The Neuroscience of Intelligence: Dr. Richard Haier

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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 Ph.D. 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, the medical school at Brown University, and the University of California at 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 controversial of all topics, I would say, in social science—strangely enough, intelligence. So maybe we could start with a little bit of historical information. I would like to know how you got interested in IQ research or intelligence research, let's say. And so let's start with that, and then we can start diving into the nitty-gritty.

Well, really it started in graduate school at Hopkins when I really became most interested in personality research. I started out studying individual differences in personality, but just by happenstance, the year I started graduate school in 1971 was the year one of the professors there, Julian Stanley, was starting a study of mathematically precocious youth. 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 books that Stanley was editing about this project. I saw these kids aged 10, 11, and 12 who were scoring higher on SAT Math than Hopkins freshmen, and the question was, you know, how does this happen? Where does this come from? So that was kind of my earliest interest in graduate school.

Although I really completed 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. At the time, the lab director was David Rosenthal, who had just finished the Denmark adoption studies of schizophrenia. Here is where I learned about genetics. My office was next door to a fellow named Monty Buxbaum, who was doing both potential research—very interested in that. So my early interest in individual differences slowly morphed into an interest in individual differences in intelligence. 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. 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, The Neuroscience of Intelligence, published by Cambridge University Press. When did that come out?

That came out 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 designed back in '93 with a student of mine, Daniel Higgins, what was probably the first online battery purporting to measure the cognitive abilities associated with the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex—supposedly the highest-order cognitive functions in the brain. 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 into good old general intelligence. You know, that killer central factor that seems to unite cognitive abilities. So it was quite a shock, especially because the neuropsychologists of the time—and they still do this—aren’t as assiduous in investigating the psychometric intelligence literature as they should be, and they tend to underestimate the central power of 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. It's a predictor that probably has 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 percent of the variability in long-term performance. So IQ—it's a killer, man. 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. An IQ score is a good estimate of the g factor; it also includes other aspects of intelligence. Intelligence 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—it doesn't mean you're smart, right?

Yes. You see that with autistic savants often. 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 spectacularly high overall intelligence.

Well, so what do you want to tell us about? You want to start with the book and walk us through it?

Well, you know, 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. I never wrote a book while I was in academia; I was writing, you know, journal papers. But Cambridge University Press called, and they have this series of fundamentals of neuroscience, and they wanted to include intelligence. I regarded that as a major step because intelligence research really has been relegated almost to the periphery of mainstream psychology.

Yeah, politically suspect, to say the least.

Yeah, and you know the switch happened overnight, from 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 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 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 really intervened in early childhood education—which at that time was called compensatory education—the early childhood education term came much later. But this idea of compensatory education took off. 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.

Then he had a hundred pages of detailed statistical analysis of why 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. But I reviewed the literature on Head Start too extensively, and basically what happened was... for those viewers who don't know, Head Start was a nationwide attempt to add additional education to the lives of disadvantaged kids, especially at the preschool level. Basically, what happened was they showed 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 grade five or grade six, the differences had disappeared completely.

So there was no evidence whatsoever of a stable, one-time, long-term gain in cognitive ability. What people were really hoping was that if you intervened early enough, you'd get something that would sort of turn into a positive feedback loop, and the gains would actually advance across time. 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 became pregnant in the teenage years, and more of them went to colleges, but that seemed to be because they were better socialized, not because they 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 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 that everybody's the same, and that if you distribute educational 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 ass and get a job, there is a job for you out there."

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. 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. That was partly because they needed a way of sorting people rapidly during times of military expansion, during wartime. But it was also because IQ tests, especially in the early part of the 20th century, were used to identify, let’s say, the deserving poor who could benefit from additional educational attainment and advancement.

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 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 was in the later part of the 20th century. 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 armed forces could do to transform you into someone who could do something that was more productive than non-productive.

And the terrible thing about that is that it's about 10 percent of the population. So you look at a statistic like that and you think, "Oh my god, you've got this massive enterprise that's chronically hungry for people."

That's right.

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. During wartime, they're actually desperate to bring in recruits, period. And their conclusion is that 10 percent of the population can't be trained to do anything useful to make them militarily operable.

