These occurrences are common enough to be familiar and problematic, but obviously aren’t absolute; not every intelligent person is racked with doubt, and not every less-intelligent person is a self-aggrandizing buffoon. There are plenty of intellectuals who are so in love with the sound of their own voice that they genuinely charge people thousands to hear it, and there are ample less-intelligent people who freely admit their limited mental powers with grace and humility. It may also have a cultural aspect; the studies behind the Dunning–Kruger effect almost always focus on Western societies, but some East Asian cultures have shown very different patterns of behavior, and one explanation put forward for this is these cultures adopt the (healthier) attitude that a lack of awareness is an opportunity for improvement, so the priorities and behaviors are very different.6
Are there actual brain regions behind this kind of phenomenon? Is there a part of the brain responsible for working out: “Am I any good at this thing that I’m doing?” Amazing as it may seem, there might well be. In 2009, Howard Rosen and his colleagues tested a group of about forty patients with neurodegenerative diseases and concluded that accuracy in self-appraisal correlated with the volume of tissue in the right ventromedial (lower part, towards the middle) region of the prefrontal cortex.7 The study argues that this area of the prefrontal cortex is needed for the emotional and physiological processing required when evaluating your own tendencies and abilities. This is relatively consistent with the accepted functioning of the prefrontal cortex, which is largely all to do with processing and manipulating complex information and working out the best possible opinion of it and response to it.
It’s important to note that this study in and of itself is not conclusive; forty patients isn’t really enough to say that the data obtained from them is relevant to everyone ever. But research into this ability to assess your own intellectual performance accurately, known as a “metacognitive ability” (thinking about thinking, if that makes sense), is considered to be quite important, as an inability to perform accurate self-appraisal is a well-known feature of dementia. This is particularly true of frontotemporal dementia, a variation of the disorder that attacks largely the frontal lobe, where the prefrontal cortex is. Patients with this condition often show an inability to assess their performance on a wide variety of tests accurately, which would suggest their ability to assess and evaluate their performance has been seriously compromised. This wide-ranging inability to judge one’s performance accurately isn’t seen in other types of dementia that damage different brain regions, suggesting an area of the frontal lobe is heavily involved in self-appraisal. So this adds up.
Some propose that this is one reason why dementia patients can turn quite aggressive; they are unable to do things but cannot understand or recognize why, which must be nothing short of enraging.
But even without a neurodegenerative disorder and while in possession of a fully functioning prefrontal cortex, this means only that you are capable of self-appraisal; there’s nothing to say your self-appraisal will be correct. Hence we end up with confident clowns and insecure intellectuals. And it’s apparently human nature that we pay more attention to the confident ones.
Crosswords don’t actually keep your brain sharp
(Why it’s very difficult to boost your brain power)
There are many ways to appear more intelligent (using pompous terms such as “au courant,” carrying The Economist), but can you actually become more intelligent? Is it possible to “boost your brain power”?
In the sense of the body, power usually means the ability to do something or act in a particular way, and “brain power” is invariably linked to abilities that would come under the heading of intelligence. You could feasibly increase the amount of energy contained within your brain by using your head to complete a circuit connected to an industrial generator, but that’s not going to be something that benefits you, unless you’re especially keen to have your mind literally blown (to bits).
You’ve probably seen ads for things that claim to offer substances, tools or techniques for boosting your brain power, usually for a price. It’s highly unlikely that any of these things will actually work in any significant way, because if they did they’d be far more popular, with everyone getting smarter and bigger-brained until we’re all crushed under the weight of our own skulls. But how does one genuinely increase brain power, boosting intelligence?
For this, it would be useful to know what differentiates the unintelligent brain from the intelligent one, and how do we turn the former into the latter? One potential factor is something that seems completely wrong: intelligent brains apparently use less power.
This counterintuitive argument is something that arose from scanning studies directly observing and recording brain activity, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). This is a clever technique where people are placed in MRI scanners and their metabolic activity (where the tissues and cells in the body are “doing stuff ”) is observed. Metabolic activity requires oxygen, supplied by the blood. An fMRI scanner can tell the difference between oxygenated blood and deoxygenated blood and when one becomes the other, which occurs at high levels in areas of the body that are metabolically active, like brain regions working hard at a task. Basically, fMRI can monitor brain activity and spot when one part of the brain is especially active. For example, if a subject is doing a memory task, the areas of the brain required for memory processing will be more active than usual, and this shows up on the scanner. Areas showing increased activity would be identifiable as memory-processing areas.
It isn’t as simple as that because the brain is constantly active in many different ways, so finding the “more” active bits requires much filtering and analysis. However, the bulk of modern research about identifying brain regions that have specific functions have utilized fMRI.
So far, so good; you’d expect that a region responsible for a specific action would be more active when having to do that action, like a weightlifter’s bicep is using more energy when picking up a dumbbell. But no. Bizarre findings from several studies, such as those from Larson and others in 1995,8 showed that in tasks designed to test fluid intelligence, activity was seen in the prefrontal cortex . . . except when the subject was very good at the task.