Latest / Lucid Interval Podcast / Neuroscience of Intelligence, Creativity and Genius - Rex Jung, PhD

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Neuroscience of Intelligence, Creativity and Genius - Rex Jung, PhD · Lucid Interval Podcast

• speaker-0: Einstein's brain and we can't really learn anything from one brain, right? As far as I understand it. Like you can't just look at Einstein's brain and go, ⁓ well, this is the part that made him a genius and we'll get to ⁓ what that word means maybe. But you know, what kind of sample size do you need to to start to see these things tease out? speaker-1: Well you you You can look at one brain and start to hypothesize from it. So he had a abnormality in the parietal operculum ⁓ in his dominant hemisphere that ⁓ he lacked a parietal operculum so information could communicate more readily in ⁓ in his parietal lobe Elon Musk. I mean I mean just the way I mean he he d you know, we talk call it disagreeableness, but I mean just really focused and on the spectrum. ⁓ so we we We would benefit from understanding how brains like these work because they are really moving things forward. It really is important. I'm so glad I was never told that I was smart or gifted ⁓ as a child or ⁓ quite a bit younger than I am, but ⁓ I'm so glad because I think that can it doesn't have to for everyone, but I think it can be a trap. ⁓ that that l you described very eloquently that it it made it so that you didn't want to risk getting out of that gilded cage, you know, that that when when you aged out of it, it's like, ⁓ I just want to do things I'm good at because I've always been told I'm good and I just want to do good things that I'm good at. And it it makes you it can make you risk averse and it's really hard to break out of that trap. Keith Simonton talks about this a lot, it's equal odds rule and you people who are highly creative put out lots of ideas and in order to ⁓ have some ideas hit you have to have lots of ideas out there. speaker-0: They just they create, create, create, make lots of songs, make lots of and then eventually just and so it's equal odds, there's an equal odds that any of them is gonna be successful. They just have more. speaker-1: Some people have decided that they like Hey Jude much better than, you know, yellow submarine or something like that. speaker-0: Relate to that. Yeah, right. Rex, thanks for joining me. speaker-1: Thank you for having me. speaker-0: So you have a fascinating ⁓ kind of collection of interests and expertise. Can you tell us about what your ⁓ background is and what you focus on? speaker-1: Well, I'm a neuropsychologist ⁓ by training, which is the study of brain behavior relationships. so I'm a practicing clinical neuropsychologist and see patients every day ⁓ diagnosing brain disorders and diseases, Alzheimer's, stroke, epilepsy, tumors, things of that nature. But then I also ⁓ in terms of my research background have studied ⁓ things like brain behavior relationships related to things like intelligence, creativity, personality, broadly ⁓ individual differences in health and in certain diseases, mostly traumatic brain injury, ⁓ schizophrenia and ⁓ systemic lupus arithmetosis. speaker-0: What is it that got you interested in the mind brain relationship? Brain behavior relationship. speaker-1: well it goes way back to before I entered the field I I was volunteering for Special Olympics and came across individuals with different brains and different behaviors and very interesting ⁓ group of individuals, some with autism, some with intellectual disabilities, epilepsy, a whole host of different things and it was really fascinating to me how their brains worked and worked differently. And at that point I wanted to do some work in that area. I wasn't quite sure what that would look like, but decided that ⁓ I would make a swerve ⁓ towards ⁓ something in in in that field how brains brains gave rise to complex human behaviors. speaker-0: What's the process for I mean, clinical neuropsychology? What are you studying in that how many years of postgraduate research are you doing there? And and I mean, like what's the path to becoming a clinical neuropsychologist? 'Cause you just don't meet very many. speaker-1: Yeah, so it's a it's a sub discipline of clinical psychology. So you get a degree in clinical psychology and then you specialize in neuropsychology. So I'm licensed as a clinical psychologist here in the state of New Mexico and ⁓ just ⁓ I specialize in neuropsychology, which is one of the sub disciplines of clinical psychology, which is, as I said, ⁓ interested in brain behavior relationships. So it involves between five and I don't know, seven, sometimes longer years of graduate school, depending on how leisurely one ⁓ takes one's ⁓ path, ⁓ a year of internship, ⁓ dedicated ⁓ clinical studies, and then ⁓ postdoctoral fellowship, a couple years of postdoctoral fellowship, which is more intensive ⁓ study and research in ⁓ for me clinical ⁓ neuropsychology. and then ⁓ licensure and and then off you go. So for me it was ⁓ close to ⁓ eight, nine year ⁓ process ⁓ to to become a a neuropsychologist. speaker-0: And during that, ⁓ you also have had a background in neurosurgery as well, right? In craniotomy. So did you begin that during your doctoral path or was that after? speaker-1: I did, ⁓ so in internship, ⁓ I did that at ⁓ Baylor College of Medicine and was ⁓ half of my rotation was in ⁓ n ⁓ neurosurgery and so ⁓ I was able to participate in awake craniotomies during that time. So that was part of my clinical training and then ⁓ I When I came to New Mexico and then started working in the clinical field, I joined the Department of Neurosurgery and then was ⁓ able to help them stand up their ⁓ awake craniotomy program there. speaker-0: What is an awake craniotomy? speaker-1: Yeah, so awake craniotomy is kind of horrifying ⁓ concept, ⁓ unless you actually need one. It's it's very ⁓ interesting actually. So people have tumors that ⁓ arise in their brain. and ⁓ sometimes they are in what are called eloquent regions of the brain. ⁓ these are regions that ⁓ are very important. They involve motor functioning or speech functioning. If you damage those, ⁓ you could be left ⁓ quite impaired. So what we want to do is wake up the patient during surgery and actually test their capabilities while the tumor is being removed to make sure that you maximally resect. the tumor or remove the tumor while ⁓ maintaining functionality. So it's a it's kind of a delicate interplay between removing the tumor but but leaving the brain intact so that the the patient is is able to speak or able to move their hands, move their feet, have motor functioning. So it's it's really important and engages the the patient in in their own well being and care ⁓ so that they can provide feedback to me and me to the surgeon about ⁓ when we need to stop or or if they can continue going. speaker-0: So to me, ⁓ you said horrifying, right? I mean that people need to be awake during brain surgery, but ⁓ I've I've heard that before. I'm just imagining the process for you to prepare. ⁓ I because I the way they're giving you feedback is they're answering questions, are they not? Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, and you you're preparing questions essentially based on the the region of the brain where you know those questions might reveal what would be affected. I mean, what's the process of preparation like? speaker-1: So we we have tests, ⁓ neuropsychological tests that we ⁓ train ⁓ train the patient on before ⁓ before surgery. So if it's an attention task we ⁓ or attention region of the brain that we're interested in, we we will do an attention task. ⁓ most often it's a language task where we'll have them name common objects, ⁓ a book or a tree or a wagon or something like that. ⁓ and ⁓ have them name ⁓ one after another items that we put up on a page or put up on an iPad ⁓ more in a more modern ⁓ setting and ⁓ have them ⁓ do serial naming ⁓ type of tasks so that we can see if i i if their speech is being interrupted or interfered with. You can put a little stimulator on the surface of the brain, a small electrical charge that interrupts the normal electrical impulses ⁓ in the brain and temporarily shut off or shut off the the breaker, if you will, at in the back of the house. ⁓ and we can interrupt that so we can map out areas that we would want to stay away from before ⁓ resecting the tumor and then ⁓ while the tumor is being resected you can check in in on the patient and see if if their naming ability for example is is being degraded or if the strength of their hand when they're squeezing squeezing your finger or something is is getting weaker, you can see if that's being degraded over time. speaker-0: So it seems like this must be a like kind of a fascinating way to do research. I mean, is that also part of the process? Or you I mean we must be making discoveries 'cause there's really no other way to to to to test this kind of function, right? I mean, in a in a healthy brain, you mean you'd have to be already operating on it to be there. Do you do you make discoveries when you're in the process of doing a craniotomy? speaker-1: People do. ⁓ we hope to. the the program disintegrated ⁓ before we got too too far. I I did publish or we did publish ⁓ a few papers ⁓ mostly on ⁓ outcome studies, neuropsychological outcome studies, but we hope to do some research. I hope to do some research in creativity ⁓ and creative cognition during awake ⁓ craniotomies ⁓ others have ⁓ done such research in things like divergent thinking tasks ⁓ during awake craniotomy to to look at fundamental cognitive ⁓ processes ⁓ that that are important to creative cognition. So ⁓ research is important and and when you have an open brain and and are are looking at the machinery of the neurons and interrogating them directly, that's really the gold standard of of neuroscience research. the the type of research that I do with you know Correlative research of structure and function of different brain regions is is at least once, sometimes twice and three steps removed from actual neuronal structure and function. speaker-0: So I th is it fair to say that ⁓ most of what we know about the brain comes from things like brain injuries? speaker-1: Yeah, yeah, definitely. ⁓ yeah, ⁓ the the the the classic ⁓ studies ⁓ have come from people with brain injuries. There's a famous study of a patient called Tan, who that's the only word he could say ⁓ because he had such ⁓ massive damage to the language networks of his brain. So Broca, whose ⁓ name is synonymous with Broca's area. of the brain expressive language ⁓ studied series of patients, one of whom was Tan, and found that ⁓ There is a localization of language in the left inferior ⁓ frontal lobe and a damage to that area through stroke ⁓ or traumatic brain injury ⁓ resulted in expressive ⁓ language deficits. Wernicke, ⁓ who is another doctor st who whose ⁓ name is ⁓ Wernicke's area is ⁓ named after, ⁓ studied receptive language. ⁓ so a lot of these diseases and disorders are are named. Named after the doctors who first discovered them. speaker-0: Yeah, so all right. As I've heard of brochosarea and Wernicke's or brochophasia, Wernicke's aphasia. So what is what do patients with those conditions like w what what kind of issue would they have? speaker-1: I mean classically broke as aphasia is ⁓ is a is an abil i i is deficits ⁓ is associated with deficits in expressive language, so inability to name things, ⁓ inability to speak ⁓ at its most extreme. So you'll you'll have ⁓ gross disorders of ability to get words out even. So you'll have ⁓ just a a blockage of the ability to to get words out at its most extreme. So expressive language is affected, whereas Wernicesophasia, receptive language, understanding others is impaired. So you ⁓ people are talking to you and ⁓ you you don't understand what they're saying, or if you're you're saying words, ⁓ people with Wernicke's aphasia saying sentences, they'll make a lot of mistakes and c can sometimes be talking in gibberish and not even know it because they can't hear themselves speaking. So ⁓ they let's see, I think ⁓ John Fetterman ⁓ had a stroke recently, the senator and yeah, from Pennsylvania, and ⁓ in his left hemisphere in his language area's temporal lobe. and it i it was hard for him, he was making a lot of mistakes ⁓ in his language and now he uses a computer and reads along, reads questions that are put to him which helps him overcome some of this comprehension deficits that he otherwise would have. So that's kind of the most contemporary example of a Wernicke's type of aphasia. speaker-0: There's a like a seminal case, ⁓ the Phineas Gage case. I've heard the story of this. D do you literally learn about that like on your first day? Could you tell us what what the story what his story was about? speaker-1: Well yeah. So Phineas Gage was a ⁓ rail railway man. ⁓ they they built ⁓ railroad ⁓ tracks or laid railroad tracks and he was involved, he was a manager of some sort, and ⁓ they it involved using tamping irons to lay charges and so these are long metal poles with a ⁓ point at one end where they would tamp down the charge. And he was tamping down a charge apparently and it ⁓ spontaneously ignited and drove the ⁓ point of the tamping iron up ⁓ through his face, ⁓ behind his eye and up through his ⁓ frontal lobes and blew out through the top of his head. ⁓ so this was kind of a classic example of ⁓ ⁓ frontal lobe injury. ⁓ Harlow, I believe, was the name of the doctor. Harlow. I think that's the name of the doctor that was taking care of him and making sure that his wounds were not becoming ⁓ in too infected. Of course they didn't have ⁓ antiseptics and stuff like that. This is the eighteen hundreds, ⁓ late eighteen hundreds, so ⁓ they're making sure that ⁓ didn't become too infected and trying to get bits of speaker-0: What time was this? speaker-1: you know, debris