Richard Haier || The Nature of Human Intelligence

we have Richard Hire on the podcast. Doctor Hire is Professor Emeritus in the School of Medicine, University of California, Irvine. His research investigates structural and functional neuroanatomy of intelligence using neuroimaging. He created an eighteen lecture video course, The Intelligent Brain, and authored The Neuroscience of Intelligence. He is co editor of the Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence and Cognitive Neurosis Science.

He's editor in chief of Intelligence, a scientific journal, and Doctor Hare received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for Intelligence Research. Congratulations on that award and looking forward to talking to you today. Well, thanks very much. This has been a long time in coming. I've known you for years. I'm glad we are finally able to

do this. Yes, I have known you for years. I remember us talking at this Harvard Visual Spatial conference that must have been like a decade ago at this point at least. Yeah, it was interesting because we had brain images of visual spatial tasks. At the time. By ten years ago, a lot of people were doing brain imaging. When I started, it was really an astounding new technology. Yes, well, let's go back, because you started off looking at waveforms, right, You did an EG Isn't that how you kind of

start off? So can you tell us a little about your first initial findings, which actually I believe if i'm remember quickly surprised you. You weren't expecting to see what you saw. Well, let me go back and think about that EEG work. It was done at a time when EEG research was just beginning to do brain mapping with EEG, and by today's standards, it was pretty rudimentary, but it was kind of interesting to see waveforms move back and forth across the brain as thinking was going on or

perception was going on. And I did some work, building on the work of a lot of other EEG work, looking at correlates between these electrical waveforms in the brain and intelligence test scores, and we found some interesting things, nothing really amazing. The real surprising work was when we moved from EEG to positronic mission tomography PET for short PET, and so I was one of the first psychologists that

had access to this technology. I moved from Brown University out here to the University of California at Irvine because they had acquired one of the very first commercially available PET scanners in about nineteen eighty six. It was in the psychiatry department, of all places. This was extremely unusual. So I was recruited into the psychiatry department and I came because I had this access to this really amazing technology.

And the first study I was able to do with PET was looking at brain metabolic rate while people solved reasoning problems on an intelligence test, and the result of that was extremely surprising because we did see areas of the brain that quote lit up that were more active while people were doing this test. But the surprising and unexpected thing was the more those areas lit up, the

less well they did on the test. There were inverse correlations between glucose metabolic rate and his brain activity in these areas and how well they did the test, leading us to conclude that it wasn't how hard your brain was working that made you smart, but how efficiently it worked to make you smart. Oh, I'm just going to jump right into this sex differences. Why not? Why not? You know, I was going to start off with a whole bunch of other things, but I feel like why not?

This kind of illustrates a point though, that I think is really interesting. So from all the data I've read, there is no average sex difference in intelligence or IQ

in the general factor. There may be on specific factors, whereas males and average might have an advantage on certain tests, and females may have advantage on average and other tests, but at the global level, however, obviously, it's a well known fact that female brains are smaller on average than male brains in average, and so people have explained that in saying that female brains actually are more efficient. So do you see the link I just made there to

what you were saying? Oh? Absolutely, that was one of the first questions I would get. No one has actually proved that female brains are more efficient, but there's a lot of evidence that supports that hypothesis. Our pet data

would would be one. We also did a study where we correlated the amount of gray matter using magnetic residence imaging, a different kind of technology than PET that we could determine how much gray matter there was throughout the brain, and we correlated that with IQ scores, and we found there were certain areas where the more gray matter you had,

the higher your IQ score. And that was interesting because the areas were basically in the front of the brain and in the parietal areas on the side in the back of the brain. But when we broke the sample out into men and women, it was the men who had the correlations in the varietal lobes and it was the women who had the correlations predominantly in the frontal lobes.

This suggested that men and women equally matched on IQ score important dimension may have different parts of the brain involved in the kind of problem solving that IQ test measure. And so the simple way to think about that is profound in its simplicity. Not all brains work the same way.

Now this will come as no surprise to most people, but in a field dominated by cognitive psychologists who regarded individual differences as error variants, and experiments designed to generate minimum individual differences, assuming they were looking at the general response of the brain that would be common to everybody. In fact, not all brains work the same way. Men and women may have brains that work somewhat differently to

arrive at the same result. Now, that's because there's differences in the amount of white matter connections between men and women. These are average group differences. By the way, there's a lot of overlap. Yeah, I keep being sure to say that.

It keeps saying average. Got to say that all the time, all the time, And so it's it's it's interesting to the brain imaging world that around the year two thousand, it's like two decades ago already, as more psychologists got access to MRIs and started doing their own brain imaging experiments, they were surprised generally at how the brains of the individual subjects look so different, so different on MRI, and by adding them together and taking a group average, they

immediately recognized they were losing a lot of information. So I have always proposed to my cognitive psychology friends that they do the following experiment, that they take the most classic cognitive MRI study and replicate it separately in men and women, or separately in high IQ people and average IQ people. This is to just illustrate the potential power of an individual difference approach, because I believe individual differences

is the key to understanding all kinds of neurobiology. For sure, I agree with that you're bringing back lots of memories. You know you will. Maybe you don't know this, and I'm sure my listeners don't know this, But I did my master's thesis at Cambridge University with Nicholas McIntosh. She was a well regarded intelligence researcher and my thesis with him was on how men on average and women on

average solve visual spatial problems differently. And it was interesting because women on average tended to solve it using verbal labels in a way, and men on average tended to visualize it more than the women on average. We found

that interesting. We're trying to explain differences in working memory based on different strategies, So you're taking me all the way back to kind of the start of my career looking at really interested in different strategy use and how that relates to intelligence and our visual spatial working memory for instance. So anyway, thanks for bringing me back. Well, I'm glad you mentioned that because I never met Nicholas McIntosh, and he wrote one of two classic textbooks in the field.

