Intelligence Theories

At number three on my list is a device in whose story I or rather my rabbit Wilhelmina played here by an actor had a starring role. Well a role anyway. I met some physics friends in the bar having a beer one evening and they said "We've just built this machine with lots of wire "and string and ceiling wax and an old television screen "and it's called a Magnetic Resonance Image machine "and would you like to put your rabbit in it?" So we went down to the sub-basement of Hammersmith Hospital and we put Wilhelmina gently into the machine. I was a bit worried about it and then after minutes of cooking we got a photograph and it looked a bit like this. Just a blur. And I didn't have the sense to realise that this was going to be quite revolutionary in its time. I think my pet rabbit was one of the first living organisms to be photographed like this. And the technology which was then in its infancy went on to become the MRI scanner. For much of my career in medicine X-rays were the most effective way of looking inside the human body. But they didn't give a particularly clear image of all the organs beyond our bones. MRI scanning changed all that. Engineers first used MRI to look inside metals. Now we're able see directly into living tissues and that's given amazing

Theories about intelligence

 From the moment we're conceived to the day we take our last breath science and the way we use it touches every one of us. Science has given immense power to save and nurture life. But the pace of change is so great that we don't often take time to stop and appreciate how far we've come. That's why I want to share with you ten of the most important scientific advances of our time and reveal some of the things that might just lie ahead. At the end of the programme I'll be asking you to vote for the advance you think has done the most to change your world. It's had a massive impact on our society. It's really changed your life hasn't it? So you're the perfect bionic woman? Yeah! And the winner? Well it's up to you. It's one small step for man one giant leap for mankind. The last years has seen science transform our world. In half a century it's tackled countless diseases put men on the moon and completely changed the way we communicate.

Intelligence Theories XII

 At the University of Goettingen in Germany they're pioneering technology that could greatly extend our control over our own brains. They're developing a means to turbo-charge our grey matter. The aim is to improve the volunteer's ability to subconsciously learn. The test itself is simple. When Leila sees a dot appear on the screen she has to tap a corresponding key on the keyboard. There is a pattern to when the dots appear. But it's impossible to detect. At least before the artificial stimulation of her brain begins.
What we want to do is to facilitate the excitability of her motor cortex. And in order to be able to do that we have to fix an electrode. I presume this is perfectly safe. I mean I'd be a bit nervous about having electricity shot through my brain. Well they're very weak currents.

Intelligence Theories VIII

 We don't know how many genes we're talking about and if there are very very many they're going to have very very small effects and be very very difficult to find. But I think these genetic differences when they're expressed are going to show up throughout the brain. It's not going to be this gene does that bit of the brain this gene affects another bit of the brain. Now that's a hypothesis for now but it's a very testable one when we find these damn genes if we ever do find them. Scientists have now gathered data from combined studies of over pairs of twins to give a more up-to-date measure of nature versus nurture.

Intelligence Theories VII

I didn't know because this was everything. Do you want to hand me the dog? I am immensely pleased with the outcome of the mating between Dr Blake and Number . We've had a splendid result. I think no question about it. Doran is about as ideal as nearly as we can judge at his early age about as ideal as we could hope. Everyone wanted to know about my genius sperm bank child. Doran represented what Dr Graham was trying to achieve. Smart beautiful. Everybody wanted a Doran. They just wanted to come to our bank and get a Doran. The phone rang off the hook. We had arrived. After years in operation my genius sperm bank was ultimately responsible for the production of children. We've got lots of baby pictures. Jessie ended up being the th baby born to the repository.

Intelligence Theories III

This was a deliberate construction of a series of crosshatches in each direction. A line across the top a line through the middle and a line down the bottom. So it actually circumscribed that engraving. As if they had made the crosses and deliberately surrounded it with these other lines as well. Here is the first example of the ability of humans to store something outside of the human brain. You're storing a message that somebody else who is part of that same group can pick up and they will understand what that meant. This is the beginning of things like art writing and everything else that follows. It was the earliest evidence of the thinking brain. There is still much that we don't know about the evolution of human intelligence. But it was during the second half of the th century that the ideas of Charles Darwin began to profoundly influence our thinking.
 Francis Galton was the first scientist to propose that intelligence was a biologically-based mental faculty. He was Darwin's cousin and was much inspired by reading his book On The Origin Of Species. Galton thought that human mental abilities were inherited in just the same way as the plant and animal traits outlined by Darwin. And he set out to prove it. Galton was obsessed with measuring things.
 He was convinced that everything was inherited from arm length to reaction time. According to his theory people with bigger heads such as himself would have a greater capacity for intelligence than others. So he started to measure the heads of a group of Cambridge students and compared those measurements to the test results. But disappointingly for him the correlation between those two sets of data was low. The evidence simply didn't stack up. But Galton stuck doggedly to his conviction that intelligence was inherited. He coined the phrase "nature versus nurture" which has proved to be one of the most enduring questions at the heart of the intelligence debate.
 But it was Galton's disciple a psychologist named Cyril Burt whose research was to have a huge impact on both our thinking about and our testing of intelligence. Horizon dramatised Burt's youthful idealisation of Galton which would have an enduring influence on his work. Galton was one of Burt's heroes maybe the only one. Of all the psychologists whose names were mentioned in my discussions with Burt I think the only one that he seemed to talk about admiringly was Galton.
This is young Loddy Sir Francis. Loddy? Loderick sir. It's a shortening. My first name is Cyril then Loderick. Are you good at your schoolwork Loddy? Oh yes sir. Very good. He's a very diligent boy. He has a diligent father. He will have inherited his father's intelligence. Burt seemed to worship Francis Galton. He kept on mentioning the one occasion on which he met him.