out of the wound and and things of that nature. it's a bit controversial now in in the neurosciences because I mean certainly the famous phrase is, you know, gage was no longer gage after after this ⁓ accident. His personality changed rather dramatically ⁓ from being sober and organized and well able to ⁓ manage ⁓ groups of men to being garrulous and profane and and ⁓ like like a child in many ⁓ respects. so this was one of the first studies of frontal lobe injury being critically involved in personality re regulation. speaker-0: Yeah, so ⁓ and this is kind of ⁓ essentially like the birth of the your field, is that fair to say, of clinical neuropsychology or speaker-1: There's many births of our field, but yeah. ⁓ but certainly many many birthing points I guess of our field. But yeah, this is certainly one ⁓ critical way station. ⁓ HM is another critical cr critical ⁓ individual. HM was a individual who Scoville I think was the neurosurgeon who ⁓ speaker-0: Tell us about them. speaker-1: He had horrible epilepsy and to ⁓ relieve him of his epileptic fits, they ⁓ removed ⁓ both of his hippocampal structures of his brain. And Brenda Milner, who is a famous neuropsychologist, famous neuroscientist, studied HM. In ⁓ in great detail and found that ⁓ he could not form new memories. ⁓ without the hippocampal structures, you cannot form new memories. So this is another brain behavioral correlate Phineas Gage with ⁓ inferior frontal lobe or ⁓ frontal lobes ⁓ being involved in personality functioning, ⁓ HM ⁓ and Brenda Milner with ⁓ hippocampus structures being ⁓ involved critically in memory formation. ⁓ so we have lots of these way stations where you ha broca with language functioning, Wernicke with ⁓ receptive language functioning. So you have lots of these famous ⁓ individuals with brain damage that allowed this field to coalesce around brain behavior relationships that then ⁓ informed ⁓ or created a field or a discipline of neuropsychology. speaker-0: Yeah, and so in a way, I mean, by by recognizing where there's injuries and w noticing the change in function, you can sort of reverse engineer and understand, you know, what's responsible for healthy brain behavior. speaker-1: Yes, yeah. It's a very mechanistic kind of computer like understanding of of how the brain works with different modules in the brain controlling different aspects of cognitive functioning. Now in the last several years, decade or more, ⁓ we have started to appreciate more the the network ⁓ functioning of the brain that moves beyond mere nodes of the brain ⁓ organizing complex human behavior to appreciate more the interplay of different networks working in tandem to pull together these nodes in cohesive interplay to underlie or inform complex human behavior, complex cognitive functioning. speaker-0: So this this kind of relates a lot to your research into intelligence too. ⁓ am I right about that? speaker-1: Definitely. So you know Go ahead. Intelligence used to be ascribed to purely the frontal lobes and ⁓ not purely but largely the frontal lobes, ⁓ massive frontal lobes of humans, underlying ⁓ human intelligence and ⁓ our our place ⁓ at the top of the intellectual ⁓ food chain, if you will. ⁓ but speaker-0: It's basically because we're we're apparently much smarter than our closest cousins and we have a much bigger prefrontal lobe. So it's just essentially that was it, saying like, well, we got this big, you know, forehead, that that must be where the intelligence comes from. That must be where the intelligence comes from. Obviously, I mean you mentioned personality with Phineas Gage, but there's also inhibition, which it probably helps to not, you know, when you get frustrated to not bash your tools to death or whatever, you know I mean? Like it it helps probably to do complex tasks. Exactly. speaker-1: And that's a big part of what the frontal lobes do and that's actually a very important part of adaptive behavior is not doing stupid th speaker-0: Right, right. speaker-1: Yeah. And why we have such big frontal lobes is to keep us out of trouble, not to ⁓ speaker-0: With each other. Yeah. I mean we've got a lot of people around and they tend to piss you off. Yeah. And apparently, yeah, we're much less violent than our closest cousins, which is good to know. speaker-1: Yep. And not get pissed off and get killed in the process. Right. And being able to survive to mate another day is is super, super important. So our massive frontal lobes are a little more ⁓ complicated than just the seat of intelligence, but you know, massive brake pedal for ⁓ keeping us ⁓ out of trouble. So Yeah, in in my research, ⁓ I was looking at, you know, frontal lobes and I was doing ⁓ technique called magnetic resonance spectroscopy. I was putting these voxels looking at biochemistry in the frontal lobes, looking at ⁓ a control region in the parietal lobe. And damned if I didn't keep getting these Correlations in the parietal lobe, but no relationship of biochemistry with intelligence in the frontal lobe. So it really started to key me in ⁓ to the possibility that the integration between the parietal lobes and frontal lobes were important as opposed to just the frontal lobes, and so we created ⁓ looked at the literature overall and created a theory about intelligence called the parietal frontal integration theory, ⁓ which is really still is ⁓ some what twenty years later the predominant ⁓ theory about how intelligence is is manifested in the human brain. speaker-0: And so I've heard that also called PFIT. Right. ⁓ so but as in the last twenty years, ⁓ have we kind of expanded that or are we still thinking it's an interplay between frontal and parietal? Because you're we were mentioning earlier that the more and more we're learning, everything seems to be about the networking between these nodes. speaker-1: Certainly as it it's been expanded. ⁓ Kristen Hilger, Erhan Gensch, ⁓ number of other ⁓ researchers that ⁓ I've worked with and and younger folks have ⁓ expanded upon this theory, but you know, certainly that the PFIT is is at the core, ⁓ but other networks are being elucidated as being important to intelligence as well, a default mode network. ⁓ most recently in papers that I'm starting to read. Certainly subcortical structures, the caudate, putamin, thalamus are are important. That was downplayed in our ⁓ original theory as being more mission critical ⁓ as opposed to creating variability because you have to have your subcortical structures working very well at some basic level in order to just sustain human life and and viability as opposed to create variability around human intelligence. So other researchers have expanded upon this ⁓ this this theory, but the the pep the the prietal and frontal lobe and the integration of those is still quite important as a as a first approximation. speaker-0: I'd like to talk about just the science of intelligence and what we know about it. And ⁓ there's kind of two ways to look at it. There's a there's a quantitative way to think about it and there's a qualitative way. ⁓ and then with neuroscience, there's there's a functional way and then there's kind of just like an anatomical way too. So I figure maybe we just start there with just the the quantitative. Is an intelligent brain different ⁓ in any quantitative way from one that's less intelligent? speaker-1: Yeah. well, from a psychometric way you're talking speaker-0: ⁓ Well no, I mean like are they are they thicker, are they bigger, do they are they denser, you know, the are d is there any kind of like functional difference or n or anatomical difference between them? speaker-1: All of it. Yeah. All of the above. So if you look if you have enough people and you start looking carefully enough, you'll start to see structural differences, you'll see functional differences, you'll see biochemical differences, ⁓ you'll see all sorts of differences elucidated and that's been the the core of I don't know, the first ten years of my research career is I was ⁓ somewhat ⁓ surprised and amazed that people hadn't been doing this research already, but some of it was that the techniques hadn't been developed. We really just had EEG electroencephalography ⁓ up to the late 1900s and MRI machines only really became readily available to researchers around you know late 1990s to the early 2000s. So ⁓ part of it was by virtue of just happening ⁓ to be at the right place at the right time and a graduate student in the late nineteen nineties and early two thousands and being able to apply ⁓ this new ⁓ technique ⁓ to the brain and being able to measure biochemistry and seeing that particular metabolites like an acetyl aspartate ⁓ was ⁓ higher levels in certain regions of the brain in people who ⁓ had higher measured levels of intelligence, that ⁓ cortical thickness was higher in the parietal lobes and in frontal lobes in people with higher levels of intelligence, ⁓ dendritic or the ⁓ myelination or white matter integrity ⁓ was higher in ⁓ re certain regions ⁓ in people that had higher levels of measured intelligence. All of these things that you're talking about ⁓ could be reliably and ⁓ accurately measured ⁓ with these ⁓ sensitive new techniques. speaker-0: How many people like do you need in a sample set to be able to see these differences emerge? Because I you I know there's a lot of discussion about Einstein's brain, and we can't really learn anything from one brain, right? As far as I understand it. Like you can't just look at Einstein's brain and go, ⁓ well, this is the part that made him a genius, and we'll get to what that word means maybe. But ⁓ you know, what kind of sample size do you need to to start to see these things tease out? speaker-1: Well you you can look at one brain and start to hypothesize from it, ⁓ but you need to get a group of like f you know, Broca did that with Tan and ⁓ Harlow did that with you know with ⁓ with with the brains that he was looking at. So ⁓ it's it's important to use that as an opportunity to do hypothesis generation. I mean even I thought about Einstein's brain. ⁓ So he had a abnormality in the parietal operculum ⁓ in his dominant hemisphere that ⁓ he lacked a parietal operculum. So information could communicate more readily in ⁓ in his parietal lobe ⁓ without a fissure basically ⁓ to to cross over so parietal operculum that That was ⁓ was different in in Einstein's brain. And people did speculate and wrote up what they would hypothesize about why Einstein might have been able to think the way he did and how he could do these mental simulations the way that he did. ⁓ so that's interesting, but not ⁓ dispositive in terms of research. So to answer the rest of your question, ⁓ looking at normal people, not Einstein's, you need dozens and perhaps ⁓ hundreds of people to ⁓ look across brains and and start to see ⁓ signal that is quite weak. ⁓ so it depends on the the strength of your measure, the reliability and validity of your measure. So certain measures are more reliable. ⁓ structural measures tend to be more reliable. Once you measure it one time, you can get the same measure if you come back a week later and measure it again. Whereas functional magnetic resonance imaging or EEG is much less reliable. It has lower reliability, so you'll you're gonna need higher numbers of individual with ⁓ individuals with ⁓ technique with lower reliability. So it just depends on on how valid your measure is, how reliable it is, and and what type of question you're trying to speaker-0: ⁓ and when you're researching like doing neuroimaging research and intelligence, obviously there you must be working against a certain norm for what intelligence is. Can you tell us about the science of how that works? speaker-1: So the tests of intelligence are highly reliable and highly valid, perhaps the most ⁓ reliable and valid ⁓ behavioral measures that's ever been created. ⁓ speaker-0: Jean, I know you just had touched on it. Can we explain the difference in reliability and validity? Just to clarify. speaker-1: So reliability is you get the same answer ⁓ over repeated measures and validity is you're you're hitting the target ⁓ of the thing that you're trying to measure. ⁓ so the the validity of the measure is is it is it measuring what you're intending to measure? Is intelligence ⁓ is the intelligence measure predictive of something ⁓ that would be reasonably ⁓ expected to ⁓ require intelligent behavior. In in the early days ⁓ they were tr using intelligence tests to predict success in school environment. ⁓ and reasonably ⁓ intelligence or lack of intelligence or lower levels of intelligence could give you trouble in a school or an educational environment. ⁓ so these tests were very important to be able to predict who would do well and who would do poorly or who would need more help in an educational environment with these intelligence tests. Now we know that the ⁓ intelligence tests have ⁓ high validity in terms of many outcome measures in terms of longevity, socioeconomic status, educational ⁓ outcomes, so the validity of things that we would equate with ⁓ high intelligence or high intellectual capacity is borne out by scores on intelligence tests. Not a one to one relationship, but it's highly correlated ⁓ with ⁓ scores on intelligence tests. And reliability, like I said, is just being able to get ⁓ the same measure when you ⁓ assess someone ⁓ repeatedly. Now we know that reliability is low when you give intelligence tests to children before the age of ⁓ eight, for example, but that it increases ⁓ over time. So testing someone ⁓ when they're younger, ⁓ you could get pretty widely discrepant ⁓ scores as opposed to testing you or me a month or ⁓ a year. speaker-0: Right. So they just they're not they're not they're not willing to participate with this particular activity of whatever it is. And I'm I'm sure there you would need different items and methods to speaker-1: Correct. speaker-0: to to assess a three year old. Yeah. ⁓ I had I did hear a some years ago there was a story of the youngest person ever admitted to Minsa was two years old, I think, or something like that. very, very young, but she could read fluently. Like ⁓ she was reading the HIPAA thing off the psychologist's wall out loud, you know. and it's like, yeah, okay, well there's there's a there there. I mean there's something to be measured, but it is like, I mean, you know, and it would be interesting to to know, I mean, I think the way they assessed her was over a multi day period. Yeah. 