events between a gene turning on and something happening in the brain, there are a thousand steps, a thousand neurochemical steps

in between, and many interactions of other genes and other events in the brain. If we get some understanding of that, we can possibly intervene to increase intelligence dramatically. possibly intervene to increase intelligence dramatically. That's why I say in the beginning of the book, in my view, the ultimate purpose of intelligence research is to be able to increase intelligence. That's why we do this kind of research. It's a somewhat controversial point of view, but that's what I think. Does brain training like Lumosity and so on, those games, do they help with an increase in IQ? No. Okay. How about paracetam? That's a nootropic. Some people say it increases their IQ. Have you

heard any research on that? I've seen no research on neurotropic drugs, brain training, computer games that suggest an increase of the general intellectual ability factor, the G factor. What about dual NBAC training? I heard that that was associated with an increase in working memory. I think you do outline that in the book itself. The original study was extremely flawed. I go through it in the book. Subsequent studies are less flawed, but the only people that seem to replicate the finding at all are the original researchers. That independent researchers have essentially been unable to replicate this finding. And even the original researchers have kind of backed off the claim

that they're changing the G factor, they're changing fluid intelligence. It might be that such training increases attention, maybe makes visual spatial ability go up a little bit, not so clear. But in terms of really affecting what we call the general intelligence factor, which is the core key factor, I don't know any evidence of it. I've gone on record saying the original report was like the original report of cold fusion. It was done by people who were really not experts in the field and kind of overhyped their own data. And the original report was seriously flawed. How about electromagnetic stimulation like transcranial direct current and There's a lot of work. And there's a PEMF like this little device.

Oh, you have one. This isn't a TDCS one. This is a PEMF. It's neorythm. I don't find that it makes me any brighter in the least, but I wear it when I'm trying to concentrate. Has there been any research? I don't know research on that particular device. The last time I reviewed the brain stimulation

research, the evidence, there was some positive evidence, but the weight of evidence seemed to be negative. Negative? Okay, okay. Okay. It decreased your IQ. There was one study that, that claimed to decrease, but that was only one study. I don't know that there has been an evolving weight of, of evidence. You know, this transcranial magnetic stimulation and other ways to stimulate the brain, they're very interesting. They should do something, but whether they can be used to increase intelligence, as I have defined it, I'm not certain of, I don't know of any evidence that I would say would be compelling, but remember my third law, it takes many years to sort this out and figure it out.

I don't recommend, meanwhile, that people make their own devices to stimulate their own brains, like some gamers were doing a few years ago. I myself would not do that. Razor blades are like diving boards. The longer the board, the more the wobble, the more the wobble, the more nicks, cuts, scrapes. A bad shave isn't a blade problem,

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years worth of blades for free. Just make sure to add them to the cart. Plus 100 free blades when you head to h-e-n-s-o-n-s-h-a-v-i-n-g.com slash everything and use the code everything. I heard that DARPA uses TDSC for sniper training, that it increases their rate of learning, which to me seems like it would increase your crystalline intelligence. Have you seen any results that are solid in that domain? I know the people who did that, who used it, some of that original research. It's very interesting research. I guess DARPA decided not to pursue it. I don't think the effects were very big. And they were effects on really increasing the speed that analysts could learn material or

increase the speed that people that were doing image analysis, that humans doing image analysis could do more of it in a shorter period of time. But again, in terms of increasing intelligence, these are interesting research questions. I don't rule it out, but so far, let me put it this way. If there was something I knew about that could increase my intelligence, I'd be using it. Right. Something that's interesting is that there's a study, I think it's in the book, a fairly established phenomenon is that the nucleus accumbens, the caudate, the putamen, the morphology of it is associated with an increase or a high rate of fluid intelligence, but only in the right hemisphere. All of this research on localization or identifying parts of the brain that are related to intelligence test scores, this is something we started in 1988.

It's been done a lot, but as I pointed out, even in 1988, finding these little spots in the brain where there's some connection to intelligence, that's just the starting point. You have to find out what it is about those spots. Is it more neurons, more dendrites, different kinds of neurons, more glial cells? You know, what's going on in those areas? more glial cells, you know, what's going on in those areas. And moreover, it's probably as important to know how those areas communicate with each other. Right. That's your PFIT model. The PFIT model, the parietal frontal integration theory, where based on all the imaging studies we could find in 2007, actually 2006, it was published in 2007. All the imaging studies of reasoning or intelligence, we looked at all the brain areas that were implicated. We looked at PET studies, we looked at fMRI studies.

