Chaos Program

If I had a bigger brain, how many more languages would I be able to say, “The check is in the mail” in? Wouldn’t it be nice to be smart enough to answer the important questions (some of them may even be more important than that one)?

The nature of people with big brains has been a favorite science fiction theme for many years. I’ve seen it done in an old episode of Outer Limits and a much newer episode of Farscape, for example. In an excerpt from their book Big Brain, published online in Discover magazine’s December offerings (here) Gary Lynch and Richard Granger come up with some interesting thoughts on this question. I’ll say up front, this was interesting enough reading that I bought the book and really hope it’s not completely obsolete by the time I have a chance to read it (Do you think there might be a flaw in my reading strategy?).

According to a blurb about the book on Discover’s website (here) Lynch is a psychiatrist and Granger a cognitive scientist, which seems to mean they are doing a little more than speculating about the subject. The hook they use to get into it is the skulls of a pre-human species of hominid called Boskop (named for the place the skulls were found). Measurements of the skulls indicate that the brains of the Boskop people were roughly 25% larger than those of modern humans. From this, Lynch and Granger calculate an average IQ for Boskop of 150 which is 50% higher than the human average. But according to the excerpt they’re gone, now. Boskop became extinct maybe 10,000 years ago. We did not.

Were Boskop not as smart as the brain size calculation seems to indicate? Or was intelligence not an important thing 10,000 years ago? Hmmm. 10,000 years ago. Isn’t that about the time the last ice age ended? Maybe their brains overheated as the temperature went up. No, that sounds a little far fetched

Anyway, there are serious flaws in calculating intelligence based on brain size alone. The biggest one is that brain size is only one parameter in intelligence. Whales have bigger brains than humans but are not necessarily smarter. The convolutions in the cerebral cortex make a big difference. Roughly speaking, the more complicated the folding of the cortex, the smarter a species will be. This is why humans are (mostly) smarter than whales. [For a decent discussion of brain size see this article at HowStuffWorks.com]

Nutrition is an important factor in brain development, too and this may have a direct bearing on the discussion of the intelligence of prehistoric peoples. For children to develop to their best potential they need the right kind of nutrition continuously at the right time of their lives. Irregular meals or irregular protein (or sickness or injury or failure of stimulation or who knows what else) in the first two years of (human) life can cripple brain development. After that time, it can never make up the ground it lost early on.

Agriculture and animal husbandry helped humans to improve nutrition and improve brain development. If Boskop people did not adopt those things (and, during an ice age, it might have been harder, or at least different than it became later), they probably did not live up to their potential, despite their brain size. Evidence of their nutritional habits is almost non-existent now. Still, significantly bigger brains would probably correlate to a longer childhood and a longer period of time needed for the brain to develop internal connections. This also increases the window of time when a famine or plague could cause irreparable damage to child mental development. Not to mention more time to develop “issues.” Imagine being a teenager for twice as long! Any creature like that could maybe be excused for having a high rate of suicide, or of teenagericide.

Lynch and Granger raise some interesting possibilities for what beings with Boskop-sized brains might have been capable of if they did live up to their mental potential. For example, their brains probably would have stored much more sensory detail for memories than humans normally do. For them, every memory would include all the sounds, smells and feelings of the original experience. The visual details would be sharp and clear, whereas ours tend to be vague and even mutable. Human brains tend to conjure up only partial memories, and fill in the blanks with imaginary details. This is one reason why two eye witnesses to the same event can have wildly different stories (see here for interesting background on how fluid eye witness testimony can be).

Would super-detailed memories be an advantage in trying to survive in an uncivilized world? On one hand, lessons learned from experience would be more accurate when the memory of the experience was more accurate. Lynch and Granger point out that this does not apply just to individual memories but to whole sequences and hierarchies of memory. That is, connections between disparate things learned are more complex, allowing more to be learned in a shorter time. On the other hand, accurate memories would also be likely to be intense memories – and those can be intensely distracting. Maybe, though, that’s one of the reasons memory is so hazy. Maybe it works best when it’s just a guide and not a complete roadmap.

The uses to which a great brain are put make a difference, too. If these hypothetically smarter people never invented scientific method or mathematics or representative government, their view of everything would have been vastly different from ours. And there would have been a tremendous impact on their adaptation to the world – and to competing species such as Cro Magnon and Neanderthals. Even a truly brilliant race of poets, musicians or bartenders may not have been able to survive as a distinct race in that world.

There is a strong argument that the Boskop people, in fact, were not a distinct race, that the whole idea is a result of sloppy science and poorly defined categories (see here for a good rundown). That explains the seeming conundrum of a smarter species than ours that somehow failed to survive even though we did. They did not die out because they never really existed. The bones ascribed to them belonged to exceptional members of other species. This should not detract from the useful discussion of the implications of a bigger and correspondingly more complex brain than ours. It is worth wondering how a more complicated brain is really different from the ordinary ones we are used to? What
is the role of intelligence in history and human development? How is it tied to culture? What is the point of diminishing returns?

In science fiction stories, smart aliens either view humans as primitives almost unworthy of notice, or become god-like yet pacifistic teachers, depending on who is doing the writing. Imagining more detail about how a bigger brain works and sounds more interesting. At least, it seems to me to be much more interesting to study people who were at least potentially smarter than us, than people who were, comparatively speaking, kind of dumb. Right?

update 1/4/2010: John Hawks, who wrote the post debunking Boskop as a species (see above) has added another post explaining how bad the anthropology is in the book Big Brain. The new post is here. I’ve started reading the book and while it uses the fictional Boskops as a way of explaining concepts about intelligence, the book is not about Boskop. It’s about the brain and the nature and qualities of intelligence with specific reference to how intelligence can be modeled (top-down style artificial intelligence). I’m not far enough into it yet to judge whether the rest of the science is as poorly researched as the anthropology. I thought about leaving a comment on Mr Hawks’s blog to tell him what I’ve just typed here,  but couldn’t find a link or form for submitting comments. His loss.

Tags: brain, IQ

This entry was posted on Friday, January 1st, 2010 at 3:31 pm and is filed under science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.