Rex Jung || The Neuroscience (and Neuroplasticity) of Intelligence, Creativity, and Genius

Doctor Young is an Assistant Professor of neurosurgery at the University of New Mexico and a clinical neuropsychologist in private practice in Alburqi. I Hope I said that right Alberka No in Albertquerque, New Mexico. A graduate of the University of New Mexico, he has practiced neuropsychology in Albuquerque since two thousand and two. His clinical work now sent around

introoperative testing of patients undergoing a weak cranny tominy. You know this is the hardest biography to read it ever design Yeah, just goes away craniotomy to remove tumors within eloquent brain tissue. Work with particular relevance to the study of individual differences, which we will talk about. He's contributed over one hundred research articles across a wide range of disciplines involving both clinical and normal populations designed to assess

brain behavior relationships. He's the editor of the Cambridge Handbook of the Neuroscience of Creativity, and his work has been featured on CNN, BBC, NOVA, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and National Geographic. Is there anything that doctor Rex Young can't do? Is the question. Great to have you on the podcast today. Thanks Scott, It's great to talk to you. I've known you for quite some time, and even before

you knew me. I knew you as I was working on my dissertation and citing your excellent work on the neuroscience of intelligence and the p fit theory. But even like what predates that, even that work, we'll get to all this, We'll get to the nerve science of intelligence, We'll get to the nerve sides of creativity. We'll get to your crany crendiatomy work. But can we start like when you were in grad school? What was your dissertation topic?

My dissertation topic was biochemical correlates of intelligence. So I was doing work in intelligence even back in my graduate work. So yeah, I was doing stuff with intelligence back then. My advisor ron Yo was interested in individual differences, so I was very fortunate to be, you know, starting work in individual differences even back then, way back in the mid nineteen nineties, when you know, before fMRI, before some

modern neuroimaging techniques that even had even hit. We were using a technique called magnetic resonance spectroscopy, which looks at brain biochemistry. So we're able to use that technique that is so groundbreaking at the time. I mean, and also was it controversial? You know, like there's this controversy surrounding

the discussion of intelligence. So even if you just use the word intelligence, like if you say this you study the science of intelligence, you don't even say what you study, people hate you already and then you know, like already off the bat. If you just say and then you say, but I studied the neuro anatomy of intelligence, they like, dave a special room in hell for you. So what was that like around that time? Because I hope it felt groundbreaking to you, because it was it did feel

It did feel groundbreaking, It felt different. I had to argue with my advisor at the time to do this, you know, this study, and then the director of the center that I was working at said, you know, this is going to be a career ender for you. You

don't want to get into intelligence research. And so, you know, there was a lot of pushback even in the mid nineties to steer away from intelligence research because it was you know, it's always been controversial, and it was even controversial back then, and people were trying to advise me to stick to, you know, more traditional types of research, stick to social psychology is what they meant to say. Well, I mean I was working in a lab where they

were studying systemic lupus arithmetosis. So there's another tongue twister. Oh, I see traumatic brain injury. So we were studying neurological diseases and they were really you know, we were applying the spectroscopic technique and finding you know, interesting biochemical correlates with neuropsychological measures of all these diseases. And I was asking, has anyone ever looked at normal brain functioning and why

would you do that? And so we started to look at normal brain functioning and that kind of led to my career and at what point. Did you intersect with the Richard Higher is it? Yeah? And is it fair to say you're like co creators of the p fit model? Sure? Yeah, very fair to say that. So in two thousand and four, I heard of a conference that was going to be held in Newport Beach, California. ISIR was holding a conference

where Vivek Probacheron, who's a neurologist. Paul Thompson, who is a pretty famous neuro scientist these days, started Enigma, which looks at genetics and neuroimaging. Who else was there another famous neuroimaging researcher who's at University of Michigan now whose name escapes me. I think you studied with him, but anyway, Jeremy Gray. Yeah, Jeremy Gray was my advisor exactly, so I knew you would know him advisor. Yeah, yeah, So Jeremy Gray was there, I mean, and they were talking

about neuroimaging of intelligence. And so I had this little spectroscopic study, and so I cold emailed rich Hire and said, I think I should be presenting at this conference because I've done neuroimaging of intelligence, and so he invited me to present with Jeremy Gray and Paul Thompson and b Beck, Perbaccaron, and so I kind of invited myself to this conference and off we went. That's an incredible Bax like origin story that involved that somehow involved my advisor. So like

