[Music]
dr richard heyer studies the neural
basis
of human intelligence and cognition he
works with neuroimaging technologies
to study individual differences in
mental ability he received his phd in
psychology from the johns hopkins
university in 1975
and has since held appointments in the
intramural research program
at the national institute of mental
health and the medical school at brown
university and the university of
california at irvine
irvine he has served on the editorial
board of three journals
neuroimage intelligence and psychiatry
research
he also served as guest editor for a
special issue on brain imaging research
for the journal intelligence
he provides neuroscience consultation to
university research groups corporations
foundations and educational and legal
professionals
he's a popular lecturer and has appeared
in numerous media outlets
in 2012 his research was featured on
nova
science now and he received the
distinguished contributor award
for the international society for
intelligence research
in 2013 the teaching company invited
richard to create an 18 lecture course
called
the intelligent brain 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 intelligence
so maybe we could start with a little
bit of of of historical information um
i would like to know how you got
interested in iq research or
intelligence research let's say and and
so let's start with that and then we can
start
dating diving into the nitty-gritty well
really
it started in graduate school um
at hopkins when i really
became most interested in personality
research
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 study of mathematically
precocious youth
and i was one of the proctors at the
very first
talent search for mathematically
precocious kids
and i wrote my first couple of papers as
book chapters in
in books that stanley uh was editing
about this project
and i saw these these kids aged 10 11 12
who were scoring higher on sat math
than hopkins freshman
and the question was you know how does
this happen where does this come from so
that was kind of my
earliest interest and in graduate school
although i really completed my my
dissertation on
personality i
took my first job at the national
institute of mental health
in the intramural research program in
the laboratory of psychology and
psychopathology which at the time
the lab director was david rosenthal who
had
just finished the denmark adoption
studies of schizophrenia
right right and here is where i learned
about
genetics my office was next door
to a fella named monty buxbaum who was
doing both potential research
very interested in that and so my
my early interest in in individual
differences
slowly morphed into an interest in
individual differences in intelligence
and at nimh they were just going through
a transition
from kind of a psychoanalytic
orientation to a neuroscience
orientation and i was kind of caught up
in that
and so that's the origin of my interest
in the brain
and in technologies to make brain
measurements and relate that to
individual
differences okay right okay now you just
wrote a book too in the neuroscience of
intelligence
campaign university press and so when
did that come out
that came out um really just about six
months ago
so it came out i think in december of
2016 but they tell me for
publishing reasons they call it a 2017
publication
i see well part of the reason i was so
excited to talk to you is that i've done
a very large
amount of research especially not so
much
practical lab research but investigation
into the structure of intelligence and
into its measurement we
we designed back in 93 with a student of
mine daniel higgins we designed
i think what was probably the first
online
battery purporting to measure the
cognitive abilities associated with
dorsolateral prefrontal cortex right so
hypothetically the highest order
cognitive functions in the brain and
we found much to our chagrin i would say
and this was a very painful discovery
that
a lot of what we had been thinking about
as potentially separable
neuropsychological functions were pretty
easily collapsible and
collapsible into good old general
intelligence you know that killer
central factor that seems to unite
cognitive abilities and so
it was quite a shock especially because
the neuropsychologists of the time and
they still do this
uh are aren't as um
assiduous in investigators of the
psychometric intelligence literature as
they should be and tend to underestimate
the central power of that and
that initial factor so anyways i'm
really interested in
intelligence research partly from a
practical perspective too because the
industrial organizational psychology
literature is crystal clear for
complex jobs the best predictor of
long-term success is intelligence and
it's
a predictor that's probably
imagine you give it an r of 0.4 to 0.5
which is pretty decent so let's say 25
percent of the variance the next best
predictor is conscientiousness and it's
pushing its limit at mopping up 10 of
the variability in long-term performance
so iq it's a killer man and it
we i make sure my students assess
intelligence with everything they do and
it always
ends up being a major predictor of
things that you wouldn't even expect
like disgust sensitivity for example so
you disgust sensitivity is higher if you
have a lower iq
yeah the g factor is powerful
you just said something though that i
want to just make a distinction about
you're talking about the g factor and
then you
kind of called it iq this is
very common in everyday language to talk
about intelligence
iq and what we call the g factor
as one thing and it really isn't so an
iq score is a good
estimate of the g factor right it also
includes
other aspects of intelligence and
intelligence in
itself although it's a broad term
is only a part of the universe of mental
abilities
so if you're very good at say
calculating
on what day january 5th was in the year
1520
that's a mental ability that some people
have doesn't mean you're smart
right yes you see that with autistic
savants often that they're
sent out often but sufficiently often
they have these amazing calculus like
calculation abilities for example that
don't seem to be manifest in a in a
spectacularly high
overall intelligence well so what do you
what do you want to tell us about you
want to start with the book
and and walk us through it well you know
it's that's
that's that's interesting because the
book is kind of a culmination
of things i've learned
mostly from my neural imaging work on
intelligence
and it kind of came as a surprise it's
the first book i've ever written i'm
now retired actually from academia never
wrote a book while i was in academia i
was writing you know
journal papers uh but cambridge
university press called and they
have this series of fundamentals of
neuroscience
and they wanted to include intelligence
and i regarded that as a major step
because intelligence research really has
been relegated almost
to uh the peripheral of mainstream
psychology
yeah yeah politically suspect to say the
least
yeah and you know the the switch
happened overnight
from may being in the mainstream to
being really peripheral
in about 1969 before 1969
almost everyone who was interested in
education
was concerned about the achievement gaps
right
and they felt universally
that once you equalized educational
opportunities
those achievement gaps would disappear
very fast yeah that was the head start
the head start yeah even before head
start
head start it came to head start
but even before head start there were
all these demonstration projects there
was one
the miracle in milwaukee and there were
all these things
that showed that if you you really
intervened in early childhood education
yeah which at that time was called
compensatory education
the early childhood education term
came much later but this idea of
compensatory education
really took off and then in 1969 the
harvard educational review
asked one of the foremost educational
psychologists arthur jensen
to write a review of the progress and
this
article in 1969 has become infamous the
opening sentence was
essentially we've tried compensatory
education
and it has failed yeah and then he had a
hundred pages of detailed statistical
analysis
of why there were no inc you couldn't
demonstrate an increase in iq score
in any of these programs now head start
had just begun so head start
wasn't included yeah but i you know i
reviewed the literature on head start
too extensively and basically what
happened was that
so that was for those of the viewers who
don't know head start was a
nationwide attempt to to add additional
education to the lives of
dis disadvantaged kids especially you
know
at the preschool level and basically
what happened
was that they actually did show
improvements in academic achievement