'Cause I I assume a a child would get really tired. I get I would get tired from four hours, five hours of an IQ test. speaker-1: Tired and bored and yeah, t keeping ⁓ keeping the child's attention is is hard enough and keeping attention for things like an intelligence test is gonna be ⁓ is gonna be really challenging. So so yeah, the reliability is going to to be quite variable, frankly, in a child as opposed to ⁓ an adult where it starts to it starts to lock in. speaker-0: So with IQ when we're measuring it it or with intelligence we're measuring it it's it's results in an IQ figure. Can you tell us about what IQ is and and how it works, how it's normed? speaker-1: It's quotient. It used to be derived ⁓ as a ⁓ it used to be something like ⁓ quantitative age as opposed to ⁓ actual age kind of ⁓ differential or ratio of ⁓ obtained age over ⁓ actual age. ⁓ so you would you know if you if you had an obtained age that was higher than your actual chronological age you would have a higher IQ with a mean of a hundred ⁓ being the the average ⁓ being a hundred. ⁓ so let's say you're I don't know, ⁓ I'm just making this up over your quantitative age of 10 years old, then ⁓ maybe you have a ⁓ an IQ of 115 or something like that. now we have normative samples, so we we run these tests by thousands and thousands of people, and we're able to actually create a derived quantitative measure. of people across the range of IQs from ⁓ seventy ⁓ which is the threshold of intellectual disability up to three, four standard deviations above the ⁓ average, which again is a hundred and standard deviation is is ⁓ fifteen points on this quantitative measure. speaker-0: So it can conceivably go up to one thirty, one forty five, something like that. speaker-1: 145 it actually goes to 150. The Wexler scales ⁓ go up to about 150. ⁓ but yeah, ⁓ one forty-five would be ⁓ three standard deviations above of above the mean, which is smart enough for just about anything. speaker-0: Well, so standard deviation is kind of huge. If you don't really have an in ⁓ to me, statistics is the opposite of intuitive. and so like standard deviation, it's like well, fifteen points, well it it really matters which fifteen points we're talking about. Because the difference in one hundred and one fifteen, can you can cause give us ⁓ these are measuring your kind of a percentile rank. It's not an absolute measure of intelligence, right? Can you can you kind of lay out how how the rarity of what we're measuring from one hundred to one fifty? speaker-1: It is so let's see if I can remember this. Eighty-six percent of the population, sixty-eight percent of the population is ⁓ within ⁓ one standard deviation of the mean, ⁓ I believe, ⁓ ninety-five percent of the population ⁓ is within ⁓ two standard deviations of the mean and ninety-nine percent of the population is within three standard deviations of the mean. But what that means ⁓ practically is ⁓ so if you're at 115 or one standard deviation above the mean, and I can never remember if it's sixty-eight or eighty-six. I think let's say sixty-eight. ⁓ you're smarter than sixty-eight out of every hundred people that you encounter. So that's a easy way to remember. And if you're two standard deviations above the mean, that means you're smarter than ninety-five out of every hundred people that you encounter. speaker-0: That's a one thirty. speaker-1: At ⁓ one thirty. And then ⁓ it gets into really rarefied air ⁓ if you're three standard deviations above the mean where you're essentially smarter than everyone that you meet. Ninety-nine out of a hundred ⁓ people that you meet, ⁓ you're gonna be ⁓ you're gonna per perform better on that test and likely have a higher intelligence ⁓ than ⁓ Ninety nine out of a hundred people that you meet. So that's very rarefied air. And it and again it's a bell shaped curve, so it's very thick in the middle. Lots of people are in the middle of that curve and relatively few people are on the edges of that curve. speaker-0: I was just about to ask about that. There's this the distribution we're describing, the normalized distribution. It's called a bell curve. There's also a book by that title, and I think it's probably the most controversial book maybe ever written in social sciences. Would you agree with that? I mean it and it essentially is describing a lot and a number of different areas, grouping people and showing where they fall along the bell curve. could you just explain what the controversy is around the study of intelligence, what would make it controversial and why people have shied away from it? speaker-1: So the book is written by ⁓ Charles Murray and and Robert, I think Hernstein, Roger Hernstein, ⁓ Robert Hernstein, I can't remember, but ⁓ Murray and Hernstein. Charles Murray is still alive and with us and has written several other books. ⁓ the controversy of that book arises from, I believe, one sentence towards the end of the book where they ⁓ opine that part of the difference ⁓ group differences in intelligence, intelligence differences between racial groups, ⁓ and in in their case blacks ⁓ and and whites ⁓ could be of a genetic orient origin. that's quite quant controversial. ⁓ Arthur Jensen wrote an article ⁓ also around the same time, I believe in the ⁓ late 1970s, ⁓ that was also quite controversial talking about racial differences in intelligence. And anytime you get into racial differences in intelligence, ⁓ it's going to be ⁓ quite, quite controversial. And you can have reasonable conversations about intelligence and what intelligence is and means and standard deviations and reliability and validity as we've been discussing, ⁓ but as soon as the concept of ⁓ the origin of ⁓ any race differences ⁓ if ⁓ if they exist, ⁓ what they might arise from, where those come from, then the train leaves the track. It it becomes enormously controversial. So that that that ⁓ is the origin of the vast majority of the controversy ⁓ of that book, ⁓ the bell curve. speaker-0: Well there's also I think I mean obviously that's a radioactive subject and I I'm I speculate I I kinda have a sense that if you grouped people by left handedness versus right handedness, you would probably find differences or h hair color, eye color. I mean at a certain point if you're grouping people and you're just drawing the groups along lines that were, let's say, arbitrary, you're you're gonna find differences that are probably not gonna be material. But ⁓ I think in general there seems to be an a ⁓ an aversion, especially in academia, to the idea that differences in ability are innate. speaker-1: There is, in spite of the fact that the differences are invariably going to be a combination of genetic and environmental origins. ⁓ it's there's never going to be I I can't think of ⁓ anything that is going to be purely environmental in origin. There's going to be a genetic origin of some of these ⁓ differences. And nothing's going to be purely genetic. Well, there are a few genetic diseases that are almost purely genetic, ⁓ but ⁓ it's ex exceedingly rare ⁓ that you're ⁓ going to eliminate environment. So it's always an interplay of genes and environment. And so these arguments from both sides, whether it's you know, ⁓ largely genetic or largely environmental or purely environmental, are anti scientific by their nature. speaker-0: So has the just the kind of the controversy around intelligence studies generally made it difficult in your career just to study intelligence? Is it harder to get funding for it and has that changed over time? speaker-1: Absolutely. No, it's only getting harder, ⁓ I would guess, as opposed to easier. I had success in getting funding ⁓ for my research when I ⁓ made a swerve towards ⁓ creativity and all of the things that we're talking about in intelligence are equally attributable to creativity. ⁓ in terms of genetic and environmental origin and group differences perhaps. ⁓ but it's so much more pleasant to talk about creativity, which has a lot less baggage attached to it than ⁓ intelligence. People are willing to entertain the fact that they might be less or more creative in one aspect ⁓ than another. ⁓ I mean you you you said just a little while ago that statistics was kind of baffling to you. But that's something that ⁓ is is not baffling to me. I I it had to be one of my strengths to go into this field. So we have strengths and weaknesses that differ from one another. And ⁓ we can talk about creativity ⁓ which is a psychometric variable that has all the same psychometric characteristics of intelligence, although it's less reliable, much less reliable and valid ⁓ than that of intelligence, but it just so much less baggage attached to it. So I have ⁓ I I have much I had much ⁓ greater success securing funding and creativity ⁓ than I ever did in intelligence. speaker-0: So I'd like to shift to creativity so that we can eventually come back and coalesce into things like genius. but ⁓ do you think that creativity is l has less baggage because it has less it's less has less predictive validity on everything? speaker-1: Yeah, I think it's a it's certainly a fuzzier ⁓ concept and a and a a less well developed concept, which is one of the reasons that I wanted to study it. I like to study things that are that other people haven't studied so much. And and ⁓ yeah. So I would agree that ⁓ creativity has less baggage associated with it because people just don't understand it as much how it works and it's kind of mysterious and and ⁓ intelligence seems much more kind of fleshed out and ⁓ it's been studied for well over a century. And a lot of work has been done in that area. It seems to be relatively nailed down. So yeah, I think people get a lot less personally involved in the concept of creativity than they do in Whether they might be more or less intelligent or not. speaker-0: How do you define creativity? speaker-1: I adopt the definition of the field, which is the production of something novel and useful, perhaps surprising, ⁓ but novelty and usefulness ⁓ are the kind of ⁓ two sides of the teeter-totter. ⁓ so ⁓ all novelty and no utility is ⁓ craziness of you know psychosis and all utility and no ⁓ novelty is is is not creative by definition. So you have to have this dynamic interplay of novelty and utility that that really hits some new need appropriately ⁓ in a way that hasn't been done before. speaker-0: What about art? I mean, does art have utility that's like aesthetic or speaker-1: Absolutely. Aesthetic, people pay to go see ⁓ art ⁓ all the time and and ⁓ I mean I've gotten in many ⁓ most of the ⁓ the most vehement arguments I've gotten to in the scientific venues with artists who would who would argue with me about the lack of ⁓ any utility, any overt utility of their ⁓ of their art. And it's like you you want people to buy your art, right? Or pay to come see it or, you know, make a living doing that, right? That's that's utility. And they no, no, no, it's just it's just for me. It's like, ⁓ come on. So there is utility ⁓ in in in in art ⁓ by its very nature. You want to ⁓ make other people happy. You want to make other people joyful. ⁓ and we we quantify that through in this day and age through money. speaker-0: That's a good that's a good way of thinking of it, although it's perverse. I mean, I'm I live in Nashville. I know a lot of artists, a lot of musicians. I I've become a photographer here and do some filmmaking and I can relate to those people's ⁓ consternation about utility because if you're thinking about what other people like, whatever you make is gonna suck. That's just what I've noticed. There's it's like a law of creativity that you have to let go of what other people think is good because if they were creative, they would have made it already. You know, if they knew it if they knew it was good, they'd be making it. And it appears apparently people that are really, really creative are you know, there's a it's like a very small number of people that are making lots and lots of things. speaker-1: Yeah, and they're able to do it and and that is and you you just hit on s a very important concept ⁓ which is the I can't remember what the law is called ⁓ offhand, but people that are highly creative produce a lot of ideas. Not all of them are gonna hit and and be popular or or be good, ⁓ but they put a lot of ideas out. It's the equal odds rule is what it's called. Dean Keith Simonton talks about this a lot. It's equal odds rule and people who are highly creative put out lots of ideas and in order to ⁓ have, you know, some ideas hit, you have to have lots of ideas out there. I great artists do that. speaker-0: Yeah. They just they create, create, create, make lots of songs, make lots of and then eventually just and so it's equal odds, there's an equal odds that any of them is going to be successful. They just have more. Yeah. speaker-1: Correct. Hey ⁓ Jude much better than, you know, yellow submarine or something like that. speaker-0: Relate to that. Yeah. Right. But that's but there's the, you there's a flavor in to it. But after a while, you know, I I'm I'm I'm a film person, okay? I'm a Cenophile. To me, it really matters who the director is. I I really pay attention to that. That's that's the primary lens through which I view the work. Now, sometimes the director's not really the author of the film in any real way. Like there's no real authorship because it's sort of mass produced, although I I mean I don't