I just read that and my jaw just dropped. It's like, wow.

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 percent have IQs of 85 or less, which means they're not going to graduate school.

No, it means that from what I've read, practically it means the Wonderlic Company has actually done a really good job—they have a nice IQ test from the commercial perspective, you know. It's actually psychometrically valid, and they've linked IQ levels to job categories.

Yes, I know.

Not only are they not going to graduate school, they’re not going to find a stable job that pays a livable wage.

Yeah, now especially given that so many of the service jobs now require a fair high degree of computational savvy or ability to interact with complex computational technology.

It's the typical till at a checkout market or the till at a McDonald’s because McDonald’s is actually very complicated. It’s often far beyond the ability of people who are on the low end of the intelligence distribution. They claimed, I think it was Wonderlic, although it might have been Hunt—what’s his name—the IQ researcher?

Is it Earl Hunt?

I think possibly. But he claimed that if you have an IQ of below 90, 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.

So I was going to say that in the United States this bottom 16 translates into 51 million people, including 13 million children who are in school. This is a very difficult problem.

Now, I knew Earl Hunt; he passed away last year. I knew him pretty well. He also would say that there is this cognitive segregation in society.

This is a point that Charles Murray makes.

Yes, well, and Earl would often ask, you know, when's the last time you had someone over for dinner who wasn't a college graduate?

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 they pointed out in there was, look, the typical educated person thinks that someone isn't very bright if they have an IQ of 115. So we're talking about graduate-level to Ph.D. level research institutions, right? Because 115—there's as many people at 115 and above as there are at 85 and below, and so it's a minority of the population.

And that's the top 15 percent.

How do you just…? People have…see, I'm a clinical psychologist, and I've dealt with people who had IQ ranges in the low 80s and tried to find them jobs and tried to train them. I have some real knowledge about the stunning gap between the people at the low end of the IQ distribution and the high end. It’s no bloody wonder people hate IQ research and intelligence research because it reveals a set of seriously dismal facts about the incredible range of ability among human beings.

Well, yes, this is true. And moreover, I would add to this that people in universities, professors, and students have a hard time understanding what everyday life is like if you have an IQ of 80.

Right.

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, challenges just barely begins to describe it. I had a client who probably had an IQ of under 80— the non-verbal portion of it anyways. He was indistinguishable in physical appearance from, let’s say, I hate to use the term “normal person,” but there's nothing more that marked him out as particularly intellectually impaired.

I tried at one point…but this was so telling to me: I got him a 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 that place couldn't hold him once the subsidy program had expired. 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 tremor. 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.

There were high performance demands on him too; he had to whip through those letters pretty quickly. 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 it would still fit in the envelope.

Then he had to separate the French letters from the English letters and associate them with the proper envelopes. That level of complexity just did him in.

So let me say two things about this. One is 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. If there’s one criticism that I think is fair, is that sometimes in these conversations it sounds like we’re devaluing people at the lower end of the distribution. We have to be very careful that we don’t do that.

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

Yes, and it’s not associated with wisdom; it's not necessarily associated with truth or with courage, or with many virtues that are valued at all—with being likable or honest.

Yeah, that’s right. How many of you know the psychometrics? The psychometric relationship between intelligence and conscientiousness is zero.

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 an increasingly complex, cognitively sophisticated environment.

Right. Jobs are just disappearing.

Yes, absolutely. Now, let’s ask the question: Is there anything that could be done about that?

Well, Western society has tried very hard with a number of environmentally based interventions: early childhood education. By the way, you said 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'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—what you find is the teacher variables and the quality of the school variables together barely account for ten percent of the variance.

Yeah, 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. He was, let’s say, 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. He had run an interesting series of analyses that I don’t believe he ever published.

One of them was, well, let’s say you segregate the Harvard population into the relatively low IQ kids—so maybe they only have an IQ of 130—and the relatively high IQ kids who are pushing up towards 160.

So you got two competing hypotheses there. One would be that the lower IQ kids come to Harvard, this remarkable environment, and they thrive because of the high educational quality.

So that they close the gap between them and the 160 kids.

