[tt] High-Aptitude Minds: The Neurological Roots of Genius

[hecowan]

What is at question is the notion itself of 
genius. What does the notion of genius 
synthesize? What values? What cultural, social 
and, above all, political values, are involved 
here?



Any organism is dispositionally gifted to perform 
tasks that concern its survival, some organisms 
exhibit greater ease in the performance of some 
tasks while others exhibit greater ease in the 
performance of other tasks. Genius is just a name 
for those that can maximize these abilities in 
order to transcend patterns considered normal, 
but this depends on training, willpower, and also 
of available means. All of us can be geniuses in 
different ways. For instance, a "simple" domestic 
worker, especially gifted to that kind of work, 
can be a genius, however, I have my doubts if 
society would classify such a worker as a genius, 
because it is a type of work without sufficiently 
relevant social value (no Nobel prize for 
domestic workers).



In certain societies the genius would be the one 
who found good solutions to the community's 
problems, and, not necessarily, for instance, the 
individual capable of feats of abstract reasoning 
but otherwise socially awkward and capable of 
having contra-adaptive responses when put before 
basic survival problems. Thus, for instance, the 
pattern of genius, in the first case, might 
depend upon an ability for common sense thinking 
and for finding the adequate responses to 
adaptive problems.



The study of the brain to see if someone is a 
genius is simply silly, and it is an illegitimate 
manipulation of neurobiology. All the 
neurobiological cognitive work is supported by an 
image space and a dispositional space, supported, 
in turn, by distinct neural bases activated in 
the limbic cortices and in subcortical nuclei, 
whose work depends upon and is inseparable of an 
integrated organismic work, in permanent 
interface with the environment. And when we speak 
of organism we speak of bones, flesh, blood, 
homeostatic mechanisms, emotions, feelings, etcŠ

maria odete


On Sat, Aug 30, 2008 at 2:20 PM, Eugen Leitl 
<<mailto:eugen at leitl.org>eugen at leitl.org> wrote:


<http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=high-aptitude-minds&print=true>http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=high-aptitude-minds&print=true



Scientific American Mind -  September 3, 2008

High-Aptitude Minds: The Neurological Roots of Genius

Researchers are finding clues to the basis of brilliance in the brain

By Christian Hoppe and Jelena Stojanovic

Within hours of his demise in 1955, Albert Einstein's brain was salvaged,
sliced into 240 pieces and stored in jars for safekeeping. Since then,
researchers have weighed, measured and otherwise inspected these biological
specimens of genius in hopes of uncovering clues to Einstein's spectacular
intellect.

Their cerebral explorations are part of a century-long effort to uncover the
neural basis of high intelligence or, in children, giftedness. Traditionally,
2 to 5 percent of kids qualify as gifted, with the top 2 percent scoring
above 130 on an intelligence quotient (IQ) test. (The statistical average is
100. See the box on the opposite page.) A high IQ increases the probability
of success in various academic areas. Children who are good at reading,
writing or math also tend to be facile at the other two areas and to grow
into adults who are skilled at diverse intellectual tasks [see "Solving the
IQ Puzzle," by James R. Flynn; Scientific American Mind, October/November
2007].

Most studies show that smarter brains are typically bigger-at least in
certain locations. Part of Einstein's parietal lobe (at the top of the head,
behind the ears) was 15 percent wider than the same region was in 35 men of
normal cognitive ability, according to a 1999 study by researchers at
McMaster University in Ontario. This area is thought to be critical for
visual and mathematical thinking. It is also within the constellation of
brain regions fingered as important for superior cognition. These neural
territories include parts of the parietal and frontal lobes as well as a
structure called the anterior cingulate.

But the functional consequences of such enlargement are controversial. In
1883 English anthropologist and polymath Sir Francis Galton dubbed
intelligence an inherited feature of an efficiently functioning central
nervous system. Since then, neuroscientists have garnered support for this
efficiency hypothesis using modern neuroimaging techniques. They found that
the brains of brighter people use less energy to solve certain prob-lems than
those of people with lower aptitudes do.

In other cases, scientists have observed higher neuronal power consumption in
individuals with superior mental capacities. Musical prodigies may also sport
an unusually energetic brain [see box on page 67]. That flurry of activity
may occur when a task is unusually challenging, some researchers speculate,
whereas a gifted mind might be more efficient only when it is pondering a
relatively painless puzzle.

Despite the quest to unravel the roots of high IQ, researchers say that
people often overestimate the significance of intellectual ability [see
"Coaching the Gifted Child," by Christian Fischer]. Studies show that
practice and perseverance contribute more to accomplishment than being smart
does.

