How much brain power does it take to invent the wheel? It’s
a question that I often pondered about in my youth. It doesn’t seem to take
much observational power to notice that round things roll and if you put an
axle in the center of a round object, you have a modern day wheel and axle.
Modern humans have been around for 160,000 years and the earliest wheel and
axle dates to about 3600BC. It took us more than a hundred thousand years to
invent what a lot of kids today can probably easily discover in their playtime.
There’s this curious phenomenon called the Flynn effect.
It’s the consistent increase in the average IQ of a population over
generations. Is it possible that the intelligence of
homo sapiens back then was just so far behind that what we consider simple
cognitive tasks now, required advanced feats of mental gymnastics?
I remember looking at Leonardo Da Vinci’s mechanical designs
when I was prepubescent teen and thinking to myself “I could’ve designed these”
I had a pretty high regard my capabilities back then :) But while Da Vinci was
no doubt a genius and his engineering designs were advanced for his time, I do
think that a lot of people living today would be capable of coming up with
similar designs, even without the benefit of formal mentoring or passed down
technical knowledge.
Not that that would matter. The days of the single inventor
working in their basement changing history may be past us. Most major advances
in technology are developed by companies or organizations with several brains
working together and more than a couple of thousand dollars in funds.
Technology is at the point where collective intelligence, as well as funds, are
required for it to advance
a.) at the left, Davinci's design for a crossbow b.) at the right, my design for a slightly different type of 2 stroke engine when i was in gradeschool. I didn't think that i was lagging too far behind compared to Da vinci back then.(I invented my own alphabet when i was young so i could write in private)
I remember when I was much younger, we were given regular IQ
tests by the school guidance counselor. Some questions in the tests were
significantly more difficult than others. I would answer the tricky questions
first thinking that maybe they would matter more. Maybe they would be worth more
points. I thought that I’d impress the person who’s checking the test more if I
answered the more difficult questions correctly. And then I found out later on
that you’d get the same points for correctly answering the easiest question as
you would the most difficult questions. That just didn’t make sense to me and I
think I continued doing what I was doing for a while.
And then later on, we were taught a strategy on how to score
well on these exams. “Answer the easiest questions first and then progressively
go to the more difficult ones. If you run out of time, answer the remaining
questions using guesswork.” I asked myself how could this be a reliable measure
of intelligence when, on top of being a multiple choice test, you were also
taught strategies on how to game it.
Perhaps the tests that we were given weren’t up to
international standards but you can train people to do better on these tests.
Which begs the question: Are we really getting smarter or are we just getting
better at answering this specific test. What exactly does this test measure?
Savants are individuals who excel on one specific task but
have difficulties in other cognitive tasks. Kim Peek, the inspiration for the
movie Rain Man, for example, could read 2 different pages of a book at the same
time with each eye scanning a different page. He could remember everything that
he read. His brain has absorbed so much information that he wasn’t just a
walking encyclopedia, he was practically a walking Google. He could also do
complex calendar calculations which no normal human being would be able to do
even with extensive training. Like other savants though, Kim peek was disabled
in other areas of his life.
A lot of people with Savant syndrome have damage to certain
parts of their brains. Savant syndrome has also been replicated artificially
using magnetic stimulation that temporally disables parts of the brain. It’s
interesting that rather than requiring more brain tissue, you actually have to
disable parts of your brain in order to do tasks that require “intelligence”.
Kim peek’s brain actually is missing its corpus callosum or the bundle of
nerves that link that the two brain hemispheres together. Our brains filter out
a lot of information which it considers unnecessary otherwise we’d be overloaded
with information. The theory is that this filtering process is what’s missing
in a lot of savants.
Kim peek’s brain could do mental feats that none of us would
be able to do but he couldn’t understand metaphors, his father had to take care of him until his
death because he couldn’t survive on his own. He couldn’t even dress himself
without assistance. His IQ was measured to be below average but does that mean
that he wasn’t intelligent? If someone with Kim Peek’s exceptional memory and
computational skills scores low on an IQ test then what is the IQ test not
measuring?
There is no scientific consensus on what the definition of
intelligence is aside from that which IQ measures, which is in itself is
controversial. One interesting fact about IQ test results is that it can be
affected by the motivation of the person taking the test. When given financial
incentives to score high on an IQ test, subjects can score up to 10-15 IQ
points higher which is a pretty significant increase.
IQ is significantly affected by the person's motivation to think and the motivation to solve a problem
Perhaps ancient human beings didn’t find a strong enough
motivation to invent the wheel until the Bronze Age when society became complex
enough that they could profit from it in some way. We could see a similar trend
in today’s technological developments. We could advance our understanding of
the universe so much faster if the US would increase NASA’s budget. Currently
though, NASA’s budget is only about 2.8% that of the US military budget. Back
in the 70s, people thought that we’d have colonies on other planets by now. We
haven’t even been back to the moon since 1972. We’re more motivated to spend brain power on problems that we can profit from in the near future.
Most people have their own barometers for intelligence. A
lot of psychologists would agree that there are many types of intelligence.
There’s mathematical intelligence, linguistic, musical etc. As we’ve seen in
the case of savants, excelling in one particular area doesn’t always translate
to functional intelligence. I think intelligence lies in the valleys in
between. It’s in the motivation to think and the capability to use these
different types of intelligence as tools to achieve a certain goal. It’s not
just to absorb information but to create something with what has been absorbed.
I think that as a society advances, the value of individual
intelligence becomes less and less important. Computers are getting better at solving
problems that involve logic, statistics, group behavior etc. Eventually we will
realize that even intelligent people can be flawed decision makers and we will
rely more and more on data crunching machines. Gifted individuals will do well
in their respective fields but the capability to singlehandedly advance
humanity may be beyond the individual unless he bands together with other
equally capable individuals. From a societal standpoint, more important than
individual intelligence is collective intelligence –the average intelligence of
a population. It directly correlates with a nation’s GDP, with its
technological advancements, with its standards of living. It also affects how
far an individual can push his intellect. Even if we do produce a man of Da
Vinci’s intellect, if he doesn’t get the funding (which is related to GDP), if
he doesn’t get the intellectual manpower that he needs to advance his ideas, he
won’t get very far.