I think his book was called IQ and Intelligence IQ and Human Intelligence IQ and Human Intelligence, and the other classic was Buzz Hunt's book Human Intelligence. And I have just finished a few days ago sending off the final manuscript for the second edition of Buzz Hunt's book Human Intelligence. We now call it The Science of Human Intelligence. And I wrote it with Roberto Colom. We were both friends of Buzz Hunt. And it's too bad. I really admired

Nick macintosh's work up until yesterday. I had it right here on my desk because I would refer to it from time to time in writing our book. And he passed away about what two or three years A couple of years ago. It was a big tragedy. Big tragedy. By the way, did you know he actually gave an invited interview at an ISIR meeting. I saw the video of it. I had arranged that and then I couldn't go to the meeting. But that is online if people

want to see his views on intelligence. Thank you. Thanks for putting that on behalf of Nick and I can put that on the show notes. For sure, he really inspired me so much as way of thinking so clearly about the time topic, and I would also say compassionately the way he covered things. He didn't shy away from any topic. If you look at his textbook, he's a

whole chapter on race differences for instance. Yeah, he doesn't shy away from it, but one doesn't leave reading his discussion about it thinking oh, he's a racist, or thinking oh he's not being even handed. You know, you'd be hard pressed to walk away from reading Nicholas McIntosh feeling that you've been short changed intellectually. If that makes sense, it does. Buzz also had a chapter on that in his book, and it was one of the last chapters we wrote. And it's a tough needle to thread the

eye of that, to say the least. When I did the eighteen video lectures for the Great Courses, I put in a whole lecture on race and IQ. I tell you the company was a little nervous about this, but I said, look, if we do it right, this will explain to pole why this is important to know about. And I was able to do a lecture that observers

found balanced and informative. The hope was people would walk away without racist support or whatever racists get from this kind of stuff, and just kind of learn about why this doesn't go away. It's a topic that is important for many reasons, but it's so uncomfortable. It's just so uncomfortable, and it's so difficult to have a conversation about it. Well, my view is that I think it's actually unfortunate that discussion of the exciting findings of this the science of

intelligence more generally consistently gets hijacked by that topic. So that's something that infuriates me because I find I find individual differences intelligence far more interesting and valuable to investigate than race differences. If you want, in my opinion, I could agree with you more. In fact, I never commented on the race difference thing up until I did this lecture in the end I recorded at the end of twenty thirteen, so I literally went decades without any public

discussion of this. I know or have met most of the players in that space. It's a relatively small space compared to the rest of intelligence, and so just from a historical point of view, I had many, many private conversations with most of the key people, and in private conversation there was no racism. There was just kind of an interest in explaining away these test differences, or it's not necessarily explaining them away, but explaining where they came from.

Arthur Jensen was famous for this. He was a bit had a bit of a touch of Asperger syndrome. Well that's interesting, is that what you were diagnosed? Have you met Did you meet him? Oh? I spent a lot of time with him at meetings. You're the first one to ever say that to me. Yeah, that's interesting. Well I didn't fully appreciate this until after he passed away, But it turns out I understand that a relative of his had Asperger syndrome, and suddenly it kind of fell

into place. It clicks. It clicks because he was absolutely unflappable in the face of enormous hostility and criticism. He just sticks stuck to trying to explain to people what the data were. No matter how technical the data might be, he felt he could explain it in a neutral way, and he said publicly and privately he would be the first to change his mind about any interpretation of the data if there was data, if new data came along, and then he hoped that any hypothesis that he had

could be disproved by data. Well, he wasn't afraid of that at all. He was really an advocate of the scientific method. Yeah, you know, I to be vulnerable a second. I had to admit, I think I'm a bit on that spectrum to a certain degree where I don't Sometimes I don't mean to get in trouble, and my curiosity leads first, and then I get in trouble and you know, the curiosity killed the cat sort of thing. And I truly don't have malevolent intentions, you know, I'm just being curious.