watch a lot of Marvel movies, for example, would be an example of that. It's kind of factory filmmaking and a lot of people love those. I want to know what this one person has to say, you know, I want to see a point of view. And some people just seem to be better at it though. Like it does seem to be it I I think it it can't be that everyone has equal odds at what they do being good. I mean, is that is that essentially what that means or is it that just that the creative people have equal odds for each of their work? speaker-1: So there's a discussion that I'm having with a friend of mine about what creativity is, whether it resides inside the person or whether it resides outside the person. And so I think imagination, the imaginative ability, certainly resides inside the person, that that that aspect of it. But what is deemed creative or not creative ⁓ is not up to the individual. That resides outside of the person. that resides in the audience that d that consumes the the imaginative work of the author or the or the director or the musician. So it is not up to the person per se to ⁓ determine the creative creativity of it. It is up to the audience. So that's where the equal odds comes in, I think, is that you have to put out a whole bunch of ideas and then the audience will say, I like this, I like this and I like this, but I don't like the rest of it. speaker-0: Yeah, there is a it's kind of a a tough nut to crack 'cause like I have I have ideas all the time and I think they're all gre I mean some of them are not, but I'm kind of sorting the ones that I think are good. But i if no one wants to buy the album You know, I mean it doesn't matter how good I mean, you and that really is just for me. You know, some people do that. Some artists they do that. They tend to be ones who have already become multiple millionaires from the first few albums and then they're like, I'm gonna put out one about me that's using nothing but the xylophone and like you know, I mean, and they they can do that and they have an audience for that and that's their personal work and it's a it's a tremendous privilege to be able to do that, to be able to just most people I know just want to earn a living from what they do. Yeah. You know, they do wanna do that. speaker-1: Now what really convinced me of this was when I was ⁓ with my wife in I think it was Italy and there was a Picasso exhibition, it's Picasso's plates or something like that. And you know, it's ⁓ ceramics and he's doing ⁓ art ceram art on ceramics and we went in there, it was just the most horrible sketches you've ever seen. ⁓ you know, a child could do better than than ⁓ these Picasso pieces on the ceramics. It's just just terrible. speaker-0: Do you think it was just like a joke by Picasso? He's like they'll buy anything. speaker-1: Well, but Picasso put out twenty thousand over twenty thousand individual pieces of art. I mean we only see what a hundred of them are iconic pieces of of art that we see in museums and and things like that, but he put out over twenty thousand individual pieces of art. A lot of them suck, but then there's Guernica, you know? So choose your poison. speaker-0: Yeah, so the most the most creative people have been the people that have been the most productively creative people. I mean that and that just that just is a the law of large numbers. It it it makes sense. If you create a lot, eventually something hits. speaker-1: And that is what Dean Keith Simonton found and he did a s he he he did research of this and found that the the most creative ⁓ scientists ⁓ put out the most papers, the most creative musicians put out the most or the most successful musicians creative put out the most ⁓ individual pieces, you know. Think of Bach or Beethoven put out the most ⁓ work. ⁓ so ⁓ that equal odds rule ⁓ held true for some of the most ⁓ famous artists, scientists, ⁓ and and authors as well. speaker-0: Well and so I w when you're saying the most famous or the most creative people put out the most stuff, I'm surely that's not how he's also defining creative, 'cause that would be truism, right? I mean, how do you how are you how how are the how is he assessing how do you assess creativity? speaker-1: Well, now we're getting t ⁓ we're delving into the area of genius, so he was looking at creative genius and ⁓ looking at ⁓ true geniuses in each of the ⁓ field and seeing what led to their success and what he found was creative output ⁓ led to their ⁓ discovery of them as ⁓ as geniuses. speaker-0: And he was ⁓ his definition of genius was with creatives in particular. so ⁓ but ⁓ you, if you were gonna be researching creativity, I mean there's a psychometric way to assess it, right? ⁓ but that's creativity and intelligence are also, I think we should also say they're not the same, are they? speaker-1: Yes. They're related, ⁓ they're correlated, and ⁓ the way we're measuring them, the way we're measuring creativity in particular, is somewhat problematic in that it is moderately correlated with our measures of intelligence. So what I was trying to do the question that I went into when I first went into study of creativity was Just what you're asking, is intellig are intelligence and creativity ⁓ similar, different, ⁓ overlapping brain regions, similar brain regions involved, different brain regions involved, ⁓ are the constructs ⁓ the same, different? I left the studies ⁓ a bit frustrated with the field of creativity in that it is really stuck on these measures of divergent thinking, which are psychometrically poor, language based largely, and ⁓ ⁓ highly correlated or moderately correlated with measures of intelligence so it's impossible to as you were getting to it's kind of a problem of tautology. It's it's circular ⁓ in nature. The the the problem being assessed is is encompassed with the within the problem that's being asked. speaker-0: What's the difference in convergent thinking and divergent thinking? speaker-1: Divergent thinking. So the best example of that is ⁓ well the most classic example of that is tell me as many ways as you can think of to use a brick and you have people rattle off ⁓ you know as a door stop as a to build a house ⁓ to ⁓ displace water in a toilet tank ⁓ to save water, you know, lots of different ways. Yes. As a weapon, yeah, so lots of different categories that you can speaker-0: Send a message to your enemies. And so you're you're timed and you have to come up with as many novel uses of a brick as possible and you essentially are counting the novel ideas. speaker-1: There's three different concepts. ⁓ there's ⁓ there's the the fluency, the number of items that you create. There's the ⁓ flexibility or number of categories ⁓ that you ⁓ elicit. And again, you you came up with a category that I ⁓ wasn't thinking of as a as a weapon and then there's ⁓ originality, the third ⁓ category, which is something that is, you know, when you put this question by I don't know, a hundred or a thousand people. ⁓ do you get the response a mock coffin at a barbie funeral which is ⁓ one of the most unique uses of a brick that ⁓ you know you would hear. So ⁓ that's that's original. Is it is it ⁓ is it both novel and useful? You know, it's arguable. But ⁓ so ⁓ fluency, frequency, and ⁓ originality are the three criteria that you ⁓ use to assess divergent thinking. Convergent thinking usually coalesces around one correct answer. These are classic intelligence tests. You know, what is the capital of Rome? or what is the capital of Italy? Right. speaker-0: No, that flew that item. Yeah. Yeah, right. Right. speaker-1: ⁓ so ⁓ you know ⁓ convergent type of thinking ⁓ tasks that usually coalesce ⁓ around ⁓ one correct answer. speaker-0: So I can see how w you would you would assort convergent thinking to intelligence because it's essentially multiple choice. You have to you have to eliminate wrong choices to converge on the right one. And then you have divergent is really you're here's a blank page. Show me what you can do with it. Here's the but here's some constraints. There's something about creativity I've learned we can talk about. damn a blank page is hard. Man, that is really hard. If you can just put one little constraint on it, ⁓ like yeah, but it's gotta be about a brick. Well you I now I'm going. Like now ⁓ th do you have any sense of why that is? speaker-1: Yeah. well the psychology of it is interesting. If you give people a starting point, ⁓ it really helps immediately constru even a line or a circle or something and say, you know, make ⁓ make a design out of this circle, a unique ⁓ design. And we have tasks like that. We've done studies like that where we'll have a little squiggly line and say make as many novel and useful designs out of this starter. ⁓ it's just easier for the human brain to start the constraint process ⁓ if you start it for them. ⁓ and it's not completely unconstrained ⁓ problem. So ⁓ you were talking earlier and I wanted to bring up the point about the the down selection or the selection process of an audience for for your work, I guess. I think you were talking about that. But the selection process actually begins, the down selection begins in your brain, where you have a bunch of ideas percolating around and they're running into neuronal populations that are either familiar or unfamiliar. and have been encountered before. And even a line or a circle ⁓ have been encountered before. One of the classic examples of this is the ⁓ Maluma takeheat problem. Have you ever heard of this? speaker-0: I've not heard of that. speaker-1: So you have kind of a a wavy little ⁓ diagram like that. And then you have kind of a sharp little diagram like that and you ask people to say which one was Maluma and which one was tacheat. And I don't know, upwards of ninety percent of the people will say that the the wavy kind of one that I made was the maluma and the sharp one was the takeheet. this is your brain constraining the problem set around things that it already knows. We know that soft sounds and soft figures, maluma is all ⁓ of a kind and the sharp sounds and the sharp figures and the consonants like take heat are are are similar. So ⁓ to as a long convoluted answer to your initial question, providing some sort of initial figure allows your brain to immediately down select from infinity to something in the thousands or hundreds. ⁓ so it's a much easier problem. speaker-0: Yeah, I mean you have like a neural network that's infinitely essentially infinitely complex. You have to eliminate you've got to like click something on the minesweeper board. Yeah. To clear out everything, you know, to clear out a lot of what's not, you know, what we don't need, you know, because it at a certain point you could be you know trying to come up with the capital of Rome when the real task is like we need to figure out what to do with this brick. Yep. Okay. speaker-1: Right. It so it helps your it helps your brain down select to just provide a starter a starter symbol of some sort. speaker-0: What do we know? I mean, do do we know anything about the ten percent of people that picked take eat? speaker-1: They're very obstinate. They know what they're doing and they know what the task is supposed to be and they're just being obstinate. speaker-0: I was gonna say are they psychopaths or th So that that's fascinating though, because that I mean that really gets into personality. ⁓ you know, are they just disagreeable essentially? They're very comfortable disagreeable. Probably a lot of lawyers. Yes. Yes, yes. ⁓ lawyers are fa probably a few psychopaths. ⁓ okay so speaker-1: And a few psychopaths, yeah. ⁓ The Venn diagram of lawyer and capacity are not mutual. speaker-0: You're you're almost certainly correct. ⁓ you one cause there are certain professions that are probably highly rewarding for sociopathy and like the financial services and the law are probably two of them. Absolutely. speaker-1: So I know that you trained to be a lawyer, so I'm speaker-0: I did, I did. So I I know many lawyers. You know, I got I got started ⁓ teaching LSAT to people. And my really this is really I was probably dunno twenty one years old when I I started teaching at the LSAT and the LSAT a law school test. It's changed a little bit now to accommodate there used to be a games portion which required you to do it visual with visual diagrams. It was the only section of the test where there were objectively correct answers. So you could just get it get ⁓ right every time if you knew how to do it. Blind people, people that are visually impaired, don't have a fair chance at that, so they've eliminated it. But it's really a pure reason test. And ⁓ it it's gotta be highly correlated with with IQ. I don't know the exact correlation, but I'm I mean, I know people that do, but they just won't tell me. but it it ⁓ it's pure reason. And the thing is I would teach the test and so I would come in and I'd tell people these people, you know, are aspiring law students and they want to be lawyers, and I'll tell them, like, I'm here because I got hired for this job, because I got this score on the test, and I also I have all the correct answers, and they still argue. When they get something wrong. It's amazing. It's amazing. And because that they're gonna be great lawyers because th they will argue that that the sky is green as long as, you know, and so the interesting thing I learned is they just love to do it. It and I get it, I love to debate. There is I've I discovered kind of an interesting phenomenon for myself is how do you convince someone that they're being irrational? Because like after having all this social proof of like I've got the key and I've done this before, ⁓ they still don't get it. speaker-1: Yeah. speaker-0: Because they can't see it. And I recognize that ⁓ it's not enough a big an important part of that test is not just to know that something is irrational. You have to know why and how. And a lot of times you'll have to identify the flaw