initially
so in grade one and grade two they were
performing above their peers but then
the
difference in improvement the difference
in performance started to decrease and
then by
about the grade grade five or grade six
the differences had disappeared
completely
so there was no evidence whatsoever of
that of that either of a
stable one-time long-term gain in
cognitive ability
or what people were really hoping was
that if you intervened early enough
you'd get something that would sort of
would turn into a positive feedback loop
and the gains would actually advance
across time and
what ended up happening with the head
start research basically was
the conclusion that it produced no
cognitive improvements whatsoever
although
more kids who went through head start
graduated from high school
fewer than were delinquent more of them
fewer than became pregnant
teenage in the teenage years and more of
them went to colleges but
that seemed to be because they were
better socialized not because they were
in any way had been made smarter so that
was a really
tremendous disappointment because it was
a bipartisan
attempt to come to grips with the
fundamental issues that sort of
bedeviled structural poverty in the
united states
no one was happy about that outcome i
can tell you well not only that but when
jensen published his article
he also said that since
iq increases seem not to be
coming from these intense environmental
interventions we should consider the
possibility that these differences have
a genetic component
and that really began the incendiary
descent of intelligence research to the
periphery
yeah the reaction against that was
universal
um because it implied a genetic
inferiority
if you didn't have genes for iq it's
also something that's universally hated
on both sides of the political spectrum
because on the liberal end
you know the idea fundamentally is is
that everybody's the same and that if
you
if you distribute education resources
properly then everyone can succeed and
so that didn't work out so well for the
liberals and then on the conservative
side the idea is
well if you could just get off your lazy
asses and get a job there is a job for
you out there
and the truth of the matter is you know
you can tell me what you think about
this but this was a statistic that just
absolutely shocked and staggered me when
i went through the
intelligence literature so you know it
is illegal in the united states to
induct anybody
who has an iq of less than 83 and the
reason for that is you know that the
american armed forces have been
conducting intelligence research for
like more than 100 years and
that was partly because they needed a
way of sorting people rapidly during
times of
military expansion during war time but
it was also because
iq tests and especially in the early
part of the 20th century were used to
identify
let's say the deserving poor who could
really benefit from additional
educational
attainment and advancement and the unit
and the military was hoping to identify
people from lower class strata that
could be
streamed into say officer training
programs and so forth
or even skills training programs to
to move people from the underclass into
at least the working class and maybe
above so
they had a bloody stake in this man they
wanted
to find people they wanted to sort them
properly and they wanted to do
social good when they weren't just
trying to win a war let's say which
often also is
a social good but what happened was that
by
i don't remember when this legislation
was introduced but it wasn't it was in
the later part of the 20th century
but their basic finding was that by say
the 1980s
they had determined that if you had an
iq of less than 83 there was not a damn
thing that the unit
that the army could do the armed forces
could do to transform you into someone
who could do something that was more
productive than
non-productive and the territorial thing
about that is that it's about 10
of the population and so you look at a
statistic like that and you think
oh my god you've got this this this this
enterprise this massive enterprise
that's chronically hungry for people
that's right it's always they're always
looking for people they're really
oriented towards taking people from the
underclass and lower working class and
pushing them up the societal strata and
during wartime they're actually
desperate to bring in recruits period
and their conclusion is that 10 of the
population
can't be trained to do anything anything
sufficiently useful to make them
militarily operable it's just i just
read that my jaw just dropped it's like
well yeah you know in the united states
we have about 330 million
people and because of the distribution
the relatively normal distribution of iq
scores
about 16 have iqs of 85
or less right right which means they're
not going to graduate school
no it means that from from what i've
read practically it means
the wonderlic company has actually done
a really they have a nice iq test from
the commercial perspective you know it's
actually psychometrically valid
and they've linked iq levels to uh
to job specifically to job categories
you know yes i
yeah i know not and a lot i was gonna
say is they're not only not going to
graduate school
they're not going to find a a stable
job that pays a livable
wage yeah now especially even given that
so many of the service jobs now require
a fair high degree of
computational savvy or elite ability not
computation but
ability to interact with complex
computational technology
it's the typical till at a at a checkout
market or or the till at a mcdonald's
because mcdonald's is actually very
complicated
is is often far beyond the ability of
people who are on the low end of the
intelligence distribution
and they claimed i think it was
wonderlic although it might know it
might have been
it might have been hunt what's his name
this
uh iq researcher is it earl hunt i think
possibly
but he claimed that that if you have an
iq
of below 90 that it's it's difficult
it's difficult for you to read well
enough to translate what you're reading
into action
so you can't actually read instructions
and follow them you don't have that
level of literacy
that's correct yeah so so i was gonna
say that in in the united states
this bottom 16
translates into 51 million people
right including 13 million children who
are in school
right this is a very difficult problem
now i knew earl hunt he passed away last
year
knew him pretty well he also would say
that there is this uh uh
cognitive segregation in society this is
a point that charles murray makes
yes well and earl would often ask uh
you know when's the last time you had
someone over for dinner
who wasn't a college graduate well that
was something that murray and hernstein
wrote about in their book the bell curve
which really struck me because i read
that book twice unlike most of the
people who criticized it
and you know one of the things that that
they pointed out in there was look
the the typically the typical educated
person
thinks that someone isn't very bright if
they have an iq of
115. so we're talking about graduate
graduate level at phd level
research institutions right because 115
there's there's as many people at 115
above as there are at 85
and below and so it's a minority of the
population and that's the top 15 percent
and you know that's that's the dollar
undergraduate
right so how do you just people have see
i'm a clinical psychologist
and i've dealt with people who had i
ranges in the low 80s
and tried to find them jobs and tried to
train them and i i have some real
knowledge about
the stunning gap between people at the
low end of the iq distribution in the
high end and it's
it's no bloody wonder people hate iq
research and intelligence research
because
it reveals a set of seriously uh
dismal facts about the incredible range
of ability among human beings
well yes um this
is true and moreover i would add to this
that people in universities professors
and
and students uh
have a hard time understanding what the
what everyday life is like if you have
an iq of 80
right five and you're making your way
you're living independently you're
making your way in the world
but it is a challenge
it is a real i mean uh just challenges
just barely begins to describe it i had
a
i had a client who he probably had an iq
of under
80 the non-verbal portion of it anyways
and
um he was indistinguishable in physical
appearance from from
let's say i hate to use the frame normal
person but
there's nothing more that marked him out
about particularly intellectually
impaired you know
and uh i tried at one point but this is
this
this was so so telling to me
i got him a uh an in uh volunteer job
which by the way is very difficult it's
harder to get a volunteer job than a