And the way we looked at this, these findings, you know, in all the studies, you had different nomenclature and different tasks and different technology. But the commonalities we could find seem to implicate areas mostly in the frontal and parietal lobes, not exclusively, but mostly. And so we developed what we call the parietal frontal integration theory of how information flowed around those areas that would be related to individual differences in intelligence. And some people might have white matter or dendrites or even mitochondria, something different that would allow information to flow more efficiently while people were processing problem solving. And that they could problem solve better and faster than other people. And at the time, there was no way to really measure information flow. You could do it indirectly with reaction time. Subsequently with fMRI and something called magnetoencephalograph, you could get such measurements. Now fMRI connectivity

analysis is looking at this kind of thing. These are techniques that were not available in 2007. This is partly why I said at the beginning that the technology is moving ahead so quickly and allowing you to ask questions you couldn't really, you could ask them you couldn't really answer before. So now they're the people doing the most interesting intelligence research with brain imaging are the people looking at how brain areas are connected to each other with white matter and how information flows around those areas using functional MRI. using functional MRI. And a lot of it is while the person is just resting with their eyes closed, but it's going to be more interesting as this research is done while the person is solving cognitive tasks. So there's a lot of interesting things.

I don't like to focus too much on the old PFIT because that was, you know, that's 13 years ago. And since then, we have a lot more information. The general PFIT model seems to be holding up well. Right. Just minor modifications. Frontal areas are implicated and how they communicate seems to be important to help explain individual differences in intelligence. Have you found any hemispheric differences? So for example, let's say the left dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex is more important than the right? There seem to be some hemispheric differences. I don't know that they've replicated all that much. One of the most surprising things to me when we first

started doing brain imaging was the lack of hemispheric differences. That, you know, everyone talks about the left hemisphere does this, the right hemisphere does that. The truth mostly, I believe, is in the communication between the hemispheres, that almost nothing is exclusively left or right. You know, there are some language areas that are predominantly on the left. So we know this when people have strokes in certain areas or brain damage in certain areas, they lose some verbal abilities. But by and large, I'm underwhelmed at the hemispheric findings so far. Yeah. What I found unintuitive was that the weaker interhemispheric homotopic connections were correlated with IQ. That was one study, a study out of Harvard,

needs some replication. And now one of the interesting things that's happening is there are so many different brain image analysis techniques being developed that one of the problems is that if you use a certain analysis technique, you find one thing. And if you use a different technique on the same data set, you come up with some differences. This has to be sorted out by people who develop these analysis techniques. This is not unique to brain imaging. This is what happened with EEG technology. You know, this group did it this way, that group corrected for artifacts in a

different way, they had different results. This will be sorted out over time. I see. You just have to be patient. And what's really nice now, we've reached a stage where brain imaging studies with the connectome, they tend to have very large samples, and the publications often will have a discovery sample and a cross-validation sample. Now we're really getting into some great science. I also heard that the thickness of the corpus callosum is related to IQ, not inversely, but that seems to go against the inter-hemispheric connection in my estimation. Can you help disentangle that?

Yeah, that's the bundle of fibers that connect the right and left hemispheres. In some people, it's bigger than others. It seems to be bigger, I think, in women than in men. So what all these differences mean are not yet clear. There's some conflicting data on the corpus callosum intelligence relationship. But if you step back, when I started studying intelligence in the 1970s, the big question was, are genetics involved or not? Now we're finding genes, you know, we're much more sophisticated. A big question was, are IQ scores meaningful or are they random numbers, basically? Well, we know that IQ scores correlate to brain

parameters like thickness of the cortex or the activity in this area or the activity in that area. So we've learned a tremendous amount about intelligence. And the field has really moved way beyond a lot of those early questions have been answered definitively, you know, genetic about genetics, for example. And now we're in a very exciting stage of working out details. And the details are phenomenally complex, phenomenally complex. But, you know, there are some people who say, you know, the genetics of intelligence is so complex, we'll never figure it out

because there are maybe a thousand genes involved and they all interact with each other and some of them interact with environmental factors that we're never going to figure this out. And my answer is if physicists like you can figure out what happened in the first nine nanoseconds of the big bang, then we can figure out these complex relationships. And the way the field is evolving in technology and data analysis, I think we'll get there at some point. I hope I live to see it, but I don't think, I think it's a finite problem. I don't think it's an infinite problem. Right. And you see that progress has

been made. So you just extrapolate that forward. In my lifetime, incredible progress has been made. And that's why I want young people in their twenties and thirties doing intelligence research to think 40 years ahead. What is it going to be like in 40 years? Will we have enough knowledge about the neuroscience of intelligence to tweak what goes on in the brain? Will we be able to take someone with an IQ of 80 and get it up to 85? change for that person and for a number of social problems, not just poverty. Some people are going to live in poverty because they cannot, through no fault of their own, compete in the modern world for jobs that pay enough. And that's why I mentioned universal basic income. On the other hand imagine if you have an iq of 130 and you can get up to 135 you're going to be more productive in your profession the probability will increase that you'll be yes yeah yeah there's no the audience for some of the people who are still like iq is just a number why don't you