and then parallel the flaw. Like, and so here here's a flawed argument. Now pick the neck if there's five more flawed arguments, pick the one that's flawed for the same reasons. But also you can't someone can't learn if when they're wrong unless they really know why they're wrong. And ⁓ That can be exceedingly difficult with people that are very disagreeable. And I've gotten really good at it, but it requires you to get them to answer questions. and they have to say it out loud. There's a really fascinating phenomenon, and I would I'm really glad I get a chance to talk to you about it. ⁓ there's something about downloading something from up here to your mouth. Like, I mean, getting someone to think it through, and but if they won't say it out loud, you kind of can't get them to recognize it. And there's something that always happens, it's a really interesting phenomenon. You ask ⁓ questions, you're kind of leading them the horse to water. And at a certain point they they they catch what they've done and they immediately clam up and they don't want to answer the question. And they'll blush and they get sheepish and sometimes they laugh. A lot of times they laugh. It's a really funny thing. Like irrationality is really funny. If you've ever read Stephen Pinker's book, Rationality, it's hysterical. It's hysterical. What do you think is going on there? speaker-1: Well, I mean it's a so it's it puts it within the social context, ⁓ first of all, ⁓ that that ⁓ it's coming out of their mouth. So it's Stephen Pinker has a new book ⁓ about you know common knowledge what people know and other people's no known knowns and unknown knowns and things like that. speaker-0: Common knowledge. I call that the Dow of Donald Rumsfeld, by the way. speaker-1: Exactly. The Tao of Donald Rumsfeld is what he probably should have called the book, but speaker-0: Probably not. Probably people probably would have sold to the wrong audience. speaker-1: But ⁓ but it's a really ⁓ important concept but when it comes out your mouth you hear yourself saying it and then you know that the other person heard you saying it and you know it sounds irrational at that point because you're seeing yourself through the other person's eyes. You're not just seeing your own self in your mind in your own mind's eye anymore where you're perfect and everything's you know rational, but you actually step outside of yourself and see yourself through the other person's Through the other person's viewpoint, I think. speaker-0: That makes a lot of sense. I I wonder though also if there's something that's happening earlier in the chain of causation because there is something about forming things into words ⁓ that that does seem to affect reason. I mean like writing things out, like I mean that it's really important obviously in science. We do science in writing still. ⁓ because there's something about forming your argument into words that concretizes it in a way and helps you for at least for me, I see like, ⁓ wait, that doesn't add up at all. ⁓ and that's just when I'm writing to myself. Well speaker-1: Well we call this yeah embodied cognition and ⁓ I see this in its deficit in when we're testing patients and I ⁓ train my ⁓ trainees ⁓ to to recognize it. So people will be doing this task and they're supposed to be sorting cards in a certain way by color, by I won't tell you the whole thing, but The fun it's a reasoning type of task. It's a frontalobe task. And we peop when people have frontal lobe deficits, you can actually see a really interesting phenomenon where people will say the thing that they're supposed to be doing, but their hands are not doing what they're saying. So you see this disconnect between what they're saying and what they're actually doing, what they're actually thinking. I should be matching by I I ⁓ or they'll say match by color and they'll match by something else, shape or speaker-0: number or something. Yeah, that's I've been tricked that way. speaker-1: Match by color, match by color, and it's a real classic frontal lobe sign where you see this ⁓ this ⁓ disin disinhibitory ⁓ phenomenon of them saying something that's completely at odds with what they're doing. And it's very important to catch this clinically, ⁓ because it's gonna get people tripped up if their frontal lobes are are offline or not in sync with what they're saying. in one part of their brain is not in sync with what they're doing, it's gonna get them in big trouble. speaker-0: Ordinarily a person would experience cognitive dissonance from those, right? I mean so that's essentially there's some kind of turmoil that happens when your actions and your words don't align. Would would these people not like be not susceptible to that? That that would be absent. speaker-1: Yeah, there's no error check ⁓ in there. And again, getting back to John Fetterman, you know, when you're saying things that are coming out of your mouth and you're not saying the right word but you don't have that error check ⁓ that says, ⁓ I said that wrong or I I didn't ⁓ get that quite right, ⁓ to where you automatically update it. Like when I said capital of Rome and I should have said capital of Italy, it's like, ⁓ I didn't get that quite right. ⁓ there's no error check and it just keeps, you know, spooling out the problem after problem. And that's the that's the shape of some people's lives, ⁓ with chronic frontal lobe problems. ⁓ but ⁓ ⁓ what you're describing in ⁓ in in the L L sat classes that you're teaching is that embodied cognition where there is a one to one correspondence between what people are thinking and what they're saying and and they suddenly realize that it's not matching up. speaker-0: That's fascinating. But John Fetterman, you I mean one can s classically you would assume that that problem would be a liability in politics, but we've now live in an upside down world where it's it's kind of an asset to never admit when you've to not even not admitting when you've made a mistake is an asset, but not even knowing when you've made a mistake. That's I mean, that's that's a superpower, right? ⁓ there's a movie, I can't remember the name of it. It's got Norman Bait or ⁓ yeah, Beatty in it. Yeah, Norman Beatty. Is that right? Warren Beatty. Warren Beatty. Warren Beatty. ⁓ see, I just did it right there. ⁓ and i I think it's called I can't remember the name of it. He plays a politician who just goes insane and starts being honest. And then he starts rapping by the end. He becomes like a white rapper and everybody's like, He's so authentic, he's gonna be the next president. 'Cause he's admired in some scandal, I think. It's a funny conceit. But now, like if that movie came out today, I mean who knows where you would have to go. speaker-1: Yeah, just saying everything that comes into his head. So so yeah, I think it is interesting and that that that ⁓ that correspondence, those networks that are aligned, continuously aligned, and they were just starting to learn about ⁓ being so important that those networks have to be continuously aligned to ⁓ to form intelligent behavior, form creative behavior, form language, form all of these things. Those networks have to be really in sync ⁓ to to to do this these things effectively. speaker-0: Yeah, 'cause you you tend to create with your body. I mean you gotta do you've gotta ⁓ sensally s at some point you have to physically manipulate something to produce. Whether you're writing, you're painting, you're you're operating a camera, you're singing, you're you know, you're doing something that's gotta and those things need to be congruent. If you can't get your body to do what your mind is envisioning, I guess you you you're not gonna successfully translate the vision. speaker-1: Yeah. And it's a bit off topic, but you know, people talk about AI and and ⁓ is AI intelligent, is AI creative, and my argument is no until it is embodied cognition. AI has to ⁓ If it's going to be like human intelligence or like human creativity, I think, I hypothesize that it has to be embodied, it has to feel, it has to move, it has to embody that thought. ⁓ we are such an embodied creature ⁓ in our thinking and moving that I don't see how those could be separate from each other in our language. I don't see how language could be in isolation. ⁓ from our lips moving and our hearing it ⁓ with our ears, our sensation. ⁓ I just don't see how that that that could be akin to to human cognition. speaker-0: Have heard any ⁓ AI music? At this point, surely you must have. speaker-1: I have, yeah, I have. And it's g gotten pretty good. ⁓ back in the early days since I I've been very interested in this and I followed it. ⁓ there always had to be a human in the loop, kind of, you know, like a puppeteer master pulling the strings, ⁓ kind of making it sound ⁓ a little more realistic. ⁓ But I just I gave a talk ⁓ a few months back ⁓ in South Carolina and these musicians played ⁓ one piece that they had created and one piece that an AI had created. I still could tell and most of the people could tell I think about eighty percent of people could tell which was the AI and which was the human, but s it was pretty good. ⁓ it was g it they're getting better ⁓ with music. so ⁓ and I've heard I've read some poetry ⁓ that AI created ⁓ that also struck me as as quite good. So I think art is going to be ⁓ I think Creativity is probably going to happen first before intelligence. because creativity is these machines are good at massively integrating large bodies of information. So, you know, talk about divergent thinking, you have the whole corpus of human knowledge at your disposal and you put it together in novel and and potentially useful ways. I I think the machines the AI machine ⁓ could be could be quite good at that. speaker-0: Do you think that they'll be able to satisfy the novelty requirement though, if they're only able to take pre existing human output? speaker-1: That's all we're doing. speaker-0: Do you th I mean do you think there are there any examples of people that are that you can think of that are not have not done that, have taken something that's truly original? speaker-1: No. ⁓ I don't think ⁓ there's any I can't think of any ⁓ creative output that didn't have precursors or pre ⁓ yeah, I can't think of any creative output that doesn't have some sort of precursor to it. speaker-0: What about ⁓ yeah as well I mean I'm thinking of Isaac Newton. And so it just I guess it kinda depends on whether or not you think that inventing calculus was a creative act. I mean it was novel at that time, but maybe it was just out there and he was the first to intuit it and he was building on other things. speaker-1: Well, But I I mean he read widely and he ⁓ was ⁓ autodidact and and certainly you know didn't spring out of of nothing. There's a so I I I think ⁓ the the basic building blocks of calculus were in his head. I think he put it together effectively and for the first time. But ⁓ I don't think ⁓ you know, the the building blocks of mathematics and algebra and and geometry were certainly at his disposal to to come up with speaker-0: And he had a constraint too, which is that he was trying to solve a very specific problem, which is to find the circumference of the earth. So there there was not an unlimited number of ways to do that, probably. Yeah. And of course the things you do for fun. speaker-1: Yeah. I well, he was insane too. speaker-0: Okay, well so that's actually I'd I'd love to talk about that. I mean he was ⁓ by all accounts a very unpleasant man. what do you think we can know about Isaac Newton like from a psychiatric perspective? 'Cause I've heard people speculate that he was bipolar. ⁓ I've also heard people speculate that he was autistic. speaker-1: Yeah, both both could be true. ⁓ and yeah, we we'll never know, but ⁓ he certainly was an odd ⁓ individual. and ⁓ you know I don't pretend to know a whole lot about him, but I I I I know that he was extraordinarily you know, odd, autodidact probably on the s speaker-0: You say autodidact, what do you mean by that? speaker-1: Self taught. ⁓ so yeah. speaker-0: Because who who else who would want to teach him? speaker-1: Yeah. ⁓ so ⁓ so I I I I I know that, you know, a lot of these ⁓ you know, bookish young men ⁓ at that time became geniuses because they just had vast amounts of knowledge that they consumed. ⁓ through reading and which is just a revelation and not everyone had ⁓ that ⁓ ability to just read all you know Greek knowledge and and all of the mathematicians and all of the philosophers that had come before them and start start going on a thinking escapade. speaker-0: Well they also had another they had a series of advantages in time because they had reached a point in history where technology had advanced that they had the bound book and they had, you know, mass type, but they didn't have the internet. They didn't have, you know, social media to distract them. They they had nothing to do. I mean, Newzan Newton made a lot of his breakthroughs when he was avoiding the plague. I he he literally couldn't talk he had no one to talk to. I think he probably pr preferred it that way. He probably did. speaker-1: Yeah, you probably speaker-0: But you know, I mean he's just spent and he spent half his time trying to f turn lead into gold and you know, doing the things that he did. you mentioned this word genius. speaker-1: The other that's the other possibility too is is besides ⁓ autism and bipolar is that ⁓ he he was poisoning himself with some of these things he was playing around with. speaker-0: Do you think that was I mean, sure certainly that wo could not have enhanced his intellectual ability, you don't think, right? speaker-1: No, it could have made him crazy with Mercury and Antimony and some of these things that he was ⁓ fiddling around with, ⁓ some of his more spiritual endeavors, ⁓ or ⁓ trying to what, turn lead into gold and stuff like that. that that probably what looked like psychotic