real job because you have to do police
screening and all sorts of things and
the selection process is just as extreme
but
i eventually ended up getting him a job
at a bike store
bike slash bookstore and at that place
couldn't hold him once the subsidy
program had expired and then
i got him a job at a charity and his job
was to fold
letters into three so that they could be
put into envelopes
well that sounds easy except that he
also
had a bit of a motor trimmer and you
know it took me about 30 hours to train
him
to fold up a piece of paper with
sufficient precision so that it can be
put in an envelope rapidly
so that the envelope wasn't so mangled
that it would get stuck in the automatic
sorting machine
and you know there was high performance
demands on him too he had to whip
through those letters pretty quickly and
then
sometimes the letters would have a
photograph
appended to them that was stapled on and
they weren't always stapled on in the
same place so then he had to calculate
how to fold the paper
over the photograph without bending the
photograph in
precise thirds so that would still fit
in the envelope and then he had to
separate the french letters from the
english letters
and associate them with the proper
envelopes and like that level of
complexity just did him
in everyone so let me let me say two
things about this
one is i hope common sense and the other
is pretty provocative
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
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
we have to be very careful that we don't
do that uh
human life has dignity and iq is not the
most important thing
that defines human yes and means
it's not associated with wisdom it's not
necessarily associated with
truth or with courage or with many
virtues that that are
being right at all with being likeable
or honest yeah that's right how many of
you know the psychometrics
the psychometric relationship between
intelligence and conscientiousness is
zero
right right so i think we have to make
that point yes i think i agree
i agree i'm trying to make the point
about how difficult it is for people who
are on the low end of the cognitive
spectrum to survive in a
in an increasingly complex cognitively
sophisticated environment
right jobs are just disappearing yes
absolutely and now
let's ask the question is there anything
that could be
done about that well your western
society has tried very hard with
a number of environmental
environmentally based
interventions early childhood education
by the way the the you said the the
literature
in organizational psychology is very
clear
the literature is equally clear in
educational psychology
oh yeah well the relationship between iq
and learning is even more powerful than
the relationship between iq and job
performance
that that's right which is kind of
common sense or it matches our common
sense
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 ten percent
of the video yeah i know i know it's
terrible
it's terrible you know when i talked to
the guy who ran admissions at harvard i
taught at harvard for a while his name
was dean whitlow and he is a really
smart guy i really like 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 and
he had run an interesting series of
analysis that i don't believe he ever
published and one of them was
um 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 260.
so you got two competing hypotheses
there one would be
that the lower iq kids
um come to harvard this remarkable
environment and they
and they and and they 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 complete completely wrong
what happens is you put both those
groups there both very very highly uh
selected but some you know in this in
the sort of superman range
intellectually and
what happens is the gap just gets bigger
and bigger as they progress through
university
and it's a dreaded example of that uh
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
it's very very it's no wonder people
dislike this research it's so
it's so anti-egalitarian in its
essential
in its essential structure well i wanted
to make a second point that i said would
be provocative
if you want to do something about this
and you know we tried a bunch of
interventions earnest
well-funded long-term interventions
don't seem
to work but neuroscience has been
excluded from discussions about what to
do about this
and i believe that neuroscience the
progress in neuroscience
research has the potential
to really dramatically increase
the g factor well that's an optimistic
statement so i'm sure we're looking
forward to some support for that one
it's optimistic and controversial
and you know just as a thought
experiment
and i can tell you why i believe this is
possible
well first before i tell you the thought
experiment the reason i i'm optimistic
is that it is because of the high
heritability
of the g factor that means you know if
genes are involved genes work through
biology
even if environment interacts with that
but
basically you have a neurobiological
system
it's complex but as you begin to
understand it you can
tweak it this is what all medicine is
doing now they're trying to understand
the neurobiology slash genetic basis
of our health and our diseases why
so they can fix it so they can
when you go to the doctor you're going
because your biology is broken
and you want your biology fixed well
let's think about
the brain now no one conceptualizes low
iq
as a disease and it's a little dangerous
but to the extent to which low iq
has a genetic input or a genetic
influence that's the extent to which you
might be able to
to find out how that works how that's
what that system is
and then figure out how to tweak that
system
to increase iq it's not
science fiction i mean that's that's a
plausible
sequence of events what
the the problem is it's a very complex
sequence
but i also think it's a finite set of
problems not an infinite set of problems
so you know physicists if physicists can
figure out
what happened during the first
nanoseconds of the big
bang we can certainly figure out
what the neurobiology of intellect
is and and how to tweak it so i think
that's possible
so now let's let's do a thought
experiment
and let's imagine there's an iq pill
and i mean that metaphorically not
literally a pill you could take
like putting uh you know a floor but
like having fluoridated water just
kind of raises the dental health of
everybody
it would be nice if we had that for iq
but just imagine what it would be
like if we shifted the distribution of
iq
15 points into the high end
so that now the average iq and i
understand
how iq is computed and norming and
everything but the point is
that no one would have an iq less than a
hundred
right what would the world be like if
everyone
could reason sufficiently to get a
a reasonable job yeah well that's a it's
a good question i mean
the the the what would you call the
perverse part of me that's funny i was
just talking to one of my graduate
students
um we've been looking at the
determinants of
male attractiveness by the personality
of female
viewers okay okay and so what we found
is that
there are some personality effects so um
extroverted enthusiastic women tend to
rate men
generally speaking as more attractive
than introvert and introverted less
enthusiastic women and
um and so so there are some just
straight personality effects but the
biggest effect by far we found was the
proclivity of
of women in general to rape men as less
attractive as the women's iq
increased and so the other thing that we
don't know is what price we pay for
for accelerated iq from uh from a
broader perspective you know 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 which is kind of
makes it a thought experiment it's a or
an experiment
real life experiment that's equivalent
to the one that you laid out but
ashkenazi jews also tend to suffer from
a host of neurological diseases that
seem to be associated with increased
neuroplasticity
and so to me it's often it's often hard
to gain on one front without losing on
another you know i mean that's the
evolutionary conundrum obviously but
we call that the social justice theory
if you're not right
on one thing you have to be bad and
everything else to kind of balance it
out
yeah well generally speaking you do pay
a price for your for your exceptionalism
you know
i don't think that's true because uh you
know the uh
the julian stanley studies of the
mathematically precocious kids
essentially found not only were they
smart but they were more mature than
their age peers
better looking they were taller they
were physically more fit
i mean it was kind of the antisocial
yeah no no i no that's true well i mean
it's just that also might be true
because one of the things that
that can interfere with iq is poor
health
and and poor nutritional quality and all