Jeremy Gray was there. I met him at that conference. That's incredible because I cited your work quite a bit in my dissertation under his supervision. Yeah. Cool. So there was a point at which you were talking to Richard and it was like it became queerly. There was a great confluence of his findings from his lab and the findings from your lab and as well as other labs and kind of pointing to a particular truth about the

neurocorrelates or structural and functional correlates of intelligence. Can you maybe tell our listeners who are not neuroscientists themselves, as clean speak as possible sort of what was the model a pifit model, how could they understand it? Well, the basic idea was that there's a distributed pattern or distributed model of brain organization that underlies intelligence. The predominant model at the time, Jeremy Gray was a proponent of this at the time was that the frontal lobes are massive.

Frontal lobes were very important and perhaps central to intelligence, and what we kept finding, what my research certainly showed was that the parietal lobes were very involved, the back parts of the brain were very involved in intelligence, and that this tended to lead to a distributed model of

intelligence as opposed to the frontal lobes being predominant. So we first called this model the Einstein hypothesis because Einstein's brain was remarkable because of abnormalities in his parietal lobe, and so we really wanted to focus on pardal abnormalities. The reviewers roundly rejected that because Einstein's only one individual and it's quite controversial about you know, genius and intelligence.

And so then we arrived at the P fit parietal frontal integration theory, with p being predominant, that parietal comes first instead of the frontal lobes predominated. So I have a personal question. You know, you came to my one of my talks, and I've told you about how when I was younger, I didn't do wonderfully on IQ tests and you're like, well, let me measure your brain, and in a way, didn't you confirm that I'm dumb, like,

didn't you find out you have? You found that I have like a small frontal lobe though, right, So how do we reconcile this with the p fit theory? So? I think the p fit theory is interesting because there's a distributed model for brain organization, and I think your brain, your wonderful brain, confirms this distributed model that you can have,

you know, smaller structures in your frontal lobe. You can have smaller structures here and there, but that this distributed model, there's other parts of the brain that can pick up the slack. So are you just saying that to make me feel better about my I mean no, no, no, you mean that you did find. The one thing that you did find in me is a very very very thick corpus closo, right right, right, So do you think that like compensated for well, yeah, yeah, different brain organizations

can lead to the manifestation of intelligence creativity. There's not one size fits all, but certainly across you know, all of these studies, these thirty six or something studies that we found the parietal and frontal lobes predominated. And again with intelligence studies creativity studies at the level of the individual, all bets are off. I mean, these are only averages across you know, large groups of individuals. So at the level of an individual, and you know, we can talk

about the way craniotomies and individual brains. At some point perhaps you really have to look at the individual and how their brain or is organized to manifest language, to manifest intelligence, to manifest creativity. And your wonderful brain manifests it slightly different than the average brain in our cohort,

but of course it gets the job done. So I mean, obviously I love that answer because I'm a bit not just because for my own ego, but also just I'm a big advocate for neurodiversity and the neudiversity movement, and it is interesting, Like you know, I looked at some of Goldstein's writings for his idea of self actualization actually came about from looking at the amazing ability of the brain for other neurotissue to kind of take over things

that had deficits, and Maslow co opted that from Goldstein the term self actualization. Yeah, I always thought that was really interesting, and we rely on that in these brain tumor patients and we were taking out literally taking out parts of their brain. We rely on neuroplasticity for other parts of the brain to take up the slack and to take up some of the cortical activities, memory being predominant some language tasks, although language is like less plastic,

but memory being predominant. If you take someone's temporal lobe, the other temporal lobe has to take up the activity and the work of the temporal lobe that had a tumor in it. So we really rely on that neuroplasticity very very much in tumor work. I love that. And then it's also possible then too for some of these brain areas to compensate but also like contribute to intelligence proper. My Q when I was tested with you was not as well as it was when I was a child.