behavior could have been ⁓ poisoning induced ⁓ psychosis. speaker-0: You know, ⁓ he also fits I guess we we would say the equal odds rule because he spent a lot of time putting out all kinds of things. I mean he kind of sort set the field of optics on its path, ⁓ but he also spent a lot of time on astrology. Like I just probably I mean, well we now know that. But I mean, you know, I mean maybe he didn't. I 'cause he did a lot on astronomy. I mean he he did everything but Mercury's orbit. So it's like, you know, as and there's a fine line between the two. You know, you're looking at the stars, you're measuring things, you're seeing patterns, and sometimes there's really patterns there and sometimes there's there's not, and you're you're finding messages in the newspaper from from the communists. speaker-1: Exactly. No, but yeah, he w he was ⁓ certainly just spending vast amounts of time on ⁓ ideas and putting out ideas and some of them were just crazy and useless and some of them were calculus, yeah. speaker-0: ⁓ so you've mentioned this term genius and I'm gonna come to that. ⁓ we're s we're kind of dancing around it. But ⁓ before we do I wanna I wanna have a couple more questions about creativity. I assume that intelligence and creativity are both associated with trade openness. speaker-1: Yeah, definitely. speaker-0: Are they equally correlated with it with trade openness? speaker-1: Well, so the trait openness is interesting because it is comprised of two facets. So ⁓ for people who don't know who might be listening to this, there's the big five, which are five factors of personality which are most accepted in ⁓ psychology circles, which are comprised openness. The easy way to measure it ⁓ to remember it is ocean. Openness, conscientiousness. Extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism are the five factors of personality. So each of them have sub two sub factors, I guess. So openness is sub two sub factors are intellect and I think imagination. ⁓ so ⁓ intellect is basically ⁓ pursuit of intellectual pursuits. ⁓ so ⁓ and imagination is what we've been talking about is kind of that internal process of of of liking to think about things and liking to go to art exhibits and liking to read poetry and things like that, which ⁓ could also load on intellect as well. But so to answer your question Openness is comprised of intelligence and creativity ⁓ features by its very nature. ⁓ so it's important if you're looking at openness ⁓ to break that down to see if you're looking at more intellectual things or more kind of creativity things or imaginative things. Yeah. speaker-0: Aesthetic things or yeah. I I love ⁓ when I learned ⁓ the learning about the big five's total hack. I mean it's a total game changer to really understand people, but learning about openness the world becomes much more easier to understand and also much more amusing. It's real I find it frequently amusing when you know that like, ⁓ if you look at this in terms of a political dimension, for example, ⁓ if someone has like one bumper sticker on their car, I think the odds like that if you go from zero bumper stickers to one, I think that the the probability of their political affiliation changing is like essentially zero. But if you go from more than one bumper sticker, it becomes overwhelmingly more likely that they're liberal. Like it's just with every additional one because they're gonna have eighteen of ⁓ And it's gonna s it's gonna be every possible cause. There's gonna be a coexist sticker and it'll be a Prius. I have I have an album on my phone of just Prius and Subarus and all of it and I drive a Subaru, right? Like I mean and I love it, you know, and I wear Chacos and like it's just the things that go together are c quite amusing when you understand that there's kinda two groups of people out there. speaker-1: Correlative nature of things start to cohere. And yet you're exactly right that the it's really funny, that's like one bumper sticker like one bumper sticker, but if you site see a car with like five bumper stickers, it's like, I don't know, that's that's a different cat. speaker-0: Yes, yes. And there so I see I go to a I go to an independent theater here in Nashville called the Belcourt Theater. It's like an indie cinema nonprofit. And I I just I have an album called Bumper Stickers of Bellcourt. And you're right, they all do. And here's the thing like you go in and it's like I can I'm you could make money all day betting on what kind of alcohol they serve at the concession stand. It's not Bud Light. They don't serve that. It's gonna be an IPA or some kind of craft mock tail. speaker-1: Ours have lots of bumper stickers. speaker-0: Because you're gonna really want that mocktail when you're watching this like queer Icelandic film about a polyamorous thruple. Like I mean, you know what I mean? Like and it's just and I'm like, Yeah, that sounds like something I would do. It's like that's that's my idea of a Friday night. speaker-1: And the very extremes of openness to new experience. Yeah. ⁓ so but yeah, some of these things are I mean the these signaling I mean these are signaling ⁓ devices that we have in and ⁓ these signaling devices are there for a reason. And we've had conversations, you know, tattoos are another ⁓ signaling device. And so it's like, you know, one discrete tattoo is is no big deal, but ⁓ when you start to get ⁓ sleeves or you start to get tattoos on your neck or you start to have tattoos on your face, it starts to literally signify frontal lobe disinhibition. Really. where you have like you are much more likely to have ⁓ disinhibitory ⁓ problems. ⁓ so ⁓ it's it's ⁓ correlative everything is correlative in these ⁓ behavioral ⁓ endeavors but i it's it's important to look at these signals and pay attention to them at times. speaker-0: Yeah, it makes sense. I mean, if you're going to permanently tattoo your body at at great length, like the more inhibited you are, the more likely you are to talk yourself out of it. Yeah, basically. They also perform a function of showing w what tribe am I a member of. Which is really important. You know, the bumper stickers are that's what that's about. speaker-1: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Right. Absolutely. And what car you drive and what house you live in, what clothes you wear, all of it. ⁓ you know, I'm not wearing a tank top ⁓ to this ⁓ interview. I'm wearing something that looks like, you know, I'm kind of a researcher maybe. Right. Or a psychologist. speaker-0: Now that you're saying this, I have a t shirt that says read banned books, which would be perfect for clipping this right now, would be perfect for that, and I wear it to the bell court. so Right, right. so is genius just a a combination of intelligence and creativity? speaker-1: Signaling behavior. And personality. ⁓ I think so there are personality variables and I really wanted to study this. So I'd studied intelligence, I studied studied creativity. I actually wrote a proposal to ⁓ get funded, which wasn't funded to study genius, which is fine. ⁓ but my hypothesis was that ⁓ genius was the interplay of probably intelligence. You have to have a certain level of intelligence. I don't think you have to have an an IQ of one forty five and perhaps in some respects that could be detrimental ⁓ to be so focused on convergent thinking as opposed to divergent thinking for example. So some level ⁓ an access to information and ability to acquire information, ability to utilize information effectively. ⁓ intelligence is important. Creativity is important, ability to ⁓ novel, ⁓ to produce novelty and utility ⁓ when you see problems that haven't ⁓ emerged before. ⁓ and what you almost invariably see in ⁓ genius is ⁓ persistence and disagreeableness, which is another big five characteristic agreeableness, but ⁓ Geniuses tend to be highly disagreeable because the world is telling them that their ideas suck and that they don't want to hear about it. They need to go along to get along. Talk about signaling that you need to like get with your tribe, get in your lane, do more of this and less of that. But the genius ⁓ is ⁓ the person that is going against the crowd and doing things differently and not going along to get along. So I think those three factors are very important. speaker-0: One could see I mean, and they're not just telling their ideas suck. They're sometimes they're just telling them that they're objectively wrong and when they know they're right, and that ⁓ that's gotta be deeply frustrating to go through life like that, especially if you're very, very intelligent and you're understanding things that you know could c could get you labeled as crazy. Right. ⁓ you know, in some cases. speaker-1: And I think that is really important to be able to persevere and persist in spite of being told that you're wrong, ⁓ and that creates this personality variable or maybe it I don't know if it's a chicken or egg thing, but ⁓ this disagreeableness emerges from that that that people tend to ⁓ be disagreeable because of that. speaker-0: So I've actually I've thought about this for years too, and this is this extra component I've thought about. ⁓ this the way you've described it is perseverance and disagreeableness is a good way to think of it. The term I've used for years for myself is boldness. Like you have to be bold enough to not only be able to build rockets and colonize Mars, you have to actually have the hutzpa to do it. Like you have to be you have to have an I mean you can think of it as healthy grandiosity, perhaps. ⁓ you know, a grandiosity that's that's you know, congruent with the reality of what you're able to do. You just have to believe you can do it and you have to ignore people who tell you that you can't because you're just used to them not getting it. speaker-1: Yeah, and and Musk, as you're kind of alluding to, is a is a good example of this in our current ⁓ current environment and you know, people some people ⁓ because of you know p politics mostly, ⁓ people will just not give Musk the time of day. But you really have to pay attention to what he's doing. ⁓ he is pushing our whole world forward in ways that Otherwise w it would not be with Starlink, with ⁓ with ⁓ SpaceX, ⁓ Tesla, who knows? ⁓ but although that was ⁓ big push to start with. but some of his ideas, I mean equal odds. Some of the ideas are gonna be stupid and fail, some of the ideas are going to succeed, and ⁓ but an interesting person to watch because he is ⁓ disagreeable and ⁓ persistent. And he's going to push the world ⁓ forward ⁓ in a big step that it otherwise wouldn't have taken. speaker-0: He's also created a Go ahead. speaker-1: He's a genius. speaker-0: Yeah, I I'm I agree with that. I think his genius all in ⁓ I'm wondering if I was gonna say I think his genius is kind of specific to domain and I'm wondering if that makes sense to you to you, but ⁓ his genius seems to be for productivity in particular. Like that that it's not just the things he's doing, is that he's kind of doing them all at the same time. And like he gets results like his essentially his management theory ⁓ for saying, Okay, well look, we need to we need to blow up some rockets. Like to in order to get to the successful it's just a way of thinking about failure that is maybe counterintuitive, but it's this boldness he has, like his perseverance. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We need well so sorry, we we crashed into the moon, but that was the only way we had to risk that to learn how to how to not crash into the moon. And it's this perseverance that's incredible. speaker-1: Yeah, it's just it's it's it's very different way of thinking. but yeah, it gets to the next level, it gets to the next step, and that failure is not seen as a failure, it's actually seen as a step towards ⁓ ultimate success. And it's just a very different way of looking ⁓ at at at problems that ⁓ people are are so ⁓ risk averse, all of us humans are so risk averse that we just ⁓ wouldn't even imagine, you know. Blowing up shit to get there. speaker-0: Right. And he does it as a matter of course. I mean, that that is a wonderful way to reframe failure though. I mean, it's the kind of thing I've so much has changed in my life as I've become ⁓ more okay with failure or not knowing things. growth mindset is a way to think of it. And and like Carol Dweck has this all this research on mindset, someone I'd love to meet someday. ⁓ but one of the things that happens if you're told from an early age that you're gifted is ⁓ that what that people are basically doing is complimenting you on being good at things without having to try hard. speaker-1: Yeah. speaker-0: Basically it. Right. So your identity comes from not having to try hard, but eventually, like you age out of that. And in certain domains, you just need to start trying hard, but then that threatens your sense of self. And so your world becomes smaller and smaller and smaller. And so you you can't try anything new because you can't risk being bad at something. And man, that that caught that kept me stuck for a long, long time. ⁓ of just being in the fear of failure, the fear of being the new kid in a new school, trying a new program and Now I go out of my way looking for ways to like push that. I mean, I've got a guitar over here that I've touched once, but I bought it two weeks ago and I'm gonna need to learn it. And like I'm about to turn forty. I might be fifty before I'm even serviceable at playing it. I'm probably never gonna be a musical genius. I just don't seem to have an aptitude for it. Although my one of my recent guests, Lynn Bingham, is a cognitive scientist that studies music and she would categorically refute that talent is a that musical talent is real. ⁓ But you know, you just have to go out and looking for things to do to kind of develop this growth mindset. It helps me start this podcast too. You know, I needed for a long time I really