Size Matters

In humans, brain size correlates, albeit somewhat weakly, with intelligence,
at least when researchers control for a person's sex (male brains are bigger)
and age (older brains are smaller). Many modern studies have linked a larger
brain, as measured by magnetic resonance imaging, to higher intellect, with
total brain volume accounting for about 16 percent of the variance in IQ.
But, as Einstein's brain illustrates, the size of some brain areas may matter
for intelligence much more than that of others does.

In 2004 psychologist Richard J. Haier of the University of California,
Irvine, and his colleagues reported evidence to support the notion that
discrete brain regions mediate scholarly aptitude. Studying the brains of 47
adults, Haier's team found an association between the amount of gray matter
(tissue containing the cell bodies of neurons) and higher IQ in 10 discrete
regions, including three in the frontal lobe and two in the parietal lobe
just behind it. Other scientists have also seen more white matter, which is
made up of nerve axons (or fibers), in these same regions among people with
higher IQs. The results point to a widely distributed-but discrete-neural
basis of intelligence.

The neural hubs of general intelligence may change with age. Among the
younger adults in Haier's study-his subjects ranged in age from 18 to 84-IQ
correlated with the size of brain regions near a central structure called the
cingulate, which participates in various cognitive and emotional tasks. That
result jibed with the findings, published a year earlier, of pediatric
neurologist Marko Wilke, then at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical
Center, and his colleagues. In its survey of 146 children ages five to 18
with a range of IQs, the Cincinnati group discovered a strong connection
between IQ and gray matter volume in the cingulate but not in any other brain
structure the researchers examined.

Scientists have identified other shifting neural patterns that could signal
high IQ. In a 2006 study child psychiatrist Philip Shaw of the National
Institute of Mental Health and his colleagues scanned the brains of 307
children of varying intelligence multiple times to determine the thickness of
their cerebral cortex, the brain's exterior part. They discovered that
academic prodigies younger than eight had an unusually thin cerebral cortex,
which then thickened rapidly so that by late childhood it was chunkier than
that of less clever kids. Consistent with other studies, that pattern was
particularly pronounced in the frontal brain regions that govern rational
thought processes.

The brain structures responsible for high IQ may vary by sex as well as by
age. A recent study by Haier, for example, suggests that men and women
achieve similar results on IQ tests with the aid of different brain regions.
Thus, more than one type of brain architecture may underlie high aptitude.

Low Effort Required

Meanwhile researchers are debating the functional consequences of these
structural findings. Over the years brain scientists have garnered evidence
supporting the idea that high intelligence stems from faster information
processing in the brain. Underlying such speed, some psychologists argue, is
unusually efficient neural circuitry in the brains of gifted individuals.

Experimental psychologist Werner Krause, formerly at the University of Jena
in Germany, for example, has proposed that the highly gifted solve puzzles
more elegantly than other people do: they rapidly identify the key
information in them and the best way to solve them. Such people thereby make
optimal use of the brain's limited working memory, the short-term buffer that
holds items just long enough for the mind to process them.

Starting in the late 1980s, Haier and his colleagues have gathered data that
buttress this so-called efficiency hypothesis. The researchers used
positron-emission tomography, which measures glucose metabolism of cells, to
scan the brains of eight young men while they performed a nonverbal abstract
reasoning task for half an hour. They found that the better an individual's
performance on the task, the lower the metabolic rate in widespread areas of
the brain, supporting the notion that efficient neural processing may
underlie brilliance. And in the 1990s the same group observed the flip side
of this phenomenon: higher glucose metabolism in the brains of a small group
of subjects who had below-average IQs, suggesting that slower minds operate
less economically.

More recently, in 2004 psychologist Aljoscha Neubauer of the University of
Graz in Austria and his colleagues linked aptitude to diminished cortical
activity after learning. The researchers used electroencephalography (EEG), a
technique that detects electrical brain activity at precise time points using
an array of electrodes affixed to the scalp, to monitor the brains of 27
individuals while they took two reasoning tests, one of them given before
test-related training and the other after it. During the second test, frontal
brain regions-many of which are involved in higher--order cognitive
skills-were less active in the more intelligent individuals than in the less
astute subjects. In fact, the higher a subject's mental ability, the bigger
the dip in cortical activation between the pretraining and posttraining
tests, suggesting that the brains of brighter individuals streamline the
processing of new information faster than those of their less intelligent
counterparts do.