of that 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
yeah you know uh i think that those
those things have to be pretty extreme
yeah to have an effect and those effects
may not be permanent actually there's
some
studies of uh deprivation of people who
suffer
suffered deprivation during the second
world war
uh that suggests that those
uh really severe deprivations didn't
have lasting effects on them
well you know well people are pretty
tough so i'm inclined to agree with that
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 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 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 going to say it very very
rapidly is imagine you'd
take a randomly set
a randomly selected set of 200 questions
that require abstraction of one form or
another to solve
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
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 devised a test
for each one of them
and you gave this test to a a lot of
people across
the range of ability what you'll find is
the scores on all those tests are
positively correlated with each other
suggesting that
all tests of mental ability have
something in common right
sure that's a great way of putting
common is this g factor this
general ability to reason and some
individual
tests have more g-loading than other
individual tests
right so and tests of abstract reasoning
tend to be highly g-loaded right said to
you repeat the following numbers
back to me three seven
two one six five
that's the not a very highly g loaded
mental ability to be able to do that
but if i gave you a string like that and
said repeat them to me backwards
that becomes a g loaded ability because
you do a transformation
yes well the other thing to say about
that too is that the positive
relationship between that those multiple
assessments that you described is
actually quite high
right right that's the thing is that
that general factor not only exists
across
domains of cognitive ability but it
tends to account for a substantial
amount of the
of the ability in each of those domains
so it's kind of like a g is kind of like
a black hole for
intelligence research and everything
keeps falling into it
so that's an interesting way to put it
because now we have these uh
genome 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 where educational
attainment is so highly correlated with
iq
that's essentially the the same thing so
we're really
moving when i 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
uh intelligence or iq testing or or the
g
factor and they seem to exist there
seems to be
hundreds of them a tiny effect
uh which will make the ultimate story
extremely uh
complicated but as i said before i think
it's a finite set of problems
right right at the end of that
sequence of solving those problems
i think there's a good chance we'll know
how to increase iq
and i think it's a good thing to be able
to do that
you know i've said publicly that more
intelligence is better than
less sometimes i get criticized because
that implies that people with less
intelligence
aren't as worthwhile that's why i want
to be very careful that i don't believe
that
but harder lives is more the accurate
way of thinking about it
and more lives in a narrower range of
possibilities and opportunities
that's right and in my view my political
bias is
therefore governments have a moral
responsibility to help those people
and and a lot of government programs
are aren't going to do it because you
know job training requires a certain
level of g
uh and so my low iq clients they used to
go to the government agencies that were
designed to help people find employment
and you know the typical
response was well just go home and type
up your cv and distribute it it's like
yeah uh you just go like i can't use a
computer
i can't type i don't know what a cv is
it's like it's it's a non-starter in all
three counts
right that's right so in the united
states there are 51 million people with
iqs
under 85 and there are about 43 million
people living in poverty
do you think those venn diagrams
intersect yeah
well we should also be clear about this
because it is so politically suspect is
that
it's not like it's it's it's
it's self-evident that people who have
less
cognitive capability are likely to end
up poor
because 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
and so the relationship between poverty
and
intelligence is self-evident if you're
willing to think it through for any
length of time
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 what it to to be blunt
but what it does mean is that if you're
intelligent you're much more likely to
become financially successful and
i think it was the hernstein hernstein
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 and you
have a
your newborn grandchild in front of you
and you can grant them
three standard deviations above the mean
in terms of wealth at birth or you 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 and the answer to that was quite
clear is that iq
trump's wealth right if his ability to
predict a positive future
yeah and that that's why i'm so
interested in the concept of
increasing iq or increasing
the the g factor not just the iq score
but really what under this reasoning
ability so you know some people have
tried to teach
college students critical thinking yeah
i think that's a good
thing it is you can smart and you can
think critically so much the better
exactly you know and you know it may
sound to your listeners i just want to
take a moment out here 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
i mean the point of this the point of
neuroscience research on intelligence
and what i hoped to achieve by writing
the book
was to show that that the genetic
aspects are not deterministic
it's the opposite genes are
probabilistic
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
for the better right well that's
definitely yeah because people do tend
to think about
biological factors as deterministic and
that that's a mistake because they can
be shifted
so with regards to the animal studies so
you know you pointed out that you can
you can come up with an iq like estimate
for say a rat
and have you seen anything that
indicates
i don't care how it's done through
training or or or neurochemically
or or or by by promoting brain function
in different ways however you might do
it that's actually indicated to you that
there is a way of biologically enhancing
the general cognitive ability even of an
animal
has anything to come out credible 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 but
that's work from the 1980s
right so i review this in in the book
there are some
interesting uh technologies that have
been developed
where you can turn parts
of a rat brain on and off at will
and see what happens this has not yet
been applied as far as i know
to learning but interestingly
there are human studies underway
with things like trans
cranial magnetic stimulation and
electrical ways to low voltage ways to
stimulate parts of the brain
and there are some interesting
experiments now being done with humans
to see if you can
improve learning or reasoning ability
yeah 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
and we're just starting to put together
a special issue
on human experiments to increase
reasoning ability
using these these techniques of
stimulating the brain
are any of you seen you've seen some
positive things with regards to
low-level electrical stimulation because
that's also been used
you know it's more it's more anecdotal
but there's a bit of research
being used to treat depression for
example that's right and i do cover
in the book the the the studies that
were published up until the time i wrote
the book and cautioned
people that they hadn't been replicated
yet
right right right but we're on the way i
mean this is this is an evolving area
that's going to be very exciting i mean
if students are listening to this
podcast
and they're thinking about neuroscience
or psychology
this kind of experiment is is is really
a new phase of intelligence research
where you can do experiments on human
beings that are completely ethical
um and relatively non-intrusive
and this is really going to change
everything now because it'll shift
intelligence research from basically
psychometric
correlations yeah past what neuroimaging
has
done which which really moved it away
from just psychometrics
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 i mean all these
fabulous connections
right right that was a new phase i i got
in early on that phase
but that phase is now moving into this
new phase
of actually stimulating the brain
to improve learning and memory and
and reasoning and all the while doing it