And then if I've hurt anyone's feelings, of course I feel horrible about it because I also have a compassion. But I can resonate with you know, a group of people who are just absolutely just ravenously curious about all sorts of different topics and who really step in it sometimes as a result. Well, of all those people that I have met or knew mostly at meeting, often their

work when presented at intelligence meetings was heavily criticized. You know, people from the audience would get up and say, you know, it just doesn't make sense or you're misinterpreting that. Only one of these people I won't say who in private conversation struck me as holding racist ideas, and that's one out of I know exactly who was in your head right now, just so you know, very probably you do,

but I know there's no sense naming this person. So the point is that most of the people who engaged in that kind of research did it to understand education achievement differences and because they wanted to fix it. That's where the whole head start compensatory education movement came from. So it's got a venerable history of good intentions. It did get hijacked today. There's a tiny number of people

who work in this area. I get papers submitted to the journal I edit on this we probably, I can't say for sure, but we probably reject more than we accept. You know, I don't have a policy of rejecting papers because they are in topics that we censor or anything like that. We kind of have a wide open gate when it comes to academic freedom in terms of getting papers into the process. But I make sure they get a fair peer review, and if they make the peer review,

then we publish them. If they don't. We don't. Unfortunately, there are a small number of people on Twitter and other social media who seem to relish in debates about this this on Twitter in any reasonable way. The issues are too complex, The technical aspects of the data are really require a lot of explanation about what the data mean and what they don't mean. And I have really avoided,

you know, Twitter fights about this. What I have noticed on Twitter occasionally, you know, somebody attacks me for doing intelligence research. It's very occasional, and it's, you know, easy to ignore. The hostility about intelligence really does. It's really a shame because, as you say, there's so much intelligence research that's interesting and provocative and positive. I've spent decades speaking to the public about intelligence. I can't even tell

you how many public lectures I've given. There's a tremendous public appetite to know about intelligence and what the research says, and intelligence slowly and steadily has been moving more mainstream than it's been since the nineteen sixties, partly because of brain imaging work. Because the idea that intelligence test scores robustly correlate with things you can measure on brain imaging. That pretty much puts the argument to rest that intelligence

test scores are meaningless and aren't real just statistical artifacts. Well, I think those are two different things. You know, something can be real and be meaningless. Well, okay, fair enough, come on, so but when you look, you know what I want to get to all the really exciting because there's a lot about intelligence research that obviously excites me. That is how I started the career. My career, and I would live in the library in Carnegie Mellen as

an undergrad. I'd live in the library reading every book I could possibly get my hands on about human intelligence. So me and you absolutely can nerd out. I feel like I want to just address that annoying elephant in the room that keeps hijacking the discussion really quickly so

we can just move on from it. So the race difference is now, this is probably this is a horrible time to even bring up that topic there because there are such racial tensions in America, and I think there's value in being sensitive to the fact that we have a long way to go in America to reduce racism. And I don't want to contribute to racism one iota.

But I also enjoy looking at data, and I enjoy looking at various various sources of information to try to I'm a firm believer if we want to make changes, we need to look at reality as clearly as possible, and it needs to be built on reality. Change needs to be built on reality. The question is what is the reality? And I'm wondering if in like two three

minutes we can summarize that state. And I'll tell you my summary of it is that there still exists a signific can difference on average group differences between blacks and whites on average on IQ scores. But I have yet to see one study showing that the cause of that that any of the group differences are explained to any degree,

let alone a sizable degree by differences in genetics. And not only that, but I think the really important point here, and you correct me if I'm wrong, because I really do want to get into the exciting aspects of intelligence. Anything that we say today about the science of individual differences intelligence, you cannot automatically extrapolate that to the group level.

And that's a point that I just really think needs to be hammered in these discussions so that we can finally, once and for all, have a nuanced, truthful and interesting discussion about individual differences intelligence without it being hijacked. So what do you do resonate with anything I just said with all of it, there's virtually nothing I disagree with.

I would talk about it a little differently, though. You are correct that there has been a persistent finding over decades that different groups have average test score differences, and the presumption early on was that all of those differences were due to lack of educational opportunities or other social

cultural aspects. The hypothesis that it might be partially genetic started to evolve as compensatory education efforts were tried to close those education gaps, hoping to see a reduction in the test score gap, which never happened, and so as frustration mounted about the inability to minimize that gap through educational opportunity and other programs, people started to wonder, maybe

genetics has something to do with it. That was an incendivey train of thought in the late nineteen sixties when it really started to take hold right through the seventies and eighties as more was learned about genetics. However, the concept that genetics was a deterministic and limited factor kind of got that understanding of genetics evolved into a more

sophisticated understanding that genetics essentially was probabilistic, not deterministic. And this really is a very important concept and it really changed the way people started to think about genetic propensities or genetic potential. So you might have the potential for heart disease, and you can you can minimize it or maximize the probability of you getting heart disease by doing lifestyle things. You know, you want to have heart disease. I can tell you what to eat and just sit

there on the couch. You know, if you want to minimize your chance, you change your diet, you exercise, and so on. Whether intelligence is the same as that is really yet to be determined because we don't know anything. We don't know anything that in my view, increases intelligence, and we can talk about what that means because it depends on the definition of intelligence. I was going to start off with the question was intelligence, But we've gotten

on this down this path. Okay, the good news about the genetics of intelligence, And I'm going to say something that is my idiosyncratic point of view. I don't know that what I'm about to say is widely accepted. But if there's a genetic component, and I'm talking now about individual intelligence, not these group averages, but if there's a genetic component to intelligence individual intelligenens, that means there's a

neurobiology of intelligence. Because genetics works, there's no gene for intelligence. There has to be genes for neurobiology and neural mechanisms and an extraordinarily complicated cascade of neurochemical events that results in intelligent thinking. Okay, but it justifies a neuroscience of intelligence. And the field of intelligence research has been moving over the last two decades more and more towards neuroscience conceptualizations