talk about the correlates between high iq and then what are the life outcomes and then low IQ? Like, for example, 166 times more likely to drop out of high school, some phenomenal number if you have a low IQ. There's really no question that for most metrics of success that people care about, more intelligence is better than less. It doesn't, better, I don't mean in a inferior, superior kind of moral view. I mean in terms of increasing the probability of your success. There's no, I said before, there's no relationship between moral character and IQ. No essential relation. You can make some... Is there a psychometric test for moral character

like there is for IQ? There are tests that measure moral maturity, moral development, and they can be related empirically to IQ a little bit, but I don't see any real practical relationship there. purposes of discussing does IQ have value, you have to put aside the idea that people with higher IQ are better than people with less high IQ, even though more intelligence is better than less. It's like being taller in many circumstances is better than being shorter. It doesn't mean that taller people have a higher moral value in some way. I think there's, I understand that there's empirical research

that shows that better looking people are more successful. Doesn't mean they're better in any way. Right. As far as I know, I have not been a subject in such a study, but we take the world as we find it. There are these things that float around, but in terms of intelligence, more generally is better than less.

Okay. On page 168, you say that to advance the field, the study of intelligence, it can't be limited to psychometric scores of the past. But what I'm wondering is why not? Because the Raven's advanced progressive matrices seems to be a wonderful test of IQ. It is. The Raven's test is a matrix test, where you have to reason out what elements of the matrix are. I'll overlay some images right now for people. And that's a good, that's a high G test. Not a perfect G test, but it's a high G test. And it would be better if we could develop a ratio scale.

It's still a psychometric score. I see, yeah. But it's a good one and people use it a lot. And of course, critics will say, well, who cares if you can solve this kind of problem? It has no relationship to the real world. But in fact, empirically, it does. People who can solve those problems

do better at certain kinds of professions. Not everyone competes within a profession equally. So in physics, for example, there are really brilliant physicists and just really smart physicists. And as a physicist, you probably, without hesitation, could name the really brilliant ones, and you would get nearly 100% agreement from other physicists, except among the brilliant ones, they might disagree who's most brilliant. Right, right, right, right.

Now, what's white matter integrity, and what's its relationship to IQ? Is it just defense against damage or something different? The brain has gray matter and white matter. The gray matter is like the processing parts of the brain. The white matter are the fibers that connect brain areas to each other. that connect brain areas to each other. And they're like bundles of fibers, literally. And so the integrity of those fibers related to the integrity of processing information. Think about if you have a very,

if you have a lot of white matter fibers connecting two areas, the communication between those two areas might be more efficient than if you had fewer connections. And there are a couple of studies of white matter integrity. You can measure white matter integrity with an imaging technology called diffusion tensor imaging. And there are some new versions of that I understand that are even better than the group

that I know about. That's this right here. Yeah. And it's that particular technique is excellent at imaging these connections. And you can follow these connections and see what areas are connected best to other areas. And it turns out that metrics of white matter integrity are correlated with things like IQ scores. What about gray matter integrity? Is there a measure of that? There are measures of gray matter volume, the thickness of the cortex, texts. And some of these measures also are related to intelligence. Brain size is related to intelligence. Whether that correlation is due to more neurons, more densely packed neurons, more white matter, all of these things are being investigated with ever more sophisticated techniques. And the weight of evidence is emerging that these things seem to be predictive.

Why they're predictive, that's kind of the next round of research. Levels of explanation. You know, we're going deeper and deeper in terms of our levels of explanation of these things. Right now, we're kind of still in the descriptive phase. You also mentioned that the path length of the frontal parietal connections are important. Now, what I'm wondering is why do path lengths differ at all? Because there's like point A to B. It seems like it's approximately the same from here to here as it is on me than someone

else, unless it makes a curve or a fractal and you're talking about the path length. Well, I think you're referring to studies that compared the path length between two nearby areas. You can look at nearby areas and get an average path length to nearby areas. Then you can look in the same people as to the average path length of different areas, of distant areas. And it turns out one study showed that the path length to the distant areas, which were a little weaker, Distant areas, which were a little weaker, actually were more predictive of IQ. Now, that was one study. So my point is that there are still a lot of conflicting information about this.

