Race and IQ - a few crisp facts

The debate over race and IQ seems endless and mind-numbing, usually generating more heat than light. A recent Op-Ed piece by Richard Nisbett, brief and to the point, collects several facts:

About 25 percent of the genes in the American black population are European, meaning that the genes of any individual can range from 100 percent African to mostly European. If European intelligence genes are superior, then blacks who have relatively more European genes ought to have higher I.Q.’s than those who have more African genes. But it turns out that skin color and “negroidness” of features — both measures of the degree of a black person’s European ancestry — are only weakly associated with I.Q. (even though we might well expect a moderately high association due to the social advantages of such features).

During World War II, both black and white American soldiers fathered children with German women. Thus some of these children had 100 percent European heritage and some had substantial African heritage. Tested in later childhood, the German children of the white fathers were found to have an average I.Q. of 97, and those of the black fathers had an average of 96.5, a trivial difference.

If European genes conferred an advantage, we would expect that the smartest blacks would have substantial European heritage. But when a group of investigators sought out the very brightest black children in the Chicago school system and asked them about the race of their parents and grandparents, these children were found to have no greater degree of European ancestry than blacks in the population at large.

.. a superior adoption study...looked at black and mixed-race children adopted by middle-class families, either black or white, and found no difference in I.Q. between the black and mixed-race children....children adopted by white families had I.Q.’s 13 points higher than those of children adopted by black families. The environments that even middle-class black children grow up in are not as favorable for the development of I.Q. as those of middle-class whites.

James Flynn, a philosopher and I.Q. researcher in New Zealand, has established that in the Western world as a whole, I.Q. increased markedly from 1947 to 2002. In the United States alone, it went up by 18 points. Our genes could not have changed enough over such a brief period to account for the shift; it must have been the result of powerful social factors. And if such factors could produce changes over time for the population as a whole, they could also produce big differences between subpopulations at any given time.

...interventions at every age from infancy to college can reduce racial gaps in both I.Q. and academic achievement, sometimes by substantial amounts in surprisingly little time. This mutability is further evidence that the I.Q. difference has environmental, not genetic, causes.

IQ scores are malleable.

Brinch and Galloway do a rather clean demonstration that contests the common notion that education has little effect on IQ. Here is the abstract and one figure from the paper.:

Although some scholars maintain that education has little effect on intelligence quotient (IQ) scores, others claim that IQ scores are indeed malleable, primarily through intervention in early childhood. The causal effect of education on IQ at later ages is often difficult to uncover because analyses based on observational data are plagued by problems of reverse causation and self-selection into further education. We exploit a reform that increased compulsory schooling from 7 to 9 y in Norway in the 1960s to estimate the effect of education on IQ. We find that this schooling reform, which primarily affected education in the middle teenage years, had a substantial effect on IQ scores measured at the age of 19 y.

Average IQ and education by time to reform.

Does cannabis use cause lower IQ?

Rogeberg offers a critique of a recent suggestion by Meyer et. al. of a neurotoxic effect of cannabis on developing brains that permanently lowers IQ, based on on a correlation between persistent cannabis use initiated in adolescence and a decline in IQ-scores between the ages of 13 and 38. The data come  the" Dunedin cohort," 1,037 individuals followed from birth (1972/1973) to age 38 y. An alternative confounding model can be based on time-varying effects of socioeconomic status on IQ.

Does cannabis use have substantial and permanent effects on neuropsychological functioning? Renewed and intense attention to the issue has followed recent research on the Dunedin cohort, which found a positive association between, on the one hand, adolescent-onset cannabis use and dependence and, on the other hand, a decline in IQ from childhood to adulthood [Meier et al. (2012) Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 109(40):E2657–E2664]. The association is given a causal interpretation by the authors, but existing research suggests an alternative confounding model based on time-varying effects of socioeconomic status on IQ. A simulation of the confounding model reproduces the reported associations from the Dunedin cohort, suggesting that the causal effects estimated in Meier et al. are likely to be overestimates, and that the true effect could be zero. Further analyses of the Dunedin cohort are proposed to distinguish between the competing interpretations. Although it would be too strong to say that the results have been discredited, the methodology is flawed and the causal inference drawn from the results premature.

Gender differences in the brain connections that predict intelligence.

From Jiang et al:

Scores on intelligence tests are strongly predictive of various important life outcomes. However, the gender discrepancy on intelligence quotient (IQ) prediction using brain imaging variables has not been studied. To this aim, we predicted individual IQ scores for males and females separately using whole-brain functional connectivity (FC). Robust predictions of intellectual capabilities were achieved across three independent data sets (680 subjects) and two intelligence measurements (IQ and fluid intelligence) using the same model within each gender. Interestingly, we found that intelligence of males and females were underpinned by different neurobiological correlates, which are consistent with their respective superiority in cognitive domains (visuospatial vs verbal ability). In addition, the identified FC patterns are uniquely predictive on IQ and its sub-domain scores only within the same gender but neither for the opposite gender nor on the IQ-irrelevant measures such as temperament traits. Moreover, females exhibit significantly higher IQ predictability than males in the discovery cohort. This findings facilitate our understanding of the biological basis of intelligence by demonstrating that intelligence is underpinned by a variety of complex neural mechanisms that engage an interacting network of regions—particularly prefrontal–parietal and basal ganglia—whereas the network pattern differs between genders.