and methodologies to study intelligence. Now, one of the reasons this is important is that if you can understand intelligence on a neurobiological level, right down to the synapse or right down to the dendrites of neurons or the mitochondria in neurons, me one of a thousand different aspects of molecular of the molecular brain. If you can get some understanding of that, you might be able to tweak the

relative systems to increase intelligence. So let me give you a statistic that startles most people, and you will recognize immediately based on the normal distribution of intelligence and the normal curve, that's sixteen percent of the population have IQ's under eighty five. Now, you don't have to believe in IQ or eighty five is not a magic number, but that means that in the United States, about fifty one million people have IQ's under eighty five. And of those

fifty one million, there's about thirteen million children. Yes, okay, now you want to talk about serious social problems. You got fifty one million people. Doesn't matter, race, you know, doesn't, the religion doesn't, voting preferences doesn't matter. You got fifty one million people who do not have the mental abilities to hold high paying jobs and possibly even care for themselves.

This is a very large number of people. Now, these people think a private humistic statement though, that's like a pretty deterministic statement that you just said. No, probablistically, it's probabilistic that. Look, in the United States, there are about forty three million people living below the poverty line is determined by some government agency that does this. So think of a vent diagram. You got forty three million people

living in poverty. You got fifty one million people with IQs that are low enough to make it everyday life difficult for them. There's got to be overlap between those two universes, those two sets of people. So if you could tweak IQ by just a little bit and move people from eighty five to ninety or from eighty to a D five, this is going to have a gigantic ripple effect on many many social problems. Now I explain all this for your listeners who would like to see

my logic on this. It's in section six point six of my book, The Neuroscience of Intelligence, and this entire section is free on my website. So if they go to Richard Hire dot com and click on the Neuroscience of Intelligence, they'll go to a pit in the show notes where they'll see a little tab where they can

click on facts and quotes for journalists. Go to that, scroll down to the bottom, and you'll see section six point six of the book in its entirety, and I explain this idea of why it would be a good thing to be able to understand the neurobiology of intelligence so that we might come up with ways to increase intelligence. Think about shifting the entire intelligence distribution a little bit to the right. I think that would have enormous implications

for society. And you know, the more it's genetic, the irony is. The more that intelligence is genetic, the more neurobiology might be involved, and the more impact. I mean, think fifty years into the future when there's a molecular biology research program worldwide for understanding intelligence, just like their molecular biology programs from understanding learning and memory, which by

the way, are elements of intelligence. So that if you want to solve Alzheimer's disease, you have to understand the neurobiology of learning and memory. And someday a pharmaceutical company is going to be able to tweak the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease to ameliorate that illness, and then you're on your way to coming up with ways to tweak similar symptoms to people without Alzheimer's disease, possibly to

increase their cognitive abilities. That's the excitement of intelligence research in a nutshell, and it could be fifty years away. Might never happen. Most of the people working in genetics, most of the people working in neuroscience, believe what I just said will never happen because the brain is too complicated.

The interactions of all these systems are too complicated to sort out, let alone how environment mental factors like stress or other factors might influence the expression of genes throughout the lifetime. This is an extraordinarily complex set of problems to solve. But my view is we need to get started. I would love to unpack so much of what you just said, but I was just curious, what was your link there to the race differences thing, because I wanted

to I wanted to end that that thread. You were starting to talk about it, and then you went off into the individual level. You summarized the findings. Fine, Oh cool, Okay, These average test score differences exist. They've been relatively stable over decades, where what the explanation for them is not known because everything that's been proposed as an explanation, the number of words spoken in the household of infants to genetics, none of that has yet been demonstrated in a compelling way.

Although you know, people say that with the new giant databases of DNA being collected literally all over the world, maybe the genetics story now will have the sufficient data in large enough numbers to test some of these ideas. Other geneticists say, it doesn't matter how big the sample size is, it doesn't matter how sophisticated the genetic word

DNA analysis is. There are just too many interactions to sort things out, and so you could never answer the question does genetics have anything to do with any group differences on complex traits? Time will tell That's my summary of where we are on that topic. Okay, So lots of unpack. So I know you're interested in the development of intelligence, and that's a topic a theme in your book. I'm wondering how you can possibly look at the development

of intelligence by only staying at that biological level. You obviously need to look at how environmental factors interact with our biology. So are you you saying that you don't think there's a lot of that. We've really found out what those environmental factors are that are most important, and a lot of the ones that people have proposed turn out to not be as predictive. Is that is that along the lines of what you're arguing, that would be a fair summary of where I think the field is.

