Our brain is the command center for the nervous system.
The organ that ensures we are conscious and can experience life.
It receives input from our five senses: seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling, and
it sends output commands to the muscles.
The human brain weighs about 3.3 lbs. (1.5 kilograms), contains roughly 86 billion nerve
cells, and billions of nerve fibers.
These neurons contain trillions of connections, or synapses.
The brain is a complex living computer.
But are all brains built the same?
That’s what we’ll be looking at in this episode of the Infographics Show: How geniuses
brains are different from our own.
Intelligence is one of the key measures for being a genius.
So before we answer this question, let’s first look at what intelligence is and how
it actually can be measured.
The definition of intelligence itself is not an entirely firm definition.
There are a number of ways of measuring it: academic intelligence, social intelligence,
emotional intelligence or even, artistic intelligence to name just a few.
And even when you look at something such as academic intelligence, it can be subdivided
further into areas such as analytical skill, reading comprehension, and problem solving.
So at first glance it’s not all that straight forward.
However, regardless of the lens through which you view intelligence, people across these
various categories, who have a higher level of intelligence, tend to be able to navigate
the challenges of life better than those individuals deemed to have a cognitive deficit.
And this brings us to IQ.
IQ stands for intelligence quotient, and it is a total score derived from several standardized
tests designed to assess human intelligence.
While an IQ test is not the perfect measure of a person’s intelligence, scientific studies
that have looked at brain activity of people with high IQ scores can provide some useful
insight into what makes intelligence.
So how then, if we start by using IQ as a measure, how do we define a genius?
One of the more famous studies was by Lewis Terman, the Stanford University psychologist
who helped pioneer the IQ test.
Terman believed this test that captured intelligence would also reveal genius, so in the 1920s
he began tracking more than 1,500 Californian school kids with IQs above 140.
This was a threshold he labeled as near genius or genius.
He wanted to see how they fared in life by comparing them with other children.
He followed the children for their lifetimes and mapped their successes in a series of
reports known as the Genetic Studies of Genius.
What did Terman discover?
The main discovery he made was that above average intelligence on its own is no guarantee
of monumental achievement.
A number of the participants struggled with success, despite the fact they were overachievers
on the IQ scale.
Several dozen dropped out of college, but others from the test group with IQs that weren’t
high enough to make the cut, grew up to become masters in their fields.
Most notably were Luis Alvarez and William Shockley, both of whom won Nobel Prizes in
physics.
Other interesting research studies have shown that people who have an above average IQ use
different regions of the brain whilst solving tasks, than people with average score on the
IQ scale.
One of the earlier studies from Slovenia showed that people who had an IQ above 127, which
is considered highly intelligent, were more efficiently able to use different regions
of the brain when solving tasks.
But maybe being a genius is not as simple as how high your IQ score is and there is
more behind the great minds of people such as Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, Mozart,
Tolstoy, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Curie, and Einstein?
To really understand the difference between the brain of a genius and that of our own,
we need to dive inside the minds of some of these people.
Luckily scientists have studied the brains of a few of them.
Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the theory of relativity.
One of the greatest minds ever born.
When Einstein died on 18 April 1955, Thomas Stoltz Harvey took his brain without the permission
of his family.
It was preserved, dissected, photographed, and even mailed to other scientists in hopes
that studying it might reveal the mystery of his genius.
Over the years that followed, several interesting features of his brain were discovered - there
were more extensive connections between the two hemispheres of his brain, it was lighter
than average weight, and part of the brain known as the lateral sulcus, was enlarged,
as was the area dedicated to mathematical and spatial thought, which is maybe not such
a surprise with Einstein’s achievements.
His brain is still around to be seen today.
If you’d like to take a peek, it’s one of the permanent exhibitions of the Mütter
Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
“I think, therefore, I am” are words made famous by the French philosopher Rene Descartes
and another genius brain that’s been studied.
In mathematics, Descartes invented the Cartesian plane, allowing algebraic ideas to be expressed
geometrically.
Descartes died in 1650 and so his brain is long forgotten, however scientists recently
analyzed the shape of his skull looking for clues as to how his brain shape might have
differed from yours or ours.
Using a CT scan, they saw that his skull looked pretty normal, until they found a bulge in
the frontal lobe area, which may correlate to the part of the brain responsible for applying
words to abstract notions.
So again these abnormalities in the shape and behavior of the brain may be the difference
between geniuses and our own brain.
Michael Michalko, the author of a book Cracking Creativity says that the difference between
genius and ordinary is that the genius simply knows how to think, instead of what to think.
If you are focusing on the how, then you have time to create new concepts that are entirely
innovative.
That’s how scientists such as Einstein have been able to think up complex equations to
model how the universe operates.
You could say a genius looks at a problem in a different way than most people do, and
combines thoughts, images and ideas into different patterns that occur in the world and that
most of us don't see.
A great example is Leonardo da Vinci, an Italian genius who lived 500 years ago and whose areas
of interest included invention, painting, sculpting, architecture, science, music, mathematics,
engineering, literature, anatomy, geology, astronomy, botany, writing, history, and cartography.
Da Vinci connected a bell ringing to a flat stone hitting the water and causing waves.
This conclusion led him to think that sound, like water, also traveled in waves.
He was, of course, correct.
Can we really tell if people are geniuses by the shape of their brain, or are there
many other factors at play such as IQ and education; or is it all just down to chance?
Let us know in the comments!
Also, be sure to check out our other video Weirdest Brain Disorders.
Thanks for watching, and as always, please don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time!