with neuroimaging right see what happens
and adding dna to it i mean
come on now this is a great time to be
entering the research in this area right
right well there's some optimism on the
horizon i mean
i looked for a while um because i've
been very interested in
improving human performance measuring it
and improving it
and uh so i look and and doing that also
in conjunction with businesses because i
like things to have a practical end and
you know i look to find out what the
research indicated with regards to
improvement of intelligence and
mostly what i found was not so much
improvement as conservation is that
if you exercise both aerobically and
and with weight lifting that that can
help you maintain your
uh fluid intelligence across for longer
across your lifespan because it
tends to decline rather precipitously as
you age which is one of the more dismal
things that you also discover with iq
research and
it starts to decline when you're in your
early 20s and it's kind of
linear downhill all the way along but
exercise really helps
but it's it's preservation which is
pretty important at my
age yeah preservation is a big deal man
but enhancement would be good
but you know this thing about an iq pill
coming up with a way you know to
manipulate your biology
the neurobiology of your brain regarding
intellect if there's a breakthrough in
this
it will come either from alzheimer's
research
or for formal aging research trying to
prevent
the slow decline of your mental
faculties as you age especially fluid
intelligence
right or trying to reverse
the ravages of alzheimer's disease
these are neurochemical problems right
you know as well an iq seems to be quite
tightly linked to well this is another
thing we could talk about because
so um i know that there are certain
biological markers that iq
is loosely associated with so you know
it it
fragments it predicts in a fragmentary
matter 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 with fluid
intelligence at about point two
and um having a bigger head is slightly
correlated especially when you correct
for body size and so is brain mass and
so is
thickness of um the myelin sheaths on
individual neurons and so
there are these there's these micro
markers of you might think about them as
neurological integrity that seem to
predict iq but
you've been doing neuro imaging and i'm
not as up on that i haven't looked at
that for a couple years so
what have the neuro imagers found about
brain structure and function in
relationship to intelligence that you
think is compelling and interesting
glad you asked this because as
i was finishing the manuscript for the
book
literally the day after i turned it in
i had to ask for it back because there
was this very interesting study
published by a group at yale
that has uh that used a fairly uh
sophisticated way to look at
white matter connections functional
structural white matter connections and
functional connections in the brain
and determining how one brain area
is uh functionally or structurally
structurally related to all other brain
areas
and you uh can put up a map of
of a person's brain that shows from
brain imaging from
mri technology how
their brain is interconnected and this
paper
said these interconnections are so
reliable within a person that they're
like fingerprints
and not only that but the fingerprints
can predict
iq and so is it density of connections
density of interconnections or something
like that or is there more something
more specific going on
it can be the density of of connections
structurally how much
white matter connects this area to that
area
you know and there are certain brain
areas where you have a lot of white
matter coming in and a lot of white
matter going out to other parts of the
brain
they're called hubs and there are
nodes that have lesser connections
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
do you remember what some of the major
hubs were like are they identifiable as
also as neural anatomical areas with
specific functions
well they're definitely neural
anatomical
areas um and
they're they're what you might expect
but they what was exciting to me is they
mapped on to a a model of
brain intelligence relationships that i
had
developed with my colleague rex young
and published in 2007
and it's called the parietal frontal
integration theory or pfit
of intelligence and the idea is that the
connections between the parietal lobe
which is
here and the frontal area
are the key connections for intelligence
okay so tell us well tell us why you you
derived that particular theory because
you know people have suggested
say alternatively that the seat of of
higher order intelligence is basically
let's say the dorsal lateral prefrontal
cortex or something like that so
why specifically the connection the
connection patterns between
frontal and and parietal areas 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
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
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
and we found that that there was not
that not all brain areas were equally
distributed they tended to be
concentrated in the front and the
parietal lobe
but also we found areas in the occipital
lobe and the temporal lobe
that were also related to intelligence
and so we developed this
model that we talked about how
information would be processed and how
information
would flow around this set of i think
there were 18
areas all and hypothesized that
people scored high on intelligence tests
would have some combination of these
areas you didn't need all of them kind
of working together
but some people would have this
combination some people would have that
combination
and if you could make measurements of
about the way
information was flowing around these
areas with a
technology like the magnetoencephalogram
which shows changes in the brain
millisecond by milliseconds
then you might be able to uh actually
estimate
iq from brain images 2007 people were
trying to do this
with multiple regression equations it
never really replicated independent
replications didn't go very far
yeah because the sample sizes were
relatively small you have enormous
individual differences
but these newer techniques these
mathematical techniques of
calculating brain connectivity
really seem to have advanced this whole
thing dramatically
was there a map between the the nodes
that were identified in this more recent
research in the areas that you guys had
identified with your overarching
analysis
yes to to the way rex young and i looked
at the
data it seemed like there was
considerable overlap
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
any hemispheric differences
we have yes there were there were more
on the left than on the right but
there were also areas on the right as
well
and these areas tend to be areas that
are also related
to uh language and
memory and attention so the
more fundamental cognitive processes of
language and memory and attention
seem to be the the architecture on which
intelligence is great
right 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 and the more
i look at the attention literature the
more i find it difficult to distinguish
it from the intelligence literature i
mean
attention and intelligence seem to be
different things and we certainly use
the words in common parlance as
different but
i haven't really been able to like
imagine you wanted to establish a
battery of attention
related tests that were independent of
g-loaded
uh cognitive abilities i haven't seen
anybody manage that and so
do do you what do you think the
difference is between the capacity to
pay attention
which also seems to be associated with
conscientiousness by the way which
isn't associated with iq but i mean
what's the relationship between intent
attention and intelligence as far as
you're concerned those studies have been
done where they take
cognitive variables the elemental
cognitive
tasks is what they call them the real
basic things that cognitive
psychologists like to study
because they like to study reasoning
right 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
that's a cognitive psychologist study
they study what's common to everybody
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
more than attention memory aspects of
memory are more correlated to the g
factor uh processing speed is correlated
right
sure and the tension is also correlated
so you know i kind of have this uh
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
this might be called consciousness so
you know you have two kids walking
through a museum for an hour
and you come out and you say the kid one
so what did you see
and you get a whole long thing and you
ask the other kid well what did you see
there and you get a much
less rich explanation
yeah of what i've always thought about