Intellectual performance and the efficiency of functional brain networks.

From van den Heuvel et al., an analysis that strongly suggests that our intellectual performance is likely to be related to how efficiently our brain integrates information between multiple brain regions:

Our brain is a complex network in which information is continuously processed and transported between spatially distributed but functionally linked regions. Recent studies have shown that the functional connections of the brain network are organized in a highly efficient small-world manner, indicating a high level of local neighborhood clustering, together with the existence of more long-distance connections that ensure a high level of global communication efficiency within the overall network. Such an efficient network architecture of our functional brain raises the question of a possible association between how efficiently the regions of our brain are functionally connected and our level of intelligence. Examining the overall organization of the brain network using graph analysis, we show a strong negative association between the normalized characteristic path length of the resting-state brain network and intelligence quotient (IQ). This suggests that human intellectual performance is likely to be related to how efficiently our brain integrates information between multiple brain regions. Most pronounced effects between normalized path length and IQ were found in frontal and parietal regions. Our findings indicate a strong positive association between the global efficiency of functional brain networks and intellectual performance.

Most prominent effects between IQ and the level of global connectivity efficiency (as expressed by a shorter node specific normalized path length) were found in the medial prefrontal cortex (yellow box), bilateral inferior parietal cortex (red box depicts effect in right hemisphere), and precuneus/posterior cingulate regions (orange box) of the functional brain network. Shown are correlation coefficient values of those voxels that had a significant negative association between IQ and normalized path length for T = 0.45 (linear regression, p less than 0.05 uncorrected for multiple comparisons, df = 18, corrected for age).

Decision-making ability, psychopathology, and brain connectivity

An open access review offered by Dolan and his colleagues continues the story of correlating our human competencies with our brain structures. They describe

...a new cognitive construct—decision acuity—that captures global decision-making ability. High decision acuity prominently reflected low decision variability. Decision acuity showed acceptable reliability, increased with age, and was associated with mental health symptoms independently of intelligence. Crucially, it was associated with distinctive resting-state networks, in particular in brain regions typically engaged by decision-making tasks. The association between decision acuity and functional connectivity was temporally stable and distinct from that of IQ.

Highlights

• Young people have a general decision-making ability, which we call “decision acuity” 

• Decision acuity is reflected in how strongly connected certain brain networks are 

• Low decision acuity is associated with general social function psychopathology

Summary

Decision-making is a cognitive process of central importance for the quality of our lives. Here, we ask whether a common factor underpins our diverse decision-making abilities. We obtained 32 decision-making measures from 830 young people and identified a common factor that we call “decision acuity,” which was distinct from IQ and reflected a generic decision-making ability. Decision acuity was decreased in those with aberrant thinking and low general social functioning. Crucially, decision acuity and IQ had dissociable brain signatures, in terms of their associated neural networks of resting-state functional connectivity. Decision acuity was reliably measured, and its relationship with functional connectivity was also stable when measured in the same individuals 18 months later. Thus, our behavioral and brain data identify a new cognitive construct that underpins decision-making ability across multiple domains. This construct may be important for understanding mental health, particularly regarding poor social function and aberrant thought patterns.

Intellectual Ability and Brain Cortex Development in Children

Shaw et. al. have recently published a fascinating study in Nature Magazine that shows that the trajectory of change in the thickness of the cerebral cortex during its development, rather than cortical thickness itself, is most closely related to level of intelligence. Previous studies attempting to correlate thickness or size of frontal cortical regions with intelligence had provided mixed results. Compared to children with average scores, cortex starts out thinner
in children with IQ scores above 120 but later grows thicker. A review of this work by Miller quotes Shaw: "The cortex gets thicker during childhood and reaches a peak and then gets thinner." But the timing of these events was dramatically different in the "superior" group. "the cortex in these children started out thinner, on average, than in the other groups. Then it grew rapidly, starting around age 7, and peaked in thickness around 11 before falling off. Cortical thickness peaked between 7 and 8 years of age in the average-IQ group, and a year or two later in the high-IQ group. By early adulthood, the cortex in all three groups was roughly the same thickness."

Different aspects of human intelligence correlate with cortical thickness versus neural activation.