And that’s just completely wrong. What happens is you put both those groups there, both very, very highly selected, but some, you know, in the sort of superman range intellectually. What happens is, the gap just gets bigger and bigger as they progress through university.

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

It’s very, very—it’s no wonder people dislike this research. It’s so anti-egalitarian 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 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. First, before I tell you the thought experiment, the reason I'm optimistic is that it is because of the high heritability of the g factor. 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/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 find out how that works—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 a plausible sequence of events.

What 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 how to tweak it. So I think that's possible.

So now let’s do a thought experiment, and let’s imagine there's an IQ pill. I mean that metaphorically, not literally—a pill you could take, like putting, 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 100.

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

Yeah, well, that’s a good question. I mean, the perverse part of me—that's funny—I was just talking to one of my graduate students. 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 extroverted, enthusiastic women tend to rate men generally speaking as more attractive than introverted and less enthusiastic women.

And so there are some just straight personality effects. But the biggest effect by far we found was the proclivity of women in general to rate men as less attractive as the women’s IQ increased.

And so the other thing that we don’t know is what price we pay for accelerated IQ from a broader perspective. You know, because I know that there is some evidence—and you can tell me what you think about this—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 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 hard to gain on one front without losing on another; you know what I mean? 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 at everything else to kind of balance it out.

Yeah, well, generally speaking, you do pay a price for your exceptionalism. You know, I don’t think that’s true because, you know, 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, that’s true.

Well, I mean, it just might be true because one of the things that can interfere with IQ is poor health 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, I think that those things have to be pretty extreme to have an effect, and those effects may not be permanent. Actually, there's some studies of deprivation of people who suffered deprivation during the Second World War that suggest that those really severe deprivations didn’t have lasting effects on them.

Well, you know, people are pretty tough, so I’m inclined to agree with that.

So, have you seen any animal experimental work that you regard as compelling that shows something like the transformation of animal cognition into something that’s higher order that you regard as compelling?

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

Right.

So what I was wondering is, has there been any evidence that you regard as credible showing that, say, so-called animal g factor extracted in the same way?

We should tell our readers, too, the way you extract the g factor, I’m going to say it very, very rapidly, is to imagine you take 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 I’d say it a little bit differently. Just 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 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.

Sure, that’s a great way of putting it.

Common is this g factor: this general ability to reason. Some individual tests have more g-loading than other individual tests, right?

So, 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 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 those multiple assessments that you described is actually quite high, right?

Right.

That’s the thing: that general factor not only exists across domains of cognitive ability, but it tends to account for a substantial amount of the ability in each of those domains. So it’s kind of like 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 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 same thing.

So we’re really moving from…when I was in graduate school, the question was, is there a genetic component to intelligence or not? To this kind of DNA analysis trying to find bits of DNA that are going to be related to what we call intelligence or IQ testing or the g factor—and they seem to exist.

There seem to be hundreds of them—a tiny effect—which will make the ultimate story extremely 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. In my view, my political bias is therefore governments have a moral responsibility to help those people. A lot of government programs aren’t going to do it because, you know, job training requires a certain level of g.

And so my low IQ clients 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, I can’t use a computer; I can’t type; I don’t know what a CV is.”

It’s like it’s a non-starter in all three counts.

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: it’s not like it’s self-evident that people who have less cognitive capability are likely to end up poor because there are serious complex problems in life that beset them that they have a difficult time dealing with, and they can’t learn as quickly.

So the relationship between poverty and intelligence is self-evident if you’re willing to think it through for any length of time, and it doesn’t mean that everybody who’s rich—that is, it doesn’t mean that everyone who is rich is smart, and it doesn’t mean that everyone who is poor is stupid, to be blunt.

But what it does mean is that if you’re intelligent, you’re much more likely to become financially successful. I think it was Hernstein and Murray that did the calculations back in The Bell Curve that indicated if you imagine that you could—you were a fairy godmother—and you have your newborn grandchild in front of you, and you can grant them three standard deviations above the mean in terms of wealth at birth, 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.

It’s that IQ trumps wealth.

Right, if it’s ability to predict a positive future.