The cerebrums of smart kids may also be more efficient at rest, according to
a 2006 study by psychologist Joel Alexander of Western Oregon University and
his colleagues. Using EEG, Alexander's team found that resting eight- to
12-hertz alpha brain waves were significantly more powerful in 30 adolescents
of average ability than they were in 30 gifted adolescents, whose alpha-wave
signal resembled those of older, college-age students. The results suggest
that gifted kids' brains use relatively little energy while idle and in this
respect resemble more developmentally advanced human brains.

Some researchers speculate that greater energy efficiency in the brains of
gifted individuals could arise from increased gray matter, which might
provide more resources for data processing, lessening the strain on the
brain. But others, such as economist Edward Miller, formerly of the
University of New Orleans, have proposed that the efficiency boost could also
result from thicker myelin, the substance that insulates nerves and ensures
rapid conduction of nerve signals. No one knows if the brains of the
quick-witted generally contain more myelin, although Einstein's might have.
Scientists probing Einstein's brain in the 1980s discovered an unusual number
of glia, the cells that make up myelin, relative to neurons in one area of
his parietal cortex.

Hardworking Minds

And yet gifted brains are not always in a state of relative calm. In some
situations, they appear to be more energetic, not less, than those of people
of more ordinary intellect. What is more, the energy-gobbling brain areas
roughly correspond to those boasting more gray matter, suggesting that the
gifted may simply be endowed with more brainpower in this intelligence
network.

In a 2003 trial psychologist Jeremy Gray, then at Washington University in
St. Louis, and his colleagues scanned the brains of 48 individuals using
functional MRI, which detects neural activity by tracking the flow of
oxygenated blood in brain tissue, while the subjects completed hard tasks
that taxed working memory. The researchers saw higher levels of activity in
prefrontal and parietal brain regions in the participants who had received
high scores on an intelligence test, as compared with low scorers.

In a 2005 study a team led by neuroscientist Michael O'Boyle of Texas Tech
University found a similar brain activity pattern in young male math
geniuses. The researchers used fMRI to map the brains of mathematically
gifted adolescents while they mentally rotated objects to try to match them
to a target item. Compared with adolescent boys of average math ability, the
brains of the mathematically talented boys were more metabolically active-and
that activity was concentrated in the parietal lobes, the frontal cortex and
the anterior cingulate.

A year later biologist Kun Ho Lee of Seoul National University in Korea
similarly linked elevated activity in a frontoparietal neural network to
superior intellect. Lee and his co-workers measured brain activity in 18
gifted adolescents and 18 less intelligent young people while they performed
difficult reasoning tasks. These tasks, once again, excited activity in areas
of the frontal and parietal lobes, including the anterior cingulate, and this
neural commotion was significantly more intense in the gifted individuals'
brains.

No one is sure why some experiments indicate that a bright brain is a
hardworking one, whereas others suggest it is one that can afford to relax.
Some, such as Haier-who has found higher brain metabolic rates in more astute
individuals in some of his studies but not in others-speculate one reason
could relate to the difficulty of the tasks. When a problem is very complex,
even a gifted person's brain has to work to solve it. The brain's relatively
high metabolic rate in this instance might reflect greater engagement with
the task. If that task was out of reach for someone of average intellect,
that person's brain might be relatively inactive because of an inability to
tackle the problem. And yet a bright individual's brain might nonetheless
solve a less difficult problem efficiently and with little effort as compared
with someone who has a lower IQ.

Perfection from Practice

Whatever the neurological roots of genius, being brilliant only increases the
probability of success; it does not ensure accomplishment in any endeavor.
Even for academic achievement, IQ is not as important as self-discipline and
a willingness to work hard.

University of Pennsylvania psychologists Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman
examined final grades of 164 eighth-grade students, along with their
admission to (or rejection from) a prestigious high school. By such measures,
the researchers determined that scholarly success was more than twice as
dependent on assessments of self-discipline as on IQ. What is more, they
reported in 2005, students with more self-discipline-a willingness to
sacrifice short-term pleasure for long-term gain-were more likely than those
lacking this skill to improve their grades during the school year. A high IQ,
on the other hand, did not predict a climb in grades.

A 2007 study by Neubauer's team of 90 adult tournament chess players
similarly shows that practice and experience are more important to expertise
than general intelligence is, although the latter is related to chess-playing
ability. Even Einstein's spectacular success as a mathematician and a
physicist cannot be attributed to intellectual prowess alone. His education,
dedication to the problem of relativity, willingness to take risks, and
support from family and friends probably helped to push him ahead of any
contemporaries with comparable cognitive gifts.

Note: This article was originally published with the title, "High-Aptitude
Minds".

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