Choi et al. report an interesting study in the Journal of Neuroscience. I'm passing on the abstract and a bit of explanation of crystallized versus fluid intelligence, but not the usual flashy fMRI graphics:

We hypothesized that individual differences in intelligence (Spearman's g) are supported by multiple brain regions, and in particular that fluid (gF) and crystallized (gC) components of intelligence are related to brain function and structure with a distinct profile of association across brain regions. In 225 healthy young adults scanned with structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging sequences, regions of interest (ROIs) were defined on the basis of a correlation between g and either brain structure or brain function. In these ROIs, gC was more strongly related to structure (cortical thickness) than function, whereas gF was more strongly related to function (blood oxygenation level-dependent signal during reasoning) than structure. We further validated this finding by generating a neurometric prediction model of intelligence quotient (IQ) that explained 50% of variance in IQ in an independent sample. The data compel a nuanced view of the neurobiology of intelligence, providing the most persuasive evidence to date for theories emphasizing multiple distributed brain regions differing in function.

As background:

gC, sometimes described as verbal ability, is more dependent on accumulated knowledge in long-term storage, including semantic memory. gF refers to reasoning ability, and is known to depend on working memory. Although gC and gF are typically correlated and can be considered subfactors of g (Jensen), they are conceptually and empirically separable. For instance, gC continues to increase over the lifespan, but gF peaks in early adulthood and then declines . Furthermore, at the neural level, lesion studies demonstrated that patients with anterior temporal damages perform poorly on tests of semantic knowledge, whereas prefrontal patients typically show profound deficits in solving diverse reasoning tasks.

Genetic variation in the enhancement of intelligence by breastfeeding.

It's the environment AND the genes...Caspi et al. provide a fascinating example of how genetic differences can moderate the effects of environmental influences on an individuals' health and behavior. The authors chose breastfeeding as the environmental exposure because the biological processes underlying its benefits for the developing brain are increasingly well understood. Here are some edited clips from the paper:

The predominant long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids (LC-PUFAs) present in human milk, but not in cow's milk or most infant formulas, are docosahexaenoic acid (DHA; 22:6n-3) and arachidonic acid (AA or ARA; 20:4n-6). Substantial amounts of DHA and AA accumulate in the human brain during the first postnatal months, and infants who are breastfed have higher concentrations of DHA and AA than infants fed unsupplemented formulas. Evidence, in general, is consistent with the hypothesis that LC-PUFAs in breast milk may enhance cognitive development. In humans, children who are breastfed have higher IQs than children not fed breast milk, and this advantage persists into adulthood.

The authors chose to study people with two allelic variants of FADS2, which they termed C and G. FADS2 is an attractive candidate gene because of its role in the modification of dietary fatty acids. FADS2, located on chromosome 11q12.2, encodes the delta-6 desaturase that is the rate-limiting step on the metabolic pathway leading to AA and DHA production.

Examination of different cohorts of several thousand children from ongoing longitudinal studies in New Zealand, England and Wales revealed that breastfed children carrying the C allele showed a 6.4-IQ-point advantage relative to children not fed breast milk. GG homozygotes neither gained an advantage from breastfeeding nor suffered a disadvantage from not being fed breast milk. The authors ruled out alternative explanations of the finding involving gene–exposure correlation, intrauterine growth, social class, and maternal cognitive ability, as well as maternal genotype effects on breastfeeding and breast milk.

...the finding has implications for the public understanding of genetics. The pendulum of opinion surrounding nature versus nurture has swung back and forth, yielding global estimates of heritability versus "environmentality" that have overlooked the contribution of interactions between specific genes and specific experiences. To date, research on gene–environment interactions has been dominated by the search for genetic variants that increase disease susceptibility to environmental pathogens; for example, carriers of "short" 5-HTT alleles who encounter stressful life events are at risk of becoming depressed; carriers of "rapid" NAT2 alleles who eat red meat are at risk of developing colorectal cancer. However, genes are not only implicated in disease; here we have shown that a genetic variant (in FADS2) may also enhance a favorable response (increased IQ) to a salubrious exposure present throughout human ancestry (breastfeeding).

The net generation

Hurt offers a review of Tapscott's recent book "Growing up Digital", which defines the 81 million people born between 1977 to 1997 that make up 27% of the population as the "net generation" (following generations X and Y).

"As the first global generation ever, the Net Geners are smarter, quicker and more tolerant of diversity than their predecessors,” Tapscott writes. “They care strongly about justice and the problems faced by their society and are typically engaged in some kind of civic activity at school, at work or in their communities."

Mr. Tapscott devotes an entire chapter to examining how Net Geners are already using their collective power to transform society — as evidenced by their impact on Barack Obama’s presidential campaign...He documents how Mr. Obama capitalized on interactive social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace that inspired the participation of millions of small donors, while Hillary Rodham Clinton relied on relatively old broadcast-style media like television and e-mail to attract much lower numbers of mostly large donors.

Mr. Tapscott identifies eight norms of many members of the Net Generation: they prize freedom; they want to customize things; they enjoy collaboration; they scrutinize everything; they insist on integrity in institutions and corporations; they want to have fun even at school or work; they believe that speed in technology and all else is normal; and they regard constant innovation as a fact of life.