A lot of those early studies had smaller sample sizes. There's now more sophisticated techniques to looking at these analyses. So, you know, we still don't know exactly what the right parameters are, but we know we can measure brain parameters that are somehow salient to individual differences in intelligence. And once we figure out what those are and how they work and where they come from then that will open the door to the possibilities of increasing intelligence i think possibly dramatically i guess what i'm curious about is why do the path lengths between individuals differ at all because let's just take eyebrows like The distance between here and here on me is

approximately the same distance as it is from here to here on you. It just depends on how you define here to here. Is it just not a beeline? Are they not connected one to the other directly, straight? They make a loop? It's a good question, but let me answer like this. Everyone's eyebrows in relation to their eyes, their nose in relation to their eyes, their mouth in relation to their nose, their mouth in relation to their cheeks, pretty much the same for everybody, but no two people have the same face. Right. No two people have the same brains. And does a millimeter difference in the brain make a difference? I think a millimeter is like a mile. I see, I see.

So who knows? And it's not just one measurement. You got trillions of synapses and neurons. of synapses and neurons. And who's to say what small differences here and there might mean on their impact on neurotransmitter levels, on the sensitivity of receptors, pre- and post-synaptic receptors. We really don't know very much on the molecular level about what these small physiological differences might mean or what they might reflect. They might reflect deeper differences. There is vast uncharted territory in the brain. And people who want to explore that in relationship to something as complex as human intelligence, this is a formidable set of questions.

Have you heard of dissociative identity disorder or multiple personality disorder? I have. Okay. What I'm curious about is do the multiple personalities, have there ever been studies where one has a drastically higher IQ than the other? You know, I don't know the answer to that. I think studies of multiple personality disorder were fashionable a while ago, and I never really got into that literature. In your book, you mentioned the Finn study of 2015, and you said it was breathtaking. It's what you've been waiting for for 40 years. Do you mind outlining for the audience

what that study is? And then I'm also curious, have there been, that was 2015. Plenty happens in just a few years. What's new? So let's go over the Finn 2015 study, and then we'll talk about what's new. Okay. So just as I was literally finishing the book and the final manuscript actually had been submitted, I asked them to send it back because I just sent it in a day or two before. And I wanted to add the study that I just read, the Finn study, a group at Yale took a database of fMRI. I think it was, now I can't remember who was fMRI or structural MRI. Oh, it was fMRI.

And from the Connectome project, one of the multi-site collaborative consortia that are pooling brain imaging data from various sites into big sample sizes. And they make it available to researchers. Remember earlier, I said we not only had to pay for every scan, we had to do them ourselves and we had to buy the equipment. Right. Now there are data sets. Now there are data sets you can access with a thousand people. And they got a couple hundred people and they did one of the early connectome analyses looking at brain connections. And they found, and they had data from a couple hundred individuals doing six different tasks.

And what they found was the brain connectivity was essentially the same in each person, irrespective of what the task was, and that you could identify. And this connectivity was so unique to that individual that it was like a fingerprint. And moreover, aspects of that connectivity were correlated with IQ. That's what was so exciting to me. And since that time, there have been other connectivity studies looking at intelligence and predicting IQ from the brain image connectivity data. I had tried to predict IQ from our early PET studies, never was successful. And even from our early MRI studies, our samples were just too small and the individual differences were too big.

And so we never were able to cross validate any of our correlations. But now with the connectome data, the sample sizes are large. They do cross validation. And it's now possible to predict IQ from brain images. I think the highest I've seen might be around 15, 20 percent, which doesn't seem like a lot, but this is just the beginning of this effort. And I think that's why it was so exciting to me, that I always wanted to do a study where you could predict IQ from brain images. And I always knew it was going to have something to do with the connectivity among brain areas, was always my intuition.

And sure enough, this study seemed to demonstrate that. And there have been some replications of this. And a lot of people, almost everybody working in brain imaging now is working with connectivity analysis. So it's very exciting. What's groundbreaking since? What has been released? What study has come out that you're like, oh, man, I've been waiting for this for 40 years, 45 years. It's not, it's no one study, but it's now that what's, what's groundbreaking is the ability now to take large samples of people with brain imaging and predict their general intelligence from that. The optimal way is not yet clear, but there's very clever and very sophisticated analysis techniques looking not just at the structure, not just at structural data, how brain areas are structurally related, but how they're functionally related.

So an fMRI, if you're doing some cognitive task and this area lights up and at the same time, this area lights up in the same way, those two areas are functionally related. They may or may not be structurally related directly. And there may be multiple other areas that intervene. So what you have is a network, you identify a network of activity. And then some of that network might develop genetically. Some might develop in genetic interaction with stress or other environmental things, as when you're a child. Other aspects of that network might develop by sheer luck and random factors during development.

These are all possibilities. But the takeaway is that you can predict some portion of IQ from brain images. That's what is exciting. And we're just at the beginning of that. It's like predicting IQ from DNA, just at the beginning of that as well. I know that each brain in the imaging is unique to the point of fingerprint, like you mentioned. What about for twins? There are imaging studies that show that twins are pretty similar, but not necessarily identical. Identical twins have very similar brains, but not necessarily 100% identical. You would be able to differentiate them based on the image? I think so.