It was even one I could say, on a higher end of the spectrum, right, Oh certain, Yeah, But isn't that interesting because when I was measured at age eleven and I was suffering from this learning disability, you know,

I was not in my best in that. So twenty many years later, these kind of brain areas can contribute to the development of intelligence across the lifespan well, And I don't know how I think you had a central auditory processing disorder at the time, and you're hearing, you know, wasn't so great, and some of those things were remediated over time as well, so your brain was able to not only compensate, but have some correction I guess or help in those areas along the way so that you

could develop. And frankly, yeah, an IQ test within that context is going to be an unfair measure of your cognitive capacity. Whereas you know, down the road, I think even though an intelligence test may not capture your full cognitive capacity, and we can talk about that, it gets closer to a fair measure cognitive capacity than when you were a child. Oh I hope. So now the other thing.

The other thing dimension though, is the you know, intelligence tests were designed to show children that needed more help, and certainly you needed help early on if you did have a central auditory processing disorder. The fact that you were you know, held back for such a long period time as an abomination, you know, when you wanted to thrive and excel and we're looking for more environmental stimulus for your brain and you were being held back because

of that early test. Well beyond the period when you should have is an abomination. Well, it certainly showed that you needed some help at that early point because your brain wasn't processing information fully. For sure, I certainly wish you were my school psychologist instead of the one I had. But I also, you know, just saw greater possibilities for so many of my friends who were in special at

as well. And this idea of your either learning disabled or your gift intellectually gifted seemed to me like a false dichotomy even when I was a young kid. And it is. So you see that in the brain as well. You see cases where there's clearly I don't like the word deficit, but you see some brain abnormalities, but you also see some extraordinary strengths in these visuals. Do you

come across this kind of stuff? Definitely? And so I was on the I mean, just to kind of finish that point, I'm on the work committee for the ICD eleven to create a new definition for intellectual disability. And one of the goals of this work group was to move beyond the use of IQ tests for the definition of intellectual disability. As you know, this has relied intellectual

disability mental retardation. It used to be called intellectual disability now has been almost entirely dependent on an IQ test that does not give you any idea of how an

individual can perform in their life. And so this new definition advocates for particular neurocognitive measures executive functioning, working memory, language functioning beyond that intellectual measure, because you have to understand what these particular cognitive capacities are in order to find out how well or what help a person needs at an individual level to succeed within their given environment.

And so getting things like you know, impulsivity or executive functioning or language abilities beyond that mere IQ test is super important at the next instantiation of the ICD ten or ICD eleven. I'm so glad that you I'm glad you're on the committee, but they should be grateful that you are on the committee as well, because you offer

a lot a good important perspective for that. It's a neuropsychological perspective, which is beyond you know, reiffining IQ as the one measure that solves all problems and the one hammer that hits all nails right right well. And it's something else occurred to me when you were talking about how well like you doesn't necessarily indicate that you will

be dysfunctional in your life. But I would also say, if you've ever been to a MENSA meeting, having an extra having as in the other end, also doesn't guarantee that, right. I mean, just having a high IQ doesn't ensure that you're going to be successful either, right, So I mean, and MENSA is a perfectly good example of that. You know, it's a nice club of people that do puzzles, but beyond that, it sounds extraordinarily boring to me been to a MENSA meeting, So perhaps I'm not a good person

to judge. Well, I certainly don't want to be on record for talking smack about MENSA because they gave me an award in twenty twelve, and anyone who gives me an award is you know, I love them. But there was a scientifically published study recently conducted on mens of membership a very very high proportion of psycho pathology among that population, and researchers like you know, proposed that high

IQ might actually like be comorbid with psychopathology. But it was literally just on MENSA people, a selected sample, so it didn't seem to me like if they looked at the general population, you would really find that if anything, you find IQ could be a protective factor, right, I guess it's usually a protective factor, but it could. I mean, knowing your IQ could create some expectations that, if not meant,

could lead to increased anxiety, depression, things like that. So I could see, you know, it's a chicken or egg phenomenon. So if you if you happen to know your IQ and you know it's extremely high, and then you're not, you know, a CEO of a company or a professor or master of whatever domain that you are working in, then that might lead to increased anxiety or psychopathology. And then also, I was a great point. First of all, a great point. I love to do the yes end