Yeah, and that’s why I’m so interested in the concept of increasing IQ or increasing the g factor—not just the IQ score, but really what underlies that reasoning ability.

Some people have tried to teach college students critical thinking.

Yeah, I think that’s a good thing.

It is. You can be smart, and if you can think critically, so much the better.

Exactly. You know, and 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 and the point of neuroscience research on intelligence and what I hoped to achieve by writing the book was to show 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 the better.

Right.

Well, that’s definitely optimistic on the horizon. I mean, I looked for a while because I’ve been very interested in improving human performance—measuring it and improving it.

And so I look and do 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 the improvement of intelligence, and mostly what I found was not so much improvement as conservation: is that if you exercise both aerobically and with weight lifting, that can help you maintain your 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 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 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 from 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, I know that there are certain biological markers that IQ is loosely associated with.

So, you know, it fragments. It predicts in a fragmentary manner.

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

And having a bigger head is slightly correlated, especially when you correct for body size, and so is brain mass, and so is thickness of the myelin sheaths on individual neurons.

There are these micro-markers of, you might think about them as neurological integrity, that seem to predict IQ. But you’ve been doing neuroimaging, and I’m not as up on that; I haven’t looked at that for a couple of years.

So what have the neuroimagers 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 used a fairly sophisticated way to look at white matter connections, functional structural white matter connections and functional connections in the brain—determining how one brain area is functionally or structurally related to all other brain areas.

You can put up a map of a person’s brain that shows from brain imaging, from MRI technology, how their brain is interconnected. 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.

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 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, and they’re what you might expect. But what was exciting to me is they mapped onto a model of brain intelligence relationships that I had developed with my colleague Rex Young and published in 2007. 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 why you derived that particular theory because, you know, people have suggested, say alternatively, that the seat of higher-order intelligence is basically, let’s say, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex or something like that. So why specifically the connection patterns between frontal 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. 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 and different imaging techniques.

We found that not all brain areas were equally distributed. They tended to be concentrated in the frontal and the parietal lobe. But also, we found areas in the occipital lobe and the temporal lobe that were also related to intelligence.

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 hypothesized that people who 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, and some people would have that combination. 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 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 nodes that were identified in this more recent research and the areas that you guys had identified with your overarching analysis?

Yes, 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 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 language and memory and attention, so the more fundamental cognitive processes of language and memory and attention seem to be the architecture on which intelligence is based.

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—imagine you wanted to establish a battery of attention-related tests that were independent of g-loaded cognitive abilities.

I haven’t seen anybody manage that.

And so 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 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, 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. Processing speed is correlated.

Right, sure.

And attention is also correlated.

So, you know, I kind of have this idea from being a parent—watching my kids grow up—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 to 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 can call it what you will, but you know, there are these differences. And you know, we have that—we’ve actually studied consciousness with brain imaging 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 did you find anything that you could make sense out of from that? Because that, of course, is obviously an extraordinarily interesting question.

I mean, is it the collapse of these networks?

Well, it’s challenging—I’m just the real expert on this; he’s published a whole series of papers. The mechanics of consciousness is still one of the great Nobel Prize-winning…

Yeah, yeah, well that’s my interpretation of literature too. It’s like it’s such a mystery that it seems uncrackable in some sense.

What was good about the imaging stuff here—you could study this experimentally.

Yep.

You could put people into different levels of consciousness and bring them out at will and see how the brain reacted.

So the thalamus seems to be important. A lot of people—thalamic connections—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 consequence when you lose consciousness.

Right.

That’s a very interesting thing too.

So I know with the thalamic—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 I haven’t got it right.

He suggests that one of the consequences of psychedelic drugs is to decrease the gating of thalamic cortical circuitry and that that's one of the mechanisms whereby that expanded, at least sense of consciousness emerges as a consequence of experimentation with this psychedelic end of the pharmaceutical universe.

Yeah, I have a section in the book where I talk about consciousness and these studies and try to relate the concept that if you can turn consciousness off, you should be able to turn it on. We know anesthesiologists do this at will.

Yep.