I've never really looked at it quite like that. But even though they have identical genes, as their brains develop in the womb and thereafter, there are a lot of random events that take place that affect brain development. So they're going to be highly similar, but not necessarily perfectly identical. And that's something else. Metric is exactly. Something else people need to keep in mind is genetics doesn't mean 100% determination. There is a probability. Some genetic things it does. So if you have the gene for Huntington's disease, that's bad. But for a complex trait like intelligence,

complex trait like intelligence, then there are so many other factors that the genes become probabilistic. It's like having genes that put you at higher risk for heart disease. You're at higher risk. That's probabilistic. And then we know there are things you can do to lower your risk, even though you're not changing the genes. So you exercise and diet and other environmental factors can influence that probability. What does it look like when a man and woman have a baby? I know that's a strange question. What I mean is the woman has an average IQ, the woman has an IQ, the man has an IQ. Does the baby then just have the average of those two, generally speaking? Generally speaking, there's a statistical phenomenon called regression to the mean. So if a tall father and a tall mother have children, on average, their children will be tall, but not as tall as either parent. They're going to regress to the mean. If you have two

short parents, on average, their children will be short, but not as short as the parents. And the same with intelligence. It's a general statistical phenomenon. But you breed two smart people together. They generally have smart kids. You breed two low IQ people and they generally have low IQ. I know that's been demonstrated in rats. Generally, on average.

I mean, there's a lot of qualifiers there. One of the things about genetics that's interesting is it seems to mix up things even within families. So you can have two bright parents having two children. One can be very bright and the other pretty average. And the reverse can happen as well. And the reverse can happen as well. Because you don't, both, each child inherited a different 50% from each parent. I see. They don't inherit the same 50%. Yeah, and they interact and it's complex.

Okay. So there's something called acquired savantism. I think there's only 20 cases in the world where people have had brain damage and then acquired an ability and still remain somewhat normal. You know, you can get impaired in other aspects like your social aspects, but these 20 people or less than 20 people have remained somewhat normal, but acquired an extraordinary ability like mathematical manipulation is quick with them or musical memorization is rapid as well. What I'm wondering is, have you heard of any studies on brain damage that has increased IQ? That's an excellent question. I've been asking it for years and I've never come across a case

where brain damage resulted in increased cognitive ability. And this acquired Savanta syndrome, I'm very dubious about the cases that have been publicized. Usually, we don't know anything factual about the history. We don't know if there's a concurrent diagnosis of autism. I'm just very skeptical of this, but I don't know of any case of any kind of lesion or brain damage that resulted in people scoring higher on an IQ test. The only exception seemed to be there are some cases of brain damage or lesions or frontal lobe dementia where people get a bit more creative artistically. Right. That seems to be a real thing, even though how creative it is sometimes is subjective.

But as far as increasing intelligence, I have never heard of such a case. You used to be a personality researcher. I think you started out as one. Is that correct? Yes. Was that in the book? I researched you. I don't know where I found it. But either way, there's a relationship between openness and intelligence, and there's a relationship between openness and creativity.

What is that relationship? Openness is one of the so-called big five personality factors, personality dimensions. Some people are just more open to experience than other people. And the more open you are to experience, that seems to go with higher intelligence, whether that's causal or just correlative, don't know. Whether that's causal or just correlative, I don't know.

And generally, personality, that's the only real personality factor that seems to be correlated to intelligence. What was the other part of your question? Okay, forget that question. LSD is known, and psychedelics in general are known to increase your openness somewhat, maybe permanently, at least three months later with some of the studies. Does that mean, have there been studies that have demonstrated one's IQ after a dosage of LSD, like say three months afterward, not while they're on the trip? Not to my knowledge. People have talked about

being more creative after certain drug experiences. I don't know systematically if this has been studied. It may well have been. I don't know. Is there a relationship between IQ and synesthesia? between IQ and synesthesia? Not that I'm aware of. Synesthesia is a very odd condition where people report seeing numbers as colors or shapes. It seems like the wiring of the sensory parts of the brain got scrambled in some way. It's very rare. I'm not an expert on it, but as far as I know, it's unrelated to IQ. Now, homosexuality is related to increased openness, and increased openness is also related to an increase in IQ, as you mentioned before. So does that mean, have you seen any studies that demonstrate that homosexuality is associated with higher IQ? No.

How about happiness? The relationship between intelligence and happiness? If you think intelligence is hard to measure, think about happiness. How happy are you right now on a scale of one to 10? Oh, I'm so glad to be speaking with you. I don't want to flatter you too much. How happy were you exactly 24 hours ago on a scale of one to 10? I mean, that's about, I'm sure I'm annoying some happiness researchers, but it's a hard concept to operationalize and get a metric that's any better than kind of a radium scale.