You know, there are general environmental variables that undoubtedly must have an impact, like stress, okay, like poverty. Well, what aspects of poverty. How do you explain individuals who grow up in extreme poverty yet are intellectually extremely able, And how do you go about studying this in a systematic way. You know, when sometimes there's a misunderstanding when I say things like intelligence is the single most important variable that

predicts various measures of success. That is an empirical fact. So if you could measure it doesn't mean that it's the only thing. It doesn't mean that it is philosophically the most important thing in success. It just means empirically, if you throw a whole bunch of variables into a quantified statistical procedure like a multivariate you know, regression equation to predict whatever measures of success you want to predict, the thing that always comes out first is some measure

of general intelligence. Now does that matter what your dependent variable is? Surely what outcome you're looking at IQ is going to have greater or less than predictive validity, Like physics versus artistic achievement. We found in art data set

shows widely different predictive validity. Like you, that's correct. And when I said, depending on what variable you want to predict, I'm talking about most of the variables that have actually been studied empirically to date that have some practical importance to most people, like academic success, like job success, those

generic categories. But certainly, if you have had a metric of kindness, if you had a metric of caring for other people over and above the kind of the personality traits, who's to say that you wouldn't choose kindness over intelligence. Because I can tell you spent having spent decades in university medical schools, I could easily rattle off a list of names of liars, cheaters, and thieves among the tenured

faculty without hesitation. On the other hand, I could also rattle off a list of names of people who are extremely kind and generous, and they're on the same faculty, and they would agree with me completely on who belongs to the other list, but that exists, and they're intelligent. They're highly intelligent people liars, cheaters and thieves as well.

So it seems like, without asking you what do you think intelligence is, you seem to equate it with the kinds of cognitive process that are measured on on Q tests, which are an assortment of cognoprostss. It's that all seem to be positively correlated with each other relating to working memory and reasoning. Problem solving on the spot makes demands on executive functioning these sorts of things. Is that how you think about intelligence? I have a very narrow definition

because it's based on what the research is about. Most of the research is about the general factor of intelligence, this general reasoning ability that you have across various kinds of different situations, called the G factor. Most of the research on intelligence is really about the G factor, and that's what seems to be most predictive and possibly possibly most genetic. Now what I just said is certainly open. I'm open to changing my mind on this as you know,

new data come out. The difficulty is the assessment of the G factor from various tests. Psychometrically is very sophisticated. People don't really know what psychometrics does. But it's a way of test construction that eliminates things like bias and maximizes the fact that minimizes bias and maximizes the predict the predictability of something with the test. So it's sophisticated.

It's not perfect, but it's sophisticated. By contrast, the statistical reliability and validity and psychometrics of tests of things like wisdom or even creativity is not as high. Now, imagine just just as a thought experiment. You work in creativity. Your work is you just read your imaging paper, fantastic, But imagine if you've got to measure of creativity and you decide to give it to different groups and different groups have different mean creativity scores. Okay, what are you

going to do with that? And do you want to teach creativity in school and you want to take you know, kids in a group that have low creativity scores on average, and what can you do to increase their creativity? A lot of people have tried teaching creativity. It may even be helpful, but it doesn't really produce artistic geniuses. You know, you raise a really good point, and I think it might be a difference between us. I feel like I

have two hats. There's one hat. I'm just the hat that I wear with you, and I'm wearing with you right now on the science of intelligence, doing studies on it at a group level, at not a group op but a population level and aggregate. But then there's the educational psychologist in me who is very, very wary about making statements about certain IQ bands and then pre judging

individual person's future potential based on their IQ score. To me, that's a form of discrimination actually, because you're taking population level statistics and you're trying to infer what one individual in that population is capable of doing in their lives. So I'm more worried about that than I am doing the good science and things of that nature. So that's where I'm coming from. Just wanted to just share that

with you. There's no difference between those two hats go on go on, because no one who's knowledgeable about the predictive bil of intelligence tests to job performance or to life success believes that where any individual is on that IQ in those IQ bands determines their life's success. These predictions are generic that are not perfect. Maybe they predict anywhere from a third maybe as much as a sixty percent of the variance, sometimes maybe a little bit more.

But you could ask the question slightly differently than the way you proposed it. You can ask is there any value in knowing your IQ score? And most people who study IQ, and I include myself in this, would say not really. I get emails all the time from people who have read my book, then you'll test them. No, who follow me on Twitter, and it's more like they've been tested and they know their IQ and they say, look, my IQ is one hundred and ten, but I want

to go to graduate school. Do you think I could be a successful graduate student? And my answer always is your IQ score has nothing to do with what you just asked me. I would have no way of knowing this. The only way you can find out is go to graduate school, try your best, and see what do you make of cases where there's a mismatch. This is an interesting question because I've been thinking a lot about this. What happens if your achievement trump's your so called potential.

You know, I had a learning disability when I was a kid, and I don't want to harp on this story, but just briefly, because of auditory issues and various other issues, I didn't do too well and didn't do hot on IQ tests when I was seven years old or so. And if someone predicted try to predict, you know, sure based on those that snapshot of my life, they would be shocked to see that I got a PhD from Yale, you know, And so I did it. I tried it, and I did it. I was successful in it. So

just like your advice, you know, go for it. What happens when your actual competence surpasses the test? Do you throw away the test? Like? Do you believe the tests or the truth? Or is the truth the truth? Like the truth of your competence? I think in the world your own question, obviously the truth is the truth. But I tell you my own story about this. I'd love to hear it. I'd love to hear it. When I

went to graduate school at Johns Hopkins. I'm going to speak a little slowly here because I want to be careful the way I say this, there was a professor on the faculty in the psychology department who was a pre eminent psychometrician, and he literally believed everything you needed to know about a person you could tell from their test scores, So that whenever there was a conversation and a name would come up of a previous graduate student, for example, this member of the faculty said, oh, yes,

so and so I remember him. His gre score was this, his Miller Analogy test score was this, and he and that, and he would then say something like yes and he did as well as you would expect from those scores words to that effect. And this faculty member was well known, a highly regarded individual, a very sweet person by the way, a gracious, terrific mentor person human being. But this is the way he viewed the relationship between test scores and people. Well.