He cites recent brain-imaging and childhood-development studies to buttress his contention that Internet use by Net Geners has fundamentally changed — and improved — the way their brains are wired. Noting that raw I.Q. scores have been climbing by three points a decade since World War II across racial, income and regional boundaries, Mr. Tapscott asserts that Net Geners are also developing valuable skills that do not show up on standard I.Q. tests.

“Not only do video game players notice more, they have highly developed spatial skills that are useful for architects, engineers and surgeons,” he says.

It's better to be born rich than gifted.

Andrew Van Dam points to work by Papageorge and Thom use genome based measurements to demonstrate that even though genetic endowments are distributed almost equally among children in low-income and high-income families the least-gifted children of high-income parents graduate from college at higher rates than the most-gifted children of low-income parents.

Thom and Papageorge’s analysis builds on the findings of one of the biggest genome-wide studies yet conducted. Published by a separate team of a dozen authors in Nature Genetics in July, it’s the latest result of a lengthy, ongoing effort to bring genetic analysis to the social sciences.

The Nature Genetics team scanned millions of individual base pairs across 1,131,881 individual genomes for evidence of correlations between genes and years of schooling completed. They synthesized the findings into a single score we can use to predict educational attainment based on genetic factors.

Thom and Papageorge studied the team’s index after it was calculated for a long-running retirement survey sponsored by the Social Security Administration and the National Institute on Aging. About 20,000 of the survey’s respondents, born between 1905 and 1964, provided their DNA along with their responses, which allowed the economists to attach genetic scores individuals’ academic and economic achievements.

Previous attempts to separate academic potential from the advantages given to children of wealthy families relied on measures such as IQ tests, which are biased by parents’ education, occupation and income...Two people who are genetically similar can have strikingly different IQ test scores because the richer ones have invested more in their kids.

A flash of clarity on what current LLMs can and can not do. An AI apocalypse does not appear to be eminent...

In his most recent newsletter, Venkatesh Rao pulls up a twitter thread he wrote in 2017 making what he calls an ontological distinction between  boundary intelligence and interior intelligence.  This was before transformers like GPT-1 began to attract more attention. The distinction Rao makes is central to understanding what current large language models (LLMs) can and can not do. Here is his unedited text from 2017:
 
1. I'd like to make up a theory of intelligence based on a 2-element ontology: boundary and interior intelligence

2. Boundary intelligence is how you deal with information flows across the boundary of your processing abilities 

3. Interior intelligence is how you process information. Includes logic, emotional self-regulation, etc.

4. A thesis I've been converging on is that boundary intelligence is VASTLY more consequential once interior intelligence exceeds a minimum

5. Boundary intelligence is by definition meta, since you're tuning your filters and making choices about what to even let hit your attention

6. I think it is highly consequential because almost all risk management happens via boundary intelligence (blindspots, black swans etc)

7. Interior intelligence is your poker skill and strategy. Boundary intelligence is picking which table to sit down at

8. Interior intelligence is reading a book competently, extracting insights and arguments. Boundary intelligence is picking books to read. 

9. Interior intelligence is being a good listener. Boundary intelligence is deciding whom to listen to. 

10. Basically, better input plus mediocre IQ beats bad input and genius IQ every time, so boundary intelligence is leverage

11. And obviously, boundary intelligence is more sensitive to context. The noisier and angrier info streams get, the more BI beats II

12. Most of boundary intelligence has to do with input intelligence, but output intelligence becomes more important with higher agency 

13. Output intelligence is basically the metacognition around when/where/how/to-whom/why to say or do things you are capable of saying/doing

14. We think a lot about external factors in decisions, but output intelligence is about freedom left after you've dealt with external part

Next, from the abstract of a forthcoming paper by Yadlowsky et al. Rao extracts the following:

…when presented with tasks or functions which are out-of-domain of their pretraining data, we demonstrate various failure modes of transformers and degradation of their generalization for even simple extrapolation tasks. Together our results highlight that the impressive ICL abilities of high-capacity sequence models may be more closely tied to the coverage of their pretraining data mixtures than inductive biases that create fundamental generalization capabilities.

And then, in the following selected clips, continues his text:

Translated into the idiom from the fourteen points above, this translates into “It’s all interior intelligence, just within a very large boundary.” There is no boundary intelligence in current machine learning paradigms. There isn’t even an awareness of boundaries; just the ability to spout statements about doubt, unknowns, and boundaries of knowability; a bit like a blind person discussing color in the abstract.

This is not to say AI cannot acquire BI. In fact, it can do so in a very trivial way, through embodiment. Just add robots around current AIs and let them loose in real environments.

The reason people resist this conclusion is is irrational attachment to interior intelligence as a sacred cow (and among computer science supremacists, a reluctance to acknowledge the relevance and power of embodiment and situatedness in understandings of intelligence). If much of the effectual power of intelligence is attributable to boundary intelligence, there is much less room for sexy theories of interior intelligence. Your (cherished or feared) god-like AI is reduced to learning through FAFO (Fuck around and find out) feedback relationships with the rest of the universe, across its boundary, same as us sadsack meatbag intelligences with our paltry 4-GPU-grade interior intelligence.

