INTELLEGANCE

9
DR MOHAMMAD A.S. KAMIL
DEFINITION
• intelligent behavior, has been variously defined as a “general mental
efficiency,” as “innate cognitive ability,” or as “the aggregate or global
capacity of an individual to act purposefully, to think rationally, and to
deal effectively with his environment” , in other words, the capacity
to have ideas and reason about them.
• It is global because it characterizes an individual’s behavior as a
whole; it is an aggregate in the sense that it is composed of several
independent and qualitatively distinguishable cognitive abilities.
• As every educated person recognizes, intelligence has something to
do with normal cerebral function. It is also apparent that the level of
intelligence differs from one person to another, and members of
certain families are exceptionally bright and intellectually
accomplished, whereas members of other families are just the
opposite.
• If properly motivated, intelligent children excel in school and score
high on intelligence tests, although this may be tautologic as the tests
are designed specially to measure certain aspects of performance.
INTELLEGANT TESTS
• The first intelligence tests, devised by Binet and Simon in 1905, were
for the purpose of predicting scholastic success.
• The term intelligence quotient, or IQ, was introduced by the German
psychologist Stern and used by Terman in 1916 for the development
of intelligence testing. It denotes the figure that is obtained by
dividing the subject’s mental age (as determined by the Binet-Simon
scale) by his chronologic agenand multiplying the result by 100.
• IQ=(MENTAL AGE/CHRONOLOGICAL AGE)X 100
• Mental age: is a measure of an individual's mental attainment based
on the age in which it takes an average individual to reach that same
level of attainment. a numerical scale unit derived by dividing an
individual’s results in an intelligence test by the average score for
other people of the same age. Thus, a 4-year-old (chronologic age)
child who scored 150 on an IQ test would have a mental age of 6 (the
age-appropriate average score is 100; therefore, MA = (150/100) × 4 =
6). The MA measure of performance is not effective beyond the age
of 14.
• Chronologic age: is a measure of an individual's age based on the
calendar date on which he or she was born, It is measured in days,
months and years.
Mental age
• The IQ correlates, but only broadly, with achievement in school and to a
lesser extent with eventual success in professional work.
• An individual IQ increases with age up to the 14th to 16th years and then
remains stable, at least until late adult life.
• The original studies of pedigrees of highly intelligent and mentally less able
families, which revealed a striking concordance between parent and child,
lent support to the idea that intelligence is to a large extent inherited.
• However, it became evident that the tests used were also greatly
influenced by the environment in which the child was reared.
• Moreover, tests were less reliable in identifying talented children who were
not offered optimal opportunities.
• This led to the equally polarized but widespread belief that intelligence
tests are only achievement tests and that environmental factors fostering
high performance are the important factors determining intelligence.
• Past studies of monozygotic and dizygotic twins raised in the same or
different families put the matter in a clearer light. Identical twins reared
together or apart are more alike in intelligence than nonidentical twins
brought up in the same home .
• A study of elderly twins by McClearn and colleagues is further instructive;
even in twins who were older than 80 years of age, a substantial part (an
estimated 62 percent) of cognitive performance could be accounted for by
shared genetic traits.
• These findings suggest that life experience alters intelligence, but in a
modest way.
• There is therefore a strong suggestion that genetic endowment is the more
important factor—a view that was championed by Piercy and more
recently by Herrnstein and Murray.
• However, there is equally valid evidence that early learning modifies
the level of ability that is finally attained.
• In this way, intelligence may be looked upon not as the sum of genetic
and environmental factors but as the product of the two.
• More importantly, it is generally appreciated that non scholastic
achievement or success is governed by factors other than intellectual
ones, such as curiosity, a readiness to learn, interest, persistence,
sociability, and ambition or motivation—factors that vary
considerably from person to person and are not at all measured by
tests of intelligence.
GENDER AND INTELLAGANCE
• As to the genetic mechanisms involved in the inheritance of intelligence, a limited
amount is known.
• There is an excess of males with what was previously called mental retardation, and now
less pejoratively “developmental delay,” and there are several well-characterized
syndromes in which the inheritance of mental retardation is X-linked.
• Also notable are the somewhat different patterns of performance between males and
females on subtests of the various intelligence tests (males perform better in spatial
ability and certain mathematical tasks).
• Males are more likely to be affected by advantageous or by aberrant genes on their
single X chromosome, whereas females benefit from the mosaic provided by two X
chromosomes.
• In some families, high intelligence segregates to certain individuals through an X-linked
pattern.
• Further study will determine the validity of these views and of what will certainly prove
to be a polygenic inheritance of intelligence and intellectual traits.
BRAIN WEIGHT ,SIZE?
• Brain weight and the complexity of the convolutional pattern are not correlated
with intelligence,despite popular notions to the contrary, including a widely
criticized analysis of the brain of Albert Einstein.
• (Witelson and colleagues proposed that an enlarged inferior parietal lobule, a
cross modal association area, accounted for Einstein’s visuospatial and
mathematical genius, but this is certainly an oversimplification).
• Only laboratory measures of vigilance and facility of sensory registration (speed
of motor responses/reaction time and rapid recognition of differences between
lines, shapes, or pictures) have a consistent but still modest correlation with IQ.
• However, it is of interest that morphometric features of the regions of the cortex
that are presumed to underlie IQ and verbal skills, such as the frontal and
language areas, show a heritable component when measured on high-resolution
MRI scans
INTELLEGANCE THEORIES
• As to psychologic theories of intelligence, several have traditionally been influential at different
historical periods.