thing and improv yes yes. And on the flip side, you know, I'll say that growing up in special ed as a kid and thinking my IQ was well, having that narrative in my head and then and then doing like succeeding academically created an imposter syndrome feeling. So I think on the other end, by the way, well, I tell tell me your story. Really well, I don't know my IQ, but I mean, most most academics have some sort of imposters. Oh I see, I see yeah, yeah, yeah, good, well,

thank you. I feel a great moment of connection there about that. Then I really felt like, you know, because I was getting learning it pretty easily. Once I applied myself and I realised I loved learning, I almost felt like, wait, am I allowed to be good at learning if my IQ is not above a certain threshold? Like? Am I breaking the defining the laws of physics? You know? They just had they just had you, They just had you pegged wrong. It's so interesting to now be in this

field and reflect back on that. It puts us in a unique position to reflect on ourselves as psychologists. So we're turn real quick to the neuroplasticity thing. By the way, did you ever there's a tangent, but are you a fan of comedy? Did you ever see Jimmy Glick show on Comedy Central in the nineties. I've seen bits and pieces of it, yeah with Martin Short, Yes, yes, yes, yes. I almost felt like I was about to have a jew like, No, let's talk about prasticity. Yeah, can we

should go back to neuroplasticity? So you know, you so you're actually catching this reference. Yes, I am, Yes, I love it. I took a risk because you know it's very obscure reference. Yeah. Although I look a little bit closer to Jimmy Glick than you do, Scott Great, Well, that may be true. However, neither of us look anything like him, even if you are closer too. Yeah. So okay, So you know you we were on the stage together at ninety two I events and you made a comment

that I just can't get. I have not been able to get out of my head since that one day a stage we were talking. People on stage were talking about neuroplasticity, and you're like, yeah, but I think people go too far in talking about neuroplasticity. I don't think

it's like as plastic as people were saying. Can you walk me back to that day, that comment, the context, and and let and and it just stood out of my head because I'm a real truth seeker like you are, and I when someone says something to me like that that makes me the kind of challenges a prevailing sort of narrative or something like, I listen to that person because it's I've got really interesting. Can you tell me what you're you're thinking about. That was about neuroplasticity. Yeah,

do you remember that? Do you remember that? By the way, I do you remember that? Because yeah, and I tell it to my patients to this day, because people talk about neuroplasticity kind of as if it's this magic the lickxer thing, you know, sprinkly thing that we can sprinkle on people, and that it will kind of solve all the problems, and it can do a lot. Neuroplasticity is very important, but it again is not the hammer that hits all nails, and it is not an infinite capacity.

So there are limited things that neuroplasticity can do and things that neuroplasticity cannot do, And to use it in its generic term is a bit imprecise. For example, a vision, if we sever the major pathways Myers loops that go through your perile cortex into your excipital lobe and leave you with what's called the homonymous hemiinopsia that you cannot see out of the half of either of your eyes. That is a permanent thing. It's never coming back. It

is not plastic. Vision has zero neuroplasticity in terms of severing those tracks and damage to the excipital lobe, that those are laid down so early in life that the plasticity of that is virtually zero. Same with well, motor functioning is not zero, but you can regain some function. But if you damage the primary motor cortex, the plasticity of the other cortex in your other hemisphere to take over that functioning of your contralateral part of your body

is very small. Game over, well, it's game minimal memory, as I was talking about, the plasticity of that is pretty good. We can expect if we take your left temporal lobe because there's a tumor in it, or if you have epilepsy and that's your seizure generator and you have a sclerotic hippocampus and that has to go, we can expect your verbal memory if we take your left

temporal lobe to reorganize in your non dominant hemisphere. Now that being said, it's also going to crowd out some of your nonverbal memory because there is limited brain capacity. So for any plasticity to happen, you also have to ask what brain function is being crowded out. For every gain, there is something that's being lost. For every environmental demand

that your brain lays down neurons. There's also things that are going away because you do have a limited space between your ears and inside your skull with these neurons that are devoted to meeting environmental demands. And so neuroplasticity does happen up to a point, but it is not infinite, and it depends on what we're talking about. So just to use neuroplasticity in a generic sense for everything in

