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* Social learning can explain much of this. We pick up much of what we know and how to behave from the actions of others, particularly if it’s something like responding to a threat, and chimps are similar in that regard. Social phenomena are covered more extensively in Chapter 7, but it can’t be the whole explanation here, because the weird thing is that when the same procedure was performed with flowers instead of snakes, it was still possible to train chimps to fear them, but the other chimps rarely learned the same fear by observing them. Fear of snakes is easy to pass on; fear of flowers is not. We’ve evolved an inherent suspicion of potentially lethal dangers, hence fear of snakes and spiders is common.14 By contrast, nobody fears flowers (anthophobia), unless they’ve got a particularly vicious type of hay fever. Less obvious evolved-fear tendencies include fear of elevators, or injections, or the dentist. Elevators cause us to be “trapped,” which can set off alarms in our brains. Injections and the dentist involve potential pain and invasions of body integrity, so cause fear responses. An evolved tendency to be wary or fearful of corpses (which could carry disease or indicate nearby dangers, as well as just being upsetting) may be behind the “uncanny valley” effect,15 where computer animations or robots that look almost human but not quite seem sinister and disturbing, whereas two eyes slapped on a sock is fine. The near-human construct lacks the subtle details and cues an actual human has, so seems more “lifeless” than “entertaining.”
4
Think you’re clever, do you?
The baffling science of intelligence
What makes the human brain special or unique? There are numerous possible answers, but the most likely is that it provides us with superior intelligence. Many creatures are capable of all the basic functions our brain is responsible for, but thus far no other known creature has created its own philosophy, or vehicles, or clothing, or energy sources, or religion, or a single type of pasta, let alone over three hundred varieties. Despite the fact that this book is largely about the things the human brain does inefficiently or bizarrely, it’s important not to overlook the fact that it’s clearly doing something right if it’s enabled humans to have such a rich, multifaceted and varied internal existence, and achieve as much as they have.
There’s a famous quote that says, “If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t.” If you look into the science of the brain and how it relates to intelligence, there’s a strong element of truth in this aphorism. Our brains make us intelligent enough to recognize that we are intelligent, observant enough to realize this isn’t typical in the world, and curious enough to wonder why this is the case. But we don’t yet seem to be intelligent enough to grasp easily where our intelligence comes from and how it works. So we have to fall back on studies of the brain and psychology to get any idea of how the whole process comes about. Science itself exists thanks to our intelligence, and now we use science to figure out how our intelligence works? This is either very efficient or circular reasoning, I’m not smart enough to tell.
Confusing, messy, often contradictory, and hard to get your head round; this is as good a description of intelligence itself as any you’re likely to find. It’s difficult to measure and even define reliably but I’m going to go through how we use intelligence and its strange properties in this chapter.
My IQ is 270 . . . or some other big number
(Why measuring intelligence is harder than you think)
Are you intelligent?
Asking yourself that means the answer is definitely yes. It demonstrates you are capable of many cognitive processes that automatically qualify you for the title of “most intelligent species on earth.” You are able to grasp and retain a concept such as intelligence, something that has no set definition and no physical presence in the real world. You are aware of yourself as an individual entity, something with a limited existence in the world. You are able to consider your own properties and abilities and measure them against some ideal but currently-not-existing goal or deduce that they may be limited in comparison to those of others. No other creature on earth is capable of this level of mental complexity. Not bad for what is basically a low-level neurosis.
So humans are, by some margin, the most intelligent species on earth. What does that mean, though? Intelligence, like irony or daylight-saving time, is something most people have a basic grasp of but struggle to explain in detail.
This obviously presents a problem for science. There are many different definitions of intelligence, provided by many scientists over the decades. French scientists Binet and Simon, inventors of one of the first rigorous IQ tests, defined intelligence as: “To judge well, to comprehend well, to reason well; these are the essential activities of intelligence.” David Weschler, an American psychologist who devised numerous theories and measurements of intelligence, which are still used today via tests such as the Weschler Adult Intelligence Scale, described intelligence as “the aggregate of the global capacity to act purposefully, to deal effectively with the environment.” Philip E. Vernon, another leading name in the field, referred to intelligence as “the effective all-round cognitive abilities to comprehend, to grasp relations and reason.”