Even though they don’t understand what they’re doing, right? They can't tell you why it works, but then can you use…if anesthetic drugs kind of dissociate the brain, and creativity seems to be related to a dissociation of the frontal lobes, can low doses, very, very low doses of anesthetic drugs cause just enough disinhibition 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; 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, I’ve never heard in that.

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 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 measures like the Raven's 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 in general intelligence, but by all appearances, that’s been a dismal failure as well.

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? 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 really wanted to do a study of wanting. 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.

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.

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. We brought in 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. The game was moving faster.

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. 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 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 hemispheric specialization for routinization 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 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 left hemisphere.

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.

Is that associated with that decreased glucose utilization? Is that the same phenomena?

I think it is. I think we were the first to show it, and we had done one imaging study before this Tetris study where we just correlated glucose metabolic rate with scores on a test of abstract reasoning—the highly 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 that 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.

It turns out to be a complicated thing because nothing about the brain is simple, right?

Absolutely.

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.

No, no, I look. I understand that that research stood out for me in a very striking manner.

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, attention; there are a lot of elemental cognitive tasks necessary to do well on Tetris, and to learn it really well.

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 they funded this, and we found, like we found with the pet scanning, there were areas where, after teenage girls with very limited gaming experience learned Tetris, 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 that 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.

Well, that sounds to me like you might actually 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 you know I’m always curious about, let’s say, the practical implications of scientific research, both at a personal level, familial level, social level—all of those things.

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 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 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, for me, given that I know 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 up above 85 percent of the general population.”

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 going to come out in the top quartile of your class assuming that you’re not at a spectacularly successful—spectacularly selective university.

But you’re going to have a much more difficult time as a master's student, and PhD level stuff is going to be—you’re going to be pushing your luck to really master that.

But, you know, you could be—here’s a domain of 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.

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, I actually happen to be a real aficionado of the trade.

So I certainly don’t think of that as something that’s a low quality or low status occupation in the least.

But we would like to tell people, “Okay, here’s an intellectual domain that’s probably too high for you to be successful without working insane hours to close the gap.”

Because you can do that with insane work up to 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 in 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 vocational testing.

They’re not that big on g, but they have their own battery of tests; they bring someone in 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 it was very interesting stuff.

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 there are so many jobs, and it’s hard to figure out, well, what makes two jobs the same or similar?

Well, I was at Hopkins when Holland was there, and some of my friends who 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 more—his scales have kind of morphed into more personality-like dimensions.

Yeah, 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 job categories onto the Big Five and with a fair bit of success.

And we’re hoping that the differentiation down to ten levels of personality will provide even more precision.

But with more general policy—let’s, okay, so fine—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 higher ed education at that kind of early age?

Europeans seem to have had great success with that—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 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 set of classes and the less smart kids into others and then there’s remedial education.

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…

And it’s so funny though because it’s so funny because the people say that with regards to academic achievement, but they play exactly the opposite stunt when it comes to such things 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 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, and say, what the hell can we do for those people that would 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 a respectable and productive and relatively stable position in society that would be useful.

And I thought there were 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 collect trash in the downtown areas.

Like he could have been assigned a city block, 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 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’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 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'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 cognitive workplace.

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 would go even a little to the left of you and I would say there’s nothing wrong with make-work programs to allow people—that gives—you know, to work with dignity.

So you have that option, but you also have this interesting 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 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.

I think more is better than less.

More doesn’t make you a better person; doesn’t make you honest; doesn’t make you likable; doesn’t make you conscientious; 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 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, 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’s 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 reason by any stretch of the imagination.

That’s right.

Poverty 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 should study the genetics of intelligence.

That’s why I hope genes have more to do with it than environment—not, you know—not yet.

Because I want to do something nefarious with genes, and I understand the history of this very.

Yes.

Because I think in neuroscience 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 that 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—our a priori racist or malevolent people, I think 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—how to resolve 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 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 it’s an extraordinarily important topic given the undeniable primacy of intelligence as the fundamental predictor of success in many, many domains across the human lifespan.

So thank you very much for spending an hour or so with us today, 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 related to your listeners.

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 it 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 non-academic groups.

Okay, well, excellent. I’ll make sure that I mention 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.