The Flynn effect. What I was thinking is, you know, the way that Stephen Hawkingking did formulated that the early universe was a singularity was just by taking a black hole and extract sorry taking the expansion of the universe and extrapolating backwards so it's like okay if we're moving forward by a certain amount per year then you just go back and back and back and back it's more complicated than that but either way you get to a singularity so then i was thinking about the flint effect and that's maybe three points every decade okay so that it's's something like that. But it can't be

absolutely correct, because then it would mean Socrates has an IQ of five or minus 600. So what are the limitations on the Flynn effect? The Flynn effect is the observation, the empirical observation, that over the decades of the 20th century, average IQ scores went up. This was discovered because you have to re-norm IQ. IQ scores are based on normative values. Right. And every once in a while, you have to renorm the test because the raw scores are going up. And that's called the Flynn effect. And whether you can extrapolate back, whether this has been a constant thing, unlikely.

Whether you can extrapolate into the future, unlikely, because there are recent studies that show the Flynn effect is largely stopped. Interesting. Sorry, was it related to increasing nutrition, like the bottom lifted? That is one hypothesis that seems to be a good one. Plus, there is better schooling. Kids are more exposed to visual spatial things and other cognitive abilities that might account for this increase. Whether the increase has been in the G factor, however, is still controversial. Remember, an IQ score includes the G factor plus visual spatial, plus numerical, plus some verbal

abilities. And any one of those other than the G factor could go up and you'd get an increasing IQ score that's not necessarily due to that underlying G factor. I see. I see. And so I think most researchers believe it's still an open question as to whether or not the Flynn effect relates to G. It's kind of a mysterious phenomenon. Almost everyone believes it's true, that it's a correct observation. But what it means is not so clear. Where it comes from is not so clear. But I don't think you can extrapolate it into the future. And it certainly doesn't mean that because IQ changes generation to generation, it can't be genetic because evolution doesn't work that quickly. When the Flynn effect was first observed, a lot of the anti-genetic people seized on it as evidence that you see it can't be genetic, it's malleable. Now we know it's malleable within certain limits, but whether or not that includes the G factor is still not so clear.

What can one do to decrease their IQ so we know what to avoid? Drug abuse? Does that permanently decrease your IQ? Amphetamines? Those things can cause long-term abuse, can cause brain, I want to say damage, but it might not reach a threshold. They might cause changes in the brain that could be damage or just more subtle changes. And we don't really know if the more subtle changes have an impact on something as complex as IQ, which is kind of a trait. Over time, if you abuse your brain, does that have an impact on your reasoning ability? It could in some cases.

But again, there are so many different factors here and parameters. I can't believe there's any positive effect on the physiology of the brain. And people who do hallucinogens, many people swear by the positive effect on creativity and expanding consciousness. I don't know about any of those things empirically, but I'm really unaware of any impact that would have other than abuse and brain damage on cognitive ability. You just made me light up, man. You mentioned consciousness. So I'm curious about the relationship between intelligence and consciousness.

Just as an aside for the people listening, as well as for yourself, professor, my goal with this channel, as well as myself for the next few years, and maybe my whole life, I am interested in something called the theory of everything in physics. So what are the fundamental laws of physics?

And I have a suspicion that consciousness is related somehow, which is completely unlike most of the physicists who are ardent materialists. And maybe materialism is true. I'm just not convinced. But either way, I'm exploring theories of consciousness too. So let's talk about consciousness. What the heck is the relationship between intelligence and consciousness? Is it that the more intelligent you are, the more conscious you are? Is there a measurement of consciousness? I know you can knock it out with anesthesia. Well, you may know that I was involved in the first brain imaging studies of consciousness. first brain imaging studies of consciousness. And I did these with my colleague and friend,

Mike Alkire, who is an anesthesiologist. And I met him when he came to me. He was a resident in the anesthesiology department. He knew about PET scanning. He said, can you help me do PET scans in people under anesthesia? He says, what I want to do is I want to scan the same person three times. Okay. Once while they're conscious, once when I give them enough anesthetic drugs, so they're barely conscious, you know, Steve, can you hear me and steve says uh yeah okay and once while steve is completely unconscious because i've given him enough anesthetic drugs so we did a series of pet studies like this yeah uh with a couple of different anesthetic drugs because they're all alleged to have different brain mechanisms and the was, what's the last part of the brain to turn off when someone loses consciousness? And what's the first part of the brain to turn on

when they regain consciousness? We published a whole series of studies on this in the late 1990s. And since then, there have been a lot of imaging studies of intelligence. I don't think there were any before us. And when you talk about consciousness, I'm talking about literal consciousness. And so there are imaging studies that are trying to find the brain areas and the brain networks that underlie consciousness by manipulating those networks with anesthetic drugs. It's an experimental approach, not just a correlation approach. And I'm not up on the latest of that. I haven't done those projects in a while. But one of the questions I first posed to Dr. Alkire as an anesthesiologist, I said, when you have a clinical patient and you are dosing them for surgery to put them under, does it make a difference if you know if they're what we call mentally retarded, if they have very low IQs?