• One is the two-factor theory of Spearman, who noted that all the separate tests of
cognitive abilities correlated with each other, suggesting that a general factor (g factor) enters
into all performance.
• Because none of the correlations between subtests approached unity, he postulated that each
test measures not only this general ability (commonly identified with intelligence) but also a
subsidiary factors specific to the individual tests, which he designated the s factors.
• A second theory, the multifactorial theory of THURSTONE, proposed that intelligence consists of a
number of entirely separable primary mental abilities, such as memory, verbal facility, numerical
ability, visuospatial perception, and capacity for problem solving, all of them more or less
equivalent. He proposed that these primary abilities, although correlated, are not subordinate to
a more general ability.
• While TEYESENCK said, intelligence exists in three forms: biologic (the genetic component), social
(development of the genetic component in relation to personal relationships), and a number of
specific abilities subject to measurement by psychometric tests.
• Thurstone’s multifactorial theory of intelligence has been periodically
reframed, for example by Gardner,(FOURTH THEORY) who separated
six categories of high-order cerebral ability but restated them in more
modern terms:
1- Linguistic (encompassing all language functions);
2-Musical (including composition and performance);
3-Logical–mathematical (the ideas and works of mathematicians);
4-Spatial (including artistic talent and the creation of visual
impressions);
5-Bodily–kinesthetic (including dance and athletic performance);
6- Personal (consciousness of self and others in social interactions).
He referred to each of these as intelligences, defined as the ability to
solve problems or resolve difficulties and to be creative within the
particular field.
GARDNER
Several lines of evidence are marshaled in support of this parceling of skills and
abilities:
(1) each may be developed to an exceptionally high level in certain individuals,
constituting virtuosity or genius;
(2) each can be destroyed or spared in isolation as a consequence of a lesion in a
certain part of the nervous system;
(3) in certain individuals, that is, in prodigies, special competence in one of these
abilities is evident at an unusually early age;
(4) in the autism spectrum, one or more of these abilities may be selectively
spared or developed to an abnormally high degree (idiot savant).
Each of these entities appears to have a genetic basis in so far as musical, artistic,
mathematical, and athletic ability often runs in families, but their full development
is influenced by environmental factors.
GENIALITY
• There are only limited data regarding the highest levels of
intelligence, identified as genius. Terman and Ogden’s longitudinal
study of 1,500 California schoolchildren who were initially tested in
1921 supported the idea that an extremely high IQ predicted future
scholastic accomplishments (though not occupational or life success).
• On the other hand, most individuals recognized as geniuses have
been especially skilled in one domain—such as painting, linguistics,
music, chess, or mathematics—and such “domain genius” is not
necessarily predicated on high IQ scores, although certain individuals
display cross modal superiorities—particularly in mathematics and
music.
BRAIN SITES FOR INTELLEGENCE
• One would suppose that neurology, embodying an understanding of so many
diseases affecting the cerebrum, might make it possible to verify one of these
several theories of intelligence and to determine the anatomy of this cognitive
entity.
• Presumably, Spearman’s (g factor)of intelligence would be maximally impaired, by
diffuse lesions, in proportion to the mass of brain involved, an idea expressed by
Lashley as the “mass-action principle.” Indeed, according to Chapman and Wolff,
there is a correlation between the volume of brain tissue lost and a general
deficit of cerebral function.
• Others disagree, claiming that no universal psychologic deficit can be linked to
lesions affecting particular parts of the brain. Probably the truth lies between
these two divergent points of view. According to Tomlinson and colleagues, who
studied the effects of vascular lesions in the aging brain, lesions that involved
more than 50 mL of tissue caused a moderate general reduction in performance,
especially in speed and capacity to solve problems.
• Piercy, on the other hand, found correlations only between specific
intellectual deficits and lesions of particular parts of the left and right
hemispheres.
• It is important to acknowledge, for example, that lesions of the frontal
lobes, and particularly the prefrontal regions, which disorder planning
and “executive” functions, do not measurably affect overall IQ but do,
of course, slow mental processing and degrade subtests specific to
these skills.
• Neurologic data, while unable to locate the sources of a general factor
for intelligence certainly does not exclude its possibility—one that is
unavoidably measured in many different tests of cerebral functions.
• It is expressed if the connections between the frontal lobes and other
parts of the brain are intact as attention, drive, and motivation are
noncognitive psychologic attributes of fundamental importance to
performance reside in this lobe.
• It is also possible, if not likely, that the parietal lobe associative areas
of the cerebrum are engaged in the processing of sensory experiences
and their manipulation in symbolic form.
• This applies equally to the ability to relate thoughts to each other
and to stored concepts, but here, memory, symbols, and names,
requiring the full function of the temporal lobes, play a central role.
CREATIVITY
• An equivalently complex problem arises in the neurologic analysis of the highest human
achievement and the method of human advancement, namely creativity.
• In some ways, creativity is tied to special skills along the lines of Gardner’s modality-
based intelligence, particularly as it relates to artistic work, but the brain structures
involved in aesthetics and abstraction are obscure, as Zeki points out.
• Some insight is gained from the fact that intelligence and problem-solving ability are only
roughly tied to creativity and that there are congenital absences and deficiencies of
appreciation of visual, artistic, or mathematical skills.
• The capacity to be creative may be inhibited by other functions of the brain, as exposed
in the case described by Seeley and colleagues of a woman with frontotemporal
dementia whose artistic abilities emerged as her facility with language deteriorated.
• creativity almost certainly do not reside in a particular lobe or structure of the brain and
may depend on the overdevelopment of certain associative areas, as well as on frontal
lobe drive and, of course, are fully manifest only by exposure and encouragement.