that as a difference in resolution of
worlds well you'll call it what you will
but you know
there are these differences and uh you
know we have that we've actually studied
consciousness with brain imaging uh with
my friend mike alkire who's an
anesthesiologist 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
and we had different levels of
anesthesia we were trying to see what
part of the brain is the last part of
the brain to turn off when you lose
consciousness
and they're listening and did you find
anything that you could make sense out
of from that because that
of course that's obviously an
extraordinarily interesting question
i mean is it the collapse of these
networks is well
challenging i'm just the real expert on
this he's published a whole series of
papers and
the the mechanism of consciousness is
still one of the great
nobel prize winning yeah yeah well
that's that that's my interpretation of
literature too it's like
it it it's it's such a mystery that
it seems uncrackable in some sense well
what was good about
the imaging stuff here you could study
this experimentally
yep you know you could you could put
people in into different levels of
consciousness
and bring them out at will and see what
how the the brain reacted so the
thalamus seems to be
important a lot of people you know
thalamus connections
uh and each anesthetic there are
categories of anesthetics
and they work they have different
mechanisms of action in the brain
yet they all produce the same uh
consequence when you lose consciousness
right that's an in that's a very
interesting thing too
so that i know with the thalamic uh what
is it
corticothalamic loops i mean there's a
guy named
what's his name voldemire god it's close
to that
i'm afraid it hasn't haven't got it
right he suggests that
um one of the one of the consequences of
psychedelic drugs is to
decrease the gaiting of of the thalamic
cortical circuitry and and that that's
one of the mechanisms
whereby that expanded at least sense of
consciousness emerges as a cons
you know as a consequence of
experimentation with this with
the psychedelic end of the
pharmaceutical universe yeah i have a
section in the 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 we know anesthesiologists do this
at will yep even though they don't
understand what they're doing
right right you know
they can't tell you why it works but
then can you use if if anesthetic
drugs kind of dissociate the brain
and creativity seems to be related to a
dissociation of the frontal lobes
can low doses very
very low doses of anesthetic drugs
cause just enough dis inhibition
to increase your creativity and
i don't think this experiment has ever
been done well i know you see something
similar in that sometimes reported with
people who developed frontotemporal
dementia
that's exactly right you know is that as
and that's that's
that's a very strange phenomenon where
as your brain deteriorates your
creativity increases
because so much of brain function seems
to be inhibitory
so i don't know of a comparable disease
that produces increases in intelligence
right no no i've never heard
in that in oh yeah the other thing
that's been so you tell me what you
think about this i mean
i was curious for a while about these
companies like lumosity because
when we developed our original
prefrontal tasks they weren't tests they
were they kind of had a game-like
element you know
and we kind of thought well maybe if you
had people practice
doing them they would obviously get
better at the specific task because that
is what people do but then if you had
people
practice a whole bunch of them maybe
they would get better at the whole
at the entirety of the tasks in a way
that would generalize to other
to other measures like like the ravens
progressive matrices which is a good
measure of fluid intelligence but
that never works and of course the
lumosity people
claimed that they were able to produce
enhancement general intelligence but
by all appearances appearances that's
been that's been a dismal failure as
well it's
it's it it's very strange in some sense
that that general factor doesn't seem to
be something that you can actually
improve
by practice right well you know what the
hell why
why i can't just i just don't get that
it doesn't make sense but
here's something you don't know about me
albert but i am in the guinness book of
records the gamers edition because of my
study my brain imaging study of tetris
and i did a brain imaging study of
tetris i think it was published in 1992.
i i really wanted to do a study of
warning i wanted to see what happened in
the brain
before and after you learn something
yeah and
back in 1991 when i was doing this
nobody had personal computers nobody had
ever heard of tetris
computer games were not what they are
today
right and i went to the egghead software
store when they had software stores that
had just opened
and i was talking to the guys there
about i needed something
where i could study before and after
they learned
something relatively simple yep they
showed me this game tetris it had just
come in they just
opened the box they put it up on the
computer there and i thought boy this is
really perfect it's simple to learn
but there's an enormous learning curve
and we we brought in
uh college students a small number of
college students
and we showed them how to play tetris
they practiced for a few minutes
we injected the radioactive glucose for
positron emission tomography
and we did pet scan studies of them that
very first day they played tetris for
32 minutes they then practiced every day
they had to come to my office because
nobody had a pc at home
they came to my office five days a week
for about four weeks
they practiced until they got so good at
tetris you know the game was moving
faster
yeah yeah it's amazing how good people
can get at that yeah
you couldn't even believe a human being
could do that yeah i know it's i've
watched people do that sort of thing
it's just absolutely unbelievable how
good they can get at it
right and when they got really good we
scanned them a second time
and we found that even though the game
was faster and harder
when they had learned how to do it they
used less glucose metabolic
rate okay so now was that also okay so i
knew that research i read that research
now
that what do you think about the now the
problem is i can't remember where this
research came from because i also read
at approximately the same time studies
that appeared to
claim and i think this was reviewed by
el conan goldberg in his book on uh
on hemispheric specialization for
routinization and
and novelty respectively that as you
when you first start to learn something
novel and
i think this was demonstrated for
example in people who were listening
they were danish native speakers who
were listening to danish in reverse
and they used very large part portions
of their brain when they were listening
to danish in reverse
but if they were listening to danish
properly spoken they used very small
specified parts of their brain that were
located in the latter or
in the back part of the of the left
hemisphere and and
there was another group of researchers
who were demonstrating that as you
learned
the degree of activation decreased and
it shifted from the right to left and it
shifted from the front to the back and
it got smaller and smaller
and is that associated with that
decreased glucose utilization is that
the same
phenomena i i think it is i think we
were the first to
to show it and we had done once one
imaging study before this tetris study
where we just
correlated uh glucose metabolic rate
with scores on a test of abstract
reasoning the high g
loaded test ravens they had taken the
test
during the imaging so we got to see what
brain areas were involved and we did
find some brain areas but the really
interesting surprising thing was
the correlation between the scores and
glucose metabolic rate
was always negative better they did on
the test the lower their glucose
metabolic rate
and that was the first inkling we had
about this idea of brain deficiency
right that there's been a lot of
research on that
uh and it turns out to be a complicated
thing because nothing about the brain is
simple
right but it does seem to make perfect
sense that expert skill is associated
with doing more with less
it makes sense now but i tell you nobody
predicted it and no no i
look i understand that's that that
research that research stood out for me
in a very
in a very uh you know in in a very
striking manner
so it also gets at this thing about that
you raised about
practicing on different kinds of tests
because one of the attractive things
about
tetris is it's visual spatial it's
planning ahead it's a tension
there are a lot of elemental cognitive
tasks
