Idiot Brain Read Online Free PDF Page B

probably seen ads for things that claim to offer substances, tools or techniques for boosting your brain power, usually for a price. It’s highly unlikely that any of these things will actually work in any significant way, because if they did they’d be far more popular, with everyone getting smarter and bigger-brained until we’re all crushed under the weightof our own skulls. But how does one genuinely increase brain power, boosting intelligence?
    For this, it would be useful to know what differentiates the unintelligent brain from the intelligent one, and how do we turn the former into the latter? One potential factor is something that seems completely wrong: intelligent brains apparently use less power.
    This counterintuitive argument is something that arose from scanning studies directly observing and recording brain activity, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). This is a clever technique where people are placed in MRI scanners and their metabolic activity (where the tissues and cells in the body are “doing stuff ”) is observed. Metabolic activity requires oxygen, supplied by the blood. An fMRI scanner can tell the difference between oxygenated blood and deoxygenated blood and when one becomes the other, which occurs at high levels in areas of the body that are metabolically active, like brain regions working hard at a task. Basically, fMRI can monitor brain activity and spot when one part of the brain is especially active. For example, if a subject is doing a memory task, the areas of the brain required for memory processing will be more active than usual, and this shows up on the scanner. Areas showing increased activity would be identifiable as memory-processing areas.
    It isn’t as simple as that because the brain is constantly active in many different ways, so finding the “more” active bits requires much filtering and analysis. However, the bulk of modern research about identifying brain regions that have specific functions have utilized fMRI.
    So far, so good; you’d expect that a region responsible for a specific action would be more active when having to do thataction, like a weightlifter’s bicep is using more energy when picking up a dumbbell. But no. Bizarre findings from several studies, such as those from Larson and others in 1995, 8 showed that in tasks designed to test fluid intelligence, activity was seen in the prefrontal cortex . . . except when the subject was very good at the task.
    To clarify, the region supposedly responsible for fluid intelligence apparently wasn’t used in people who had high levels of fluid intelligence. This didn’t make a lot of sense—like weighing people and finding that only lighter people show up on the scales. Further analysis found that more intelligent subjects did show activity in the prefrontal cortex, but only when their tasks were challenging, as in difficult enough for them to have to put some effort into it. This led to some interesting findings.
    Intelligence isn’t the work of one dedicated brain region but several, all interlinked. In intelligent people, it seems these links and connections are more efficient and organized, requiring less activity overall. Think of it in terms of cars: if you’ve got a car with an engine roaring like a pack of lions impersonating a hurricane, and a car making no noise whatsoever, the first one isn’t automatically going to be the better model. In this case, the noise and activity is because it’s trying to do something the more efficient model can do with minimal effort. There’s a growing consensus that it’s the extent and efficiency of the connections between the regions involved (prefrontal cortex, parietal lobe and so on) that has a big influence on someone’s intelligence; the better he or she can communicate and interact, the quicker the processing and the less effort is required to make decisions and calculations.
    This