anything doesn't make much sense to me. If you're talking about neuroplasticity of intelligence, well, we can talk about improving intelligence, which is an interesting conversation and studies have been done. There's positive and negative results related to that. And does it regress back to the mean after a period of time? Is it near transfer or far transfer? All these types of things. Does a crowd out working memory? All these things? But that's, you know, something that is within the realm

of neuroplasticity. So that's a very long winded answer to your very pithy question. Oh well, you know, I thought it was a great answer and really something to think about. There was a best selling book a couple of years ago called The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Dodge, I think, or so have you read it? I have not read it. I read very few of these books. Well maybe you should write one. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's another topic. Yeah, well, I think it's an important caveat something.

You know that the mind is not infinitely valuable, but you know the idea of neuroplus that he does capture the general publics. The public loves that stuff. You know, like faling very appealing. That can change our minds, to change our brains is enormously appealing. But you know how much who knows? Is are there? Genetic constraints? Who knows are there? You know? How much time do you want

to spend to do that? You know this famous Dragansky study that I cite in a lot of my talks, where you've learned to juggle for three months three ball juggling, and you get a little blip of volume change in your right parietal excipital temporal junction. That took three months of very concerted juggling to where you know, people who didn't know how to do that at all got a little half a centimeter of tissue volume change over that

period of time. And that's that's neuroplasticity, but it's very very small amount of brain tissue that was noticed to be changed in that very concerted effort of three ball juggling. Yeah. So I had, you know, this connection between genetics and how it codes for the proteins that eventually build up

to brain. And I had a chat on my podcast with Robert Pullman, who is this obviously you know, behavior geneticis And we got a little bit of a heated, respectful discussion because I felt like he was being a little bit too deterministic about it about the situation. How He's like, we really like way way over estimate the extent to which the environment impacts us at all, Like we need to stop with this Puto Coal correctness. You know.

It's like it's the genes. And I mean, if that is true, then I don't see a mechanism where like immediately genes like build the brain, you know, like outside of any context. I just don't see a developmental mechanism where that could possibly be true. Yeah, I think, I mean, I'm very humble about this. I think our knowledge about this is very rudimentary, and I think our best estimate,

the best starting point is fifty to fifty. You know, fifty percent genes fifty percent environment is probably our best starting point for just about any complex human behavior. And so you're saying it's a chain. So whether or not it'll be gene or environment, no, no, I see genes also a bad joke. It was a bad jokes. Well, yeah, yes, thank you. Sorry. And then also though, genes only work through interaction with environment, so you know, genes do not

turn on and off in isolation. If you're kept in a dark room with no interaction with the environment, the genes aren't going to work. So you know, the complex gene environment interactions we don't even pretend to understand, uh currently, So I just you know, I throw up my hands and say, it's it's really too complex for us to take a really hard stand on this currently. And fifty

to fifty sounds about right to me. And that's why you haven't written a best selling book yet exactly because it's not going to be dogmatic about it like he, I mean, Pullman for most of his career has been so careful and you know, he's done great scientific work. It has been very clear about the caveats. But then he writes his pop er book and it's all the caveats go out the freaking window. And it's like, you know, like maybe that's what happens when you, you know, write,

you write a book, You're you're selling ideas. Yeah, yeah, it's true, it's true. Okay, so let's talk about creativity. Okay, let's go into the world the realm of creativity, because what I find so interesting is the realm of the intelligence neusience of intelligence. That universe sometimes looks like the complete opposite universe then the universe of the neuroscience of creativity.

Sometimes sometimes although I like to say, well sometimes I like to say tongue in cheek that everything that I say about this evil, bad, racist world of intelligence is sweetness and light. When I go in front of a group of creativity audience, when you're talking about creativity, it's wonderful.