In their current (undoubtedly very impressive) incarnation, what we have with AI is 100% II, 0% BI. Human and animal intelligences (and I suspect even plant intelligences, and definitely evolutionary process intelligence) are somewhere between 51-49 to 99.9-0.1% BI. They are dominated to varying degrees by boundary intelligence. Evolutionary processes are 100% BI, 0% II.

Childhood deprivation alters adult brains despite subsequent environmental enrichment.

A sobering study from Mackes et al:  

Significance

Millions of children worldwide live in nonfamilial institutions. We studied impact on adult brain structure of a particularly severe but time-limited form of institutional deprivation in early life experienced by children who were subsequently adopted into nurturing families. Institutional deprivation was associated with lower total brain volume in a dose-dependent way. Regionally specific effects were seen in medial prefrontal, inferior frontal, and inferior temporal areas. Deprivation-related alterations in total brain volume were associated with lower intelligence quotient and more attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder symptoms; alterations in temporal volume seemed compensatory, as they were associated with fewer attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder symptoms. We provide evidence that early childhood deprivation is related to alterations in adult brain structure, despite environmental enrichment in intervening years.

Abstract

Early childhood deprivation is associated with higher rates of neurodevelopmental and mental disorders in adulthood. The impact of childhood deprivation on the adult brain and the extent to which structural changes underpin these effects are currently unknown. To investigate these questions, we utilized MRI data collected from young adults who were exposed to severe deprivation in early childhood in the Romanian orphanages of the Ceaușescu era and then, subsequently adopted by UK families; 67 Romanian adoptees (with between 3 and 41 mo of deprivation) were compared with 21 nondeprived UK adoptees. Romanian adoptees had substantially smaller total brain volumes (TBVs) than nondeprived adoptees (8.6% reduction), and TBV was strongly negatively associated with deprivation duration. This effect persisted after covarying for potential environmental and genetic confounds. In whole-brain analyses, deprived adoptees showed lower right inferior frontal surface area and volume but greater right inferior temporal lobe thickness, surface area, and volume than the nondeprived adoptees. Right medial prefrontal volume and surface area were positively associated with deprivation duration. No deprivation-related effects were observed in limbic regions. Global reductions in TBV statistically mediated the observed relationship between institutionalization and both lower intelligence quotient (IQ) and higher levels of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder symptoms. The deprivation-related increase in right inferior temporal volume seemed to be compensatory, as it was associated with lower levels of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder symptoms. We provide compelling evidence that time-limited severe deprivation in the first years of life is related to alterations in adult brain structure, despite extended enrichment in adoptive homes in the intervening years.

Cognitive abilities across the lifespan.

Hartshorne and Germine do a massive analysis of changes in cognitive abilities across the life span, showing that digit symbol coding, digit span, vocabulary, working memory, and facial emotion perception peak and decline at different times, with the last of these continuing to improve into later ages.

For each task, the median (interior line), interquartile range (left and right edges of boxes), and 95% confidence interval (whiskers) are shown. WM = working memory.

Their abstract:

Understanding how and when cognitive change occurs over the life span is a prerequisite for understanding normal and abnormal development and aging. Most studies of cognitive change are constrained, however, in their ability to detect subtle, but theoretically informative life-span changes, as they rely on either comparing broad age groups or sparse sampling across the age range. Here, we present convergent evidence from 48,537 online participants and a comprehensive analysis of normative data from standardized IQ and memory tests. Our results reveal considerable heterogeneity in when cognitive abilities peak: Some abilities peak and begin to decline around high school graduation; some abilities plateau in early adulthood, beginning to decline in subjects’ 30s; and still others do not peak until subjects reach their 40s or later. These findings motivate a nuanced theory of maturation and age-related decline, in which multiple, dissociable factors differentially affect different domains of cognition.

Why do intelligent people live longer?

Ian Deary offers an interesting essay in Nature. Here are some clips:

Scores from cognitive-ability tests (intelligence tests or IQ tests) have validity that is almost unequalled in psychology. A general cognitive-ability factor emerges from measures of diverse mental tasks, something that hundreds of data sets since 1904 have replicated. People's rankings on intelligence tests show high stability across almost the whole lifespan, are substantially heritable and are associated with important life outcomes — including educational achievements, occupational success and morbidity and mortality. More thumping confirmatory studies of the link between intelligence and mortality have appeared...One of these contains nearly a million Swedish men tested at around age 19 during military induction and followed for almost 20 years. It shows a clear association: as intelligence test scores go up the scale, so too does the likelihood of survival over those two decades...Intelligence can predict mortality more strongly than body mass index, total cholesterol, blood pressure or blood glucose, and at a similar level to smoking4. But the reasons for this are still mysterious.