I corresponded with him shortly before he passed away. He was very elderly. It was many years after he left the university. I had not corresponded with him for many, many years, and then for various reasons, I did have a chance to correspond with him. And I was later told by somebody else, who also was much closer to him than I was, that he remarked to this other person about me, no rich, he seems to have achieved a lot more than I would have thought from his scores.

How they know your scores? Well, he knew everybody on the facult You could see your application. It was all on the scores. All the scores were on your application at that time. And he looked at him, and he remembered him, and he believed them. And now I took this as one of the great compliments of my life. By the way, So yeah, I think the bottom line is you can't over rely on a test score. Is

just a test score. Life is complex, you know, reducing people down to a few scores, you know, Physicians kind of do it all the time. You know, go to a physician, you say, well you remember me, Oh, yes, you're the person with blood pressure. O. You know this and that and your weight. I told you last time you had They remember you in terms of numbers. So it's not that outrageous a thing, except it's kind of an outrageous thing. Yeah, So I don't think I disagree

on this at all. Well, I wanted to quarify. You said you didn't think that hat one and that hat two were different from each other, and then it seems like you're now agreeing they are different from each other. So I'm trying to clarify what you're saying there. Well, the scientist hat tells you what the prediction is population, and your education, psychology experience tells you that there are

a lot of exceptions to the prediction. But the people who make the prediction wouldn't dispute that there are many exceptions. But the reason you can have some kind of science is because you have some level of predictability. It's not deterministic though, and there are many exceptions. So I know many many cases of kids that had dyslexia who grew up to be multi millionaires through their own business sense. Oh yeah, you know, there are many, many things. I think.

The mistake is going the other way. The mistake, I think is that because of all the exceptions you and everybody else personally know, they say, well, the science can't be true. Oh I see, you see. Well, yeah, that's maddening to scientists. But you see that with everything though, that way of thinking. Right when we talk about sex differences and personality, for instance, we talk about down the

line of the most controversial topics. Here's the thing, you know, how do we explain how do we do public good public science communication where we explain that, you know, the exceptions matter, but so do the generalizations. I wrote a tweet about that, actually, just a couple of days ago. I said, both matter, both are can be true at the same time. Yes, But did you like that tweet? I gave it a life. So how do we responsibly communicate that to a public that seems to want to

take one side or the other. I can tell you I've been trying to do this for decades in my public speaking and the first step is you have to do public speaking. You have to engage the public. Not everyone can do it. Took me a while to kind of hone my public speaking ability. The the lectures I did for the Great Courses Company, which have been popular, that helped quite a bit, but I'm only one person.

Scientific communication is not easy because scientists tend to qualify things, and they tend to before they get to the point. They tell you what the problem is and the method and the details of the method, then how it was analyzed, and finally they get to the result. And this is not the way you talk to the public. So you know, I start some of my public lectures with a picture of a well known person, an autistic savant, high functioning

autistic savant. And one of the things he's done isrized the string of digits for Pie, and I start by asking the audience, you know, Pie is three point one four, and then there's an infinite series of numbers, and I tell the audience, how many do you think he memorized? He took a month, studied a computer print out, memorized a string, and then went on the BBC and publicly started regurgitating the sequence of pie as people checked along the way. How many digits of pie do you think

he he did five hundred, you know, fifteen thousand? You know, the answer is twenty two thousand, five hundred and fourteen. Is that Dano Tammant? Yeah? Yeah, And he wrote he wrote an autobiography. I know him, I know him. Interesting person, isn't it? Yeah? Yeah, very interesting. But the point there's a brain that can do something most people cannot do,

is he highly Is he a genius? And then we have a conversation about what these words, what these words mean, And then we talk about synesthesia, a condition that an unusual brain condition that apparently he has. So there are ways to engage the public without explaining what a multiple regression equation is, you know, starting there, you know. So, but it's it's highly important because there is a hunger

to know these things. And in some ways the public is way ahead and their understanding and interest in intelligence than some academic departments, you know, where intelligence is a fighting word. Yeah, I hear you. You know. The excitement that I had for the field in early in my career was purely about the least controversial aspects of the field. Really, it was like I was just so curious, like, what

are the environmental correlates, what are the neuro corelates? You know, if we decompose an IQ test to its various components, what are the different strategies people use? I mean really nerdy things that I never even imagined a million years would could be controversial, do you know what I mean? It was just like me just being really nerdy. Now, I just I and I'm going to keep saying this over and over again. I wish that the field would

stop being hijacked by well a, it's passed. You know, IQ tests were used by by unsavory purposes in the turn of the twentieth century. I mean, you know, we sent it, we sent back a lot of immigrants. Uh, you know, we using the tests. We used it in the army for for uh various in various ways that probably weren't weren't right. You know, it has, it has had a history of abuse, But that doesn't necessarily mean the I mean, the test it self is a blunt instrument.