Intelligence Theories II

Even now when I look at bees it's hard to imagine that these tiny nervous little insects could be intelligent. Yet in all this apparent chaos there is a tremendous amount of order. Bees are not behaving randomly they are going about the task of solving a series of specific problems. They spend the first few days feeding the queen and taking care of her. And then they spend a few days building honeycomb in the hive. And then a few days guarding the hive's entrance and then finally several weeks gathering food from flowers. These are all clever things and yet this behaviour is driven by biological cues. All through the life of a bee an innate sensitivity to certain cues helps guide its behaviour. And this is by no means an exception this is the rule in the animal world. And it makes sense too. If the behaviour is sufficiently predictable and the cues are sufficiently predictable it makes sense for an animal not to reason out what it ought to do but to simply respond automatically.
 A good example of this is tits open milk bottles because instinctively they peel back bark to look for grubs. Gould concluded that unlike humans the short lifespans of many insects and animals means they simply don't have enough time to work out solutions to problems. Their apparently intelligent behaviour is just a response to a series of biological cues. However there are animals that do appear to display a capacity for intelligent problem-solving.
 Research into one species - chimpanzees - has begun to reveal greater capabilities that go beyond pure instinct. Writer Danny Wallace went to Uganda to find out more. He was keen to investigate an experiment to test a chimp's ability to solve a complex problem. This box of bananas placed away from the cage poses a tricky problem. Ah. I see what you've done. 'To get the bananas to come towards me I would have to pull both ends of the rope. 'But they were too far apart.' Right OK. I can't. Diana? Will you be another chimp please? Chimp-cam. 'I could see that if I didn't get Diana involved I'd get no bananas at all. 'And that didn't bear thinking about.' One two three. We did it we got the bananas. Now for the chimps. Chimp one has a rational choice. Share the bananas with chimp two or get no banana at all. Three two one. Release the chimp. OK. So he's going a bit mad. Chimp one can't get the bananas. Chimp two is going mad chimp one is wondering what's going on. Oh he has let him out. T
 hat's amazing. That's incredible. Chimp one he's very happy and off they go. That was brilliant. That was quicker than me. The chimp appeared to be making a thoughtful decision suggesting that chimps are intelligent enough to co-operate. A key human trait. Yet human intelligence still sets us apart from our closest
evolutionary cousins. Thank you for taking part in this experiment. This is for you. Scientists have delved deep into our prehistoric past to try to find out when we developed superior intelligence. When did our ancestors cease being brute animals and first become truly human? When did we learn to think?
 Thinking is the defining trait of humankind. It has given us machines. Technology. Power. No other animal has the ability to look at the world outside and transform it. Where all other animals live from day to day we alone plan ahead. Dream. And create. Find the day we learned to think and you would have identified perhaps the single most important moment in human history. But it was not going to be simple. Thinking leaves no traces. There are no fossilised thoughts waiting to be dug out of the ground and dated. It was like investigating a murder scene without a body. So scientists had to look for indirect clues. Not fossils but other evidence for when thought began. And then they realised that thought must have come hand-in-hand with something else. What are we going to look for first of all that's going to give us evidence that humans were behaving in a modern way? So we look in a way for proxies.
But there was one kind of evidence archaeologists could look for. The obvious line of evidence is art. When you get unquestionable art that's widespread and common I think you can say you're dealing with people just like us. Only humans create and can make sense of art. I'm sure that dozens of dogs have walked down this street in the past years and perhaps not a one has glanced up in awe or wonder and thought to himself what does this mean? For a dog this is colour on a wall. Perhaps even less than that. But to a human being a painting is far more than just a collection of colours.

Intelligence Theories I

 What is intelligence?What does an entomologist study? Wow! That was tough. Did a lot of people get this one in two minutes? And why do some people apparently have so much more of it than others? Where does intelligence come from? Is it a matter of luck biology or just a good education that makes this guy cleverer than me? Is there anything that I or my parents could have done to make me more intelligent? Well scientists have been battling thorny questions like these for decades making intelligence one of the most studied traits in science. But it's only really now that we are beginning to get some answers.
For nearly years Horizon has been following that search to understand our mysterious mental power looking at everything from our evolutionary history to whether a computer could outsmart us. And asking the questions how do you test for intelligence? Is it inherited or innate? Nature or nurture? In so doing science has begun to redefine our understanding of what makes every one of us unique.
The benchmark for measuring one person's intelligence against another is the iconic IQ or Intelligence Quotient test. Most of us will have sat through one of these at one time or another. It is the dreaded IQ test with sections on spatial awareness general knowledge and reasoning.
 And it tots up different areas of skill to create one score. A single mark that can brand you with either a low high or maybe an average IQ. Now we've been judged on the merits of this test for years now. What's remarkable about it is that it was introduced in . So essentially this has remained the same for almost years. In Horizon tested the IQs of seven experts in their field to see who would come out on top. Seven people from seven very different backgrounds. All highly successful. And all seven prepared to do battle over the elusive nature of intelligence. The test lasts minutes.
What it revealed would show how our understanding of intelligence has changed since the IQ test was first devised. We have spent years on IQ tests that are basically the same. Imagine if physics or chemistry or medicine or biology were the same today as they were years ago.
 That's essentially the state of the testing industry. It's unusual to find a methodology that has changed so little. And perhaps this reflects the century-long struggle to work out how intelligence develops. In their bid to understand human intelligence scientists have looked for evidence of it in other animals. During the s Dr James Gould searched for signs of intelligent behaviour in the complex lives of bees.