necessary you know it's fine motor
control really necessary
to to do well on tetris and to learn it
really well
and so the tetris company found my
research
some years later and asked if i'd be
willing to try to replicate it with more
modern imaging which of course i was
willing to do
and so they funded this and
we found now instead of pet scanning we
use functional mri
and structural mri both and we did find
like we found with the pet scanning
there were areas
where after teenage girls with very
limited gaming experience
learned tetris uh their
brain activity decreased
but we also found from
the structural mri that there were
increases in gray matter
and the really interesting thing is the
areas where there were increases in gray
matter
did not overlap at all
with the areas that functionally
decreased it would have been a terrific
story wow
that's strange yeah well things are
always more complicated than you hope
them to be
not only that but i can tell you that
every time i did a brain imaging study
we always found the exact opposite of
what we expected
was that that sounds to me like you know
you might actually be
uh be operating as a real scientist well
i mean things are so damn complicated
that it's really difficult to guess
right to begin with well it led to one
of my three laws that i
based the book on law number one is no
story about the brain is simple
law number two is no one study is
definitive
and law number three is it takes a long
time to sort out
all the various studies to see what's
consistent and what establishes a
reliable weight of evidence
okay so let me put you on a different
track momentarily and maybe this won't
work but but
but you know i'm always curious about uh
let's say the practical implications of
scientific research both at
a personal level familial level social
level all of those things you know so
i mean one of the things that i'm
planning to do in the near future is to
launch a website
that will enable people to assess
themselves with what we've developed a
scale called the big five aspect scale
that breaks the big five
down into ten aspects each of which
which provides some additional high
resolution
and useful descriptions of personality
so you'll be able to go there and find
out what your personality is like
you'll be able to compare yourself to
other people who you know
to find out where your similarities and
differences are but one of the things
we've been thinking about doing as well
is putting up on the same site a real iq
test like nicely validated
probably focusing on fluid intelligence
because it's a little bit
less linguistically complex to do so but
maybe
measuring verbal intelligence and then
showing people
the strata of occupations in which
they're likely to find maximal success
because you know from for me given that
i know that that people vary in their
cognitive abilities tremendously and
that that's actually an important
determinant of their life outcome it
seems to me
so let's say someone tests out in an iq
of around 115
and so you could say look you know
you're pretty damn smart you're you're
up above 85 percent of the general
population
you you could you could probably do a
pretty damn good job as an undergraduate
university if you're also disciplined
right if you were conscientious you hit
the books hard you're gonna
you're gonna come out in the top
quartile of your class assuming that
you're not at a spectacularly successful
uh spectacularly selective university
but you're gonna have a much more
difficult time as a master student and
phd level stuff is going to be
you're going to be pushing your luck to
to really master that
but you know you could be here's a
here's a domain of
of of of what would you call it
industrial organizational activity where
you could really be in the top
10 percentile you know it's like so if
you have an iq of 115 like you might
make one bang-up plumber
and you could have a spectacularly
successful career as a plumber and maybe
as a manager of other plumbers and all
of that and
you know and i mean i actually happen to
be a real aficionado of the trade so i
certainly don't think of that as
something that's a
that's a low quality or low status
occupation in the least
but we would we would like to tell
people okay
here's here's here's a
here's an intellectual domain that's
probably too high for you to be
successful without working
insane hours to to to to close the gap
because you can do that with insane work
up to some some limited degree
but it seems to me that the logical
thing to do at least in part is to
give people a sense of what their
advantages and limitations are
and then say to them okay well given
that here is a place that you could go
where you could be optimally successful
and so you know that's kind of my take
from a policy perspective let's say but
like what have you thought about you
know the massive diversity
and intellectual ability i mean what are
the implications from a policy
perspective as far as you're concerned
well i think vocational guidance is
clearly one i actually did some
consulting and some research for a
non-profit
group called the johnson o'connor
foundation which is uh
vocational testing they're not that big
on g but they have their own battery of
tests
they bring someone in um and
do a full day of cognitive tests and
from that
they give some advice about what kinds
of professions
match their cognitive strengths and
weaknesses
and i actually did some brain imaging on
their tests and was very you know very
interesting stuff
um what do you think they do did you
think
because it's hard to do the
psychometrics properly with regards to
vocational
guidance because we don't really know we
don't have a good handle on how to
classify
jobs into their various subtypes like
john holland has done some good work
doing that but
but there's so many jobs and it's hard
to figure out
well what makes two jobs the same or
similar you know
well i was at hopkins when holland was
there and some of my
friends were graduate students worked
for him and i learned all about that
vocational testing it's very powerful
and as you know
it's that's more his his scales have
kind of morphed into more personality
like dimensions yeah well
that's it you want that well that's
exactly the nexus that we want to play
at it's like okay
because there is a reason i know people
have been mapping holland's
holland's job categories onto the big
five and with a fair bit of success
you know and we're hoping that the
differentiation down to the
to ten levels of personality will
provide even more precision
but but with more general policy let
okay so fine so
reasonable vocational counseling that's
a good idea
when does it start is starting junior
high
like do you do what the europeans do and
start to track people into trades and
and and higher ed education at that kind
of early age
europeans seem to have had great success
with that
so it's certainly the germans in
particular yeah so it's reasonable to
look at but the problem in the united
states there are so many problems with
the way we
uh conceptualize education
and the whole idea of tracking i don't
know how it is in canada but in the
united states this idea of
tracking has a very negative balance to
it
you know segregating the smart kids into
one
one set of classes and
the the less mark gives into others and
then there's remedial education
and there's been a tendency a strong
tendency in the united states
to feel that kids learn from each other
so you don't want
homogeneous groups based on learning
ability
you want uh yeah it's so funny though
because
it's so funny because the people say
that with regards to
to let's say academic achievement but
they play exactly the opposite stunt
when it comes to such things as
as childhood sports you know so if you
look at football for example it's like
well hey
let's segregate likeability it's like
you don't have the people who stumble
around on the field dropping the ball
all the time
playing with the top end quarterbacks
and nobody thinks there's a problem with
that
they don't say well everyone learns from
everyone else in that situation so
to me it be speaks more of a refusal
to admit to the stark reality that there
are massive cognitive differences
between people and to try to
actually start to address that with some
degree of seriousness
and the seriousness should be something
like okay well let's look at the bottom
15
of the population cognitively speaking
it's like
what the hell can we do for those people
that's going to be useful and
you know like the guy that i was telling
you about i was trying to think of some
way that he could find uh
uh respectable and productive
and relatively stable position in
society that would be
useful and i thought there was a couple
of things he could do like one of the