All of these complex and hard issues of individual differences and brain correlates are wonderful when you're talking about creativity instead of intelligence, even though you're talking about exactly the same issues. Intelligence has such a bad rap, but creativity

immediately gets a pass. So it's quite fascinating when I go to give a creativity talk and I'm talking about some of the exact same issues as intelligence, including genetic contributions, and people are much more comfortable talking about high genetic corelates or penetrance in a creative aspect as opposed to an intellectual aspect. It's it's just fascinating. It is fascinating. Why do you think it is the case? Why do you think intelligence is such a ludded word? Is the

history of the intelligence testing and the uses that it is. Yeah, I mean it's a hard it's a hard history to overcome, and you know, we continue to struggle with that. But you know, at some point we do need to recogniz is that we're talking about these fundamental human attributes that are true across intelligence, creativity, personality, all aspects, aptitudes, all

aspects of individual differences. And to take it's hard, but to take a dispassionate look at it when we're looking at it scientifically, I know, when looked at politically, and some of these things are political because intelligence tests are used in schools, for example, and they're used in some realms that have a political slant to them. Creativity tests are too, They're used for gifted and talented selection as well.

So some of these same controversial issues apply to tests of creativity, but again get less baggage attached to them. So I think we I don't know. I hope that we're doing better in one hundred years, that we can look at science without such immediate bibilis I guess word,

and not devolved to our camps. But I mean, I've I've tried to have these conversations, and you and I have had these wonderful conversations in a variety of venues with people that are hostile to intelligence and hostile to even creativity that I think we can just keep who's hostile creativity? Well, some artists don't like talking about the creative process, or like me, talking about the creative process

and such scientific terms when it's so mysterious. For example, So I don't know that was a Jimmy another Jimney glick moment, doesn't like it. You can always find someone hostile to your point of view. Yes, yes, this is true, This is actually a profound point. I'm going to write that quote down. I'm going to tweet that yes, yes, find someone hostile to your point of view, reck saying okay, yum ohong, sorry, now you're confusing me. I thought I was young. So when it's profound, it's yum, oh, I

see it when I'm quoting you, when I'm quoting that. Yeah, So creativity neuroscience of creativity now you find whereas in the neuroscience of intelligence, mostly kind of this lateral prefontal cortex is connecting there with the pridal of But when you get into the realm of the neuroscience of creativity, it seems like your reviews of the literature show that more of the medial prefrontal regions like relate to what's called the default mode network, play more of a role.

Can you explain to the general public what in the world that means what I just said. Yeah, it's it's

a little hard to explain. But the lateral parts of the brain are more involved in expression of behavior in the external world, the manifestation of behavior in the external world, doing things out in the world, whereas the medial parts of the brain are more involved in internal representations thinking about things, thinking about your relationships, thinking about the past, thinking about the future, mental time travel, so mental simulations

are involved in this default mode network. So it's a really important capacity that humans have to be able to simulate or try out ideas before you buy them in the external world. And I think that in terms of novelty generation, which is one half of the creativity definition, that novelty generation part is seems to be very involved in the neural networks that overlap with the default mode network or the medial parts of the brain. So to me,

it seems like a beautiful architecture trectoral design element. It almost poetic that like the lateral you know, outside surface of the brain is or involved in your conscious perception of the outside world, your medial defall MOW network, the inside of your brain is more functionally related to inner thought and imagination. I mean, that's kind of beautiful, isn't it. It is beautiful. The more you understand about the architecture of the brain, the more beauty you see in it. Actually,

it's really beautifully designed the hands of God well or something. Yeah, these evolution God, both these networks that we're starting to appreciate are really elegantly designed, if you will, or organized if you won't, that in such a way to create a interplay that allows us to survive, allows us to solve problems both long term and short term. Problems and allows us to move back and forth between these worlds in very rapid sequence and in demand in service of

environmental demands. So it is really an elegant design that allows us to survive and has allowed us to survive and thrive up to the present day. So I really see both intelligence and creativity and perhaps personality as really important survival tools that have persisted in our brain organization over time that have led to both wonderful and horrible things, including the nuclear bomb and the internet, and wonderful things technology that will allow us to survive hopefully into the

next century. It's beautiful. Yeah, I'm glad that we could share that moment of appreciation for brain organization. And Okay, so creativity important for the future civilization. We're both agreed on that, right. What about genius? What the hell is genius? Like you talk about neuroscience, intelligen you talk about neurosy, the creativity, Now, genius is one of these phenomenons, Like it's not just you're not just going to understand it