The field has focused on four non-exclusive possibilities for the link between intelligence and death. First, what occurs to many people as an obvious pathway of explanation, is that intelligence is associated with more education, and thereafter with more professional occupations that might place the person in healthier environments. Statistical adjustment for education and adult social class can make the association between early-life intelligence and mortality lessen or disappear. But not always.

Second, people with higher intelligence might engage in more healthy behaviours. Evidence is accruing that people with higher intelligence in early life are more likely to have better diets, take more exercise, avoid accidents, give up smoking, engage in less binge drinking and put on less weight in adulthood. But this too doesn't seem to be the whole story.

Third, mental test scores from early life might act as a record of insults to the brain that have occurred before that date. These insults — perinatal events, or the result of illnesses, accidents or deprivations before the mental testing — might be the fundamental cause behind both intelligence test scores and mortality risk. So far, little evidence supports this.

Fourth, mental test scores obtained in youth might be an indicator of a well-put-together system. It is hypothesized that a well-wired body is more able to respond effectively to environmental insults. This 'system integrity' idea has a parallel in the field of ageing, where some data suggest that bodily and cognitive functions age in concert. Some supporting evidence comes from the finding that simple reaction speed — the time taken to press a button when a stimulus appears — can displace intelligence test scores as an even better predictor of mortality risk.

There is also a search for other, non-cognitive psychological characteristics that are associated with living longer. For example, it seems that, independently of any association with intelligence, being more dependable or conscientious in childhood is also significantly protective to health. Children who scored in the top 50% of the population for intelligence and dependability were in one study more than twice as likely to survive to their late sixties as children scoring in the bottom half for both.

Born Rich

I want to pass on a few slightly edited clips from an interesting essay in The Dispatch by conservative writer Kevin Williamson that a friend pointed me to. And then I pass on the comment on Williamson's ideas offered by another friend: "Wow, this one’s a big gulp of the Kool-Aid. This thesis is patently untrue. As the one percent continues to grow in our current corporate low-tax, constantly crippled regulated business environment, the fallacy of this perspective grows along with it. This is exactly the thinking that book I recommended discusses (Oreskes and Conway: "How American business taught us to loathe government and love the free market.") Our democracy as it is currently functioning is not a Great Leveler.

One of the most distasteful aspects of our politics is the extent to which it is so obviously driven by envy, which is what 99 percent of that “privileged elite” talk ends up being about. But I suppose I am the wrong person to complain about that, because I was born rich, but I don't mean rich in the usual money sense.

Our intellectual and political life is dominated by a relatively narrow class of what we might call intellectually tall people, high-IQ people with diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. And while a great many of them believe that inherited wealth is profoundly unfair, very few of them have any similar thoughts to share about the social role of inherited intelligence.

One of the hardest things to drill into the noggins of the American ruling class (and let’s not pretend that there isn’t one, even if it isn’t exactly what you might expect) is that there is no more merit in being born with certain economically valuable intellectual talents than there is in being born tall, or with curly hair—or white, for that matter. Inherited wealth is an enormous factor in the lives of a relatively small number of Americans and a more modest one in the lives of a larger number, but inherited brainpower is the unearned asset that matters most. We live in a very competitive, very connected world, one with very, very efficient labor markets...We have pretty effective tools (including standardized testing) that are very useful for reaching far, wide, and deep into the population to identify intellectual high-fliers and to direct them into educational and career paths that will give them the chance to make the most out of their lives. There probably is no better place in the world to be born poor and smart—but there is no more merit in being born smart than there is blame in being born poor.

The American “meritocracy” is based to a considerable extent on the generally unspoken proposition that intelligence is merit, and that smart people deserve their success in a special way. Our country is run by smart people, and the smart people in charge very much want to believe that they are where they are because of merit, because of the exemplary lives they have led, not because of some unearned hereditary trait that is the intellectual equivalent of a trust fund. The 1994 book "The Bell Curve" was an attempt to explore the paradox of the hereditary “meritocracy” in a serious way, and it was shouted down by—this was not coincidental—the class of people whose self-conception as a meritorious elite was most directly threatened by the authors’ hypothesis.

Understanding the privileges that go along with inherited intellectual ability as being in a moral sense very much like the privileges that go along with inherited wealth (or an inherited social-racial position or whatever privilege you like) opens up a radical and disruptive perspective on American public life—and draws attention to social situations that, even if understood to be unfair because of the role of hereditary advantage, are not open to resolution through redistributive taxes or affirmative action or anything like that. We aren’t going to mandate that half of the brain surgeons or theoretical physicists have below-average IQs.

Being a conservative, I believe that a healthy society necessarily contains a great deal of organic, authentic diversity. Being a realist, I also believe that this diversity comes with hierarchy. As Russell Kirk observed:

Conservatives pay attention to the principle of variety. They feel affection for the proliferating intricacy of long-established social institutions and modes of life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism of radical systems. For the preservation of a healthy diversity in any civilization, there must survive orders and classes, differences in material condition, and many sorts of inequality. The only true forms of equality are equality at the Last Judgment and equality before a just court of law; all other attempts at levelling must lead, at best, to social stagnation. Society requires honest and able leadership; and if natural and institutional differences are destroyed, presently some tyrant or host of squalid oligarchs will create new forms of inequality.