things he could have done i think
he could have been encouraged let's say
to to collect trash in the downtown
areas like he could have been assigned a
city block
and and it could have been said to him
look your job is to keep this
damn city block clean here's a bag
here's a stick you get up in the morning
you go do this it's like
makes everybody's life more pleasant
it's a valuable contribution
it's something you could do with a
certain degree of pride and it and
there's a socially valuable end of it
now
what happens in toronto is that people
drive around these
vacuum cleaner machines on sidewalks and
pick up the
the scrap paper and all of that that
actually turns out to be a very
cognitively demanding job because
well you have to pay careful attention
you can't run over people you have to
have decent social skills and
you know it's complicated but it might
be nice to see
but we but we're not mature enough to
have a discussion like this as a society
we might want to say it's like okay well
there's a group of people who aren't
going to be able to compete
in the in the cognitive
workplace they're they're not going to
do it and there's actually lots of them
and
we're not going to say they're lazy and
we're not going to say they're not
looking for work we're not going to say
any of that we're going to say look
we need to find occupations
that have public utility that aren't
just make work projects that
people of that level of
abstract capacity could actually perform
but i don't think we have the maturity
to have that conversation
we don't have the economics and so i i
would go even a little to the left of
you and i would say there's nothing
wrong with make work programs
you know to to to allow people i mean
you have you know
to work with dignity so you have that
option but you also have this
interesting
uh experiment being proposed of the
minimum annual income
yeah well that one worries me because
see there's a couple of things about
that one that concerns me
because you know so we're having a
conversation here where we're taking uh
differences in iq seriously but the
problem with the
guaranteed annual income issue i think
one of the problems
and i'm not denying its potential
utility it's something i think that
would have to be experimentally
determined you know
and all of that and maybe it could
replace a plethora of less efficient
social
welfare programs but you know
it isn't obvious to me it's obvious to
me that there's a substantial proportion
of the population and i would say it's
probably five percent
that would destroy themselves instantly
if you gave them a guaranteed
annual income and they would do it
because they're very low in
conscientiousness for example
and very impulsive and like i've worked
with many guys
often ex-cocaine addicts who were often
not
all that high on the end of the
cognitive distribution but very very low
in
conscientiousness high in impulsivity
and those guys were absolutely fine as
long as they were flat broke
but man i tell you as soon as they had
money they were done
it was like three days in the bar
cocaine binge
face down in a ditch and then they were
fine until they got money again
and so i don't the problem with the
guaranteed annual
income solution is that you know man
does not live by bread alone let's say
and
that if you have money and you have
things to do
then you have a life but if you just
have money
you don't have a life well you know i
look at
you know i have a very narrow lens on
this what do i know about the big social
policies and
you know i don't know anything about
that more than anybody else i have
opinions like everybody
but my narrow lens is through
intelligence yep i think more is
better than less yeah more doesn't make
you a better person
doesn't make you honest doesn't make you
likeable doesn't make you conscient does
it
doesn't solve the problems of the world
but if we can do something to increase
intelligence generally i think that
would
go in some measure toward alleviating a
lot of these
these uh very complex problems
so imagine the homelessness problem some
proportion of chronically homeless
people have schizophrenia yeah
schizophrenia
is a genetic disorder nobody knows what
the genes are
or how they work but it's pretty clear
there's a genetic component
if you can find the genes figure out
what they do
and come up with real good treatments if
not
cures for schizophrenia and possibly
preventions for schizophrenia
that indirectly is going to help
alleviate the homeless problem right
so i don't know what to do about the
homeless but if you can figure out what
to do about
schizophrenia that's going to have some
impact on that yes it's basically yeah
well use you know your claim
to some degree is that these more
complex social problems should be
decomposed into isolatable micro
problems and that specific solution
should be sought for them and that
that certainly strikes me as an
appropriate approach because everybody
is different not everyone is
for the same reason no no well that's
for sure that's for sure
not everyone's poor for the same for the
same reason by any stretch of the
imagination
that's right poverty is doesn't have one
cause no
and it's not merely caused by lack of
money either because that would be a
much easier problem to solve
unfortunately it's not so simple so the
one thing that we're probably getting
toward the end the one thing i would
like to leave your listeners with
is really optimism these are not dismal
problems in perpetuity because the
genetic approach
i think and i'm kind of out you know i'm
kind of out there
on this this is not a mainstream view
but i think the more something is
genetic the more likely it is we can
change it for the good
and that's why we just should study the
genetics of
intelligence that's why i hope genes
have more to do with it that environment
not you know not yet because i i want to
do something nefarious with
genes and i understand the history of
this very
yes yes because i think in neuroscience
there's there's optimism and to guard
against
the negative aspects the potential
negative aspects of this
the only solution is to have public
conversation about this
and to get people to understand iq
intelligence g
factor these are not all the same things
they have different relationships to the
data
to the genetic data particularly so we
have to understand these things
and once we have some sense of this and
not
paint people who believe in that there's
a genetic component as
as our as a priori racist or malevolent
people um i think we
we can come to a common understanding
about how genes and environment
interact and figure out how all that
works
and begin to think how in the year 2050
or 2060 we're going to have to resolve
people have resolved some of these
issues
to practical benefit well that is a good
place to leave it i think
we've had a very productive discussion
so i think that's probably a
nice place to to to bring everything to
a close i've been speaking with dr
richard heyer who studies the neural
basis of human intelligence and
cognition and who has
recently released a new book called
the neuroscience of intelligence
published by cambridge university press
it's an academic
book but for people who are interested
in a serious discussion of the
relationship between biology and
intelligence then it's a good go-to
tome and uh it's it's an extraordinarily
important topic given
the undeniable primacy of intelligence
as the fundamental predictor of
of of let's say success in many many
domains in
in across the human lifespan so thank
you very much for
spending an hour or so with us today and
uh
and with any luck maybe we'll talk to
you again in the future i'd like to talk
to you perhaps about consciousness at
some point that might be entertaining
well listen i've really enjoyed it i
appreciate the chance of having more
than three sentences
you know uh three sentences uh
you know uh related to to your listeners
uh i just want to say one thing about
the book it is written
for the way public as well oh okay well
that's a good thing to know
cambridge wouldn't let me call it the
neuroscience of
intelligence calling what every parent
and student needs to know
about neuroscience but because they
wanted to market it as a strictly
academic book but
it's getting quite a bit of attention
just among uh non-academic groups okay
well excellent well i'll i'll make sure
that
i i mentioned that in the description
which i will
i'll post a link to the book probably on
amazon
that's usually the most straightforward
thing and also point out that it is in
fact written for people who aren't
only specialists in the area so that was
good
all right thanks yep thanks a lot hey
listen thank you very much i appreciate
it no problem
it's a pleasure talking with you too
good to meet you okay bye
bye