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THEBRAIN ANDINTELLIGENCE

For many years researchers have believed that intelligence is a quality which is spread throughout the whole human brain.

By using advanced scanning equipment, researchers led by John Duncan of the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge now think that it is much more localized and at the front of the brain in particular. Duncan and his team have given subjects problem solving tests. These tests are used to test and measure intelligence. They resemble puzzles where sequences of numbers or letters have to be rearranged or continued, or patterns of shapes have to be inverted. While subjects are carrying out these intelligence tasks, their heads are scanned to see where electrical activity and blood flow in the brain are concentrated. It turns out that activity was concentrated in the frontal cortex and so, Duncan and his team presume, intelligence is situated there too.

The usual definition of "intelligence" was set by Charles Spearman 100 years ago. This was the quality that allows some people to be very good at a variety of things - music, mathematics, practical problem solving and so on - while others are not. He called this quality general intelligence or the "g" factor for short. It was a questionable idea at the time but still no-one has given a better definition. Because the notion of intelligence is not clearely defined, the idea that there is a fixed location for intelligence also looks questionable. The questioning comes in an article in the prestigious journal Science. Yale psychologist Robert Sternberg points out that many people who are clearly intelligent, such as leading politicians and lawyers, do very badly in intelligence tests. Conversely, there are plenty of academics who are good at intelligence tests but who cannot even tie their own shoe laces! Sternberg implies that the idea that being a successful politician or lawyer does not require intelligence, flies in the face of reason. Rather more likely is the idea that so-called intelligence tests can have little to do with many practical manifestations of intelligence. The skills of verbal and mathematical analysis measured by these tests can tell us very little about the skills of social interaction and people handling which are equally essential for success and are, therefore, equally valid qualities of intelligence.

Sternberg makes a further criticism of the conclusions drawn by Duncan's team. The mental-atlas approach really does not tell us anything about intelligence. The fact that we know a computer's "intelligence" is produced by a computer chip and that we can say where this chip is, does not tell us anything about the computer's intelligence or ability. We could easily move the location of the chip and this would not change the computer's "intelligence". As Benjamin Martin, a traditional psychologist, points out, this may happen in reality when after physical damage to one area of the brain, knowledge and ability become able to relocate.