by looking at neuroscience of it, right, Yeah? I think so genius, I think is three things now and my thinking has evolved over time. I think Certainly it's the interplay of probably high level of intelligence. Most if not all, of our geniuses of the past arguably have had high ish levels of intelligence. Too high could be perhaps problematic. We can talk about that. Certainly, high levels of creativity

are involved in the manifestation of genius. And then the third thing that is involved is some idea that really takes hold in society, that is like a virus that overwhelms society in such a way that it is really pushes society forward in some meaningful way. So it has to be recognized by society as something that really is of such novelty and utility that it pushes society forward in a very important way. Right. But you see that

as the juxtaposition of intelligence and creativity and opportunity. Yeah, intelligence, creativity, and opportunity, if you will, I guess that's your word. But I accept it that there is the opportunity or intersection of those talents with the society's recognition or zeitgeist, or the manifestation of an idea that is outrageously popular and takes off. Yeah. I've always been really fascinated with

Dean Simonton's research on multiples. Yeah, and there's some you know, the cultural milos where some things are in the air. You know, certain ideas are kind of right. Picking doesn't mean that every brain is going to pick it, but high likelihood that if you have a certain threshold of expertise at least, you know, you'll see that we need

to do that. Yeah, that's what we need to do, right, And if Einstein hadn't come up with the theory of relativity, it would have perhaps emerged by now, certainly by now, but in the next you know, ten years after nineteen oh five or whatever. So funny, so we're to think about it was that long ago, nineteen oh five. Yeah, and just how little instruments we had to test his theories that he had that imagination that had panned out

to be correct. I mean, that's that's quite a thing to be able to imagine such a vast, infinite universe and have the time to do it. I mean, talk about opportunity. I mean, he was not burdened by an academic career, if you will. He worked in a patent office, so he had the time to allow his imagination to roam widely and without the you know kind of burden.

If like I said of having to be a professor or be a woman and have to have childbirth, and sure, yea many things that many things that would occupy your imagination or occupy your cognitive resources at the time. So gosh, there's so many ways we go with that. But I think that I want to make sure that we talk about awake craniometries. Yes, I did it, I did it. Yes,

I've been practicing it all internally. Yes. Wait, but actually before we talk about I do want to just talk about Einstein for a second because I have a hypothesis that the kind of brain regions that enabled his superior reasoning was not the default mode network sort of social imagination. In fact, he might have even had a deficit in social autistic Yeah, exactly what I mean. So I'm thinking that it probably was his p fit or his parietal will.

He probably had his paridal a little bit. And also I will say, one thing that I have in common with Einstein is the corpus corpus close thickness, early hair and yeah exactly. But yeah, it just dawns on me that I don't think that it was his like default mode network that was the key source of imagining what it would be like being on a light beam. That's such a non social thing to imagine it's a non

social thing. But that is default mode activity, that that imagination, that imagination ability to put himself on that light beam into was it? Was it or was it visual spatial imagination? Certainly visual spatial imagination, But I think it's still default mode. Really it's mental simulation, it's mental time travel. I think I think it's default mode activity. But don't you find the kind of mental time travel coming from the defaultble network tens to have be things that are social in content,

and content doesn't have to be social in contact. It can be social in contact, doesn't have to be social in contact. For people who are less social, the content will differ. So I think the content depends on the type of person it is an individual. I mean, you're looking at studies, and we're all looking at studies that involve normal undergraduates who are social by nature on the average.

But I think if the person, the individual is less social or perhaps on the spectrum, that the content of their imagination is going to be more with things as opposed to people, and those things are going to be things like traveling on a light beam. There's so many reasons why that's interesting because it's like it's not like the brain activation is the causal thing. I mean like it's a reflection of the overall system of the organism.

But sure, you know, to be able to say, like, oh, the reason why Einstein is the way he was is because his brain was activated. There. You know, it's like we don't have the default mode of a bunch of aspies. We should That would be kind of cool, right, Yeah, what would the default will of aspies be? Yeah? I think it would be really I think that study would

be fascinating. It would probably be less social content as opposed to the you know, weird people that we have Western educated, intelligent, rich and democratic and neurotypical neurotypical and neurotypical undergraduates. Yeah, yeah, well that would be we should definitely do that Study's that would be so cool. Okay, awake cranwgius. At the moment everyone's been waiting for weak creatomies.