It's not The test itself is not evil that they can't spot. Let me say two things about that. The first is the abuse empirically seems to be less than most people, including people like me in the field, have always believed. You know, Russell, Warren Russell has written a book thirty five Myths about Intelligence or words to that effect.

It's just about to come out. He's talked about it on his Twitter feed and he goes into some of the detail of this, and at one point he actually went back to immigration records and found the number of people who were sent back as mental defectives based on tests and with some tiny proportion of one percent. I mean, it happened, but it's not this GigE gigantic male practice. That's the one thing. So it's not to excuse it, but I think it's been exaggerated without really an empirical

investigation of the facts of it. And the second thing is there was an editorial in Nature, I think in two thousand and fifteen on the occasion of the publication of the largest genetic study of educational attainment, which is a proxy for iq snyders. So they published this in Nature and they found basically you could have polygenic scores that would predict education attainment and was a giant sample. I think memory serves, it's around three hundred people in

the sample. Now we have a sample of one point two million doing the same thing. But that was a big deal in twenty and fifty. But those effects sizes are way too small. To the point is Nature published an editorial on the occasion of publishing this at the time was a landmark study. The essence of the editorial it was intelligence is a legitimate thing to study. It may have a bad history, but we have to move on.

And they cited a special issue of the journal Intelligence at the time edited by Doug Detterman on teaching intelligence in universities. And I had a little piece in there, and other people had pieces in there, and the surprising thing was very few. There are very few courses on intelligence in undergraduate education at colleges and universities, very few.

Most people don't want to teach it because you have to talk about someone some uncomfortable aspects of it in the context of the much bigger context of all these other interesting and important things. But Nature. I regarded that editorial in Nature as an absolute turning point because they basically said it's okay to study the genetics of intelligence and intelligence itself and this is the future. It was

what they were the way I remember that editorial. So it does pain me also to see all of this fascinating and exciting and potentially extremely important research being hijacked by these old controversies, especially since racists don't give a damn. It doesn't matter what our data shows. They're going to find a way of everybody's going to change their mind if you show that your race, this ideology is based

on empirically false things, you know. So the fact that that is even affecting the funding for intelligence research, you know, I thought there should be a National Institute of stupidity, just like there's a National Institute for other diseases, And of course the National Institute of Stupidity would have to fund research trying to cure stupidity, and that the only

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Transcend Course dot com. That's Transcend Course dot com. Save your spot and learn how to become the best version of yourself by going to Transcend Course dot com today. Now back to the show. So intelligence, we're both agreement and intelligence is important, but it's not all there is to a human There are things, you know, there are caveats.

I just I think we have responsibility to just say these caveats because people just misinterpret it when you say intelligence is important, that somehow you mean it's all that's important or that or that you equate it with human worth. I don't equate. I don't know about you, but I don't equate an IQ person's IQ score with the value

as a human being. No, just the opposite. I mean, what I argue in my section six point six is that you can't hold it against someone if through no fault of their own, they don't have the mental skills to be really successful in society, and therefore the role of government is to give them a safety net to provide for them. Now, how you do that, you can discuss that. You can debate that I was leaning toward

universal basic income for low IQ people. But then obviously if they have trouble managing money, that may cause more problems. So you need you need some discussion about how policies can help people. But people have to be treated as individuals. And clearly, just my example of the people I know in medical school who are liars, cheaters, and thieves, I mean,

you cannot equate intelligence with human worth. I also say, however, and this might seem contradictory, but I also believe that all things being equal, more intelligence is better than less, and therefore we have a moral obligation to try to increase intelligence if we can. If environmental manipulations work, we should support it. So having smaller class sizes increased intelligence, I'd be all for it. Now, smaller class size has

no relationship to the development of intelligence. I think that's really an interesting argument, because I think there's trade offs with all the different traits we have in the world, And it's fascinating when you look at the brain of the neural networks associated with imagination sometimes are exact opposite of the neural networks activated on IQ tests. Sometimes in order to be creative, you have to tone down that

executive network. I think it depends a lot on what you're trying to do, what you want to do in your life, and well you want to I personally think i'd rather have a couple extra imagination points if I even if that means sacrificing five IQ points. So what do you think about what I just said? Nothing you just said contradicts what I said. They match. So I didn't say that IQ was the only important thing what I said. And also, I do think it's an empirical

fact that more intelligence is better than less. That's all I said. More creativity is better than less, More kindness is better than less, More colerance is better than less. I don't know how to get people to be more tolerant. I don't know how to get people to be hided. You know, I don't know how to get people to be more intelligent. But I'd like to find out. I'd like to live to see it. So, yes, I think

you can make a value judgment. Imagine a thought experiment where we have the ability to manipulate the intelligence of a child or an infant, and you give parents a choice. We can turn the thermostat up or we can turn it down. Who would select to have a less bright child? I can't even imagine that that would be. Now if you said you could have a choice between more intelligence, or more charisma or more physical attractiveness, now this might present people with a dilemma. Now if you start adding

in other variables, you know, but intelligence. You know, there are plenty of people who are highly successful based entirely on their looks. I'm not one of them. I was going to say, like people like you are a good example that it's a burden. What can I say? Yeah, So when you talk about something like more intelligence is better than less, that doesn't mean that it makes you a better person. It just gives you more you know, reasoning ability, which you can use for good or for ill.