thought I needed a PhD in neuroscience first to get it. And it took me like eight years to realize that I didn't need that and I still didn't get the PhD in neuroscience. You know, like you know, you know what I mean? Like you just stay stuck. And so it's what you were saying. Like at a certain point, intelligence does probably become a liability. If you're really good at weighing the odds of how unrealistic your your ideas are, that could be quite discouraging if you lack the the boldness and perseverance. speaker-1: It really is important. I'm so glad I was never told that I was smart or gifted as a child. I think it was kind of an era thing. You're ⁓ quite a bit younger than I am, but ⁓ I'm so glad 'cause I think that can it doesn't have to for everyone, but I think it can be a trap. ⁓ that that l you described very eloquently that it it made it so that you didn't want to risk getting out of that gilded cage, you know, that that when when you aged out of it it's like, ⁓ I just want to do things I'm good at because I've always been told I'm good and I just want to do good things that I'm good at. And it it makes you it can make you risk averse and it's really hard to break out of that trap. And I really was ignorant enough or whatever, ⁓ to just say, ⁓ let's try this. And ⁓ no one's looked at this problem. Well, I'll I'll look at this problem. ⁓ it's really controversial. I don't know. Who cares? ⁓ yeah, Charles Murray, Hernstein, Arthur Jensen, ⁓ Eugenics. ⁓ well, you know, let's look at it from a different perspective. I'm just not gonna, you know, talk about that stuff. and it's all worked out fine. ⁓ but ⁓ it's ⁓ if I were to look at it pragmatically from a academic perspective and having a a tenure track career, I never would have I never would have done this. And I did not have a tenure track career as it as it so happens, but I didn't aspire to one either. speaker-0: so I'm wondering, do you work with ⁓ people that are gifted, neurodivergent, things like that in your clinical practice? speaker-1: I do. ⁓ I see ⁓ occ you know, patients that come to me. ⁓ it's really funny. ⁓ so I I I have a lot of pati not a lot ⁓ occasional patients come to me and say, Hey, ⁓ I had my ⁓ IQ tested when I was a child and it was, you know, one hundred thirty five or one 72, some impossible number. And it's like, okay, great, we'll see what we get. And ⁓ and then we end up having to have this hard conversation when it's 120 or you know, whatever. Exactly. And it's like, no, no, no, you you must have done I must have done something wrong. because what ⁓ you know I was always told that ⁓ you know I was ⁓ a genius when I was was was a child. It's like, hey speaker-0: one twenty. Right. speaker-1: one twenty is good enough to do anything you want in life. You can be a doctor, you can be a lawyer, you can be you know that's that's that's IQ that's that's plenty of IQ to you're to do anything. The rest of it is about ⁓ creativity, persistence, perseverance, you know, personality variables but speaker-0: Conscientiousness is a big one. Just being able to work hard. It's a hard thing for me. It doesn't come easily to me. and so I'm do I'm but I'm trying to cultivate it and speaker-1: But it's like the that that's the threshold, but people get so hung up on ⁓ the giftedness thing and the the intelligence thing that I often have to and I I have no idea what my IQ ⁓ my IQ's never been measured. I have no idea what is it. Thank thank goodness, you know, it people get really hung up on on the number and the number isn't important. ⁓ what you do with your ⁓ native intelligence is is the important thing and taking the risk ⁓ that you can go places with the intelligence that you've that you've been given ⁓ by virtue of your genes and the environment that afforded you ⁓ the manifestation of your genetic pen potential is is where it's at. speaker-0: One thing that I've been interested in for a long time is the particular emotional needs that people that are gifted and talented had. There was this psychologist named Casimir Dobrowski. Are you familiar with him? ⁓ so he's the first person to study. ⁓ he he has this theory of positive disintegration. ⁓ he's kind of a contemporary of Abraham Maslow, but he was a Polish psychologist in Warsaw behind the Iron Curtain. And so he he operated a state-run hospit, it was a it was like a hospital, but he also worked with ⁓ mathematically precocious children and also ⁓ ballet dancers, like elite ballet dancers. And he observed that the they were their personalities were the same. They were basically the same children. ⁓ and that they had all these what he described as overexcitabilities, ⁓ or or hypersensitivities, or was intellectual overexcitability or sensory. So like some people get bugged by tags in their shirt. Like I just wear shirts with no tags 'cause it'll annoy me, but and then there's there's all sorts of emotional overexcitabilities where it's just like a the child will just melt down. And ⁓ it was kind of an it was one of the first people to describe the way that intelligent people are qualitatively different and also to tie them to it's like, hey, that they're the same as the ballet kits, that they're elite or violinists that were just identified at the age of five, that were maybe that's part of it, that it there's the trauma of being told at five years old that you're gonna be a genius, that that probably has a lot to do with it. But I've always been interested in this and I'm just wondering if do you find in your practice that like people that have really extraordinary abilities ⁓ or at least are perceived to have them have particularly particular challenges with their emotional health. speaker-1: I haven't experienced that. So per se, I mean it might be the population ⁓ so I'm near s I practice near Santa Fe, so I see a lot of I see a fair number of artists, but I'm also near both Sandia and Los Alamos, so I see a lot of engineers. So you see y y you tend to start grouping people by their profession as opposed to by their intellectual capacity. So there's I've seen a lot of prominent artists, authors, ⁓ and whatnot from Santa Fe, and I've seen a lot of prominent physicists and chemists and nuclear engineers from Los Alamos and and Sandia. Artists tend to be a little more fligtier in general than the engineers, and that's just a personality variable where I think people self-sort into that profession. ⁓ just like lawyers and ⁓ doctors self-sort into their various professions. speaker-0: You take the thing that annoyed your family the most and you make a career out of it, basically. If you're disagreeable, become a lawyer. If you daydream all day, you become a physicist and like if you won't stop doodling, you become an artist. speaker-1: Exactly. If you kinda like people, I guess you become a doctor. ⁓ so I mean I I don't see emotional vulnerability stratified by intelligence like you're describing. I don't see that. I know there is so some research out there about People with high IQ being more neurotic and and that's the N in Ocean of the Big Five. And that tends to come from studies of people in Mensa and people in mensa tend to be more neurotic because that's a self-sorting ⁓ type of speaker-0: Chosen to become a member of Minta, they've gotten themselves tested, they've been apparently, you know, they're they're they're focused on their own intelligence, so that's almost a form of neuroticism by itself. speaker-1: Exactly. So that's a self-sorting kind of thing, and MENSA is not a a great representative sample of high IQ individuals. It's a very self-selected sample of high IQ individuals that also happen to be more neurotic than the average high IQ individual. So ⁓ you have to be very careful about what you're looking at because when you look at broad stratum of ⁓ high IQ individuals, ⁓ there is ⁓ IQ is protective against neuroticism and mental illness ⁓ in general. So ⁓ you see ⁓ inverse correlation between neuroticism and and IQ across broad stratifications of of individuals. So yeah I think what you're talking about is probably the neurotic identification of being the the neuroticism inducing which I don't fully understand and haven't researched of being ⁓ identified as gifted ⁓ and talented. I think that is ⁓ perhaps ⁓ madness making ⁓ in its own right. speaker-0: Or like being born a prince or something like that. You know what I mean? Like just being told from an early age that you're literally an infallible being make you crazy. It's just isolating. Yeah. speaker-1: Yes, I can't. I think there's some of that going on and and then you're you know, you've got a different bell shaped curve within that group of gifted people where, you know, there's more resilience or less resilience and and so some of it is madness making and some some kids do just fine. So ⁓ I don't know much about that, but I don't find that ⁓ the patients is a very long complicated answer to your question, but ⁓ the patients that I see who are ⁓ highly intelligents ⁓ highly intelligent ⁓ tend to be you know, like everyone else in terms of their personality structures and their foibles and their response to brain disorders and disease and injuries and stuff like that. speaker-0: There are some ⁓ some individuals who have been have extraordinary abilities that are autistic or on the spectrum, ⁓ or I guess perhaps there's a broader definite there's a broader term which is neurodivergence, ⁓ and I'm not sure if that encompasses something more than than ASD. ⁓ but what do we know about people that that have just completely different ways of thinking? I mean that we mentioned earlier that maybe Newton was autistic. There seems to be an association with people with autism and being very, very, very good at some things. ⁓ what do we know about that phenomenon? speaker-1: Yeah, ⁓ very little about any of these phenomena actually. So I should back up and say the things we know about intelligence are many, but the tip of the iceberg, the things we know about ⁓ creativity are fewer, the things we know about genius are minuscule. ⁓ these are still early days. Anyone that wants to study these things is still not too late to get your PhD in neuroscience. Anyone who wants to study these things, there are open areas ⁓ to ⁓ to research and autism and as d ⁓ is immensely fascinating to me and and one of the things that got me interested in this field as I ⁓ alluded to at the beginning. So autism is interesting ⁓ because yes it gets you very focused on one or a few ⁓ Things that you are highly focused on and can develop immense expertise on. And people with autism per se tend to have ⁓ intellectual disabilities. But people with who are neurodivergent or on the spectrum, ⁓ as as we say, what used to be called Asperger's syndrome, but that's out of favor since Dr. Asperger was friendly with the Nazis, so we don't call it Asperger syndrome anymore. the ⁓ that ⁓ people on the spectrum can have the full range of intellectual ⁓ capacity and then these highly specialized ⁓ interests that that ⁓ give them like a superpower ⁓ to be able to really focus and to really ⁓ dig into a subject and having all that expertise and being able then to perhaps diverge and create within that within that area, that domain, ⁓ could be enormously powerful. speaker-0: There ⁓ I've had a couple of people on this show already who are autistic or ⁓ or at Asperger's, and ⁓ some of the most extraordinary people I've ever met and just the way that their minds operated, you know, again, there's a theme that's come up here, which is that I'm really interested in not just the quantitative ways that people are different, but the qualitative ways that that is so different. ⁓ th I interviewed ⁓ several weeks ago someone named Lynn Bingham who I've mentioned. She's a cognitive scientist and a music theorist and she has synesthesia. So she so it gives her absolute pitch. She she perceives pitch as color. And that enabled her to make some discoveries that basically all humans ⁓ mediate movement and vision through sound, essentially. So that's why ⁓ the same symphony players with the same sheet music will produce a different sound with a different conductor because they can make conductors moving differently. And she just has perfect pitch. So she she observed that and got a PhD out of it. And I'm like, that that sign me up for that career path. That's a great way to do it. ⁓ she learned to play the bass by watching it on television. And ⁓ so she became a basis in the symphony after five months of doing it when she got to college and that's how she was able to make this observation. And I was asking her just to to just describe I mean, she's a cognitive scientist, so it's a it's an ideal person to ask about these kind of things about how her mind is qualitatively different. And she told me, and I'm not I'm not a hundred percent sure that th that I agree with this, most people tend to think linearly. They think in lines. And ⁓ that definitely makes sense because we tend to read that way. And so, you know, some people's eyes will go left to right, but if they're in a different culture, they might go top to bottom. right to left when they're reasoning things out. she says that as a ⁓ she does not think linearly, she thinks in constellations. So essentially she's saying three dimensionally instead of two. And she was doing this fascinating thing, right? She was rotating things like this with her hands as she was describing it to me. So an example she gave was she saw some commercial and it had a little jingle going and she goes, Huh, that's Twinkle Twinkle Little Star played backwards. And people were like, what? How in the hell do you know that? And she's like, well you just do that. Like and of course I mean of course you don't just do that. You don't Or or or this way. And it's in, but she was like, there's concepts. And it was it was kind of a just it was beautiful, honestly. I don't know another word for the the experience