We've studied over one hundred individuals. I've done awake craniotomies with a neurosurgeon over one hundred individuals, and talk about

individual differences. We open up the brain and do testing, neuropsychological testing while a patient is awake and while the tumor is being removed, and we want to make sure that the motor cortex isn't hurt, or language isn't hurt, or visual spatial organization or math ability isn't hurt while a patient is awake, and we're starting to look at non dominant hemisphere, which you know, neurosurgeons are not as interested in the quiet hemisphere or non eloquent hemisphere, the

right hemisphere, but we know that prosody and some creative aspects, certainly nonverbal reasoning is organized in the right hemisphere. So we have in collaboration with a musical professor, we're looking at musical ability and non dominant language ability in the right hemic sphere during craniotomy as well. So it's a

fascinating procedure. People at their most vulnerable people are there are extremely brave in doing this procedure to get the tumor out, and it's something that really is I think the culmination of my studies and individual differences at the level of an individual. Holy cow. So they're awake, Yeah, I mean that's credible. What does it feel like, well, your head's numb, so it's kind of like going to the dentist and you get all your teeth numbed up,

so you feel your teeth all adrillne on it. So you can take your skull off and expose the brain, and then you put a little stimulator on the surface of the brain and you can temporarily shut off kind of like flipping the breakers on the back of the house, different circuits while patients are talking, and you can stop talking.

Or you can have someone involuntarily move their limb by putting a stimulator on the surface so the brain and making the neurons work, or making the neurons stop working by putting a small electrical current through them while the patient is awake, and you can see which neurons are critical for the performance of that activity is language, for example, expressive language, receptive language, motor activity, any activity that you can localize in the brain, but we have to localize

it in the individual brain because language is supposedly, as we learned in the textbook You and I Scott that broke his area is in the inferior frontal Low and Wernicke's areas in the superior posterior temporal lobe. Not always the case, right, not always the case. I mean it depends, and you can have little nodes that are distributed, distributed around. In one patient, reorganization that had occurred due to epilepsy, and kept stimulating and kept taking out Brookes area, and

we ended up resecting the entirety of Brokers area. But the patient kept talking, talking, talking, so we knew everything was fine. Brokes area was somewhere different, so interesting, and yet you wouldn't be able to tell just talking to the person. No, they're like, oh, well, your Brokers area is no or imaging them because the blood flow, you know, is a really gross measure. And we love all these fMRI studies, but we forget that they're about blood flow,

they're not about neurons. And so you get an estimate of the neurons that are underlying that work. But that's only an estimate, and so you really have to understand the actual neurons that are doing the work. If you're going to you're going to take them out for sure. How many people do wake craneometries around the world, I mean, is it a common practice? It is, It's been going on for the last hundred and well about one hundred years.

Penfield Wilder Penfield started doing these at the beginning of last century. And Canada and every just about every state in a major medical center in the United States has a center to do away cranyonomies. New Mexico, being one of the smaller states, did not have one until we started that here more recently in the last three years, and now we have a viable center here. But you have one in Pennsylvania where you are, or and certainly

New York has several in the hospitals up there. Yeah, I don't trust a sadistic neuroscientists playing around with my oh, what like a puppet, right, like, oh, with strings, a puppet with strings. We could just you know, take this area and make him, you know, sing opera. You know, it doesn't work like that. We can't make you sing opera. It's not like hypnosis, like making you cluck like a chicken or something like that. That's good, yeah, but it is.

It is fascinating to see what ongoing neural activities we can interrupt, what neural activities we can excite, mostly motor activity, and you can have sensory experiences by stimulating the homunculus and identifying the face area or the arm area or the leg area by going you know, right up the homunculus of the sensory or motor cortex, so you can see exactly where things are just as just as we

see in the textbook. That is so amazing. Well, your whole career has spanned lots of really fascinating topics, and I just thank you so much for the work you've contributed to the field, to my own research, and thanks for you know, just your support of my work and my own quirkiness over the years too. Scott. I'm really happy to reconnect with you and hope we can stay connected likewise. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this episode

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