And if I could make people kinder, I would work on that. But my field is intelligence. Yeah, no, I hear what you're saying. I have an allergic reaction to reductionism. So I am thinking about how is reducing intelligence to brain waves or neuroscience. I know that you use words such as astonishing in your book. You say astonishing neuroscience methods.

I know you're very excited about it, and I don't want to take away that excitement because it kind of excites me when I see someone excited about new frontiers. I just am asking a question in the sense that how do you not view that as reductionistic for understanding intelligence? Many aspects of science require a certain amount of reductionism, So reductionism, you know, studying something without reductionism. I think it was EO. Wilson. I'm going to screw up this quote,

but EO. Wilson said something to the effect that without reductionism, you have art. With reductionism, you have science. It's an interesting quote. I guess I suppose it depends what your purpose. You know, for scientific studies, reductionism sometimes is incredibly important to isolate a variable and to narrow your construct. But dealing with the messy reality of school children, for instance, and trying to give them resources and see who would

benefit from what resources. What are people's kids' dreams, desires, what are their future goals. It seems like asking people what their future goals would be it would be more beneficial for understanding the human being than just looking at their brain patterns. Do you disagree with that? No, If you are a vocational counselor, you need to see the person in as big a context as you can imagine. If you are a therapist, you need to see the

person in the biggest context you can imagine exactly. If you are a university admissions officer, this gets a more interesting because you can see a person in a context that has two elements. A subjective element of letters of recommendation, achievement in high school, how many nonprofits to the high school students started, how many famous friends their parents have that can write letters of recommendation? And you can have

an objective component like a standardized test. And as you know, all the research shows that all that subjective stuff adds little, if any predictive value to the objective test. Now it goes against people's sensibility. When I was on the medical school admissions committee many years ago, my colleagues would sit and they would spend half an hour or more on a folder reading the personal state meant saying things like what do you think you got a dis grade in

this course? And I would finish four folders in the time they were taking to do one because I waited the MCAT score, and then I looked for reasons in the folder. If a person had a solid m CAT score that was the criteria that met the criterion of our university, then I would just scan the folder to see if there were any red flags about why this person should not get an interview. And I knew I

could not read the tea leaks. I could not extract nuances from the rest of the folder, except if there was something like, well, let me explain to you why I was arrested after that barroom fight. It was an actual case, by the way, Yeah, you know, flags like that got my attention. But by and large, the research shows the objective measures are as are as predictive as they can be without adding the other stuff in. So the goal of admissions officers is to make the fewest

errors possible. Now they have many criteria. You know, they have diversity as a criteria as a criterion. That's that you can't really tell that by a test score. But test scores typically nowadays are only one of many, many factors that are used. Sometimes there's some test optional. Now University of California is stopping the standardized tests for five years. They're going to develop their own. This will be a very amusing to see what they come up with that's

different and more predictive. They probably won't even use the word predictive, they'll just kind of call it useful. So I wish, I hear you, and I wish that we had better objective measures of more of the totality of a human. I resonate with your point that we have to be wary about relying on subjective measures just because our heart is telling us to do so. But I

also think that it's important to have a heart. And I know you don't disagree with that, but I'm saying, you know, this is the point I wanted to make, you know. I wish that we had more reliable and valid measures of a child's soul, of a student's well determination. I should say, the fire in their eyes. You can't see an applicants fire in their eyes by test scores on a piece of paper, So these are maybe intangibles, but I wish that we did a better job scientifically

measuring some of these seemingly intangibles. Well, that's why the interviews sometimes try to get at and interviews are notoriously unreliable, very subjective, and they're very subject to manipulation charm, right, you're talking about charm earlier. Yeah, Yeah, the first thing in a that when I counsel people on how to approach medical school interviews, first thing I tell them is your job is to make the interviewer like you, and

the rest is downhill. And you have about forty five seconds from the time you start the interview to make that happen. Because he's going to make a he or she's going to make that judgment in about forty five seconds. Because they see a million people, you have to stand out and if you're likable, the rest of the interview will go well. And I think there's true in a lot of circumstances. You know, likability is important, it's important. A lot of characteristics of a human are important. But

you mean to our topic today, so's intelligence. So I'm going to end on that note, and I want to thank you. I really respect the work you've done your career and it influenced me in my own dissertation. When I was working in my own dissertation on a broadening general intelligence to unconscious and PUSSIT learning measures and creativity, I found the PIFIT model you and Rex Young developed very very important for my work. So look, I want to thank you so much for being such a legend

in the field of intelligence. And on one hand, that really is a warm, fuzzy feeling that I'm gott and I appreciate it. On the other hand, it's making me feel even older than now. You know, when I give talks now there are people in the audience who do very sophisticated brain imaging who literally were not born when

I did my nineteen eighty eight study. So time marches on, and by the way, I will end on this note, this is why I am optimistic that very complex problems like figuring out the neurobiology of intelligence, it's a matter

of time. And if you go back fifty years ago to where we are now and what we know about the brain and our methodologies white years and so imagining fifty years in the future, I think, you know, it's a lot is possible that seems impossible now, Well, thanks for coming on and talking to us about the future of human intelligence. Well, I appreciate the chance and my best wishes same to you. Thanks for listening to this

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