of having her describe her mind to me. It was so beautiful to think of a constellation of little ideas that she could manipulate in three dimensions and reason that way. it's just a wonderful thing. And I'm wondering, you know, I I think the process of studying that is obviously Very iterative. You just have to interview those people and ask them, tell me about how your mind works. ⁓ is there is there I mean, is that kind of science being done? I mean, it be just because of the nature of it, that you can't really you can't generalize from it that that there's a limitation on what we can do there? speaker-1: know if someone's studying that in particular, that it's I mean it's called ⁓ ideographic type of research where you study individuals ⁓ like that. ⁓ you you're making me think of Temple Grand and I don't know if you've heard of her she's a she's a professor, she used to be in northern Colorado. I don't know if she still is, but makes me think of her development of ⁓ mechanism to soothe cows when they were I don't know, being slaughtered perhaps, ⁓ or ⁓ being tagged or something. ⁓ but it squeezes them. ⁓ and she ⁓ I think ⁓ had some sort of notion of the comfort she felt when she was being bundled or squeezed, you know, when she was ⁓ uncomfortable and ⁓ that squeezing of the cows was something that she developed that has been adopted ⁓ you know, worldwide. ⁓ and she's ⁓ researcher in in how to ⁓ do things ⁓ in in animal husbandry and stuff like that. So ⁓ but yeah, this this kind of intense way of looking at ⁓ a specific problem ⁓ is really valuable ⁓ and really interesting. And how does I mean ⁓ back to Elon Musk, I mean a bit autistic. speaker-0: I think he he had a diagnosis of that from an early age, I think. speaker-1: I didn't realize that. But yeah. I mean just the way I mean e you know, we talk call it disagreeableness, but I mean just really focused and ⁓ you know, just kind of obliviousness to kind of social norms kind of on the spectrum. ⁓ so we we we would benefit from understanding how brains like these work because they are really moving things forward in ways that we don't we can't understand with our brains that are more broadly designed to attack problems holistically. These are much more focally organized brains and more ⁓ interestingly organized brain, differently organized brains that ⁓ we would benefit from understanding better. I don't know that people are doing this. speaker-0: Well it's very it's very similar to Yeah, it's very similar to what you're doing though. I mean you're you're looking at brains that are different, damaged perhaps, ⁓ but still different, differently functional, and then noticing what what makes them different and and kind of learning more about, you know, the the general brain from that. I mean, it's kind of like we were saying with creativity. At a certain point you gotta narrow the problem down. You know, you gotta you gotta find something to look at. I'm sure there's there's something interesting about every brain, probably, but ⁓ some brains are probably more outliers. speaker-1: I think that would be I mean if I had if I hadn't, you know, run out of time in this life, ⁓ I think that would be a very interesting problem to to tackle. if I were a younger man, ⁓ that would be very interesting problem to tackle that you're describing. ⁓ someone someone should do that. speaker-0: What kind of discipline would that be? Cognitive psychology just assuming someone wanted to get a PhD in doing that. Cognitive psychology? speaker-1: Psychology yeah, cognitive ⁓ neuroscience would be good areas. But I I I'm partial to neuropsychology because that gets to behavior, ⁓ not just ⁓ not too overly focused on brain, the structure and func function of the brain and the mechanistic nature of the brain. But ⁓ neuropsychology really is a nice interplay between brain and behavior, which I I I think is really important to keep the the the person in mind when you're when you're studying brains. speaker-0: Yeah, I mean I once I kind of understood what the discipline was about, I'm like, ⁓ that's a combination of everything I'm interested in but you know, as we established from the beginning, it's about a decade long path. ⁓ you know, so depending on assuming you're not trying to do something else, you know, while you're doing it. speaker-1: I I was pretty focused well yeah, I was pretty focused on on this during that time and I I took a ⁓ a bit of a leisurely path, but yeah, takes takes takes some time. But speaker-0: this all kind of relates to ⁓ something that ⁓ I think we can we're wrapping up here, a term that is associated with you called positive neuropsychology. ⁓ can you tell us what that is? speaker-1: Positive neuroscience, yeah. ⁓ yeah. I it's the concept of of studying things that the brain does well. ⁓ even though I'm every day confronted ⁓ with patients that have something wrong with their brain structure or function. ⁓ I'm really the the 180 of that to do the the turn is to ⁓ I've really been interested in in studying things that the brain does well. Intelligence, creativity, personality, genius, those things ⁓ are positive and and ⁓ have allowed me to have to strike some balance ⁓ with some things that are are pretty c can get you down ⁓ as a clinician. I mean I I have hard conversations on a weekly basis with patients that I have to tell that they have Alzheimer's disease or some other horrible degenerative ⁓ process of their brain that there's no current cure for. So these or you know inoperable tumor or tumor that's gonna come back and eventually take their life. So ⁓ studying some of these positive things really creates a nice counter counterweight or balance to to the hard work of ⁓ clinical psychology and clinical neuropsychology. speaker-0: Yeah, there's also I think to me I associate the term which is the idea that like our inherent differentness ⁓ between people, our individual differences are a gift. It's it's a positive thing that all of our brains don't work the same way. speaker-1: It is a gift and it's it's it's not fear-based and I think some of the fear and acrimony that that surrounds study discussions around intelligence in particular and and creativity, as I alluded to earlier, the these are this the these are Same wine from different flasks, ⁓ that that ⁓ you know we we really ⁓ can see positives in our gifts that we have, our intellectual gifts, our cognitive gifts, our creative gifts, the personality ⁓ structure that allows us to overcome ⁓ or contravene some of ⁓ the gifts we didn't receive. And I I didn't receive all the gifts. ⁓ I have some things that I ⁓ certainly struggle with and have struggled with, continue to struggle with, as do you. ⁓ but ⁓ you you work with the gifts that you have to and I talk with this ⁓ about this with my patients. We need to it's important to identify the the gifts, the strengths we have, the positive strengths we have to try to overcome any weaknesses that emerge. speaker-0: Yeah, do you think it's better to lean into your strengths or try to to bring up your like your deficits? speaker-1: I think it's un it's it's important to understand both, ⁓ ultimately. ⁓ if you if you ignore your deficits, if you ignore your weaknesses, ⁓ they will sneak up on you, ⁓ as as you described earlier. speaker-0: I'm not a math person is an an example of a of a term I wanted to bring up also about limiting belief. Like is there is there any validity to that, by the way? Like the idea that there are math people, there are people that are good better at math and language. speaker-1: There there yeah, there is ⁓ there are people who are better at math and language. ⁓ we call them engineers. And ⁓ but you are gonna become a math person if you're gonna pick up that guitar and play it because ⁓ music is about math. Music is ⁓ fundamentally about math and it's about ⁓ these ⁓ scales and the length of the distance that you are gonna be hitting on those strings and those are mathematical relationships that create ⁓ those notes and you are gonna become a mathematician as you learn ⁓ the guitar ⁓ at some level. ⁓ are you gonna learn calculus? I don't think so. ⁓ but you're gonna be stretching regions of your brain that are are also associated with mathematical reasoning, which is really quite interesting. Those are same ⁓ similar regions ⁓ of your brain that have have to do with ⁓ mathematical processing. speaker-0: People that intuitively understand that, by the way, they can think about music in terms of like harmonic relationships, in terms of math, and they just understand that. It that is again is something that is incredibly fascinating. speaker-1: It is fascinating. I and I work with a musician. He and I have collaborated on ⁓ research together, this wonderful musician who's taught me a lot about math, ⁓ the ⁓ relationship between music and math and and the planet the r rotation of the planets, it's all ⁓ related as as Isaac Newton ⁓ certainly knew well. speaker-0: Yeah, there's rhythm and so rhythm has to be measured in something and if you're gonna measure in things then eventually there will be fractions of other things and you're off to the races. speaker-1: Exactly. Exactly. speaker-0: Yeah. ⁓ so I guess my final question ⁓ that I'd like to get at is ⁓ was gauge still gauge? speaker-1: Gage was not gauge. your frontal lobes and your personality are so fundamental to who you are that blowing out such a large section of his frontal lobe probably changed fundamentally who he was. ⁓ you can remove large chunks of of brain and we have ⁓ with the weight craniotomies and not changed. fundamentally who people are. ⁓ but when we start tinkering with the prefrontal cortex, ⁓ it from my experience, ⁓ it really does start changing fundamentally who people are. And so I think gauge was no longer gauge. speaker-0: So in other words, like there's no there's no like unified self, basically, that would speaker-1: There is a unified self. Okay. But if you if if you if you ⁓ disaggregate ⁓ a significant module of that unified ⁓ self ⁓ it becomes it it becomes incoherent. The self can become incoherent ⁓ and become unrecognizable. ⁓ as ⁓ as it as it previously was, and I think that happened with Gage. speaker-0: Okay. ⁓ is there anything else that you would like to leave us with, any profound ideas? We're gonna have to come back later for for like round two to talk about consciousness and things like that. speaker-1: No, I think this is a fascinating conversation. I I ⁓ can't believe we've been talking for almost two hours. speaker-0: I told you two hours is never enough time. speaker-1: You're a great conversationalist. speaker-0: Thank you so much. Thank you. This is the thing that annoyed my family that I'm now trying to make a living from. speaker-1: The law wasn't quite right. speaker-0: I just couldn't stop asking the questions. You it's funny you say in law when I was in law school, I took a class called methods. ⁓ I went to LSU, so we had to take some additional courses to to understand the difference in common and civil law systems. And so you look at different methodologies and there's these Latin canons of construction and the civil law is very there's a difference between deduction and induction and then ⁓ common law is based on deduction and civil law is based on induction. You'll just start from a general principle and a code and then you'll you'll essentially apply that. But there's there's a value that's being applied and I love this. This is my favorite class, like thinking of induction versus deduction and like, well, why would you be do it? But one of them you kind have to do both, one and then the other. And ⁓ I remember thinking ⁓ having an experience in this class and in many of them, especially with the civil law where everything's like kind of hierarchically laid out. There are hierarchies a lot that kind of because you said you go from the highest level of abstraction down to very specific, that I would sort of know the answer before the question had to be asked. ⁓ I would just kind of know what was next. I was just like, Well, this this must be this. And I was particularly good at that. But I I from then I all right at that moment, and this is my first semester in law school, my mind started deviating away from the law and towards well, like, okay, if okay, people that are very intelligent tend to be good at this particular kind of task, but is there only is this the only way to be intelligent? Like, it that was another thing I wanted to to ask you about was I mean, am I good at this because I'm kind of good at a certain level of abstraction and the law was built up around that, or is there only one way to to be rational. ⁓ or is that there only one way to be rational for us because our brains are limited in its architecture of a way to do that. You know, I'm thinking about divergent and convergent reasoning and never answered those questions, but, you know, I by the time I left law law school I was way more interested in that than I was in, you know, though I was in admiralty law or whatever. speaker-1: Sounds like you should have been a philosopher instead of a speaker-0: Perhaps. Yeah, perhaps. That was really the legal the the it was the history and philosophy of law. I would have loved legal academia, but didn't work out for me and I'm pr I'm probably much happier not having been legal academia, but maybe another field, probably it would be psychology, probably philosophy of mind, something like that. And we'll see. If you're you you're telling me it's not too late, maybe maybe I'll in my forties I'll get a PhD. speaker-1: It's not it's not too late. speaker-0: It's not impossible. Yeah. ⁓ well thank you so much for your time. ⁓ I would really love to continue this sometime 'cause we we didn't scratch the surface of the weird stuff yet. speaker-1: Yeah. No, it's lot of fun. We'll talk to you again soon. speaker-0: Okay, thank you so much, Rex. speaker-1: All right. Bye.