Placebo effects in brain training

Foroughi et al. address the question of whether our desire to become smarter may blind us to the role of placebo effects in brain training regimes. They found that few published articles on cognitive training provide details regarding participant recruitment... whether participants were recruited overtly [e.g., “sign up for a brain training study” ] or covertly [e.g., “did not inform subjects that they were participating in a training study”]. The authors:

...designed a procedure to intentionally induce a placebo effect via overt recruitment. Our recruitment targeted two populations of participants using different advertisements varying in the degree to which they evoked an expectation of cognitive improvement. Once participants self-selected into the two groups, they completed two pretraining fluid intelligence tests followed by 1 h of cognitive training and then completed two posttraining fluid intelligence tests on the following day. Two individual difference metrics regarding beliefs about cognition and intelligence were also collected as potential moderators. The researchers who interacted with participants were blind to the goal of the experiment and to the experimental condition. Aside from their means of recruitment, all participants completed identical cognitive-training experiments. All participants read and signed an informed consent form before beginning the experiment.

Here are their summaries:

Significance

Placebo effects pose problems for some intervention studies, particularly those with no clearly identified mechanism. Cognitive training falls into that category, and yet the role of placebos in cognitive interventions has not yet been critically evaluated. Here, we show clear evidence of placebo effects after a brief cognitive training routine that led to significant fluid intelligence gains. Our goal is to emphasize the importance of ruling out alternative explanations before attributing the effect to interventions. Based on our findings, we recommend that researchers account for placebo effects before claiming treatment effects.

Abstract

Although a large body of research shows that general cognitive ability is heritable and stable in young adults, there is recent evidence that fluid intelligence can be heightened with cognitive training. Many researchers, however, have questioned the methodology of the cognitive-training studies reporting improvements in fluid intelligence: specifically, the role of placebo effects. We designed a procedure to intentionally induce a placebo effect via overt recruitment in an effort to evaluate the role of placebo effects in fluid intelligence gains from cognitive training. Individuals who self-selected into the placebo group by responding to a suggestive flyer showed improvements after a single, 1-h session of cognitive training that equates to a 5- to 10-point increase on a standard IQ test. Controls responding to a nonsuggestive flyer showed no improvement. These findings provide an alternative explanation for effects observed in the cognitive-training literature and the brain-training industry, revealing the need to account for confounds in future research.

Piano training enhances speech perception.

Fascinating work from an international collaboration of Desimone at M.I.T., Nan at Beijing Normal Univ., and others:

Significance

Musical training is beneficial to speech processing, but this transfer’s underlying brain mechanisms are unclear. Using pseudorandomized group assignments with 74 4- to 5-year-old Mandarin-speaking children, we showed that, relative to an active control group which underwent reading training and a no-contact control group, piano training uniquely enhanced cortical responses to pitch changes in music and speech (as lexical tones). These neural enhancements further generalized to early literacy skills: Compared with the controls, the piano-training group also improved behaviorally in auditory word discrimination, which was correlated with their enhanced neural sensitivities to musical pitch changes. Piano training thus improves children’s common sound processing, facilitating certain aspects of language development as much as, if not more than, reading instruction.

Abstract

Musical training confers advantages in speech-sound processing, which could play an important role in early childhood education. To understand the mechanisms of this effect, we used event-related potential and behavioral measures in a longitudinal design. Seventy-four Mandarin-speaking children aged 4–5 y old were pseudorandomly assigned to piano training, reading training, or a no-contact control group. Six months of piano training improved behavioral auditory word discrimination in general as well as word discrimination based on vowels compared with the controls. The reading group yielded similar trends. However, the piano group demonstrated unique advantages over the reading and control groups in consonant-based word discrimination and in enhanced positive mismatch responses (pMMRs) to lexical tone and musical pitch changes. The improved word discrimination based on consonants correlated with the enhancements in musical pitch pMMRs among the children in the piano group. In contrast, all three groups improved equally on general cognitive measures, including tests of IQ, working memory, and attention. The results suggest strengthened common sound processing across domains as an important mechanism underlying the benefits of musical training on language processing. In addition, although we failed to find far-transfer effects of musical training to general cognition, the near-transfer effects to speech perception establish the potential for musical training to help children improve their language skills. Piano training was not inferior to reading training on direct tests of language function, and it even seemed superior to reading training in enhancing consonant discrimination.

Training wisdom - the Illeist (third person) method.