That is to say it made no difference? Well, I wanted to know. You weren't sure? That's what you're investigating. More or less anesthetic. Yeah, that's an interesting question. And he had no idea. I said, well, is there a textbook we can go to

that will have some information on this? And he said, no. This is all just kind of clinical feel. He said, and we don't really know how unconscious a person is. We give them enough medication. We'll poke them with a needle at some point to see if they respond. And that's how we know how if somebody's deep enough for surgery. And he says, we give them memory disrupting drugs.

So if they wake up during surgery, they won't remember it. It's horrifying. It's horrifying information to me. But this is the way the state of the art was in the 1990s. I'm not sure it's much different now. There are monitors that allegedly monitor how deeply someone is anesthetized. That is how unconscious they are. Whether these work very well or not, I don't really know. But that's how I think about consciousness. But there's a

much bigger group of people who think about consciousness in a more philosophical, less anesthetic sense more of a meditation sense yeah and i'm not aware of any data that links meditating meditating to changes in intelligence that would go with so-called changes in consciousness i just don't know whether that data exists or not. Speaking of meditation, some people would say mindfulness meditation helps them with an increase in attention and attention is related to intelligence. It's not synonymous with it, but have you seen any research that you find, that you find credible about mindfulness and IQ? find credible about mindfulness and IQ? No. Remember, attention is one component. So if you are doing an intelligence test and you take some drug or some manipulation like meditation that increases your attention, you might work through the test a little faster.

your attention, you might work through the test a little faster. Whether you work through it better is not so clear. If you work through it and you receive the same score, but you did that faster, is that not an increase in intelligence? Because intelligence takes into account per unit time. It depends on what the test is. And many of the good tests are time limited. So the more you finish correctly. Right. And you did mention in the book that the timed tests tend to be highly, more highly correlated than not with G. Right. Because given enough time,

a lot more people can solve a lot of the problems. But the idea is by truncating the time, you're really kind of stressing the system. And the people who can do it very fast tend to do better on some of these other things. I don't know if you had a chance to look at the video that I sent you of Josh Kabak. Have you taken a look at it? I just briefly looked at it and it's not something I know anything about. So I just, you know. Okay. Okay. Well, I i'll outline it he was putting forth a theory that perhaps plants are more intelligent than humans because maybe they they communicate clearly but it takes quite some time and maybe throughout the course say a thousand years from now we would be

gone but the plants would still be communicating and they serve as their own hive mind or their own brain in some interconnected manner and i was curious what you think of that theory from an intelligence point of view, given that you have a very specific definition of intelligence. Yes, it has no bearing to human intelligence and what we study for human intelligence. And you might say that certain instincts are more intelligent than humans as they've been around millions of years. It's a, it's a use of the word intelligence that is kind of interesting, but has no meaning to me. I see. I see. Have you looked at the link that I sent you about Eric Weinstein on

intelligence? Yes. I watched the whole thing. Okay. Now that I haven't watched in quite a while, so I don't, I don't actually know what I'm going to ask you about it, but do you mind expounding? Like what did you think about his theories on intelligence? If you can even articulate them to the audience first, that'd be great. Well, it was a discussion between Joe Rogan and Eric Weinstein, two very intelligent people, talking about their views about

intelligence. And it was amusing to hear intelligent people talk about something they had limited knowledge of. And they were quite opinionated about it. Joe Rogan seemed much more open about it. Eric Weinstein had some interesting views about what tests mean and what intelligence tests don't mean, all of which I've heard for decades. For example, do you mind saying some of them, some of the, it doesn't measure everything that makes people intelligent. It's very narrow and it doesn't include creativity, for example. And that some,

he specifically talked about African Americans being more creative musically and IQ tests don't do that. And it was a kind of an unfocused discussion that threw in stuff about intelligence and intelligence testing in almost random ways. It wasn't a really coherent discussion about intelligence the way you and I are having a discussion about intelligence. So it was amusing. It was a little frustrating because they were talking about things in a way that intelligence researchers would kindly say would be unsophisticated. And they were talking a lot about the race issue, which made them both uncomfortable, understandably, about the average differences among, between blacks and whites specifically

on IQ tests, and what this means. I think they missed the bigger point on this. If you want to understand, if you want to fix that difference, like compensatory education, like Head Start, like almost every developmental and educational psychologist would like to do, including myself, you have to understand where the difference comes from. And if there's a genetic component to that, you got to know that. If it's a cultural problem, you got to know that. If it's a cultural problem, you got to know that. And so it's still an uncomfortable subject. Most people stay away from it. And ironically, the longer people, the longer scientists stay away from it, the longer the underlying problem, whatever it is, will persist. Have you been keeping up with Elon Musk and Neuralink? I've been following it to the best of my ability. What he's doing is very interesting.

