Elephants and whales have bigger brains than humans, but people are more intelligent. Intelligence resides in the brain tissue that is not needed to control the body.
The size of our brain and our intelligence have increased over the course of evolution. Intelligence is the ability to solve problems, quick reasoning, the capacity to act purposefully, think rationally and interact with your surroundings in an effective manner. There are many types of intelligence: linguistic, logical, mathematical, spatial, musical, social, and motoric intelligence. The intelligence quotient (IQ) is a poor measure of it.
One researcher claims that we all have ‘a small Rainman’ in our brain. Another feels that exceptional talent is primarily a question of training.
There are various theories about the neurobiological background to Savant syndrome. The exceptional gifts associated with that syndrome almost never develop unless the brain has been damaged, preferably on the left side. This allows a strengthening of the connections with other brain structures, which leads to superior functioning of the visual cortex, the part of the cerebral cortex responsible for vision. There is some evidence to support this hypothesis, such as the left-sided brain damage in Kim Peek.
A person with savant syndrome often excels in one talent. Calculations, drawing or playing piano. There are savants who can’t count but can apply algorithms.
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st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } It’s only recently that autism has been recognised as a brain development disorder. A mother can’t help it if her son doesn’t want to be cuddled.
Autism is characterised by severely disrupted social interaction and a severely reduced repertoire of activities and interests. Autism was described for the first time in 1943 by Leo Kanner in Baltimore and, independently, by Hans Asperger in Vienna in 1944, both using the same name for it. There were, however, major differences between the two descriptions.
/* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:Standaardtabel; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:”"; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:”Times New Roman”;} We are aware of our surroundings and of ourselves. Some brain structures are essential for consciousness, like the cerebral cortex and the thalamus, where the information from our senses is collected. After a stroke on the right side of the brain, both self-awareness and awareness of the surroundings may be partially impaired. The patient may not be aware of being paralysed on the left side and may ignore everything on the left, both in the surroundings and of his own body. This condition is known as “Neglect”.If you approach the patient’s bed from the left, you will not be seen, even though the patient can turn his head and could see you. If this patient reads a newspaper, he only looks at the right-hand pages, and he only draws the right-hand side of objects like a clock, a cat or a flower. Only the right-hand side of their dinner is eaten. If you turn the plate through 180 degrees, then they eat the other half.
Daniel Tammet has Asperger syndrome, a form of autism coupled with high intelligence. He also has Savant syndrome which is generally characterised by excellence in one skill. Tammet has, however, unprecedented mathematical and language talents. In 2004 he set a record by faultlessly reciting from memory 22,514 decimal places of the number pi in five hours and nine minutes. He learned the series of numbers in just three months.Autistic people often think in images, an ability called synesthesia. Tammet has this ability too, for example he sees Wednesday, his birthday on January 31, 1979, as blue, and so the title of his book becomes clear: Born on a Blue Day.
For Tammet, letters and numbers have colours. He sees numbers not only in colour, but also in different forms and sizes: he can recognise every prime number up to 9,973 by its crystal form. When I spent a few days with him just before the publication of the Dutch translation of his book, Tammet told me proudly that he now also paints. “What are you painting?” I asked with interest. “The number pi,” he answered. He sees series of numbers, like the decimals of the number pi, as mountainous landscapes.
Life has to meet a number of criteria such as mobility, metabolism, growth, independent reproduction (requiring information-carrying molecules like DNA or RNA), integration and regulation. Although the last two properties are also present in single-celled creatures, they reach the pinnacle of their development in the evolution of the nerve cell.
Separately, no single criterion specifies life. Flowing water moves, rusting iron metabolises, a crystal grows, and nowadays many young people decide that they can have a better life without reproduction. Integration and regulation can also be programmed in a computer. To define life, the combination of all these criteria must be present.
At the other end of the scale, doctors have been establishing death for centuries by the absence of a heartbeat and respiration, and by calculating that these functions will not return.
We have always been taught that nerve cells are extremely susceptible to a lack of oxygen: irreparable brain damage occurs after just four to five minutes without oxygen. This is true, but apparently it is not because nerve cells are so sensitive to a shortage of oxygen.
According to the Rotterdam ‘professor of happiness’ Ruut Veenhoven, feeling happy does not depend on having a goal in life. This does not surprise me because life has started by random chance, then evolved and has no purpose.
But enjoying it is useful, as it is closely associated with food and reproduction and thus crucial for survival. These ‘hedonistic’ feelings are so strong that they lead to overpopulation and obesity. Being in love, maternal love and pleasure in social contacts are also positive feelings benefiting the survival of the species.
The cognitive development of humans enabled feelings of pleasure to be elevated to the ‘higher order’ of art and science, altruism, financial and transcendent activities, and to happiness.
We know what disturbances in these feelings can do from psychiatry. Mania can be accompanied by strong feelings of happiness and an absence of every positive feeling – so-called anhedonia – is seen in depression, schizophrenia, autism and addiction.
During the early stages of development, our gender identity (the feeling of being a man or a woman) and our sexual orientation (homo, hetero, or bi-sexuality) are programmed in the brain, as is our body image. An unusual disorder of this last process is Body Integrity Identity Disorder.
People with Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID) feel from an early age that part of their body does not belong to them and they want to get rid of it, no matter what the cost. They do not accept a particular limb as part of their body, even if it there’s nothing wrong with it.
This leads to an overpowering desire for amputation. Only once their leg or arm has been amputated, and 27 percent of these people manage to achieve this, do they feel “complete”. Surgeons who carry out these requests run the risk of being condemned for amputating a healthy limb. This is strange, as the same thing happens with transsexuals, and even, if we’re talking about the principle, when a circumcision is performed.
Adolescents do not consider their immature brains to be the problem, rather their parents. In fact, it’s about the same thing: the parents are substituting for the adolescent’s immature prefrontal cortex (PFC).
The parents must take care of the planning, organisation, moral framework and the behavioural limits during the period in which the adolescent’s PFC is still immature. These are the functions that the adolescent’s slowly maturing PFC will gradually take over. The problem is that the adolescents of today have realised that their parents do not have the power to enforce their role as a substitute for the PFC.
Swaab
Dick Swaab is a professor of neurobiology at the University of Amsterdam and is associated with the Nederlands Institute for Neuroscience. He writes a weekly column for NRC Handelsblad.
Elephants and whales have bigger brains than humans, but people are more intelligent. Intelligence resides in the brain tissue that is not needed to control the body.