I think my most sane moments are those when I experience myself as watching, in third-person mode, rather than “being” Deric, the immersed actor. Science journalist David Robson does an essay on this perspective in Aeon, “Why speaking to yourself in the third person makes you wiser,” noting that this ancient rhetorical method, used by Julius Caesar and termed ‘illeism’ in 1809 by the poet Coleridge (latin ille meaning ‘he, that’) can clear the emotional fog of simple rumination, shifting perspective to see past biases. Robson notes the work of Igor Grossmann at the University of Waterloo in Canada, whose aim is:

...to build a strong experimental footing for the study of wisdom, which had long been considered too nebulous for scientific enquiry. In one of his earlier experiments, he established that it’s possible to measure wise reasoning and that, as with IQ, people’s scores matter. He did this by asking participants to discuss out-loud a personal or political dilemma, which he then scored on various elements of thinking long-considered crucial to wisdom, including: intellectual humility; taking the perspective of others; recognising uncertainty; and having the capacity to search for a compromise. Grossmann found that these wise-reasoning scores were far better than intelligence tests at predicting emotional wellbeing, and relationship satisfaction – supporting the idea that wisdom, as defined by these qualities, constitutes a unique construct that determines how we navigate life challenges.

The abstract from Grossmann et al.:

We tested the utility of illeism – a practice of referring to oneself in the third person – for the trainability of wisdom-related characteristics in everyday life: i) wise reasoning (intellectual humility, open-mindedness in ways a situation may unfold, perspective-taking, attempts to integrate different viewpoints) and ii) accuracy in emotional forecasts toward close others. In a month-long field experiment, people adopted either the third-person training or first-person control perspective when describing their most significant daily experiences. Assessment of spontaneous wise reasoning before and after the intervention revealed substantial growth in the training (vs. control) condition. At the end of the intervention, people forecasted their feelings toward a close other in challenging situations. A month later, these forecasted feelings were compared against their experienced feelings. Participants in the training (vs. control) condition showed greater alignment of forecasts and experiences, largely due to changes in their emotional experiences. The present research demonstrates a path to evidence-based training of wisdom-related processes via the practice of illeism.

Robson finds this work particularly fascinating,

...considering the fact that illeism is often considered to be infantile. Just think of Elmo in the children’s TV show Sesame Street, or the intensely irritating Jimmy in the sitcom Seinfeld – hardly models of sophisticated thinking. Alternatively, it can be taken to be the sign of a narcissistic personality – the very opposite of personal wisdom. After all, Coleridge believed that it was a ruse to cover up one’s own egotism: just think of the US president’s critics who point out that Donald Trump often refers to himself in the third person. Clearly, politicians might use illeism for purely rhetorical purposes but, when applied to genuine reflection, it appears to be a powerful tool for wiser reasoning.

For an example of third person usage reflecting not wisdom, but a narcissistic personality, look no further than our current president, Donald Trump, as noted in this Washington Post piece by Rieger.

A positive tonic: Human Progress Quantified

Edge.org has just posted responses to its 2016 question of the year "What do you consider the most interesting recent [scientific] news? What makes it important?" Over the next period of time I'm going to be posting edited clips from some of these responses, starting today with Steven Pinker's contribution on human progress:

Human intuition is a notoriously poor guide to reality...Fortunately, as the bugs in human cognition have become common knowledge, the workaround—objective data—has become more prevalent...Sports have been revolutionized by Moneyball, policy by Nudge, punditry by 538.com, forecasting by tournaments and prediction markets, philanthropy by effective altruism, the healing arts by evidence-based medicine.

The most interesting news is that the quantification of life has been extended to the biggest question of all: Have we made progress... in improving the human condition?...Most people agree that life is better than death, health better than disease, prosperity better than poverty, knowledge better than ignorance, peace better than war, safety better than violence, freedom better than coercion. That gives us a set of yardsticks by which we can measure whether progress has actually occurred. The interesting news is that the answer is mostly "yes."... the rate of homicides and war deaths had plummeted over time...People are living longer and healthier lives, not just in the developed world but globally. A dozen infectious and parasitic diseases are extinct or moribund. Vastly more children are going to school and learning to read. Extreme poverty has fallen worldwide from 85 to 10 percent. Despite local setbacks, the world is more democratic than ever. Women are better educated, marrying later, earning more, and in more positions of power and influence. Racial prejudice and hate crimes have decreased since data were first recorded. The world is even getting smarter: In every country, IQ has been increasing by three points a decade.

"Ecomodernists" such as Stewart Brand, Jesse Ausubel, and Ruth DeFries have shown that many indicators of environmental health have improved over the last half-century, and that there are long-term historical processes, such as the decarbonization of energy, the dematerialization of consumption, and the minimization of farmland that can be further encouraged...for all the ways in which the world today falls short of utopia, the norms and institutions of modernity have put us on a good track. We should work on improving them further, rather than burning them down in the conviction that nothing could be worse than our current decadence and in the vague hope that something better might rise from their ashes...quantified human progress emboldens us to seek more of it...The empowering feature of a graph is that it invites one to identify the forces that are pushing a curve up or down, and then to apply them to push it further in the same direction.