I'm not sure how much real neuroscience there is underlying what they're actually trying to do. But it's worth doing. They're playing around with something very interesting. And there might be a teacher in it have you seen anything that would increase someone's iq by by injecting i'm not injecting by inserting electrodes uh no because we don't know where to insert them and what to tell the electrodes to do but doesn't mean we can't find out i don't know if you look into artificial intelligence but the generalizability is what held Watson back

from being considered to be a high IQ computer, let's say. That is, it was great in one domain. Is there a test for IQ for computers that you know of or that you can think of? Or do you have any speculations? Well, let's see. About 15 years ago, I gave a talk at a group of artificial intelligence researchers about what they might learn from people like myself who study real human intelligence. And my whole talk was a pitch on the G factor, the general ability. It was a pitch on understanding the general factor, the G

factor in humans and how important the G factor was. And at the time, a lot of artificial intelligence was trying to break human cognition into discrete pieces. This task, that task. And I said, the key is how you're going to integrate all that. And that when they did statistical analysis on human cognition. cognition. Okay, so with respect to artificial intelligence, I gave a lecture to a group of artificial intelligence researchers many years ago, and I emphasized the g-factor, that it wasn't so much the individual components, but how they would be related in artificial intelligence.

And I subsequently understood that the field of artificial intelligence is now paying much more attention to this general factor and algorithms that would simulate it. What they're doing, I don't really know. I'm not really up on artificial intelligence. But you asked if there was any test, computer test for artificial intelligence. I have wanted to ask, compare Siri to Echo and Alexa

on asking them questions from an IQ test. Just kind of general information. I would imagine they'd score extremely high on a Raven's test. Well, they couldn't do a Raven's test. Right, because they're audio only? Yeah. So, I mean, it's an interesting question. There might be computer programs already that solve Raven's problems.

I'm not aware of it. It seems like it would be an easy visual input, relatively easy visual input. So, yeah, I don't really know that much about artificial intelligence, but my hunch is the more they can simulate real human intelligence, not an easy thing to do, but that must be where they're trying to go. I think it's in this book, you mentioned that there's some studies with rats and the G factor in rats. Now, that's extremely interesting, if that's true. You can extract a G factor from animals. Not only are there studies... Can you tell me a little bit about that?

g-factor. There is a good research report showing that the g-factor occurs in, I think it was over 30 different cultures, where they gave a battery of tests from which they could extract the g-factor. So it's not culturally specific. It seems to be more of a cultural universal. That's number one. Number two, there are animal studies where you can have animals do various problem solving activities, you know, and score how well they do. factor analyze the different problems they do, and you can come up with a G factor that's very similar to the G factor in humans. This has been done in rats. It's been done in guppies. Interesting. Yeah. So there seems to be this general reasoning factor in a number of animal species. Now, what it means, I'm not clear, but it's important for intelligence researchers to know that this may not be a uniquely human thing. There's the age-old question, what separates man from the beast, us from the animals? Do you have any speculations, any ideas? Maybe humans, are humans the only ones that would sacrifice food for intellectual stimulation?

The only differences I know of are the obvious. I don't know how to conceptualize an answer to that question. It used to be when I was in college, people would say that tool use separated humans. But in an anthropology course I took way back in college, they were showing some, I think with Jane Goodall film of monkeys using sticks to extract termites and then lick the stick. So they were using tools. So, yeah, there are obvious differences, but the brains are different. Humans seem to have more cognitive capability, especially for abstract things. So I don't really know much. Professor, where can people find out more about you?

Where can people find out more about you? What you're working on? People can go to my website, richardheyer.com. You will find links to the book, The Neuroscience of Intelligence. They will see links to the two books in progress, and they will see PDFs of many of my research papers and some links to various videos of conversations like this one. Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Well, please send me a link to the final version. And I enjoy talking to you. It was pretty wide ranging. Yeah, that's right. And it doesn't look like I read it because I don't make a single note in any of my books. If you know the personality research, I score extremely high on orderliness, which means I like things to be in their place. I don't want to desecrate this book with my ink, so I keep it pristine. But I read it cover to cover. Well, I appreciate there's a few. Yeah, yeah.

I don't recommend books. I think I think I don't. I think this might be the only book there I'll be recommending on the entire channel. Maybe there's one. I can't recall.